Felix Cooper

France built the Congo-Ocean railway with African bones 17,000 dead from forced labor, for a train That's the real "civilizing mission"

I just can't get enough of Oketz dogs. They're the coolest!

Fuck it, here’s a 🧵 on the I*D*F’s cowardly K-9 unit Oketz. Its founder Rudolphina Menzel was a Jewish cynologist & member of the terrorist cell Haganah. Would you believe me if I told you that the Nazis tried to recruit her to be the Wehrmacht’s top dog trainer?

"Three women with severed arms and two men wounded in the head and legs, all were severed." These were the words from the scene of the Israeli occupation massacre at Burj al-Moataz, a five-story residential building packed with displaced families in the heart of al-Rimal neighborhood in Gaza City, where airstrikes targeted residential apartments and set the building ablaze near a wedding celebration. The strike hit the first floor, while women and children remain trapped on the upper floors as fires continue to burn through the building. Civil defense teams are working to bring the fires under control and search through the flames and rubble to retrieve the bodies of martyrs and pull survivors from inside the apartments, as witnesses report a large number of martyrs and wounded. wadeaa_.9 (IG)

TW: Rape On the same day that al-Bassa was occupied, and the new State of Israel was founded, May 14th, 1948, the Galilean coastal village of al-Zib was also occupied, by Haganah soldiers from the 21st Battalion of the Carmeli Brigade. Few weeks later, already as part of the newly-formed IDF, officer Dov Yermia, one of the few Zionist officers at the time who still managed to maintain some sort of a conscience during that atrocious campaign, entered the position of Deputy Commander of the 21st Battalion. 41 years later, in an interview conducted by Ezra Grinbaum, on behalf of Yigal Allon House museum, Yermia testified about a horrifying case of gang rape that happened during the occupation of al-Zib, when a whole squad of Zionist soldiers molested a local girl. Later, to prevent UN officers from hearing about it, it was decided to send the girl to a Kibbutz in the south. Her actual fate is unknown, and might have been even worse. I believe this case was never mentioned, at least in detail, in any of the the works by the more well-known Nakba researchers. I bring the testimony below, probably for the first time ever in English. I tried to keep the translation as close as possible to the original Hebrew testimony. A few months after that incident, Dov Yermia was also the one to expose the al-Hula massacre, carried out in the South Lebanese village during Operation Hiram. In the photo: the village of al-Zib after its occupation Dov Yermia: "One of the soldiers approached me, I can't remember his name, and told me: "When our company occupied al-Zib (it was about 3 weeks prior) a certain squad captured a girl from among the villagers who did not flee, and all the men in the squad raped her one by one." The squad, like the whole company, was mixed - new immigrants together with locals who were born here. It was in the middle of the training I told you about. I turned away from all my activities and took the whole squad with me for a personal interrogation. I interrogated them severely, without any physical pressure, of course, until one of them, a high school graduate from Tel Aviv, educated, gentle and a poet, broke down, confessed and told me all the details of the incident. He burst into tears and said, "I don't know, Dov, how this happened to me. We became animals. She was a beautiful girl and I also found myself participating along with the rest.” I immediately called the battalion commander, and he told me to come to him. Then he told me: "Leave them, Dov, after all, it happened in war" and other words of persuasion so that I'd let it go. I refused and personally invited the military police from Acre, who came immediately and took the soldiers into custody there. Of course, the matter immediately spread within the battalion and made waves. At the next battalion headquarters meeting, the battalion commander brought up the problem of the rape and said that there is a fear that the UN officers patrolling the area (this was during the first ceasefire) will reach the girl, discover the act, and it will make a big stink, and without batting an eyelash, he added, "There is no choice, she needs to be eliminated." This time I couldn't stay silent. I jumped up and announced in a decisive voice: "You will eliminate her and I will eliminate you." Then he made the matter seem like it was a joke and said, "What do you think, that I meant it seriously?" He saw that this would not work and continued the discussion, the conclusion of which was that the girl should be sent to a kibbutz in the Negev. I knew from then on what war was, what the army was, and what could happen to us as well, and I began to stand guard. The members of the squad were detained for questioning in Acre for several days and in the end were returned to the battalion accompanied by a statement from the military police that the investigation had not revealed beyond doubt that the offense had indeed been committed and that there is room for a trial. The guys returned to the company and the combat tasks assigned to me in those days were too frequent and overwhelming for me to continue dealing with the matter."

NYT: Bernie Sanders said in an interview that at 84, his days as one of the defining faces of progressivism in America are numbered, so he is working to help elect as many like-minded allies as possible up and down the ballot, from county commissions to the Senate. “By the time I’m 104 and serving my 8th term in the U.S. Senate — that’s a joke,” Mr. Sanders said, pausing for effect. “Yes of course, we’re building a movement for the future.”