Freedom Flotilla (7): some of those who Israel murdered at sea

The names, and in most cases the photos, of the nine people murdered by Israel have finally been known but only upon their arrival to Turkey. They are all Turkish nationals but one, a 19 years old boy, is also US citizen.

However there are more deadly victims, as the Zionist commandos threw many corpses overboard (organizers keep the figure of 16-20 killed). That is what Manuel Tapial, who was aboard the Mavi Marmara, said in Spanish to SER radio. He also said that there were executions after the Zionist commandos had total control of the ship and that they were shot from the zodiacs that surrounded the ship (from Un té por Palestina, podcast included).

The same story is confirmed by Bulent Yildirim, president of IHH (source):

They gave us nine bodies. Relatives are going to identify them. But the list of martyrs is larger.

There are missing people. Our doctors handed them 38 injured but they now say that there are only 21 injured.


What follows is an incomplete list: those whose bodies Israel has returned:

Furkan Dogan, 19. Born in the USA with dual Turkish-US citizenship. Student at Kayseri High School, planning to study medicine. Two siblings.



Necdet Yildirim, 32. From Malatya. IHH aid worker. Married with a three-year-old daughter.



Cevdet Kiliçlar, 38. From Kayseri. IHH aid worker, former journalist. Married with two children. You can see some of his photos at Flickr.



Ali Haydar Bengi, 39. From Diyarbakir. Graduate in Arabic Literature by Al-Azhar University, Cairo. Married with 4 children.



Cengiz Akyüz, 41. From Iskenderun. Married with three children.



Fahri Yaldiz, 43. From Adiyaman. Firefighter. Married with four children.




Cengiz Songür, 47. From Izmir. Married with seven children.




Çetin Topçuoglu, 54. From Adana. Former taekwondo champion, coach of Turkey's national taekwondo team. Married with one son. (Link to his Facebook page)



Ibrahim Bilgen, 61. From Siirt. Electrical engineer. Member of the Chamber of Electrical Engineers of Turkey. Married with 6 children.


Source: Lawrence of Cyberia.

Some of them were shot at close range, repeatedly so. Executions by a unit created by the Italian fascists.

In other developments:

• Hamas has refused the selective delivery of some of the flotilla aid cargo by Israel. It demands that all cargo, including the much needed construction materials, are included.
• Account of the massacre by Sarah Colborne.
• Israeli MP at flotilla, Haneen Zuabi, faces death threats.
• Mass demonstration called at London for Saturday.
• You can find a very brief synthesis of what does the Gaza siege means for the daily lives of the people surviving at the Zionist-made ghetto at Intifada-Palestine.

Police commanders to jail for G8 Genoa assault and killing

Now and then we get some good news for a change. Sadly some of these good news seem to be hidden by the mainstream Imperial media and we have to look at alternative sources to get to know them.

This is the case of the sentence against 25 police officers who lead or took part in the 2001 assault against a school in Genoa that was the base of a group of nonviolent protesters against the G8 summit that year and participants in the alternative Genoa Social Forum held simultaneously in the same location.

The trial revokes a previous sentence from 2004 that only condemned some of the police agents involved in situ but acquainted the whole command chain that gave the orders, sentencing them to a total of 85 years of prison for falsification in second degree (they introduced explosives in the school) and severe injuries (one of the victims died, many others were seriously harmed).

The sentence is still under what the state attorneys demanded: a total of 110 years. However this is not the official position of the government that has declared its support for the attackers.

Sources:
· Diagonal Aragón (in Spanish)
· Processi G8 (in Italian)

Sardinian Neolithic art in danger

I got a special newsletter some weeks ago from Diego Menozzi and Paola Arasio, who lead the excellent site on Megalithic monuments Stone Pages and its affiliated forum, but I did not realize the relevance of what they said on it until now: some tomb in Sardinia with conservation issues, you know: the typical problems of archaeology as governments don't care about culture, much less if it doesn't provide political redits.

But now I have accessed to their colorful press release along with Prof. George Nash (via Pileta de Prehistoria) and the problem suddenly became more striking and pressing:


Clear why, right? How can such a beautiful and well preserved monument from what surely was the all-times Sardinian apogee (the Nuraghe era) be treated as some nuisance the government does not want to spend money in protecting and promoting?

The site is known as the Checkered Tomb or Tomba della Schachiera (also: Sa Pala Larga 7) and is located in Bonorva, NW Sardinia, along with many other tombs and monuments, probably dated to the 3rd millennium BCE. It was excavated recently and merely disposed of afterwards, by covering the entrance with a concrete slab (permeable to water and somewhat corrosive) and destroying much of the context by filling with concrete as well, receiving so little attention that even the mayor of the town was unaware of the findings.

For the authors of the press release, this monument and others in the area is easily comparable to famous Maltese monuments, however would not it be for nearby farmer, Mr. Porcu, who took photos in the latest excavation season, in 2009, we would not have even a picture of them... anywhere, except maybe in some forgotten archive of the Italian cultural bureaucracy.

Blog shut and author sentenced for exposing Zionists

Italian blogger Paolo Munzi saw his blog shut down by the authorities and brought to trial, where he was sentenced to 6 months of prison for "defamation" but acquitted from having violated privacy laws and inciting racial hatred, for publishing a list of 160 Italian professors deemed to belong to the Zionist Lobby.

One wonders if it was proven in court that those people did not belong to the Lobby or if he was just sentenced without performing such crucial proof.

I suspect the latter: that he was presumed guilty because he attacked the Zionists. Therefore I must declare my solidarity with the censored blogger and decry again the attempts of censorship on denouncing such a Nazi network as is the Zionist mafia.

Sources: EAAZI, The Truth will set you Free, JTA.

Italy: banana republic?

How to live in Italy and not to stumble upon Berlusconi?


What follows has no precise author (some attribute it to Stephano Benni) and has been circulating through the Internet with minimal variations. Now I translate it from a Spanish-language version found at Rebelión.


Hello. My name is A., I live at Milano 2, a building made by the Prime Minister.

I work at Milan, at a company whose main stockholder is the Prime Minister.

My car, that I use to go to work, is insured at a company also owned by the Prime Minister.

In the evening, I leave my workplace and go shopping to a supermarket of the Prime Minister, where I buy products manufactured in companies of the Prime Minister.

At night, I almost always watch the TV channels of the Prime Minister, where films (often produced by the Prime Minister) are interrupted with advertisements made by the publicity agency of the Prime Minister.

Then, I get bored and go to navigate a while through the Internet, using the server of the Prime Minister.

Particularly I watch the football results because I am a follower of the team of the Prime Minister.

Once a week or so I go to a cinema that belongs to a chain of the Prime Minister, where I watch a movie produced by the Prime Minister as well as the initial commercials made by the agency of the Prime Minister.

On Sundays I stay at home reading a book that is printed by a company of the Prime Minister.

Naturally, like in all democratic countries, also in Italy it is the Prime Minister who makes the laws, then sanctioned by a Parliament whose majority is in the hands of the Prime Minister.

Who, obviously, governs in MY best interest.


Update (Feb 11): another article now at Rebelión, reviews how Berlusconi rose to power with the full support of the Mafia and the old-school Christian-Democracy, itself closely knit to the Mafia since the time of the US occupation at the end of WWII. Matter that has been confirmed by several repented witnesses.

Legal neofascist patrols take Italy's streets

Interesting, yet very scary article at BBC today on the newly implemented "citizen patrols": they seem mostly to be made up of neofascists and even wear fascist-like uniform and ensigns, pride of extremely racist views and even make fascist salutations.

Just some pics so you get the idea:

A Messina patrol with khaki uniforms and (not visible) eagle ensigns, the chief or the "National Guard" and a member saluting to the cameras

When is Italy going to be kicked out of EU?
.

Italian fascism reinforced

As you may know I'm quite worried about the rise of fascism in Europe. Not so much about the marginal extremist parties, that too, but specially about the sliding into totalitarianism without almost noticing, carried by "perfectly normal" conservative or even socialist parties.

In the case of Italy, where there is no free press de facto (all the relevant media belongs to Berlusconi, a system almost identical to the regime of Milosevic in Serbia: allows voting but misinformation reigns), where the ruler has got away from justice way too many times by pushing legal reforms that would make him immune to prosecution, where he is strongly suspected to be in collussion with the Mafia and member of the former totalitarian and violent masonry the Logia P2, the situation has gone awry long ago.

Sadly the EU has not been able or willing to impose a quarantine on his regime, the same it did with that of Haider in Austria some years ago. But the situation is way too similar. And one can't ignore that the neofascists of Fini are a pillar of Berlusconi's ruling bloc.

Today we learn with deep sadness and worry that Italy has gone one, or rather two steps further into full fledged fascism: it is the first EU country to make illegal immigration a punishable crime, not just for immigrants but also for "collaborators", like people who might rent homes to these refugees, who can be punished with up to five years in prision. Simultaneously "citizen patrols" have been legalized.

I have been very much concerned in particular about Italy's democratic demise in the las two decades and I suspect that this year and these laws will be soon considered by historians as an inflection point in the slide of old Italy to a new form of fascism.

What is even more worrisome is that the same kind of trends you see everywhere in EU: France, Britain, Spain... all these states and many others are more and more becoming less democractic and more totalitarian. Civil rights are less and less and we are almost forced to look outside Europe, maybe to countries like Brazil or Bolivia in order to find references for democracy in the 21st century.

A very sad decade for Europe indeed.
.

Policemen guilty of 2001 Genoa summit abuses

15 of them have been sentenced to penalties that range to a maximum of 5 years of jail for the chief of the prision brigade that was in charge when most of the abuses happened. 30 others have been acquitted.

In that infamous day of the 2001 Genoa G8 summit, anti-riot police massively and indiscriminately arrested activists of all sorts, beating them brutally, causing one dead and comitting other abuses such as focing women to strip in front of male agents.

But judicial severity has been much harsher for activists, some of which have been sentenced (in a separate trial) to 11 years in jail.

There is still another trial under way against 29 policemen accused of abuses in a separate detention center.

(Source: Al Jazeera).

The Comitee Truth and Justice for Genoa asks in regard to this trial: is Italy still a democracy? They think the penalties are way too soft:

What is evidenced and scares is the consideration that have in our country the violations of fundamental rights: a minor crime destined to prescription in tribunals, totally irrelevant for politicians, that in all these years have been unable to pass a law against torture and fire the public servants (in some cases they have even been promoted!) involved in the processes for the Genoa G8 meeting. In Bolzanetto [the jail near Genoa] unacceptable abuses were comitted. Mistreatment to detainees is totally incompatible with democracy. In these years a climate of impunity has been promoted. We ask to the political forces and the Parliament: is Italy still a democracy?