The Prisoners’ Diaries provides a series of first-person commentaries on what Palestinian prisoners have been enduring for decades in the dark recesses of Israel’s unlawful and inhumane network of prisons. This book combines the witnessing by prisoners with just enough information about the magnitude of the Israeli prison system to give readers a true understanding of this most agonizing dimension of the Palestinian ordeal.
" This book is so valuable as it combines the witnessing by prisoners with just enough information about the magnitude of the Israeli prison system to give readers a true understanding of this most agonizing dimension of the Palestinian ordeal.”
− Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University and UN Special Rapporteur for occupied Palestinian Territories
“ I defy you to read these stories and not weep for Jews and Palestinians. Now dry your eyes and work for justice, peace and reconciliation.”
− Stephen Robert Sizer, Anglican vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water, Surrey, England, writer, peace activist and freelance photographer
“ A humane, beautiful, valuable yet painful book. I ask all people of conscience to read it to learn more about the suffering of the Palestinian detainees in Israeli Occupation prisons.”
− Hana Shalabi, former hunger striker, Hasharon prison, Tel Aviv
Dreaming of Freedom Edited by Norma Hashim
- Paperback: 184 pages
- Publisher: Saba Islamic Media; 1st edition (2016)
- ISBN-13: 978-9675068966
Foreword (Dreaming of Freedom: Palestinian Child Prisoners Speak)
What strikes me most directly after reading these moving statements by Palestinian child prisoners is the aura of state terror that pervades the lives of all Palestinians living under occupation. Horrifying as is the experience of these children, mainly mid-teenagers, the deeper horror is the degree to which the entire community of Palestinians is scarred for life by Israeli brutality. Of course, it is the stone throwing children that bear the brunt of the violence that is reported by the vivid statements compiled here, but their younger siblings and older parents and relatives that are also being scarred for life by the arrest and interrogation process developed by Israel that seems calculated to be as intimidating as possible.
Reading through such pages of torment, a pattern of abuse clearly emerges that exhibits Israel’s total disregard for international human rights and international humanitarian law as it applies to these young Palestinians, who are totally vulnerable to such oppressive tactics. Although international humanitarian law fails to focus with sufficient specificity on the vulnerability of children, there are some general measures of protection given in Articles 71-74 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which ensures that any civilian subject to occupation who is charged with criminal activity shall be informed in writing in a language that he or she understands, is assured the right to the assistance of a lawyer, and must be given the opportunity to present evidence in defense. It is no surprise, based on our knowledge of Israel’s apartheid administration of Palestinians living under occupation that none of these rights are recognized and respected. Indeed, the daily reality of life for Palestinians of all ages is one of rightlessness and unconditional vulnerability.
Despite the generality of abuse to which Palestinians of all ages are subjected to throughout their entire life, it is important to take account of the particular forms of experience that are the tragic destiny of Palestinian children, realities that begin from the earliest stages of childhood. What these reports convey as a result of their overlapping accounts narrated with a concreteness that makes the reader confident about the credibility of the stories being told. This credibility is further reinforced by the consistent reports of respected Palestinian and Israeli NGOs concerned with the protection of human rights of those being subjected to the rigors of Israeli criminal law enforcement. In other words, from everything we know, there is every reason to place trust in the accuracy of these first-person accounts, and given the careful method by which this material was assembled it is possible to construct an accurate portrayal of this pattern of lawless law.
Among the features of this pattern that particularly stand out, I would mention the practice of apprehending Palestinian youth accused of resistance activity in the middle of the night in the presence of the entire family including very young siblings. The accused youth is literally seized from his home and family without being informed of what he is alleged to have done, with parents being given no idea where he is being taken and for how long. Invariably, as well, the child being taken captive is painfully tied and blindfolded often in the presence of his family, thrown onto the floor of a military car, and generally badly beaten while being taken to an interrogation center or some preliminary holding area. The interrogation process is itself completely alienating and calculated to overcome even the most stubborn refusal of a teenage boy to cooperate with his jailors by acknowledging guilt.
It seems clear that the ‘crime’ that almost all of these Palestinian children are accused is throwing stones at vehicles that belong to Israeli security forces or settlers. There is no claim by the Israeli authorities that these stones caused any injury or even damage, but the allegations are treated as if involving the most serious imaginable crimes. As has been observed by progressive Israeli journalists and others, the throwing of stones should be principally understood as forms of symbolic violence expressive of the inherent right to resist unlawful and abusive occupation. What is more, such stone throwing is consistently met with excessive force by Israel that constitutes violence of a much more punitive and consequential nature, and seems inflicted with an intent to intimidate not only the immediate victim but Palestinian youth in general.
In the end, the tactics used by Israel are mostly successful in extracting confessions from the Palestinian children, seemingly regardless of whether the allegations are accurate or mistaken. What we take away from the ‘confessions’ reported in these statements is an utter inability to determine whether it is accurate or fake. As the prisoners are being threatened with continuous beatings, contrived reports that others have independently confirmed the accusations, prison ‘plants’ or ‘snitches’ who mislead the accused on behalf of the captors, and a variety of abusive practices, it is hardly surprising that the will of these children is eventually broken in almost all cases. In a manner that I encountered in apartheid South Africa maintaining innocence is usually punished worse than confessions, whether true of false, and thus there is no incentive whatsoever to hold out. What is even more dehumanizing, is the demand of Israeli officials that these Palestinian teenagers implicate their friends and neighbors. It is evident that several of narrations compiled here report great courage in holding out by refusing to confess, although in such a confined setting where the difference between guilt and innocence is obliterated the significance of such a sacrificial resolve of steadfastness is rarely appreciated or even known in the outside world.
Another striking feature of this arrest and interrogation experience is the punitive reliance by Israel on post-release punishment in the form of house arrest. Several of these young Palestinians declare that would prefer confinement in an Israel prison than enduring house arrest. At first, this preference is difficult to comprehend. On reflection, it becomes more understandable given the nature of life under occupation that allows so few opportunities for satisfaction, and house arrest is a tantalizing deprivation of the comraderie of friendship and neighborhood life.
These Palestinian children express a shared feeling of humiliation that seems to be even more painful for them than the beatings received. The word (izlaal in Arabic) recurs repeatedly in these narratives, and I think testifies to the dehumanizing effects caused by feelings of helplessness and futility, which Israel seeks to induce so as to give rise to an atmosphere among Palestinians of resignation, if not spiritual surrender. A similar approach is evident in relation to house demolitions that are justified in the name of security, but are carried out for the sake of collective punishment and intimidation. Jeff Halper, a respected Israeli critic of the practice estimates that less than 1% of all house demolitions have a genuine security justification.
There are several conclusions that emerge from this deeply moving collection of separate but interconnected witnessing by these Palestinian children. First of all, the urgent need for a distinct international treaty devoted to the situation of children living under conditions of prolonged occupation. Realizing that Israeli occupation has lasted almost half a century with no end in sight, it is intolerable from the perspective of human dignity and human rights, to fail to offer much more concrete protection, including procedures for redress of grievances. Secondly, we need studies of the longer term effects in terms of trauma of such arrest and interrogation experiences, as well as on the impact on families and communities not only of the dynamics of victimization, but also of the shared sense of hopelessness that is the inevitable byproduct of witnessing a brother or son dragged away by abusive soldiers in the middle of the night. And thirdly, we need widespread dissemination of these Israeli policies and practices, especially as carried out with the evident intent of immobilizing resistance to an unlawful occupation that has gone on far too long.
In this spirit, I commend a close reading of Dreaming of Freedom: Palestinian Child Prisoners Speak. With such knowledge solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and dignity becomes almost a psychological inevitability and an even more urgent moral imperative of our world than we previously realized.
Richard Falk
My name is Leuren Moret, an internationally recognized Geoscientist and specialist on the environmental and biological effects of ionizing radiation. In 1968, I was one of the first women to graduate from UC Davis with a B.S. in Geology. At that time I was made aware of secret mind control experiments at the "monkey colony", by students working there. Hidden away from the campus in a peach orchard on university property, horrific experiments were conducted on monkeys with the tops of their heads cut off and wires coming out of their brains, which were later described and photos published in the media by opponents of animal experimentation. Many years later while doing research on the resulting mind control applications for HAARP, I discovered a photograph in a 1964 UC Davis newsletter, of Edward Teller (known as Dr. Strangelove) with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller by his side, at the dedication ceremony for the new Applied Science Facility where the animal experiments were adapted for human applications and global HAARP transmissions. The human experiments were conducted in a "safe house" under the MKULTRA program, in Livermore, California.
After graduating from UC Davis in 1968, I collaborated with famous Paleobotanist Dr. Daniel I. Axelrod for 16 years, conducting yearly Paleobotanical expeditions and investigations around the World. That experience led to collaboration at the British Museum with Dr. Lewis Leakey, identifying paleobotanical specimens from East Africa and reconstructing hominid environments. I also conducted research at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University, for Dr. Christopher Jeans, son of the well known astronomer Sir James Jeans.
After living in Iran and traveling around Europe and the Middle East, I returned to UC Berkeley and graduated in 1978 with an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies and the equivalent of a Masters degree in Wildlife Studies. After working at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab 1989-1991 as a geochemist on the WIPP and Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage projects, I became a Federal Whistleblower on nuclear weapons lab science fraud, graft, and corruption.
In the early 1990's I served as the President of the International Association for Women Geoscientists (AWG), while conducting PhD graduate work on the history of the earth's magnetic field in the Dept. of Earth Sciences, and received a UC President's Mentoring Fellowship as one of the 5 most promising student scientists on the campus.
My research led to a chance meeting in 2000 with Marion Fulk, the Manhattan Project scientist who solved the difficult problems on the Hydrogen Bomb for the US Government, and made it work. He became my mentor and greatest supporter over the next ten years as I built a global reputation as an expert witness and educator on the harmful effects of nuclear technologies to biological systems and the health of the environment. With this research came a new and perhaps as important field of knowledge, the new global Weapon of Mass Destruction based on Tesla technology known as HAARP. It was secretly co-developed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union at Livermore nuclear weapons lab and in Russia.
After visiting 50 countries educating the public, media, Parliaments and Congress, and making 20 speaking tours in Japan from 2000-2010, I finally found the personal satisfaction and fulfillment that had been missing from my earlier career experiences. Today in retrospect, I can think of no greater reward for my many years of effort and hard work in the sciences, than to be the messenger warning the Global Community about the horrific dangers of HAARP and nuclear technologies, and predicting the HAARP triggered Fukushima disaster in 2004 in the JAPAN TIMES: "Japan's Deadly Game of Nuclear Roulette."
Diana Luppi wrote the underground sensation, ET:101 The Cosmic Instruction Manual, over 25 years ago. It has created an enormous ripple over the years, and is now making an international "comeback". Translations in many languages are being prepared, as the "new wave" hits the shores.
The first time I read it, I could hardly believe what I was reading - was it a "tongue-in-cheek" quasi-satiric poke at the human condition, from the viewpoint of our "Cosmic Family", who were reassuring us that they are here for us? Those who have read it know the exquisite feeling of recognition and relief, knowing that in this whacked out, crazy hologram, there are others of like frequency, "out there"... you and I are not really crazy - or alone. Funny, bordering on hilarious, this treasure of a read is always fresh and always enlightening!
A vast Inter-Galactic Family knows what's happening here, and lets us know that the old paradigms are truly on their way out - for good!
Jonathan Pelto has been actively involved in Connecticut public policy, advocacy and electoral politics for 40 years.
Presently, an investigative blogger and citizen journalist, Pelto uses blogging and social media as advocacy tools to educate, persuade and mobilize people with a focus on issues related to public education and the Corporate Education Reform Industry’s growing efforts to undermine and privatize public education in the United States.
In addition to writing a daily blog, which has become the most read commentary site in Connecticut, he has also written a number of articles about education reform issues for media outlets including The Progressive Magazine and Truthout.
In conjunction with education advocate Diane Ravitch, Pelto created and continue to manage the Education Bloggers Network, a confederation of over 238 bloggers and commentators from around the country who share a belief in public education and a willingness to use their time and energy fighting against the Corporate Education Reform Industry.
In 1984, Pelto was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives as a senior at the University of Connecticut and, over five terms, rose to the level of Deputy Majority Leader. Pelto was a long-time member of the Appropriations and Education Committee and chaired the Appropriations Sub-Committee on Higher Education.
Since leaving the Legislature in 1993, he’s worked as a communications strategist developing and implementing sophisticated public relations, media relations and advocacy programs aimed at educating, persuading and mobilizing targeted audiences. His clients have included many of Connecticut’s most significant non-profit organizations, corporations, associations and unions, as well as Native American Tribes.
Over the years he’s also managed or worked on numerous political campaigns at the federal, state and local levels including campaigns Chris Dodd, Gary Hart, Connecticut gubernatorial and congressional campaigns and many state legislative races.
In 2014, Pelto was a petitioning candidate for governor in Connecticut running as the nominee of the newly created Education and Democracy Party. Pelto’s running mate was Hartford Connecticut educator and policy activist, Ebony Murphy. Pelto and Murphy were not able to collect the necessary signatures to get on the November 2014 ballot.
Wendy Lecker is a senior attorney at the Education Law Center, where she oversees ELC's school funding and school equity work in New York. Wendy was a staff attorney at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE), plaintiffs in New York’s landmark school funding case. She has also worked as a consultant in education finance and policy for The Rural School and Community Trust and Connecticut Voices for Children. She is currently an education columnist for Hearst Connecticut Media Group.
Hi, I'm Lindsay! I am the founder and owner of Well Beaming, LLC; a company devoted to improving the health and wellness of others through a deeper understanding of how the mind-body connection influences everything from how we eat, to how we dress, and our overall life style! I have always had a passion for health and fashion. After graduating with a finance degree from Washington State University, I decided to follow my passion and worked for Nordstrom where I learned the basic fundamentals of putting together an outfit, regardless of your age, shape or size. At the age of 24, I moved to Los Angeles & began a career in Entertainment. As a Casting Assistant, I worked on ABC’s Extreme Weight Loss. After reading thousands of contestant’s stories about their struggle to achieve good health and happiness, I knew I had to make a difference. I enrolled in the Institute of Integrated Nutrition and received my certification. I moved back to the Northwest with a mission to help people understand real health is SO much more than diet and exercise. It is about feeling your best in all aspects of your life.
Rev. Mary Linn Clarke, founder of the Inner Light Metaphysical Center since 1975, was raised in this philosophy. It was the only Metaphysical Center to be invited to be a member to the International Council of World Churches. She has done extensive study in this field under the late Dr. Enid Smith and Rev. Lillian Dee Johnson. She studied extensively at Harmonia College in St. Petersburg, Florida, as well as in Chesterfield, Indiana. Rev. Clarke is noted for her healing abilities, as well as her teaching in the development of Metaphysics and what it can do for your spiritual development; mentally, physically and spiritually. Currently Rev. Clarke resides in Ellenton, Florida, with her husband Rev. Thomas Clarke. They continue to guide and teach others this philosophy at various Metaphysical Centers in the area. Rev. Clarke enjoys helping others and hopes this book will provide spiritual enlightenment to all who read it.
Mary Linn’s facebook page https://www.facebook.com/cosmiccenterofspirituallight
Mary Linn is currently holding her weekly 10am Sunday Spiritualist Service at the Cosmic Center of Spiritual Light in Sarasota.
Bret Boone Former MLB player April 6, 1969) is a former Major League Baseball second baseman. During his career Boone was a three-time All-Star, four-time Gold Glove winner, and two-time Silver Slugger Award winner. He is a member of the Boone family, one of the most recognizable families in baseball.
Boone started his playing career with the Seattle Mariners where he set the club record for home runs in a season by second baseman in 1993 (12 in 76 games)[3] but was traded that same year to the Cincinnati Reds along with Erik Hanson.
In 2001 Boone returned to the Seattle Mariners, the organization with which he came up from 1990 to 1993.[4] Now an All-Star—having averaged 21 home runs a year from 1998 through 2000, twice reaching a career high in doubles (at 38, in 1998 and 1999) -- Boone's superior play continued as he led the league in runs batted in (141), while producing a batting average of (.331). He also broke the Mariners' team record of home runs for a second baseman with his 37 home runs while hitting 37 doubles.
Boone started in the All Star Game in Seattle, received a Silver Slugger Award and finished third in the AL MVP voting. His Mariners paced the league with a record 116 wins, earning the AL West championship and advancing to the ALCS, tying the all-time team record for wins in a season with the 1906 Chicago Cubs.
The following year Boone won a Gold Glove for his defense and continued to show the power he had demonstrated the previous years, hitting 24 home runs with 34 doubles. On May 2, 2002, Boone and teammate Mike Cameron became the first teammates to each hit two home runs in a single inning, doing so in the first inning against the White Sox.
With local media and behind the scenes he was famous for his humorous behavior. Boone took up not one but three lockers, as Erick Walker notes, "one for him, another with a nameplate above that read 'Boone's friend' and a third with a nameplate that read 'Boone's friend's friend' that was scattered with about 100 bats.
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