Institutionalised, racist attitudes and behaviour! :(

[been-there]

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Killing and ill-treating an occupied, captive people of a different ethnicity as a form of “sport”.
No! That couldn’t happen.
We've been raised supposedly to ‘never forget: never again’!
Right?

Wrong!

Killings of Afghans 'happened all the time'

By Nick McKenzie, Joel Tozer and Chris Masters | November 15, 2020

“One of the most disturbing things for me was people saying the phrase ‘it happened all the time’,” says Dr Samantha Crompvoets of the information special forces insiders and whistleblowers disclosed to her about summary executions of unarmed Afghans, including prisoners and civilians.

Dr Crompvoets is the author of a secret 2016 report commissioned by military chief Angus Campbell. It was her report that sparked the nation's biggest war crimes probe, the Brereton inquiry, a summary of which is due to be publicly released this week.

Dr Crompvoets' April 2016 report to generals Campbell and Sengelman described conduct that the military insiders she spoke to likened to the Abu Ghraib affair, the Iraq prisoner torture scandal that enveloped the US military in 2004. The crimes disclosed in her interviews with Australian special forces included alleged "competition killing and blood lust" and "the inhumane and unnecessary treatment of prisoners".

In her interview with The Age, the Herald and 60 Minutes, she says some allegedly unlawful behaviour, such as summary executions, were “celebrated and normalised, and almost a rite of passage for some people”.

Some of the men she spoke to, such as a soldier who described two unarmed teens having their throats allegedly slit and their bodies disposed of in a river, were in mental anguish. Others were emotionless as they explained how the mistreatment of prisoners became routine as small groups of special forces began writing their own rules of war.

Dr Crompvoets did not spare the chain of command, which sent special forces on multiple deployments and in some cases incentivised high body counts while failing to act on suspicious “killed in action” post-operational reports and briefings.

She wrote how insiders felt it “shameful” that the officers leading the special forces in Afghanistan “muted” concerns about misconduct that were raised at the time. They deployed special forces again and again on capture and kill missions in what by 2012 had become a hopeless war.

She remains in touch with soldiers shattered by what they witnessed and, sometimes, their own failure to challenge more powerful colleagues or officers who would be later rewarded with medals and promotions.

“I don’t think we should forget that it's not just those soldiers in the Special Forces units. It's those people around them that potentially facilitated those behaviours as well,” she says. “I also spoke to people who did call out bad behaviour and who were basically belittled and left broken.”

In 2018, two years after Dr Crompvoets delivered her confidential findings that war crimes had likely occurred, parts of her report were leaked to The Age and the Herald by military sources. Dr Crompvoets was savaged on social media and in some mainstream outlets, accused of being a left-leaning feminist cultural warrior. The irony was that she was in fact a conduit for the concerns of battle-hardened soldiers.

Former defence minister Brendan Nelson falsely claimed that the war crimes under scrutiny were "fog of war" incidents, rather than summary executions. The execution of prisoners and non-combatants is a crime under international and Australian law.

On Thursday, Lieutenant General Campbell will tell the nation of the scale of alleged war crimes committed by Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. He is releasing the summary of the final report of the Brereton inquiry, the inspector general's exhaustive and forensic probe triggered by Dr Crompvoets’ earlier work.

The Brereton inquiry has interviewed more than 350 witnesses on oath and has reviewed thousands of classified files. Witnesses have given detailed statements and some suspects have confessed.

The report is expected to detail “bloodings”, in which junior soldiers were encouraged to execute prisoners and civilians. The twelve cases reported previously by The Age and the Herald involve Afghans murdered while defenceless and unarmed. Some had their hands bound.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/kill ... m=referral

[been-there]

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Former Israeli minister Effie Eitam, who said of Palestinians: “We will have to kill them all” has been nominated to head Israel’s official Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Speaking to The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg in 2004, Eitam said:
“These are creatures who came out of the depths of darkness. We will have to kill them all”.
Realising that these words wouldn’t make good PR he added:
“I don’t mean all the Palestinians, but the ones with evil in their heads. Not only blood on their hands but evil in their heads”.

Eitam has been nominated to head Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem to which practically every foreign leader visiting Israel is brought to have their photo taken.
It’s not a done deal. Israel’s higher education minister Ze’ev Elkin reportedly nominated Eitam, and an Israeli official told the Associated Press that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backs the appointment.
Israel’s cabinet will make the final decision.

Voices that ought to carry some weight are speaking out against Eitam.
“He is not a man who regards everyone as equal, which is a basic assumption for anyone running an institution like Yad Vashem,” Shraga Milstein, the 87-year-old chair of the Israeli Association of Bergen-Belsen Survivors, told the newspaper Haaretz. That is quite an understatement.
“As we know, the Holocaust didn’t start with gas chambers,” Milstein added. “It started with differentiating between people and seeing some people as unequal to others.”

Lethal orders
Eitam’s genocidal views of Palestinians expressed to Goldberg in 2004 are no aberration.
In 2009, The Electronic Intifada published a compendium of some of Eitam’s most violent and hateful acts and declarations – as he toured the United States as a “special emissary” for Netanyahu.
Amid a horrifying record, some things stand out.
During the first intifada, Eitam was implicated in the killing of a young Palestinian in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Several senior officers were convicted of telling their soldiers to break the arms and legs of Palestinian youths. Part of their defense was that they were just following orders from Israel’s defense minister Yitzhak Rabin and from their commander Effie Eitam. In 1988, Eitam – known at the time as Effie Fein – was a commander in Israel’s notorious Givati brigade in Gaza.
As The Jerusalem Post reported on 9 May 1994, about the 1988 incident, Eitam “was heard over the military radio ordering his troops to use clubs to break the bones” of two Palestinian protesters. One of them, Ayyad Aqel, aged 21, died.
Aqel, from al-Bureij refugee camp, was “handcuffed and blindfolded” during the fatal attack in an olive grove, The Guardian reported on 2 November 1990.
According to the same Guardian report, Eitam “was said to have used dogs and batons” against Palestinians, and on one occasion ordered that a Palestinian who defied a curfew “be bound in a public place.”
“I want to see blood here as a warning to others,” Eitam reportedly said.
While Eitam received a slap on the wrist in the form of a reprimand, he was later promoted to brigadier-general.

In 2002, as he launched into politics, Eitam called for Israel to embark on wars of aggression across the region as far afield as Iraq and Iran.
Under their cover, he hoped, “the opportunity will be created to deal more deeply with the Palestinian issue.”
Ultimately, Palestinians could have their state, but only in Egypt’s Sinai and in Jordan.
Palestinians would eventually leave their homeland, but in the meantime, Eitam was generous enough to allow them to remain “residents without the right to vote.”

“Shoot him in the head”
Eitam attacked Ariel Sharon, Israel’s notoriously violent prime minister at the time, for being too soft on the Palestinians.
He called for the murder of Yasir Arafat, then leader of the Palestinian Authority.
“If I [could] give the order now, he would be dead in 15 minutes, together with his whole gang,” Eitam said, according to the The Jerusalem Post on 5 July 2002.

He also called for the extrajudicial execution of Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah military leader who was at that time being interrogated by Israeli forces.
“Take him out to an orchard and shoot him in the head,” Eitam suggested, adding that senior PA politicians Ahmed Qurei, then the legislative council leader, and Mahmoud Abbas, currently PA leader, should all meet the same fate.
They were in Eitam’s words all “impure animals.”

Eitam’s brand of extremism proved popular enough to win his National Religious Party a place in the Knesset and in Sharon’s government.
Eitam served as minister of housing and infrastructure (i.e settlement building) until he resigned over Sharon’s plan to withdraw Israeli settlers from the interior of Gaza.

Palestinian “cancer”
Palestinian leaders are not the only targets of Eitam’s violent hatred. He has habitually incited violence against Palestinian civilians individually and collectively.
In 2005, Israel’s high court nominally banned the Israeli army’s practice of using Palestinian civilians as human shields – although it has continued.
Under the practice, Israeli occupation forces send Palestinian civilians – including children – into dangerous situations so that the civilian rather than the soldiers would take any fire – a blatant war crime.
The 2002 death of a Palestinian teenager in one such incident prompted the high court case.
Eitam objected to the ruling, saying it would “expose IDF soldiers to more danger.”
In 2006, Eitam incited the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
“We will have to do three things: Expel most of the Judea and Samaria Arabs from here,” Eitam said, using Zionist terminology for the occupied West Bank. “Some of them may be able to stay under certain conditions, but most of them will have to go.”
Eitam then called Palestinian citizens of Israel “a fifth column, a group of traitors of the first degree,” and argued that Israel would have to “remove” them “from the political system.”

Underlying his proposals is his view, expressed to Haaretz in 2002, that Palestinian citizens of Israel are a “cancer” eating away at the body of the state. In response to that, veteran Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar commented, “The fact that the Nazis were especially fond of this metaphor is probably not lost on” Eitam.

Crime of genocide
Israel’s propagandists recognize that putting Eitam at the head of Yad Vashem would be a major public relations headache – and that may yet sink the appointment.
“There are enough people, whether it’s BDS or whether it’s people that deny the Holocaust and so on, who will say ‘Look, the guy, how can he speak on behalf of Holocaust survivors when this is what he says about the Arabs?’” Collete Avital, a former Israeli diplomat, told AP.
Avital was referring to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights – which has absolutely no relationship whatsoever to Holocaust denial.

But her concern is clear: Israel’s instrumentalisation of the Holocaust to justify crimes against Palestinians would become much more difficult with a head of Yad Vashem who is so honest about his ethnic hatred of Palestinians.

The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of a number of inhuman acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
Under the convention, the crime of genocide includes “direct and public incitement to commit genocide.”
If anything fits this description it is Eitam’s record of dehumanizing Palestinians as “evil” and as “animals” and calling for their mass killing and expulsion from their homeland.
Thus, we will soon find out if Israel will be putting a genocidaire in charge of its Holocaust memorial.

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/al ... t-memorial

[Scott]

I remember the 1968 Olympics. Or I remember watching some of it on TV.

I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time, and as the Summer games were to be held in Mexico City where the altitude was fairly high, a lot of people had been training in the Rocky Mountains and there was a lot of local or regional buzz about it.

From what I remember of 1968, I don't believe the Communist salute was endorsed for American participants in those days.

If any White athlete gave the Roman salute upon winning a medal today, they not only would never compete EVER again but would probably be lynched.

1936 Berlin Summer Olympics