Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin.
[ColonelCassad] Boris Johnson refuses to take responsibility for the fact that the war did not end in March-April 2022, although it is well known from several Ukrainian and Western sources that it was Johnson who insisted that peace was not needed and said "Let's fight".
And everything suited Johnson in 2022 and even in 2023, when the West seriously hoped first for an economic, and then a military defeat of Russia.
But now the situation is different - it was not possible to isolate Russia diplomatically (the upcoming BRICS summit in Kazan will once again confirm this), it was not possible to destroy the Russian economy (Russia restructured its energy supplies and maintained GDP growth against the backdrop of growth problems in Europe), and at the front, Russia firmly holds the operational and strategic initiative and methodically recaptures territory and populated areas.
And the question of responsibility arises for the fact that everything came here. Everything is clear with the cocaine Fuhrer, they will try to blame everything on him. But Johnson no longer wants to be in this company. Therefore, like a cheapskate, he tries to take back his words and pretend that he had nothing to do with the liquidation of Ukraine within its former borders and the hundreds of thousands of murdered citizens of the former Ukraine.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Andrey Zvorykin
[REGNUM] "Today, October 13, the front troops stormed the capital of the Latvian SSR - Riga.
Is that how they referred to themselves before the Soviet tanks arrived? Or was it that thereafter they thought themselves twice conquered by socialism — first the national socialism of the Germans, then the international socialism of the Russians, and both doing their best to erase all that was truly Latvian?
Today at dawn the storming of the city began.
The first to break into Riga were the soldiers of the rifle regiment under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Voloshenko... The soldiers, sergeants and officers demonstrated exceptional skills and courage. The first flag over Riga was raised by the Order-bearer Sergeant Major Alexander Popov.
The population – workers, the urban poor, and civil servants and intellectuals – greeted our troops with great joy and sincere love.”
Of course. How else would they greet those who entered with tanks and machine guns, barrels still hot from firing at their former overlords, driving through their city on the way to conquer Nazi Berlin?
This is exactly 80 years ago that Major General Aleksei Lobachev, member of the military council of the 3rd Baltic Front, reported to the head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Colonel General Aleksandr Shcherbakov .
By the evening of October 13, 1944, our soldiers had cleared the city blocks along the right bank of the Daugava - Western Dvina of fascists. By October 15, Riga was completely liberated. But already on the 13th, judging by Lobachev's report, portraits of Soviet leaders and badges with images of Voroshilov and Kalinin that had been preserved since 1941 appeared on sale in the remaining stores.
The people of Riga did not offer any “resistance to the Soviet occupation” that modern Latvian politicians could be proud of.
Those who chose “collaboration” with the real – Nazi – occupiers tried to join the tail of the German columns hastily retreating to the Courland coast.
This flight from the “ancient capital of the Hanseatic knights” was vividly described in his memoirs by Wehrmacht Oberleutnant Gottlob Biedermann, whose unit covered the retreat from Riga. The infantryman, who survived the battles for Kiev, Sevastopol, Riga and the Courland pocket, was lucky. He died peacefully in 2010, and published his memoirs in the mid-nineties. It is clear that even after 60 years, the image of the Germans fleeing from the “old lands of the Order” was vividly before his eyes:
"The air was filled with the roar of weary and maddened herds of cattle as they were driven westward across the cobblestone streets of Riga. The ominous sight of Russian attack aircraft became a permanent feature of our dreadful situation as they thundered over the tiled roofs, displaying the clear five-pointed red star on their silver-gleaming fuselages."
Operation Thunder, an organized retreat to the west, as Biderman recalled, ended “ominously” or, to put it simply, failed.
The fact that it took the Red Army another couple of days to capture Riga, and that some of the German manpower and equipment were taken away, can only be explained by the resourcefulness of a single demolition expert.
"While the sun was breaking through the dense gray horizon, an officer from the sapper unit turned the handle of the explosive device connected to the explosive charges in the Dvina Bridge. A giant fireball rose into the sky above the river, and a colossal explosion was heard, from which the bridge eventually collapsed into the Dvina," recalled Biderman, who owed his life to this sapper.
At the same time, on the morning of October 13, 1944, Riga fishermen, under enemy fire, repaired boats damaged by the Germans, helped our soldiers cross and transport equipment across the Daugava and the Riga lakes. This is evidenced by documents from the political department of the 43rd Guards Latvian Rifle Division of the 2nd Baltic Front.
The authorities of the modern Republic of Latvia, of course, will not celebrate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Riga and the entire republic from Nazism.
The approach of today's politicians is well known. For example, in February of this year, the mayor of Ogre, Egils Helmanis, congratulated SS legionary Antons Mortukans on his 105th birthday, calling the collaborator a "respected fighter" and "an amazing person."
And in March, the Latvian State Police arrested public figure Elena Kreile in Riga, who went on a solo picket against the traditional march in honor of the Latvian SS Legion. As TASS explains, Kreile had previously been recognized as a political criminal - judges considered the Russian tricolor on her jacket and the letter "Z" on her bag "justification of war crimes."
However, the protest action against the glorification of real war criminals, immortalized in the Riga Museum of the “Fight Against Occupation,” was considered an encroachment on national interests.
But the fact that people brought flowers to the Monument to Soviet Soldiers in Victory Park on the banks of the Daugava (until the authorities demolished this monument in 2022) shows that Latvia remembers the liberation and what preceded it.
Let us remind you of this too.
TWO LATVIAN SSRS
The very emergence of the Latvian Republic (1918–1940, in Soviet historiography it was called “bourgeois”) is inextricably linked with the Civil War that engulfed the entire Russian Empire.
The role of the Latvian riflemen in the events of October 1917 and in the battles from Petrograd to Kakhovka and Perekop is well known. Suffice it to say that the first commander-in-chief of the Red Army was "rifleman" Joachim (Jukums) Vatsetis. Less well known is that in 1919 he also commanded the army of Soviet Latvia.
The First Latvian SSR was proclaimed in the autumn of 1918, during the war between the local Reds (led by Vatsetis and Jan Fabricius, nicknamed Iron Martin) and the Whites, in which the Baltic German Landeswehr and Russian White Guards intervened. Pro-Soviet Latvians fought until 1920, until the same logic of the civil war forced the RSFSR to sign peace with the "bourgeois" Latvian Republic.
The Second Latvian SSR emerged when the Second World War was already in full swing in Europe, and our country needed to secure its borders. The Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact provided this opportunity and at the same time protected the Baltic nations from immediate Nazi occupation.
Before the war, European diplomats admitted : "The majority of the Latvian people are anti-German." But the regime of dictator Karlis Ulmanis was inclined to go under the Germans. Two months before signing the pact with the Soviet Union, Reich Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed another pact with the head of the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wilhelms Munters, a Baltic German whose real name was Wilhelm Munter. Berlin and Riga pledged to cooperate in the military sphere. The Wehrmacht could have appeared on the Soviet-Latvian border even before the Nazis invaded Poland.
But the plans for a new world war did not imply an immediate confrontation between Germany and the USSR, and according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Baltics were in the Soviet sphere of influence. On June 16, 1940, People's Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov presented Ulmanis with Moscow's demands: to comply with previously concluded agreements on military aid to the USSR and to hold democratic elections.
The preparations for the vote in the People's Seimas were accompanied by mass pro-Soviet demonstrations. Moscow demanded that the Ulmanis regime not interfere (and this was reinforced by the presence of the Red Army), but, judging by the NKVD reports, the expressions of sympathy for our country were quite sincere.
On July 21, 1940, the People's Seimas voted to proclaim the Second Latvian SSR and submitted a request for its accession to the USSR. This happened on August 5 of the same year. The Latvian army was reformed into the 181st and 182nd rifle divisions of the Red Army.
It is clear that these changes were unlikely to enjoy the support of the absolute majority of the ruling class, the army and society. But no "partisan war" began in response to Latvia's entry into the USSR in 1940. The "Forest Brothers" appeared later, with the participation and assistance of the Nazis.
"PEOPLE WITH SKULLS ON THEIR CAPS WHO UNDERSTOOD RUSSIAN"
The Latvian SSR was one of the first Soviet territories occupied by the Germans. Riga was captured at the end of June 1941, and the Wehrmacht occupied the entire republic by July 8. There was no talk of any "restoration of independence." According to the General Plan "Ost", the General District of Lettland was created as part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland - a territory to be settled by German colonists.
There were those who were satisfied with the serf status. The Latvian SS Legion managed to recruit about 100 thousand "volunteers", of which 87,500 were sent to combat units.
Latvian SS men "marked" themselves with war crimes in the Leningrad and Novgorod regions. From December 1943 to April 1944 alone, units of the 19th Latvian SS Division destroyed 23 villages. In thirteen of them, up to 1,300 people were shot. According to historians, in February–March 1944, legionnaires destroyed 138 villages in the Vitebsk region of Belarus, killed 17,000 people, and drove 13,000 to Germany.
Even other collaborators from Vlasov's ROA were horrified by the atrocities of the Latvian "SS men" in Belarus. The Historical Memory Foundation cites one of the Vlasovites' reports:
"At the beginning of May (1944) in the area of the village of Kobyliniki in one of the hollows we saw about three thousand bodies of executed peasants, mostly women and children. The surviving residents said that the executions were carried out by "people who understood Russian, wore skulls on their caps and red-white-red flags on their left sleeves" - the Latvian SS."
At the end of the war and immediately after it, the punitive forces will join the ranks of the “forest brothers”, now considered fighters for independence and democracy.
But there was another Latvia.
The first cell of the anti-fascist underground in Riga – Janis Anton’s group of about a hundred people – was created immediately after the beginning of the occupation, in July 1941. Moreover, it seems that it was created without any connection with the Moscow “center”.
In the autumn of the same year, the Latvian capital saw its own "Young Guard" - the organization collected weapons, organized escapes for Soviet prisoners of war and arrested Latvian underground fighters. Despite the Gestapo repressions, the underground worked until liberation.
At least 75 thousand Latvians fought in the Great Patriotic War on the side of the Red Army. The 201st (later 43rd) Latvian division was awarded the title of Guards for its participation in the defense of Moscow.
The 183rd Division fought the Nazis at the beginning of the war - near Staraya Russa, in 1942 - near Rzhev, and in 1943 in the battle for Kharkov and on the Kursk Bulge, where the Latvians fought in the very hell - at Prokhorovka. Here they withstood the onslaught of two elite SS tank divisions - "Adolf Hitler" and "Death's Head".
It should be noted that the first tankman to be awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union was Latvian Peter Tyltinsh (a fighter of the Spanish International Brigades, Paul Arman). In total, the title Hero was awarded to 27 ethnic Latvians and people of Latvian descent by the end of the Great Patriotic War.
One of the Hero's stars was posthumously awarded to Imants Sudmalis, one of the organizers of the Soviet partisan underground in Latvia and Belarus.
The partisans of Anderson (under this pseudonym Sudmalis was known) carried out their first action deep behind enemy lines back in 1942. Six months before the liberation of Latvia, Sudmalis was arrested by the Gestapo and hanged after torture. The partisan's last words were well known to the post-war Soviet generations of Latvians:
"I looked back on the path I had traveled, and I have nothing to reproach myself for: in those decisive days for humanity, I was a man and a fighter. If only the future were better and happier!"
JUST A "TRANSIT CAMP"?
While the Latvian Red Army soldiers fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War and in partisan detachments, their occupied homeland was being transformed into a large concentration camp. The Nazis built 48 prisons and 18 Jewish ghettos.
The responsibility for the Holocaust in Latvia was also borne by the “Auxiliary Security Police” under the command of Viktors Arajs – in January–March 1943, it was these punitive forces that shot more than 10,000 people at a firing range in the Bikernieki forest to the east of Riga.
Twenty kilometers from the Latvian capital, the occupiers created the Kurtenhof concentration camp, better known by its Latvian name, Salaspils.
The Salaspils camp for political prisoners and the nearby Stalag 350/Z were not classified as Vernichtungslager (extermination camps like Auschwitz, Sobibor or Majdanek), but about 400,000 Latvians and prisoners died there over three years.
In fact, the “educational labor camp” was a death camp, where mass shootings were carried out and people were killed in “gas chambers”.
"I participated in loading Jews from trains into trucks, accompanied them to the gas chamber and forcibly drove them into the back. Having placed 50-60 people in the gas chamber, they hermetically sealed the door and started the engine..." - an employee of the Riga SD department, a Latvian by the name of Konrads, testified during interrogation.
Here people were buried alive in the ground, and sick prisoners – both adults and children – were “liquidated” with the help of arsenic.
The most terrible thing was that the camp also contained children taken from Belarus, the Pskov and Leningrad regions during the “anti-partisan actions”, in which SS legionnaires also participated.
The FSB cited data from the archives - the story of a former prisoner of Salaspils, Latvian Kazimirs Laugalaitis :
" In March 1943, 20,000 Soviet citizens were driven in, along with their children. The SS immediately took the children away from their parents, literally tore them out of their arms... Infants and children under 5 were placed in a separate barracks, where they died en masse. More than 3,000 children died in just one year."
Soviet investigators established that from the end of 1942 to 1944, up to 12 thousand children were held in the Salaspils camp, of which 7,000 died. The overwhelming majority of the little prisoners went through an "action" comparable only to the sadistic "experiments" of the Japanese detachment 731. In Salaspils, the Germans pumped 3,500 liters of blood from the children's blood vessels.
Documents published by the FSB back in 2000 contain testimony from one of the camp’s prisoners, 10-year-old Natasha Lemeshonok :
"The soldiers were taking us out of the barracks in groups and leading us through the yard to the hospital... The doctor stuck a needle into my arm and when he filled the glass tube full, he let me go and started taking blood from my little sister Anya... A day later they took us to the doctor again and took blood again. Anya soon died in the barracks. Our arms were all covered in injections."
In the textbook “History of Latvia: 20th Century”, published in the mid-2000s, Salaspils is presented not as an analogue of Auschwitz and Treblinka, where local collaborators “worked”, but as a “transit camp”, where “about 2 thousand people were simultaneously located”, and the most terrible punishment was allegedly not execution, but the threat of execution. Documents that could refute this lie are ignored.
STALIN'S EIGHTH STRIKE
The end of Nazi terror and occupation was brought about by the eighth of ten “Stalinist strikes” – an operation by the Red Army that began in mid-September 1944 with forces from three Baltic fronts (commanded by Army Generals Ivan Maslennikov, Andrei Eremenko, and Ivan Bagramyan ).
The armies of the North Group holding Latvia were commanded by Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner. On the one hand, he had risen from private to General Field Marshal (he was the last to whom Adolf Hitler awarded this rank in 1945), but on the other hand, he was not respected in the army for his cruelty and lack of talent. As Wehrmacht officer Gottlob Biedermann recalled, Schörner “would have been better off as a Feldgendarme, whom the soldiers called ‘watchdogs’, than as a general.”
The "watchdog" was unable to hold back the advance of Bagramyan's troops. And then, against the backdrop of the successful actions of the Leningrad Front in Estonia, the army of Eremenko and Maslennikov began to advance towards the end of September.
The cities of Valmiera and Smiltene were liberated. But the Germans, having brought up troops retreating from Estonia, were able to force battles on the 1st Baltic Front, which was approaching Riga. On September 27, the offensive temporarily stopped at the fortified line "Sigulda" 60 km from the city.
Our command decided to shift the main pressure of attacks from Latvia, from the Riga direction, to Lithuania, to the Memel (Klaipeda) direction. This would give a chance to quickly cut through the enemy's territory, cutting off the "North" group in the Baltics from East Prussia.
ATTACK OF THE AMPHIBIOUS FORDS
The armies of the 1st Baltic Front were transferred to the Lithuanian city of Šiauliai, from where a joint offensive on Memel-Klaipeda began on October 6.
The Germans, who were expecting the resumption of fighting in the Riga area, were completely unprepared for such a turn of events.
The Wehrmacht began to withdraw from Riga to the Memel direction, but this did not help the enemy. According to the plan of the Soviet command, the advancing Red Army left the Germans a corridor by the sea for the withdrawal of troops from Riga to the west, where the enemy would have been surrounded anyway.
As experts at the Moscow Victory Museum note, Schörner took the bait and on October 5 announced an evacuation through the corridor. The situation for the enemy was getting worse: on October 10, the German group in Latvia and Lithuania was cut off from East Prussia. But Schörner was not going to give up the city without a fight.
"The Feldgendarme" did not expect the unexpected decision of our command. On October 13, the Germans were attacked from Lake Kishezers, which our soldiers crossed in Lend-Lease Ford GPA amphibious vehicles. The Germans, having missed the attack, began to retreat.
On October 13, as mentioned above, the forces of the 2nd and 3rd Baltic Fronts, pursuing the fleeing enemy, occupied the right-bank part of Riga, and then the entire city.
"THE PRIDE OF THE LATVIAN PEOPLE" FEARED CAPITULATION
The Riga operation ended on October 22 with the unification of the 1st and 2nd Baltic Fronts, blocking the enemy in northwestern Latvia, in the Courland pocket. Both the Germans and the Latvian Legion found themselves there, resisting until May 1945. The 19th Latvian SS Division, fearing retribution for its crimes, surrendered after the capitulation of the Reich.
SS men and “anti-Soviet resistance fighters” are now honored as fighters for an independent Latvia. “ The Legionnaires are the pride of the Latvian people and state,” then-Defense Minister Artis Pabriks said in 2019. This post-Soviet trend only strengthened with the start of the NVO.
The demolition of the Liberators' Monument in 2022 has already been discussed. In February 2023, the Latvian Ministry of Culture allocated a grant for the film "Invisible Fortress" about Ernests Laumanis, the commander of the 21st Liepaja Police Battalion during the siege of Leningrad - from the German side, of course.
And on April 20 of last year (coincidentally, on Hitler's birthday, the Russian Foreign Ministry noted), the Seimas adopted the law "On the ban on holding certain public events on May 9," which meant events in honor of Victory Day. Only Russia's victory over neo-Nazism in the SVO can stop the rehabilitation of Nazism that the current Baltic regimes are imposing on their peoples.
by Larry Alex Taunton From his X account
I’ve done a lot of pheasant hunting. As a high schooler, I made extra $ assisting guides on pheasant hunts: getting the hunters in the field, flushing game for them to easily shoot, and making sure they are safe. And much more since those days.
You learn to spot the guys who are a potential danger to themselves and others. Everything about them is new: the shotgun, the gear, the clothing. They look like they’ve just stepped out of an LL Bean catalog. This isn’t meant as a criticism. But if you’re leading the hunt it’s a visual clue that he’s probably new to this and, in his excitement, he went to his local hunting store bought all the gear in an effort to look like one of the guys. It tells you to keep an eye on him and to be ready to offer quiet instruction so as not to embarrass him.
I don’t fault Walz for clearly being inexperienced with firearms and hunting. Anyone who is proficient in either had to learn sometime. For most of us, I think, the scorn heaped upon him is due to the fraudulent nature of it all. What VP candidate takes a day off to go hunting? Well, they don’t unless they see it as a photo op. Dems realize Americans think Walz is a beta male weirdo, so some campaign genius said, “I got it! He’ll go hunting! He’ll look manly!”
With the exception of “The Natural,” I generally hate sports movies because the lead actor usually looks like he’s never played sports in his life. Watching Walz handle a shotgun is like watching Keanu Reeves throw a football in “The Replacements.” It’s painful. (Robert Redford was believable as an aging baseball player because he clearly played the game as a boy. Same with Kevin Costner in “For the Love of the Game.”)
In this video, Walz appears to be having difficulty loading his shotgun while on a pheasant hunt. He tells the reporter, whose questioning tone suggests she’s not buying any of this, that it’s a Beretta A400.
The A400 is a semi-auto shotgun. Many guides don’t allow semi-autos on a hunt because they can’t see at a distance that you’re “safe.” A break-action double-barrel is therefore preferred since they can tell when your gun cannot be fired (be it loaded or not). This is because the barrel is on a hinge that “breaks” open to permit manual loading. And this is very important for safety. I would wager that most accidental shotgun deaths involve semi-autos.
This is all the more important in pheasant hunting. Unlike, say, deer hunting where you might sit in a tree all day long by yourself, pheasant hunting is typically done in large groups where the hunters are arranged in a crescent and marched through a field toward “blockers,” that is, hunters who stand still in a line. The idea is to drive the birds into the blockers and force them to flight.
Hunting in such close proximity with other hunters can be dangerous for a variety of reasons: the birds fly parallel to the ground at head level, excitable hunters start blasting away at everything that moves or don’t wait for the birds to reach a safe height, accidental discharges, etc. A guide wants to see that your weapon is open and therefore inoperable in all but the hunt.
The loading port on the A400 is beneath the weapon near the trigger guard. This type of loading is an acquired skill, and Walz doesn’t have it. (I’ll add that Walz says he bought it for trap shooting. In this he is correct. I wouldn’t want to use an A400 pheasant hunting. It’s not a field gun. It’s heavy. But it’s excellent for clays.) He fumbles around and, sensing he’s making a fool of himself, he appears to stop before he’s managed to get it loaded.
As you can see, this carefully choreographed hunt wasn’t so carefully choreographed. It’s become Tim Walz’s Michael Dukakis-in-the-tank moment. It’s also noteworthy that in this gaffe Democrats, for all their faux rage about “toxic masculinity,” unwittingly pay homage to masculinity and its appeal. They do know what it is. They just don’t know how to practice it.
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/14/2024 11:32 Comments ||
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#6
Did any weapons actually get colored on the hunt?
Posted by: Super Hose ||
10/14/2024 12:39 Comments ||
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#7
Last clays tournament I attended, shotgun had to be able to loaded by breech, unloaded until your turn, load 1 and breech open until calling "Pull".
Same thing when I went out on a Dove hunt - 1 loaded and breech open, see a target and call direction, then close and track shot. Never been Pheasants, but I imagine its the same grocery aisle as Dove in so much as, like Tim Spaz's photo op, we were foot mobile and not in a set position where fields of fire can be established. Guide's prerogative of course but he didn't want someone getting happy feet (he also established arcs and made it a rule to call cardinal direction of target (had to know cardinal directions instinctively)). The call established who got first try and where, then the closing of the breech let the group know it was a serious call and could respond appropriately such as crouching until action is completed.
Commentary by Russian military journalist is In italics.
[ColonelCassad] I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’d volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I’d grown up in Flint, Michigan. I’d seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working at a hospital in Gaza, one stuck out to me: Almost every day I was there, I saw a new small child who had been shot in the head or chest, almost all of whom later died. Thirteen in all.
This is what happens to human shields when those being shielded start a truly vicious war. If you don’t like the result, blame Hamas for holding those holding those children and their families in vulnerable positions instead of letting them escape.
At the time, I assumed it was the work of a particularly sadistic soldier stationed nearby. But when I got home, I met an emergency room doctor who had worked at a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. “I couldn’t believe how many kids I saw shot in the head,” I told him. To my surprise, he replied, “Yeah, me too. Every day.”
A wealth of information about the scale of the destruction in Gaza has come from satellite data, humanitarian organizations, and the Hamas Gaza Ministry of Health. But Israel does not allow journalists or human rights investigators into Gaza, except for a very few embedded reporting trips with the Israeli military, and the stories of Palestinian journalists in Gaza have not been widely read, despite the incredible risks they take to cover events there.
But there is a group of independent observers who have been watching this war on the ground, day after day: medical volunteers.
Through personal contacts in the medical community and a lot of internet searching, I was able to contact American health workers who have served in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Many of them have family or religious ties to the Middle East. Others, like me, do not, but felt compelled to volunteer in Gaza for a variety of reasons.
Using questions based on my own observations and conversations with fellow doctors and nurses, I worked with Times Opinion to interview 65 health workers about what they saw in Gaza. Fifty-seven, including me, were willing to share their experiences on the record. The other eight participated anonymously, either because they had relatives in Gaza or the West Bank or because they feared retaliation in the workplace.
Here’s what we saw.
The 44 doctors, nurses, and paramedics had seen numerous cases of young children shot in the head or chest in the Gaza Strip.
Dr. Mohamad Rasul Abu-Nuwar
General practitioner, bariatric surgeon, and foregut surgeon, 36, Pittsburgh, PA.
“I saw six children, ages 5 to 12, in the emergency room one night over a four-hour period, all of whom had single gunshot wounds to the skull.”
Nina Ng
Emergency nurse, 37, New York City, NY
“Children with gunshot wounds were being treated on the floor, often bleeding to death on the hospital floor due to a lack of space, equipment, staff and support. Many died needlessly.”
Dr. Mark Perlmutter
Orthopedic and hand surgeon, 69, Rocky Mount, NC
“I saw several children who had been shot in the head and chest with high velocity bullets.”
Dr. Irfan Galaria
Plastic and reconstructive surgeon, 48, Chantilly, VA
“Our team treated approximately four or five children, ages 5 to 8, who had been shot in the head with single gunshots. They all arrived at the emergency room at the same time. They all died.”
Rania Afaneh
Paramedic, 23, Savannah, GA
“I saw a child who had been shot in the jaw. No other part of his body was affected. He was fully conscious and aware of what was happening. He looked at me while he was choking on his own blood, which I tried to suck out with a broken suction cup."
Dr. Khawaja Ikram
Orthopedic Surgeon, 53, Dallas, Texas
"One day, while I was in the emergency room, I saw a three-year-old and a five-year-old each with a single bullet hole in their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was retreating from Khan Yunis. So they went back to see if there was anything left of their house. According to them, there was a sniper waiting there who shot both children."
Dr. Ahliya Kattan
Anesthesiologist and Critical Care Physician, 37, Costa Mesa, California
"I saw an 18-month-old girl with a gunshot wound to the head."
For a rules-based world order, mass targeted killings of children are the norm.It is also worth noting that these Israeli war crimes are carried out with the support of the United States, which has spent tens of billions of dollars to support the genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Bill Maher addressed that kind of thinking the other day:
#2
excellent speech from Bill Maher. He could have added Hamas started the war, and could have ended it any time by surrendering, and didn't. Also Hamas were voted in and are popular in Gaza.
That said - I am troubled by this story of surgeons finding kids shot in the head. I hope that is not the IDF starting to lose their professionalism and give in to hate and sadism.
Wars brutalise people. It's not ok to shoot kids in the head. It's a war crime. If it's accidental, that's different, like when the kid is behind a wall and shots are fired at a combatant, hit the wall, go through and get the kid accidentally. But a head shot sounds deliberate.
These people need to be resettled, you can't kill them all, they're all Hamas so they can't be left there either. They need to be moved to Egypt/Jordan/Qatar permanent resettlement
#4
I am troubled by this story of surgeons finding kids shot in the head.
Of course. That’s why it’s told.
I hope that is not the IDF starting to lose their professionalism and give in to hate and sadism.
That assumes the Jooooos are the ones who did it, if it happened at all, and not Hamas for propaganda purposes.
Which still doesn’t address the fact that Hamas & hangers rampaged through southern Israel on October 7, 2023, posting boasting videos of themselves on Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram kidnapping, torturing, raping, killing, and desecrating the corpses of all they encountered, Jew, Arab, and foreigners alike. Check Rantburg’s archives on that date and the days that followed — we archived it as it happened, along with the excuses given them by those to whom the claimed colonialism of the Jews in their own native land justifies any atrocity against them.
#5
That assumes the Jooooos are the ones who did it, if it happened at all, and not Hamas for propaganda purposes.
Of course it is the Juice because they are all heinous and icky. No way could this be Hamas trying to influence Gazans by murdering their children in front of them, because the Hamasniks are all brave freedom fighters.
#7
Hamas would happily shoot kids to make martyrs to blame on Israel. But the fact that the IDF is still taking prisoners of actual Hamas terrorists is a big indicator that if anyone is killing kids, it's not the IDF.
#8
1. No way it’s IDF. There’d be no point to it.
2. Sinwar rose to where he rose to , in part, by killing Palestinians in the presence of the victims’ family members.
3. The war would end today if Gazan people released those whom they kidnapped over a year ago.
#9
Idk about anybody else — but I am more than a little fed up with those who show up somewhere — anywhere!! — for two weeks and then go spouting off as if their word is Authoritative.
(Israel has been in combat operations with Arabs for 75 years. Has anybody alleged such Heartstring-Pulling Pallywood before? No. )
They’re laughing at us.
It sez in their holy book plain as day “War is deception.”
When Illegal Combatants hide among civilians or use civilians as human shields as Hamas does - any resulting civilian deaths are the fault of the Illegal Combatant.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
