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Leah Hop

Mexican car wash massacre: rehab centers latest target in drug war. - 0 views

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    Research Question: What is the cause of all the violence associated with the Mexican drug trade?  Source: The Christian Science Monitor Source Citation: Kurczy, Stephen. "Mexican car wash massacre: rehab centers latest target in drug war." Christian Science Monitor 27 Oct. 2010. Student Edition. Web. 11 Apr. 2011. Summary: In Mexico, within less than seven days, there have been three massacres taking at least 41 lives of young people who used to take part in the drug trade. This shows that the drug lords will do anything to keep information from authorities. The main target are those who are in clinics or drug rehabilitation, and overall the ones targeted are young people. These killings have spread across the country of Mexico and have resulted in more than 28,000 deaths since December 2006. Reflection: I am saddened when I read about how so many younger people are being killed, especially those that are trying to overcome their involvement with drugs. Also, experts say that youths are turning to a life of organized crime due to a lack of job opportunities or lack of an education.  Questions: 1) Is anything being done to stop further random shootings at drug rehab centers? 2) Are there other ways Mexico can decrease youth involvement with the drug trade? 3) Are drug lords doing this just to prevent former addicts from giving information? What are their motives behind such brutal shootings?
Leah Hop

Get Shorty; The Mexican drug trade.(Shifting balances of power)(The Last Narco: Hunting... - 0 views

  • Three brutal Mexican massacres in less than a week have killed at least 41 people, with young people formerly involved in the drug trade making up the majority of the victims
  • massacres could signal the lengths to which Mexico's drug lords will go to prevent reformed addicts from giving information to authorities
  • "Police believe drug cartels use the clinics to recruit hit men and smugglers, threatening to kill those who fail to cooperate,"
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  • The latest attack Wednesday morning killed up to 16 people working at a car wash operated by a drug rehabilitation center in Tepic
  • "The workers were all men; they were washing cars when the gunmen, probably members of organized crime, drove up in SUVs and started opening fire
  • The coastal state of Nayarit is known as a peaceful corner of Mexico, but Reuters reports "the shootings underscores how killings have spread from the notoriously violent border region across the country."
  • On Sunday, at a drug rehabilitation center in Tijuana, 13 recuperating addicts were lined up against a wall and shot dead. On Friday, at a birthday celebration in Ciudad Juarez, gunmen killed 14. In June, 19 more people were gunned down at another drug rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez
  • the killings highlight how young people, and even children, are being targeted
  • Experts blame a lack of job opportunities - more than 20 percent of Mexican youth don't have access to jobs or an education - for drawing youths into an increasingly violent underworld
  • More than 28,000 lives have been lost to drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon took office and dispatched the military to fight organized crime in December 2006.
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    Research Question: What is the cause of all the violence associated with the Mexican drug trade?  Source: The Economist (US) Source Citation: "Get Shorty; The Mexican drug trade." The Economist [US] 18 Sept. 2010: 105(US). Student Edition. Web. 11 Apr. 2011. Summary: At the top of the Sinaloa cartel is Joaquin Guzman Loera, also known as El Chapo meaning shorty. Despite growing up in a poor family working opium poppies, he has later been known as Mexico's most legendary escapee and was named 41 on the list of the world's most powerful people by Forbes magazine. He controls a lot of Mexico and although he tries to focus on business, it is still brutal. Reflection: Two parts of this article that really stuck out to me where that the Mexican drug cartels are the most powerful organized-crime group in the Western world, and that even if El Chapo were to fall, there will be plenty more where he came from. These two things really emphasize the power and enormity of the drug trade. Questions: 1) If the government is able to stop major drug lords, will this help stop the drug war? Or will more rise to power as a drug lord? 2) How does someone from such a poor background come to great amounts of power? 3) Is the only way to not let the cartels be the most powerful organized-crime group by stopping people like El Chapo?
Laurel Ackerman

Letter From Palestine - 0 views

  • The Tel Aviv suicide bombing a week earlier, in which twenty-one Russian-immigrant kids were killed and about a hundred wounded, was a good thing, and many more such bombings are needed in order to throw off the yoke of Israeli occupation.
  • The Palestinians I talked to were just as harsh on their own leadership, excoriating the Palestinian Authority for its incompetence, corruption and brutality. The signs are everywhere: You can drive through Gaza and see, amid the shocking poverty, sumptuous palaces built by Arafat's cronies, many of them paid for by the crooked import/export monopolies they wangled after the Oslo agreements were signed
  • In Deir al Bala, there was still animated discussion and approval of the January assassination of Hisham Makki, the notoriously corrupt head of the Palestine Broadcasting Authority (the hit is widely believed to hav
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  • e been carried out by dissident elements of Yasir Arafat's Fatah organization). The PA has done little to relieve the suffering of civilians impoverished or made homeless by Israeli army closures and shelling, though it should be pointed out that the majority of its revenues, tax transfers from trade, have been withheld by the Israelis since the beginning of the intifada.
  • I visited the village of Al-Khadir, near Bethlehem, the day after the army had set up new blockades that prevented the villagers from getting to 5,000 acres of their farmland, the lifeblood of their community, land that the nearby settlement of Efrat has had its eye on for some time
  • The government will prevent villagers from going to their fields, using various pretexts; then it will declare the fields "abandoned" and seize them. Finally, they'll be handed over to a new or existing settlement.
  • n an attempt to head this off, the villagers had set up tents next to their fields, to let everyone know they weren't giving up without a fight. I could see the Israeli tanks patrolling on the next hilltop. "Don't point at them!" one man told me. "They'll shoot at you." A few days after I was there, a coalition of villagers from Al-Khadir and Israeli anti-occupation activists marched up to the hilltop together and held a peaceful demo. The army ordered them to leave in ten minutes. After deciding that they weren't leaving quickly enough, the soldiers began to beat the protesters, breaking the arm of one Israeli activist, Neta Golan.
  • the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut, in which 1,000-3,000 Palestinian civilians were butchered by Israel's Phalangist allies while under close Israeli army supervision
  • The latest signs from the region are ominous. After the recent killing of a settler near Hebron, Israel carried out a scorched-earth campaign, demolishing dozens of houses and wells, destroying fields and expelling hundreds of occupants. This was followed by the demolition of dozens of homes in the Jerusalem-area refugee camp of Shuafat and in southern Gaza. For its part, Hamas has vowed revenge and more suicide bombings in response to the Israeli army killing of an 11-year-old boy in Gaza.
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    How does the conflict in Israel affect the futures of Palestinian children compared to Israeli children?  Carey, Roane. "Letter From Palestine." The Nation 273.4 (2001): 28. Student Edition. Web. 16 Feb. 2011. Searched InfoTrak Student Edition: Israel Palestine Conflict http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=STOM&docId=A76563733&source=gale&srcprod=STOM&userGroupName=lom_accessmich&version=1.0 Summary: This is a letter explaining the issues between Palestine and Israel. It starts with talking about some radical Palestinian men who are bent on bombings being the way to throw off Israeli occupation. Then, the author talks about the violence between the two people groups and the futile attempts of the Palestinians to dissuade the Israelis. It also talks about the history of the conflict.  Reflection: I realized that even though we did listen to Abdullah in class, there are people who still want the bombings. I think that will have to have a play in the futures of the Palestinian children. Depending on the families of the Palestinian children, do their futures change? It's also interesting that the Palestinians are even harsh on their own government. Nothing is working in Israel. It's an issue. Questions: What are the statistics of Palestinians killed? What are the statistics of Israelis killed? Is there any way to get a kid's perspective?
Joy Merlino

Testing the water - 0 views

  • THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE FOR national liberation lacks leadership and is currently on hold. What's left for Israel to sort out now are its Palestinian citizens, who comprise 20% of the population in Israel and are increasingly treated as a fifth column, discriminated against at every level.
  • The call for a state for all its citizens, for equality and full democracy, are demands that threaten the Zionist project of a Jewish state with exclusive rights for Jews, preferably without the indigenous Palestinian population.
  • The silent and semi-visible system of segregation, apartheid and racist policies placed against them since the establishment of the state of Israel is taking more aggressive, visible and vocal expression, both within the government and Israeli media.
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  • We are also witnessing an unprecedented and alarming rise in the submission of overtly racist bills that target Palestinians individually and collectively; calling for revoking their citizenship, limiting their political freedoms, banning them from marking the Palestinian Nakba (1948 catastrophe) and banning them from residing in Jewish towns, amongst other things.
  • Racist right-wing activists not only thrive in such an atmosphere but are also given the means to publicly target Palestinian citizens, frequently inciting violence and racism and provoke yet more dehumanising campaigns.
  • he march of the fascist group in Umm AL Fahem on 27 October was a case in point. The march was called for by the extreme right-wing organisation, Eretz Yisrael Shelanu, and supported by Michael Ben-Ari, an Israeli Knesset member from the National Union, an extreme far-right party.
  • He is a leading figure in the colonial movement in the West Bank, and has been sentenced to several prison terms for physical assaults on Palestinians.
  • Marzel is a former member of Cakh, a Jewish terrorist organisation headed by Rabi Meir Kahane, which called for the forced expulsion of the Palestinian population.
  • Cakh was outlawed in 1994, following the massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron by one of its members, Baruch Goldstein.
  • According to the organisers, they wanted to impress upon the residents of the town that they "are the landlords of the State of Israel" and called not only for outlawing the Islamic movement, which happened to be their chosen Arab 'enemy' of the day, but also for its expulsion from Israel.
  • Viewed by many as a deliberately provocative act, the march was nevertheless authorised by the Israeli Supreme Court, despite its history of incitement to violence.
  • In the online version of Yediot Aharonot, the second-largest daily publication in Israel, Marzel is quoted as saying: "nothing is more symbolic than the fact that on the day of the 20th anniversary of his murder, Rabbi Kahane's followers will continue his struggle against the Arab enemy."
  • The problem facing Palestinian citizens is not what Marzel and his ilk say: they are merely articulating what the government is not yet able to say. These small, partisan, fascist groups achieve their purpose by successfully organising media stunts such as the event in Umm AL Fahem. However, the real 'performance' was the one choreographed and directed by the official authorities, including the police.
  • Was the Israeli Supreme Court decision and the thousand-strong police presence, including their brutal confrontation with fellow citizens, only intended to protect the freedom of expression of a group that publicly incites violence against Palestinians and Arabs, and calls for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens? No, not entirely.
  • The 'performance' in Umm Al Fahem was a message to all Palestinian citizens and their leadership warning them to beware, telling them "you either accept Israel as a Jewish state, with exclusive rights for the Jews, and live with gratitude as second-class citizens, or we will crack down mercilessly", with transfer remaining a looming option.
  • n Umm AL Fahem, Marzel and his group were simply doing a job for the government with their attempt to demonise the Palestinian citizens as terrorists, this time taking the Islamic movement as their cause celebre, to 'legitimise' future government actions against them. In Umm Al Fahem, just as in Israel's operations in the West Bank and Gaza, where it has been escalating violence against the Palestinian communities in incremental doses, Tel Aviv is testing the ground in preparation for future, more aggressive operations to come.
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    Shiekh, Awatef. "Testing the water." The Middle East Jan. 2011: 22+. Student Edition. Web. 16 Feb. 2011. Summary: This article is talking about the racism that exists for the Palestinians living in Israel. It states that they are "discriminated against at every level." The government as well as the media are taking part in this visible discrimination. The freedom of Palestinians living in Israel is being limited by racist bills. Right-wing activists are publicly targeting Palestinians. An example of this is the group Umm Al Fahem.  Reflection:  We have heard about the seizing of Palestinian land, and the Israelis living in Palestine, but we do not often hear about the Palestinians living in Israel. According to this article, the treatment of Palestinians in Israel is horrible. There is open discrimination, not openly supported by the government, but definitely not stopped by it. In reality, the actions of the Palestinians towards the Israelis are not the only acts of violence. The Israelis act out as well, it is simply not brought to our attention as often.  Questions: 1) How will this affect the peace treaty negotiations? 2) How will this attitude of hatred affect the future generations? 3) Will the refugee negotiations be affected by this treatment? 4) How does this compare to how the Israelis living in Palestine are treated?
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