US Marines urinating on Taliban corpses

From childhood we read and watch fairytales and Disney films which usually go something like this; beautiful boy is born, beautiful girl is born, at least one is elite or from royalty in order for the pauper to eventually get lucky and also become royal or rich, and if we readers and watchers are really lucky (Sleeping Beauty) both will be of the blue blood variety. Even when the beautiful and slim girl is also rich and unfortunate, she will inevitably suffer some hardship. This hardship is caused by someone ugly, monstrous, usually another woman. This suffering may last for years, no matter how long its duration, the girl will never have the initiative or strength to do anything about it herself. The evil forces head for a duel, ending in a climactic scene in which the prize, the beautiful helpless girl, is rescued by the handsome and valiant young buck.

Then you hit puberty and watch Hollywood movies with explosions and real life beautiful and skinny people, so much of the same happens except the point is driven home more clearly; that vengeance and violence is OK as long as you are the GOOD GUY. So you tell me who is the good guy?

'Kill Team Afghanistan' In the photo, Morlock grins and gives a thumbs-up sign as he poses with 15-year-old Mudin’s body. Note that the boy’s right pinky finger appears to have been severed. Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs reportedly used a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears to cut off the finger, which he presented to Holmes as a trophy for killing his first Afghan. - Rolling Stone magazine

Afghanistan - The Diamonds in the Dirt

Just wanted to spread this beautiful blog about Afghanistan, it's on Tumblr http://watanafghanistan.tumblr.com/ this is their latest blog

The US and their bluffs; 10 years of lies

They came to Afghanistan 10 years ago to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, They fought endlessly and killed 29,007 and more civilians in 10 years. In the same 10 years they achieved nothing of what they had initially planned to do except for killing Osama bin Ladin after 10 years & that also in PAKISTAN!

After 10 years of fighting and killing Afghan civilians, bombing their houses, damaging what others they didn’t bomb by night raids and manually destroying everything their foots set on. Capturing and imprisoning civilians without evidence, torturing them, humiliating them, depriving them of their rights. All this without any proof what so ever!. So after 10 years of all that in the name of getting rid of Al Qaeda and Taliban, the US say Talibans are not our enemy.

If so, then WHY did you kill those thousands of people in the name of Taliban? If they were not your enemy why did you kill them? this further increases the civilian death rate by their hands to even 100,000s!.

If they are not the enemy then why is there still hundreds of Taliban imprisoned in Guantanamo bay?

If talking to the Taliban was an option then why they did not talk to them years ago, that they are nowmaking office for them in Qatar and trying to do reconciliation?

What was that 10 years of war for? didn’t you come here to rid the country of Taliban as you claimed? The US reasons as to why they are in Afghanistan changes every now and then!. What does this tells us of this corrupt government?

“There was so much confusion about why we were there, whether it was to get rid of the poppy fields, or for national security. It seemed to change all the time. - While I was there millions of bullets passed through my hands. I can’t account for where those bullets went. We were supplying more and more, and I didn’t know where they were going. It haunts me. When I came back after my first tour I just couldn’t see what we had given to the country. I felt ashamed. They were dark days. When I joined the army I was lean, green and keen. I was proud of being a soldier. But now, as a serving officer, I want my feelings to be known. I want the government to consider the welfare of the guys out there, and the welfare of the Afghan people. People are suffering and it shouldn’t be allowed.”Lance Corporal Joe Glenton

Their war is fake, so are their reasons. They are in Afghanistan only for their personal matters, This war is for making profit for all those who invest in it. This war is not to help Afghan people as many are convinced to believe. Their Soldiers are not dying to protect them, they are not dying to serve their country.

Imagine what a shame it is, When your government makes you send your son/father/daughter/mother to fight off the Taliban the so called “terrorists” and then in the end the same government tells you that they are not the enemy. If so then what for did all those NATO/US soldiers die for?

For nothing, that’s the point. They died so that the War mongers get richer and richer, they died so that the business who invest in these war make more and more profit. But somehow the people are made to believe they died to save their country.

“Our real enemies are not those living in a distant land whose names or policies we don’t understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it’s profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it’s profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us”
- Mike Prysner

I’m amazed and I wonder why do these soldiers enroll in such military actions in first place. Your country is not at danger and specially not from Afghanistan at all. You are not saving your country by killing civilians in Afghanistan( well since Talibans are not enemy anymore and Al Qaeda is not in Afghanistan anymore so who else but civilians are left?) . 

A few months after i was there a lot of things weren’t going right for me, the command structure the missions we were getting didn’t make any sense, we were going after people the mujaheddin and they didn’t have any ideas which ones were the right ones we were kicking at the wrong doors terrifying children. Helicopters screaming over their heads at night, I was trying to calm down the women and children while the innocent men were dragged and separated out and completely humiliated in front of their families. if you are talking about all these people killing American soldiers in Afghanistan that they are terrorists. They are not terrorists they are wearing sandles and they got an AK and they got 14 years old building bombs to kill these American soldiers because we killed their family  - Grant Collins war veteran

For us, the US & NATO armies are the real terrorists. We are labeled as insurgents and terrorists when we are only defending our lands, dignity, and our homes. 


See also http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/

2011: We Care More About Kim Kardashian than the Arab Revolutions!

2011 is drawing to a close and what sums it up? According to Time Magazine it is the protester. Yet the REAL indication of anything in life apparently is Google. And the most Googled people are... Kim Kardashian and Rebecca Black. One a socialite turned sex tape star turned reality TV star, and the other a 13-year-old girl who put her music video on youtube and ended up receiving death threats due to the questionable quality of the song. I have nothing against these two people, they've done well in spite of their not so great beginnings of stardom. But the fact that in the UK the Arab Spring (or the economic crisis) did not feature is shocking but not surprising. 


The Middle East, 'what does that have to do with us?' A generation will claim. Well apparently a lot actually. We decided to fight alongside our ally, America after 9/11, by going to war in Afghanistan when Bin Laden had clearly already fled the country. We continued fighting there, but in order to justify this we then changed our tune and then were there because we were fighting the Taliban. Colonialisation apparently ended an age ago but there we were, in 2001 imposing regime change. What has the Afghan war achieved? They are the 2nd most corrupt country on earth, just after Somalia, a country which doesn't even have a government in most parts of the country. They remain one of the poorest countries on the face of this earth, despite billions having been invested/disappeared there. Thousands of Afghan civilians dead and livelihoods destroyed, did any of them hijack planes and fly them into anything?


Moron watch --->> To add insult to injury they have idiots like Ross Kemp (in Ross Kemp in Afghanistan) saying to them  that they should be grateful that we went in and rescued them from the villainous Taliban (when we didn't care before 9/11) and imposed democracy.


Then we have Iraq, one of the most disastrous wars of our era, obliterating the most ancient city in the world and creating sectarian strife which reverberated all over the Arab world. Putting aside the folly that was WMDs, Britain had everything to lose and nothing to gain from again, imposing regime change in a country that has nothing to do with us. Our foreign policies have many faults but it is my utmost belief that 7/7 would never have occurred had we not gone into yet another catastrophic war in Muslim lands. When Wikileaks exposed the devastating abuses of war that have happened, on top of what was already public knowledge e.g. Haditha, Abu Ghraib, the rape of a 14 year-old girl and then assassination of her, her 5-year-old sister and parents by US soldiers to name but a few, the things that made the news were the embarrassing diplomatic conversations, not the war crimes. Did any government even suffer for the war crimes committed under their watch? Did any of their children die? No. The only people apparently suffering judicially from exposing the people that are meant to be serving US are Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.


Moron watch --->> To add insult to injury, there was one American politician allowed to guest on Question Time claiming that the Arab revolutionaries would not have been inspired to revolt had Iraq not had the blessing of democracy imposed on them.


Next on George W. Bush's hitlist/axis of evil - Iran; the country ahead of its time in rejecting Western imperialism and corruption of their country. Do people not realise this is why America hates Iran? When I went to open a business account recently, what were the countries we were banned from trading with? North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Syria. Cuba - a harmless Caribbean country who had a revolution over 50 years ago, ejecting Batista and his American supported corruption. Syria, another non-Western puppet, funny that there are so many countries on the same level or worse as these countries yet conveniently, it is the countries that reject Western political influence that have sanctions imposed on them. A billboard I saw in New York ->>

We were quick to bomb Libya even though 2 minutes ago we were shaking hands with Gaddafi, all because Gaddafi was 'suddenly' going after civilians, so we bombed the civilians ourselves, going above and beyond the UN mandate of a no-fly zone and taking sides thus ensuring the political gains of the 'National Transitional Council'. Is that another regime change I sniff? Still it was the best PR war, we even had the privilege/puke-fest of a hall of Libyans apparently fawning over Cameron and Sarkozy. The media coverage of that war has a nice rosy tint despite there being protests at the new government already.

In my sister's access to business class in college, the class was assigned an essay on the Arab Spring and the role of women, most of her classmates lamented this subject, it dared to stretch their horizons beyond their X-Boxes and X-Factors*. Due to this essay alone, many dropped out and/or failed the course, they did not even WANT to research what was going on in the world, one even remarked that he could not care less if all these Arabs all blew themselves up. 

Even though the average British person may not give a tiny piece of bird shit about Arabs/the Middle East/North Africa/Muslims, you only have to look at our foreign minister's twitter @WilliamJHague to see that our politicians are absolutely obsessed with all things Middle East! But of course it's not just a one-way street, when a corruption investigation was launched into Saudi weapons dealing they blackmailed us not to go any further, lest they pull out of their anti-terrorism initiatives. Remember the reason we went into Afghanistan? Yet all but one of the 9/11 hijackers were actually Saudi.

I say in 2012 our foreign policy should reflect the will of the British people, just as Cameron defied all logic to pander to the anti-EU brigade of Britain, which is the majority of the country to be fair, perhaps we should keep our beak and money out of the Middle East. At least that's one thing I can agree with the right-wingers on.   

*see http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/2011/12/brain-dead-people.html

Women's Role in the Arab World

*Inspired by the encircling & protection of women protesting in Tahrir Square*

Many in the West deride women's rights in the Arab world or lack thereof, I am not defending it but everywhere in the world there is sexism in various different forms.

In Yemen, the current president Ali Abdullah Saleh criticised women for protesting because this indicated that they were fraternising with the opposite sex. Firstly, this statement was clearly made in a pathetic attempt to deflect criticism from his own actions onto Yemeni women and secondly, any footage you see will show that the women protest only with each other and their children.

Women are oppressed in Nepal, a Buddhist country for goodness sakes, through avenues such as inheritance rights and access to education. There was even an incident where a nun was expelled from her sect and refused treatment at a state-run hospital, what was her crime? Having been gang raped then robbed by a bus driver and four others who were pretending to help her.

In Saudi Arabia, in 2007 a woman met up with a man, unaccompanied, apparently to retrieve some photos of her from him. They were then set upon by a gang of seven strong who gang raped her. The gang was inevitably punished with imprisonment for up to a measly four years, yet she was also sentenced to six months imprisonment and 200 lashes for meeting up with a man who was not her relative. She was eventually pardoned by the King of Saudi because of the media furore and global criticism it caused.

There was a recent report of a woman in Afghanistan who was raped at the age of 18, as fate would have it, she became pregnant from this rape. She reported this to the authorities, who charged and imprisoned the perpetrator. However the rape victim herself was imprisoned for her role in the 'moral crime', about half of the female Afghan prison population are there for similar so-called moral crimes. She has been in prison for over a year with her child in tow and she was offered early release if she marries her attacker. She was unwilling of course at first, but she says she is now willing to do so for the sake of her child to not be incarcerated any longer.

Although thank goodness there is not such overt atrocities in the UK, sanctioned by the state anyway, there is sexism in every country. Here, like other countries that continue to ignore legislation, women are still paid less for the same job as a man. They are also exploited nationally every day in the most popular 'news'paper in the country. Women in the entertainment industry must look as good as possible and say as little as possible, that is meaningful anyway. Despite all the advancements of women's rights in this country, what is the first thing that a man will say to a woman who he is having a conflict with? I have lived in a working class area my whole life and when any couple has a domestic on the street, even with kids in tow, the first thing he will call her is a slag, whore and the ilk. This sexism crosses class divides, a self-proclaimed Conservative activist hash tagged a North African journalist referring to her as an 'Arab whore'. The police refused to investigate the case, she cited selective investigation compared with the recent racist football spat. (see 'Why Are We All Racist?'). Also, let us not forget the worst atrocity against females, the biggest genocide in the 20th Century; the selective abortion of female babies.


Just as men would have women believe that they are all terrible drivers or they cannot do this or that, women will conform to stereotypes that men create. Women should not let men define what they should be, that should be for us to determine. One of the most important steps in the Arab revolutions, if not the most important, is for women to play a greater role, for when you educate the women, you educate the whole nation*.





See also http://raraproductions.blogspot.com/ & http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/

*Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)