By LASHA DARKMOON

“Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”

Moshe Dayan, Israeli general

So what is President Donald Trump doing to put a stop to the appalling cruelties in Occupied Palestine that form the subject matter of the video we are about to see?

The answer is — nothing.

What makes matters worse is that we now have a president who has come out openly in support of torture.

When asked what he felt about torturing people, President Trump said: “I have spoken with people at the highest level of intelligence and I asked them the question ‘Does it work?’ and the answer was ‘Yes, absolutely’.” With that simpering, self-satisfied smile of his, he was to add complacently: “I want to do everything within the bounds of what you’re allowed to do legally, but do I feel it works? Absolutely, I feel it works!”

If Trump believes that torture actually “works”, he is mistaken. Torture only works if the suspect is guilty. If he possesses dangerous knowledge that he is concealing. But it doesn’t work if the suspect is innocent, as is mostly the case, and has nothing of importance to reveal. It’s well known that people will confess to anything under torture. Just to get the torture to stop. Information extracted under these circumstances is worthless. Everyone knows that.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. Why so often? If torture “works”, why didn’t Khalid “sing” after the first waterboarding? Or after the second? Why did they have to drown him (almost) 183 times in one month?

That’s six times a day!

The reason they needed to torture Khalid six times a day for 30 consecutive days was clearly because torture wasn’t working! And yet we have the President telling us: “Absolutely, I feel it works!”

According to official reports, there are 73 types of “interrogation” and 200 different torture methods used in Israeli prisons, to which President Trump turns a blind eye. Or endorses. Abby Martin reveals in the shocking video posted below that Israel has a deliberate policy in regard to the Palestinians called “SHOOT TO CRIPPLE”. IDF soldiers are instructed to aim directly at the penises and vaginas of their victims. More wheelchairs are consequently found in Occupied Palestine than anywhere else in the world.

All this President Trump knows, yet he does nothing to stop it, singing the praises of the Jewish state whenever he opens his mouth. (Click on link for 25-second video).

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LET’S go over to Israel now and see how nice these people are.

You want to study cruelty? To write a doctoral study on sado-masochism under a democratic system? Well then, hop on a plane to Tel Aviv and you can start sharpening your pencils as soon as you get to Ben-Gurion Airport.

A few years ago, there was an article in Haaretz called “Parallel Lives”. It was a detailed study by Dalia Karpel of the psychology of Israeli torturers in Palestine. I can no longer access the article on my computer. For some reason, all I get when I click on the link is this enigmatic sentence: “An error occurred while processing your request. Reference #30.6d52655f.1512602150.17d4c28a.” Yeah, sure.

Fortunately, I saved my notes.

(IMPORTANT UPDATE: The Dalia Karpel article, impossible to find on my google search engine, has just been found and sent to me by an internet savvy correspondent. The article can be read in its shocking entirety if you click on this link).

The Dalia Karpel report is dated 4 October, 2007. Allow me to copy and paste some of the quotes from this scary article:

The study by Israeli doctoral student and clinical psychologist Nufar Yishai-Karin included interviews with 18 soldiers and three officers who served with her in two armored infantry units. She knew most of them from her military service. She interviewed each of them personally in his home for a few hours and recorded the interviews; she still has the tapes. Her prior acquaintance with the soldiers led them to trust her implicitly, and they opened up fully, readily telling her about crimes they themselves had committed: murder and killing, BREAKING THE BONES OF LITTLE CHILDREN, inflicting humiliation, destroying property, stealing… The article describes the brutalization of some of the soldiers. Among the brutalized group was the impulsive type of soldier, who used the opportunity to let off steam, sometimes enthusiastically. Testimony: “I went out on my first patrol. Others on the patrol were just shooting like crazies. I also started shooting like all the others. Look, I WON’T TELL YOU IT WASN’T COOL! … Suddenly you are responsible for what you are doing. You take the gun. You shoot. You do what you want.” (‘Parallel Lives’ , Dalia Karpel, article in Haaretz. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/909589.html).

One of the study’s most shocking findings is that the soldiers enjoyed the intoxication of power no less than the kick they got from the violence.

At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence,” Yishai-Karin observes in her thesis. “They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power and the sense of danger.” Testimony of IDF soldier: “When there is chaos, I like it! That’s when I enjoy it! It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some week, I GO NUTS!” Another soldier: “The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You ARE the law! You are the one who decides. The moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, YOU ARE THE LAW! YOU ARE GOD!” (Dalia Karpel, Ibid.)

The callousness of some of the soldiers produced extreme indifference to the Arabs’ suffering. There were some tough soldiers who developed an ideology holding that even minor events necessitated a brutal response.

“With women I have no problem,” one soldier said. A woman threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to crotch area]. I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I GAVE HER A RIFLE BUTT IN THE FACE. SHE DOESN’T HAVE WHAT TO SPIT WITH ANY MORE.”

Some junior commanders encouraged the brutality and even endorsed it:

“After two months in Rafah a new commanding officer arrived. So we do a first patrol with him. It’s 6am. Rafah is under curfew, there isn’t so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him . . . He grabbed the boy. I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth: HE BROKE HIS HAND AT THE WRIST . . . BROKE HIS LEG . . . AND STARTED TO STOMP ON HIS STOMACH! We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock. The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are ALREADY STARTING TO DO THE SAME THING.” (Dalia Karpel, Ibid.).

The sad truth is that the level of cruelty practiced by these people — see picture — is nothing new. Israeli human rights abuses are fully supported by the American government and always have been. The Israelis, you will be pleased to hear, are no more wicked or cruel than their ancestors were. Psychologically, they at the same level of cruelty as they were in 1948 during the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, but technologically they are now in a position to inflict far more horrendous pains on a subjugated population, as they do in Gaza at regular intervals when they feel the need for orgasmic paroxysms and extracting pleasure from pain:

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YES, they’ve been at it a long time, but I doubt they are any more wicked or cruel than they ever were. They are just as bad. Here they are, their charming ancestors, over 70 years ago:

“The Jews ordered us to line up against the wall and started shooting. All were killed: my father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, uncles, aunts and some of their children. Halim Eid saw a man shoot a bullet into the neck of my [pregnant] sister. THEN HE CUT HER STOMACH OPEN WITH A BUTCHER’S KNIFE. (Fahimi Zidan, a Palestinian child survivor of the infamous Deir Yassin massacre of 1948).

“It was decided and carried out,” Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion noted a year later in 1949. “They washed her, cut her hair, raped her and killed her.”

I’m not sure who Ben-Gurion was talking about, but you can bet this sort of thing happened far more to Palestinian women than to Jewish ones. “There is no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews,” Richard Catling, a British army officer, noted shortly after the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre. “Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Many infants were also butchered and killed. I also saw one old woman who had been severely beaten about the head with rifle butts.”

Israeli General Rafael Eitan remarked frankly in 1980: “We have to do everything to MAKE THE PALESTINIANS SO MISERABLE that they will leave.”

Well, they’ve tried every trick in the book and the Palestinians are still with them. They refuse to leave. Maybe they have nowhere else to go. Or maybe they prefer dying in their own land than in someone else’s.

Here is Jacques de Reynier, representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross, writing a memo about the Deir Yassin massacre:

Amid disemboweled furniture I found some bodies. The “cleaning up” had been done with machine-guns, hand grenades, and finished off with knives. I turned over the bodies, and found a little girl mutilated by a hand grenade. Everywhere it was the same horrible sight. This gang was admirably disciplined and only acted under orders. The gang were young men and women, armed to the teeth with cutlasses in their hands, most of them still blood-stained. A beautiful young [Jewish] girl WITH CRIMINAL EYES showed me hers … [severed head] … DRIPPING WITH BLOOD. SHE DISPLAYED IT LIKE A TROPHY.

Here again is Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the IDF, writing in the New York Times on 14 April 1983:

“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel. Force is all they understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours. When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to SCURRY AROUND LIKE DRUGGED COCKROACHES IN A BOTTLE.”

A charming people, these, who have somehow managed to convince 70 million Christian Zionists to give them their full support and finance them in their follies.

One final titbit to show you the mutilated face of Palestine:

— “Whoever [i.e. Arab at checkpoint] does not act nicely gets beaten. We have clubs for that. Sometimes I might just not like his face. And then he gets one too. JUST A WAY OF PASSING THE TIME.” (Israeli policewoman, quoted in Haaretz, 16 January 2004). — “I ran toward them and PUNCHED THE ARAB RIGHT IN THE FACE, never before did I do such a thing, he collapsed on the road. I dragged him over behind the jeep, pushed him in. We sat in the back seat. Our Arab lay down there and just wept quietly to himself. He bled and made a puddle of blood and saliva, which angered and disgusted me, so I grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head to the side. He cried out loud. He didn’t stop crying and someone said his hands hurt from the handcuffs. One of the soldiers approached him and punched him in the stomach. THE ARAB SUFFERED FROM PAIN AND GRUNTED, WE ALL GIGGLED, IT WAS FUNNY. I KICKED HIM REAL HARD on the bottom and he whirled inside, just as I planned. They shouted that I am crazy and laughed – AND I FELT GREAT! (Liran Ron-Forer, December 2003)

Watch this video and weep.

VIDEO : 25 mins