Scenes From An Iraki Childhood - Sadr City July 12th 2008 Run boy run edition
A boy runs from his home as American soldiers drag his father outside - Sadr City July 12th 2008
Boy stands watching as his mother pleads with an American soldier to take his boot off her husband. Note the shirt the boy is wearing - Sadr City July 12th 2008
Boy saying “goodbye” to his father before the Americans take him away to an interrogation centre - Sadr City July 12th 2008.
This posting is specifically for the tiny minority of our readers who are American (or British) . What you are looking are just some of the reasons why we hate you. What you are looking at are just some of the reasons why for as long as their are Americans in our country our country will never be at peace.
Irak is for the Irakis. This is my home not yours and you completely and utterly unwelcome here.
Mohammed Ibn Laith
Iraq is too big to swallow for the empire and the empire’s leaders too arrogant to spit it out. More of these aggressions create terror in the occupied population and the resistance gets 100’s of recruits.
It is when the women, the mothers, wives, sisters push their men to fight that will destroy the occupation.
rh
I am a Canadian Blogger, female, who turned to Islam, after the Iraq war began. I am shaking with rage over what I see in these photos. My heart goes out to the women, children and the men of Iraq.
To win this battle is to support the Ummah!
The American Media says “The Surge is Working,” but the little boy saying good-bye to his father will catch the Great Satan’s Media in their lies.
American people are “brainwashed”. They do not think for themselves. They are woefully ignorant of what is happening in the world, thanks to their government. Now, the US is “broke” and the American people are starting to wake up. They are not prepared for what is about to happen to them under Bush’s leadership.
What has happened to Iraqis, no one can justify that. Unify! Fight for your country and your children! Keep the photos rolling, and bloggers all over the world will take up your cause.
May Allah (PBUH) be with you.
Mohammed,
You are wrong, some Americans do read this blog. Some Americans have hated the occupation, degradation, humiliation and murder that is our presence in Iraq from the outset. There are two roads to change: violence and non-violence. The first is rapid and rarely works; the second is slow and also rarely works. However, it is the only road that some of us know.
Mohammed is right when he says “tiny minority” Dr.C - Our American readership is less than 2% of the total. Of the baseline 120,000 readership about 2,000 are from I.P. adresses in the U.S.A, we get around 500 from the U.K.
Globally the overwhelming majority of our readership is from the Middle East, and North Africa, Asia, and those countries in Africa with a fairly large Muslim population.
We get some visitors from South and Central America especially Argentina and recently Brazil as well as Venezuala and Columbia.
We never forget our Jamaican reader !!! :-)
Of the European countries the largest number of readers (between 3 and 4,500) are from Sweden which is completely understandable when you remember that Sweden has an Iraki refugee population of between 70 and 80 thousand among them me.
Haitham
I stand corrected. Would that all Americans would read this blog to understand how completely brainwashed we are. As Mohammed has indicated many times, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is worse than an obscenity.
Apropos obscenity, please readers, take a look at the videos I embeded in my post:
http://justpeacenow.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-low-will-we-go.html
I am from Las Vegas NV and am a Peace activist. I want us out of your country as bad as you do. We can only hold peace vigils and write our US congress toi get them to move as quickly as possible. We all have been involved in war from the Korean Conflict to the Iraq War. We are all working to help our troops come home and let you get on with your lives.
I am sincerely sorry that we have caused so much mayhem and death.
as an American, i accept your hatred, Mohammed. i, and millions of my fellow citizens, fought hard to keep our troops out of your country, and failed. we’re still fighting, trying to get them out. i won’t make excuses, but it is harder than you may know: we’re not all the rich, spoiled, powerful people that many think populate every last square inch of this country. do you know what it is like for black americans here? even in the face of a possible Obama presidency, things are a long way from “good’ for us. i invite you to perceive that this is a nation of over 300m people, and that only ~5% of that number enjoy what most describe as “true” freedom, and most of that group is rich, white, and xtian.
don’t mistake all Americans as the same. I’ve read this blog for a long time, and as a scholar of ancient Iraq, my hatred of the war and occupation is very great, as great as it can be for one who has not lost a loved one in this war. and i have lost friends, iraqi and american, if that lessens your hatred at all.
anyway, hatred solves nothing. but you are absolved of yours, and i perceive your righteousness.
I left that contaminated land not long ago and I will never set foot there again.I am totally disgusted by what has been done in Iraq and Afghanistan.Believe me that most americans are for the occupation,every citizen in the USA is as guilty as if they had commited these war crimes themselves,how many times I have heard “we sleep safe in our beds at night because our sons are over there” and their bragging back home of “how many they have under their belts”,meaning dead Iraqis .But the most common one is “I don,t give a shit what they do over there as long as our gas is cheap”.There are a few minorities who are against the occupation but they are a minority.Even the poor in America will stand with their hand over heart believing all the garbage they are told.Vietnam was the same, atrocities committed and all the do-gooders participating in their anti war marches did nothing to change the american landscape,america is a nation that thrives on greed, vulgarity and the need to own everything and anything.Hatred may solve something in the end, it may rid the world of a cancer ridden parasite called the USA.
Amurrka. What comes around ALWAYS goes around.
All Empires fall. I’t’s a 15,000 year old rule.
Most crash partially and short term. Brits, Spaniards, German, Russian.
This one is going to fall very, very hard. Think Roman, Mayan, or Aztec.
Guess who is next ? The nation produces nothing any more but weaponry, whacked movies and games, and dope addicts. It was a fine ride but this freight train is headed over a cliff………… BIGTIME
Dougz’ Amurrka is facing a constitutional crisis and a financial disaster, both the effects of a long term failure of leadership. The roots of these problems lie in our domestic politics even though they are reflected in our relations with the outside world, e.g., in our Messiah complex and missionary/crusader-style foreign policy, our related militarism and our consequent inability to control our financial system.
One of the things we as a nation have lost control of is our relationship with the State of Israel. Our Congress and Executive no longer determine that relationship. That task has been given over to Israel herself and to a narrow but powerful lobby. As a result the relationship is no longer defensive, but one complicit in Israeli expansionism.
What I’m interested in here is getting an Arab/Muslim/truly Middle-Eastern point of view on the *extent* to which our failure to control that relationship has led us to ride into this “valley of death.”
I think that that is no more than a convenient excuse. The fact is that the United States is an imperialist power. Has been for a long time, and behaves like one. Part of that behaviour is to have local satrapies.
Name me even one occasion on which the USA has intervened on behalf of a downtrodden people in what the overwhelmingly white elite of the USA calls the “third world” - you cannot do it because America has never done it. Instead it consistently allies itself to tyrannies, preferably tyrannies whose local ruling class are beholden to the US.
Furthermore you are one of the most insanely militaristic and militarised societies on earth. Name me even one decade in which your soldiers have not been active. You cannot because there has never been a decade in your entire history when they you were not at war.
In the Middle-East you support a racist apartheid settler state - the State that has usurped the rights of the Palestinians. Just as in South Africa you supported the apartheid state dominated by the Nationalist Party of the South Africans of Dutch descent who call themselves “Afrikaners” and who systematically erected a framework of “law” to usurp the rights and the humanity of the majority population there.
To say that there is an imbalance betweeen you and the Zionist state is to miss the point. Their effect on you is, as I see it, marginal.
Your country would, I believe, behave just as viciously and just as savagely and just as cynically in a world where the Zionist state had never existed. The details of American imperial policy would be a little different the overall thrust, the cynicism, the rapaciousness, and the brutality would be the same.
At the core of American society is a profoundly racist ideology. That of the “shining city on the hill” the “light unto the nations” the belief that America and Americans are somehow intrinsically better. This is both the sin of “Shirk” - which in English means “idolatry” and the sin of going against the word of God who teaches us in the Holy Qur’an that he has created us male and female and of different nations and tribes that we may know one another and not desise each other. To say that you as a people are intrinsically better in some or all respects than any other people or all other peoples simpy by virtue of being American is to say very explicitly that you are a master race and entitled to act as one towards the untermenschen.
Even Americans who profess to be what you call “liberal” have had this idolatrous belief pounded into the very core of their consciousness and set of beliefs. How often on “liberal” sites have you seen people reacting in completely genuine horror and outrage to the news of some act of American military depravity with a statement along these lines:
No you are not better than that. You are worse than that, just as all the empires that were based in Europe that went before yours were worse than that. The only respect in which you differ from them is the twist that you give the ideology of the master race.
Perhaps what those who say:
Really mean is:
You have not ridden into this valley of death because the Jews or any other scapegoat you care to think of enticed you into it. You have ridden into this valley of death because you wanted to.
July 20th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Cazador said:
One of the things we as a nation have lost control of is our relationship with the State of Israel. Our Congress and Executive no longer determine that relationship. That task has been given over to Israel herself and to a narrow but powerful lobby. As a result the relationship is no longer defensive, but one complicit in Israeli expansionism.
Mohammad bin Leith replied:
I think that that is no more than a convenient excuse. The fact is that the United States is an imperialist power. Has been for a long time, and behaves like one. Part of that behaviour is to have local satrapies.
To this I can only admit to over six hundred military bases world-wide and to our wars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States
I have certainly received what I asked for. I am content with the virtual bruises.
We Americans must, however, *do something* in addition to the contemplation of our sins. I am not sure that we can await the cleansing of our souls.
If you will, I’ll return.
By all means return. “Know your enemy” is always good advice. American imperialism and militarism is the enemy of your people just as it is the enemy of mine. A government that behaves like that abroad will, sooner or later, start behaving like that at home.
It is in both our interests for the American empire to be driven out not only out of Irak, but out of all of the Dar al-Islam. You because for America to continue its failing attempts to dominate us will drive you ever further down into a spiral of ultimately ruinous wars and social collapse. Me because I recognise that we need to put our house in order and that the first step of this is expel the intruder. Only then can we begin to return the Ummah to a healthy and equitable Islamic society living in peace under the Shariah.
We may not be brothers in religion but we remain brothers in humanity and I wish you success in your efforts.
I am from the US. I have read several of your articles. None, are more ashamed than I, of this heinous administration’s attack on Iraq–with no justification. When I heard that our Congress wanted the Iraqi’s to pay for their own reparations, with their oil money, I was outraged. I would like to say, that I have signed petitions, written my congressional reps, and senators, to change this situation. If I had the money, I would take in refugees, myself. I am so sorry for what our country has done!
There is a place www.thelistproject.org that will help all Iraqis that worked as translators and interpreters for US. Begin edit of comment by admin
It is sad that they are being hunted and killed simply because they worked for a free Iraq after the fall of the dictaitior. To think the are considered traitors is beyond belief. All hated Saddaim that had any sense. And now the hate the people that worked to rebuild their country. These are loyal Iraqis that work for Iraq. They dont blow up innocent children and women. They dont carry a gun or a bomb. They love Their brothers and sisters. So why are they hated so. But there is help or them. Please save this site and pass it to those that need helpEnd edit of comment by adminNote by Gorilla’s Guides. You plainly have not bothered to check that this site supports the Iraki resistance. By all means take your traitor partners in your war crimes who betrayed their own people and welcome to them.
TO JEANIE BURGER..The only ones that blow up innocent children and women are the sick and twisted individuals called US soldiers who are in Iraq, most of whom are uneducated buffoons,rednecks,gang members.You really don,t get it do you??You commit war crimes like this and then you turn around and want to help those poor people out of the goodness of your heart,or perhaps its your guilty conscience!If you had one( a conscience) you would refuse to live in the USA.Note to gorillas guides, you could not have said it better.
Peace to you Green Planet. I agree completely with my colleague who was on admin duty last night that for America to take its dogs with it when it leaves is no more than fitting. It will save decent Irakis the trouble of hunting them down. To assist the enemies of your country in wartime is to commit the crime called treason. In Iraki law the penalty for those found guilty of treason is to be hung - sometimes preceded by a flogging.
However I cannot let this stand:
Emphasis added by me.
It is certainly true that the vast majority of civilian casualties have been caused by the Americans. It is also true that the American forces who are still trying to subjugate Irak target civilians and use collective punishment of entire civilian populations as an act of deliberate policy.
Then there are the death squads affiliated to the Americans and the GZG of which the most notorious is the Badr Brigade.
On the resistance side there are avowedly terrorist groups the so-called “Islamic Army” is one such.
Anybody irrespective of who they are and the irrespective of the cause in which they fight who deliberately targets civilians is a terrorist and “anybody” includes American soldiers on one end of the spectrum to the IAI member or a person professing to be a member of the Jaish al-Mahdi who goes flat against the will of the Iraki people and targets civilians on the other end of the spectrum.
The record of cynically deliberate, shamelessly blatant, and viciously barbaric American behaviour in my country against my people speaks for itself. Because of her words and deeds America stands convicted of inexcusably barbaric behaviour and it is that behaviour is the reason why the words “America” and “American” have rightly become the terms of opprobrium that the words “Germany” and “German” after the inexcusably barbaric behaviour of the Germans during the Second World War were revealed to a horrified world.
I urge you not to give the American war criminals the weapon of an easy refutation by saying things like:
in the heat of the moment.