ZGram - 8/22/2001 - "Orient House" - VIII

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

August 22, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

A Zgram reader wrote, expressing the sentiments of many in countries near
and far:

"I wouldn't want 500 million Muslims hating my guts who believe in Paradise
after self-life sacrifice."

With that as a preface, I bring you now "Orient House" VIII.  This Robert
=46isk report was written about a week ago and describes an incident one
would not think can happen in a civilized country inhabited by people we
support with our tax money - people, if you can call them that, who drip
"human rights" out of both sides of their mouths and hush us morning, noon
and night about their "Holocaust" so we don't  bruise their tender
feelings.

[START]

Israeli police 'carry out routine, organized  cruelty'

By Robert Fisk in Jerusalem

14 August  2001

 The Arabs called it a "day of rage" but the Israelis were the  ones
demonstrating their rage outside Orient House yesterday. The  Palestinian
youth who dared to hold up a Palestinian flag made of paper was  seized  by
six border guards and plain-clothes police, kicked, beaten,  punched  in
the face and back and then kneed in the groin in front of us  all.

  Many of the police had been brought down from Haifa, where a  Palestinian
suicide bomber had blown himself up a few hours earlier in a vain  effort
to murder Israelis in a caf=E9, and there was a tangible desire to  inflict
pain on some of the crowd.

  A tall, thin young man with shaggy  brown hair who tried to escape a
policeman's grasp at the iron security  barriers was dragged back into  the
police lines and set on by eight men.  There must have been 20  television
cameras and a score of photographers  running level with the  Shin Bet
intelligence boys as they dragged the man  screaming up the road  towards
Orient House, kicking him in the chest and  forcing back his head  until he
choked. The moment he was in the back seat of  a white police  van, an
Israeli plain-clothes man in a red shirt set upon him.  As he was  held
down from the other side of the vehicle, the Israeli kicked  him  again and
again between the legs until the young man was crying in a  high, animal
voice.

 It was, as one of the foreign protesters  muttered, enough to turn a
Palestinian into a suicide-bomber. It was also  very, very weird. Here we
were, perhaps a hundred journalists watching a  hundred "peace"
demonstrators, European, American, Christian and Jew, and  Palestinian,
and every few minutes, on a signal from a fat policeman in a  blue shirt,
his colleagues would run amok.

  After all the talk of  Israel being a peace-loving state among the
nations, founded upon the rule of  law, the police would suddenly prove
that those constant Palestinian  complaints of beatings and brutality  were
true, right in front of us. A  border guard became so fascinated by  the
beating of one man - he could not  take his eyes off the fists that  were
hammering into the man's stomach and  ribs - that he forgot to keep  the
press at bay and allowed me to walk up to  the van as one of his
colleagues viciously assaulted another  man.

  Every police force can lose its cool - we have our bad eggs in  Britain -
but this was calculated, routine, organized cruelty. A lot of the  border
guards were grinning when the Palestinians screamed. After a while  it  was
obscene to watch.

  I walked over to the Israeli mounted police.  One of the officers was
sitting in the saddle, smoking a cigarette and  laughing as he talked on  a
mobile phone. A Shin Bet man patted the lead  horse. "Most of these are
Hannovers," he said of the breed. "We've got  Hannovers and quarters.  They
take really good care of them."

 Up the  street, closer to Orient House, his colleagues were taking good
care of their  prisoners. In front of the horrified eyes of a group of
humanitarian workers,  one of them American, they beat the captured
Palestinians all over  again.

  The crowd had no chance of seizing back Orient House, occupied  by
Israeli troops and police after Thursday's Jerusalem suicide  bombing  that
massacred 15 Israelis.

  They were kept all of a quarter of  a mile from the building. But the
horses were ridden into the crowd; a couple  of stun grenades were fired
into it. Just one officer realized, after more  than an hour, that this
piece of state bullying was a public relations  disaster.

  "Stop carrying them," he shouted as two Palestinians were  dragged past
the cameras under a rain of blows. "Let them walk."

  But  they could no longer stand upright. One of them had his shirt
dragged over  his head to reveal a back covered in red welts. A thought
kept recurring in  our minds: if this is what the Israeli police do to
Palestinians in front of  us, what do they do to them behind our backs?

  Nor was it difficult to  guess what these young men were thinking. Just a
few hours before, they had  heard that a 10-year-old Palestinian girl had
been shot dead by Israeli  troops in Hebron, in another of those  notorious
"clashes", as the press likes  to call them, and that, after a  night of
grieving, her 60-year-old  grandmother had died of a heart  attack.

  A little after midday  yesterday, the little girl and her grandmother
were buried together in the  same grave.

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