It breaks my heart to know how quickly the children of war torn/third world countries are forced to grow up. How, they endure, endure, and endure thrice more and when you look at their eyes, you see that they are just children - living how no one should be made to live.
(Source: momentsofbeing, via kindlemyheart)
I get lost in the poetic fluidity of the voice that penetrates, hits the note deep inside. A lullaby - mesmerizing, enticing, ever breathtaking. And it is when I seem to veer off the path of righteousness most, that your voice pulls me back like a thread that keeps me hanging, serving a purposeful reminder. Blessed words of the Creator, ever so blessed are you.
According to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, U.S. troops willfully massacred an Iraqi family in the town of Ishaqi in 2006, handcuffing and then shooting 11 people in the head including a woman in her 70′s and five children ages five and under.
McClatchy is reporting that the soldiers then called in an air strike on the house to cover up evidence of the killings.
This account differs sharply from an official version of the 2006 incident, which indicated that coalition forces captured an al Qaeda in Iraq operative in the house, which was destroyed in a firefight. The WikiLeaks cable, however, corroborates accounts by Ishaqi townspeople and includes questions about the incident by Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
The cable is dated twelve days after the incident, which took place March 15, 2006. In it, Alston says that autopsies performed in Tikrit on bodies pulled from the wreckage of the farmhouse indicated that all of the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head.
If true, this action, although not as egregious as the My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, wherein 347-504 unarmed civilians were shot to death by U.S. forces during the Vietnam conflict, still speaks volumes about war and the atrocities committed for war’s sake.
Read the original article (Warning: Graphic Images)
I guess war crimes and crimes against humanity, cease to be of importance when you’re the USA (and when Obama’s got your back, ensuring your immunity).
Nearly any other developed country in the world - Bush (and Blair) would be at the International Criminal Court right now.
But hey, I guess ‘democracy’ has it’s perks.
This and many more human rights violations by USA.
(Source: sha-ho, via mendmyheart)
(via samirathejerk)
Heart you Derrick ♥
(Source: derrickrosegifs)
Eclipse 202 taken by NASA.
(via liliaanpooon)
So-beautiful-smile by cricrich on Flickr.
This beautiful kid was wounded by a land mine in Afghanistan.
Then he came in our Hospital for war wounded Afghan people, in Peshawar to be amputee. A silent and brave victim of an awful war.
After a while he could walk with new artificial limbs and was very proud to stand again.
Let’s not forget his smile and his courage.
Your sweet smile despite your sufferings is humbling, your courage inspiring. God bless you, sweetheart.
(via mendmyheart)
“Chi non stima la vita, non la merita.”
He who does not value life, does not deserve it.
— Leonardo da Vinci
(Source: leonardian, via mendmyheart)
Omar Khadr, a sixteen year old Guantanamo Bay detainee weeps uncontrollably, clutching at his face and hair as he calls out for his mother to save him from his torment. “Ya Ummi, Ya Ummi (Oh Mother, Oh Mother),” he wails repeatedly, hauntingly with each breath he takes.
The surveillance tapes, released by Khadr’s defence, show him left alone in an interrogation room for a “break” after he tried complaining to CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) officers about his poor health due to insufficient medical attention. Ignoring his complaints and trying to get him to make false confessions, the officers get frustrated with the sixteen year old’s tears and tell him to get himself together by the time they come back from their break.
“You don’t care about me. Nobody cares about me,” he sobs to them.
The tapes show how the officers manipulated Khadr into thinking that they were helping him because they were also Canadian and how they taunted him with the prospect of home (Canada), (good) food, and familial reunion.
Khadr, a Canadian, was taken into US custody at the age of fifteen, tortured and refused medical attention because he wouldn’t attest to being a member of Al Qaeda, even though he was shot three times in the chest and had shrapnel embedded in his eyes and right shoulder. As a result, Khadr’s left eye is now permanently blind, the vision in his right eye is deteriorating, he develops severe pain in his right shoulder when the temperature drops, and he suffers from extreme nightmares.
He has been incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, suffering extremely harsh interrogations and torture (methods), and is now 25 years old.
If you want to be updated with Omar Khadrs case, then please like this Facebook page dedicated to him.
The media is full of bullshit. They’ll show you wars - but never where the bullets land. Gunfire, but never the civilians it kills. The atrocities committed at Guantanamo are inhumane. You wonder why there’s so much hate in the world, let me ask you how much malice does a heart have to contain to do such a thing to a then 16 year old boy? What kind of person are you?
(via thalamtnafsee)
This is old but needs to be posted
OVER A million Iraqis are dead from America’s war.
That sentence is a cognitive litmus test. Some people’s immediate reaction is, “That can’t be right,” because the United States couldn’t do that. Or because crimes on that scale don’t still happen. Or because they do happen, but only in horrible places that the United States hasn’t rescued.
One million is a “Grandpa, what did you do to stop it?” number. It’s a number that undeniably puts the American state among history’s villains. Those who are not willing or able to accept this are physically unable to retain the fact that over a million Iraqis are dead. Their brains expel it like a foreign germ.
Noam Chomsky once wrote that the “sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of ‘Fuck You,’ so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response.”
That pretty much sums up the how the media reacted to the one million figure in 2007 when it was announced by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB). (In fact, the firm estimated 1,220,580 Iraqis had died, confirming and updating a separate study done the year before by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and published in the Lancet medical journal.)
Take Kevin O’Brien, deputy editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Upon receiving a media advisory about the findings from ORB, whose clients include the British Conservative Party and Morgan Stanley, this was his response: “Please remove me from your mailing list and spare me your transparent propaganda.”
The silence is deafening.
(via thalamtnafsee)
![NEW YORK (AP) — For years, Gac Filipaj mopped floors, cleaned toilets and took out trash at Columbia University.
A refugee from war-torn Yugoslavia, he eked out a living working for the Ivy League school. But Sunday was payback time: The 52-year-old janitor donned a cap and gown to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in classics.
As a Columbia employee, he didn’t have to pay for the classes he took. His favorite subject was the Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca, the janitor said during a break from his work atLerner Hall, the student union building he cleans.
“I love Seneca’s letters because they’re written in the spirit in which I was educated in my family — not to look for fame and fortune, but to have a simple, honest, honorable life,” he said.
His graduation with honors capped a dozen years of studies, including readings in ancient Latin and Greek.
[ … ]
“The richness is in me, in my heart and in my head, not in my pockets,” said Filipaj, who is now an American citizen.
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NEW YORK (AP) — For years, Gac Filipaj mopped floors, cleaned toilets and took out trash at Columbia University.
A refugee from war-torn Yugoslavia, he eked out a living working for the Ivy League school. But Sunday was payback time: The 52-year-old janitor donned a cap and gown to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in classics.
As a Columbia employee, he didn’t have to pay for the classes he took. His favorite subject was the Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca, the janitor said during a break from his work atLerner Hall, the student union building he cleans.
“I love Seneca’s letters because they’re written in the spirit in which I was educated in my family — not to look for fame and fortune, but to have a simple, honest, honorable life,” he said.
His graduation with honors capped a dozen years of studies, including readings in ancient Latin and Greek.
[ … ]
“The richness is in me, in my heart and in my head, not in my pockets,” said Filipaj, who is now an American citizen.
