“Wherever we came out we were branded Satanists,” writes Rami Abdel Rahman in this personal account of his experiences as a young metal head in the 1990s heavy metal scene of Jordan.
Read the whole history on FREEMUSE.ORG
Live up on that hill, just right at the eastern side of the bridge.
Me and Magdi on one of those nightouts with friends.
On our doorstep, there is a note on the outside that reads: "No advertisements please... We love Spotify, spicy food and....," and a reminder on the inside that reads: "money - transport card - keys - cigarettes - mobile phone and LOVE." You've got to take the love that we have in and spread it out into the world.
The reminder on the front door's inside
Rania Abdelrahman, my sister, tied the knot last friday.
In four months, we will be celebrating the end of the 00s, a decade that would probably be more remembered for terrorism, social media, natural disasters, viruses, and the globalization of war (as opposed to world war I, II). In 1999, media around the world used the usual scare tactics of predicting a global shut down, the Y2K - We were expecting all electronic date registers to break back to the 1900s instead of moving on to 2000s. Both 00s nonetheless."You could call me a ”matchmaker”, said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum’s matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys for 10 000 dollars, from poor people. He then proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for 160 000 dollars. The accusations have shaken the American transplantation business. If they are true it means that organ trafficking is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell the New Jersey Real-Time News.
On the question of how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies: ”Quite a lot. And I have never failed,” he boasts. The business has been running for quite some time. Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard and member of the National Kidney Foundation’s Board of Directors, tells the same newspaper that organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel, is carried out in other places of the world as well. 5 – 6 000 operations a year, about ten per cent of the world’s kidney transplants are carried out illegally, according to Delmonici.
Countries suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where the organs are allegedly taken from executed prisoners. But Palestinians also harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country’s organ reserve – a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.
Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem Post wrote that ”the rest of the European countries are expected to follow France’s example shortly.”
Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country with a medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business – on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, -03).
In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to address the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at having the Israeli public register for postmortal organ donation. Half a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud Olmert himself was the first person to sign up. A couple of weeks later the Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a success. No fewer than 35 000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it would have been 500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the reporter, wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still large. 500 people were in line for kidney transplant, but only 124 transplants could be performed. Of 45 people in need of a new liver only three could be operated on in Israel.
While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.
Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.
I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestininan families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Achmed Ghanan.
It was close to midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military column sounded from the outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts of the West Bank. The two thousand inhabitants were awake. They were still, waiting, like silent shadows in the dark, some lying upon roofs, others hiding behind curtains, walls, or trees that provided protection during the curfew but still offered a full view toward what would become the grave for the first martyr of the village. The military had interrupted the electricity and the area was now a closed-off military zone – not even a cat could move outdoors without risking its life. The overpowering silence of the dark night was only interrupted by quiet sobbing. I don’t remember if our shivering was due to the cold or to the tension. Five days earlier, on May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used the village’s carpentry workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to put out of action was Bilal Achmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing Palestinian youngsters who made life difficult for the Israeli soldiers.
As one of the leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by the military for a couple of years. Together with other stone-throwing boys he hid in the Nablus mountains, with no roof over his head. Getting caught meant torture and death for these boys – they had to stay in the mountains at all costs.
On May 13 Bilal made an exception, when for some reason, he walked unprotected by the carpentry workshop. Not even Talal, his older brother, knows why he took this risk. Maybe the boys were out of food and needed to restock.
Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special force. The soldiers stubbed their cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola, and calmly aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close enough they needed only to pull the triggers. The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair. Villagers say that people from both the UN and the Red Crescent were close by, heard the discharge and came to look for wounded people in need of care. Some arguing took place as to who should take care of the victim. Discussions ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family. Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.
A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column who had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel Aviv, to the place for his final rest. ”Captain Yahya is the worst of them all,” the villager whispered in my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body and changed the green fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives of the victim were chosen by the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing cement.
Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from the soldiers who, as they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal was put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became clear to the few people present just what kind of abuse the boy had been exposed to. Bilal was not by far the first young Palestinian to be buried with a slit from his abdomen up to his chin.
The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: ”Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied. Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they performing autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted? Nafe’s uncle was upset and he had a lot of questions.
The relatives of the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts as to the reasons for the killings, but the spokesperson for the Israeli army claimed that the allegations of organ theft were lies. All the Palestinian victims go through autopsy on a routine basis, he said. Bilal Achmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians killed in various ways that year. According to the Palestinian statistics the causes of death were: shot in the street, explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in school, killed at home etcetera. The 133 people killed were between four months to 88 years old. Only half of them, 69 victims, went through postmortem examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians – of which the army spokesperson was talking – has no bearing on the reality in the occupied territories. The questions remain.
We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.
It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began."
It has been up for a while, undergoing fine tuning, but I thought I'd tip my blog readers about it. On this website you can find news articles that I have been writing, link to blog post, twitter feed, my CV and some more information. It will be updated regularly with new articles and media productions.
Your feedback is appreciated.
Three weeks.
33 young Arab and Swedish opinion leaders.
Different locations around Stockholm.
Reality TV style.
Goal: Change the world.
Tool: Social Media.
The whole group (except for mark, who suspiciously disappeared).
Participants Olof Jönsson, Alexandra Sandels (Sweden) and Yousef Al Ghalban (Gaza) after a sauna session, drinking beer on the balcony, and going over a myriad of photographs of recent Israeli massacres in Gaza.
Lots of salmon is always guaranteed at dinner time.Here are my notes from Mark's lecture:
The ladies are listening, attentively.
Dependency and Inclusion, counter dependency and fight, trust and structure, performance and productivity and termination: the stages of successful group work as presented by Åsa.
Åsa and Roger and their white boards and beautiful smiles.
The beautiful Amahl, formerly owner of the blog EuroArabe, and one of the bravest persons I've had the honor to meet in my life.
Special thanks go to Ryan Noble and Petra Hedbom for helping me with camera shots.
Good news for the arms industry, apparently.
• During the period 2004–2008 the UAE was the largest recipient of major conventional weapons in the region and the third largest in the world. Imports in this period included around 80 F-16E combat aircraft from the USA and around 50 Mirage-2000-9 combat aircraft from France. The UAE placed a number of significant orders in 2008 and looks set to remain a significant importer in the coming years.According to SIPRI, the Middle East's share of total global transfers of major conventional weapons currently stands at 18%, rising from 15% during the previous study period. The UAE's share stood at 34%, Israel's at 22% and Egypt at 14%. The institutes explains that despite all speculations about Iran's arms import plans, "it accounted only for 5% of total imports in the region," making it the 27th largest importer globally.
• During the period 2004–2008 Iraq was the world’s 28th largest recipient of major conventional weapons, with 40 per cent of its imports coming from the USA. In 2008 Iraq ordered 140 M1A1 tanks from the USA and announced plans to obtain advanced combat aircraft and additional armoured vehicles.
• Israel’s arms imports in 2004–2008 consisted primarily of 102 F-16I combat aircraft and related air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons. The vast majority of weapon systems ordered by or transferred to Israel during this period came from the USA. Israel also imported components for its weapon systems from a variety of countries, including EU members.
"We have two hospitals, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan," Royal Jordanian Air Force Col. Nart Alkhas said. A 50-bed Jordanian military hospital located in Masar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, cares for more than 650 patients a day, providing critical health care for thousands of Afghans who suffered neglect at the hands of the Taliban regime. More than 500,000 patients have been treated at the Jordanian military hospital in Afghanistan. Many of the patients are women, who were forced into a subservient role and feared to leave their homes until coalition forces entered Afghanistan in 2001.
In Iraq, a second Jordanian military hospital provides much-needed health services to Iraqis and serves as an ad hoc trauma center, treating patients wounded in terrorist attacks and moving them to Jordan or other locations "if they are in bad condition," Alkhas said. More than 4 million people have been treated in Jordan's military hospital in Iraq, and Jordanian military general surgeons have performed 1,638 surgeries, Alkhas said.
Jordan has committed nearly 600 health care practitioners to the medical assistance missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. They consist of medical personnel and Jordanian special forces, who protect the hospital staff, Alkhas said.
Jordanians have donated 250 armored personnel carriers to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. The vehicles consisted of 50 Ukrainian-built BTR-94 armored personnel carriers, 100 British Spartans, and 100 American-made M113A1 armored personnel carriers, coalition officials said. Jordan also donated two C-130B Hercules transport aircraft to the Iraqi air force, as well as 16 UH-1H utility helicopters.
According to the US Department of Defense, the US military provides round the clock logistical support to the Jordanian operation in Afghanistan so Jordanians can focus on providing medical support.
The original “East Bank” Jordanians, through probably no longer a majority in Jordan, remain predominant in the country’s political and military establishments and form the bedrock of support for the Jordanian monarchy. Palestinians, who comprise an estimated 55% to 70% of the population, in many cases tend to regard their stay in Jordan as temporary, and some are at most lukewarm in their support for the Jordanian regime.No official details were to be found yet of any other military cooperation between the US and Jordan. But it is no secret that the intelligence cooperation between Jordan and its allies is ripe.
Jordanian bloggers have been recharging against the so called honor killings . Every year, an average of twenty women are killed on suspicion of "adultery" in mostly-conservative Jordan. The murderers are their husbands or relatives who do so to reclaim the "family honor." More often than not, the victims turn out to be sexually inactive at the time of the murder. Many mistake this for being part of Islamic practice. The punishment for "adultery" in Sharia law is by whipping convicts, not killing them, provided that four witnesses caught them "red handed."
Former NATO Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in Amman, Jordan 2005. Full speech. NATO appointed Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the new Secretary General. He was at the center of defending Denmark during the so-called "Muhammad Cartoon Crisis."This ICP will contribute to the promotion of political and military ties between the Euro-Atlantic and the Mediterranean regions. Through enhanced security cooperation between NATO and its MD partner Jordan, it will reinforce Mediterranean regional security and stability.
It also helps framing NATO-Jordan political and military cooperation in a more strategic and prospective way. Jordan's decision to finalize the Individual Cooperation Program with NATO represents a significant step forward in its cooperation with the Atlantic Alliance.
This bilateral accord provides that Jordan and NATO cooperate on a wide range of categories such as "political and security issues; defense, security and military issues; public information; science and environment; civil emergency planning; and administrative, protective security and resource issues." Egypt was the first Arab nation to finalize its partnership agreement, Jordan is second.
Jordan started its dialouge with NATO back in the late King Hussains time, in 1995, one year after signing the Peace Treaty with Israel. The cooperation stepped up its pace when King Abdullah II, Chief of the Jordanian Armed Forces, was enthroned 10 years ago.
Following up on my recent blog posts and the buzz it created about Jordan's "not-so-secret" involvement with the NATO-ISAF operations in Afghanistan, I had an exchange with one of my ex-editors at The Jordan Times. He pointed me to the fact that Jordan announced it would send troops to Afghanistan in 2001 for "peace-keeping". The editor added that Jordanian journalists were flewn to Mazar-i-Sherif in Afghanistan to see in their own eyes a Jordanian military clinic in the war zone.
However, contrary to other "peace keeping" missions that Jordan was/is involved with, i.e. Croatia, Bosnia Herzogvania, Sierra Leone and East Timor, Afghanistan is still in a state of conventional war. Jordan's participation in the ISAF, as shown in a leaked NATO document, means it is not merely operating a "clinic". In 2007, the Herald Tribune reported that more than 90 Jordanian security personnel were deployed in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, dubbed by the NATO as its largest and most important land operation outside Europe, is one frontline of the "global war on terrorism." Although both the UK and the US have refrained from using this term, the land operation is now expanding into Pakistan, while the intelligence action of the conflict continues to take shape on a global scale.
Jordan has participated significantly in the intellgentiance part and it paid a dear price, when Al Qaeda in Iraq killed more than 60 Jordanians in a 2005 bombing in Amman. Later on, Jordanian-US intelligence cooperation led to terminating almost all Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq.
The agreement between Jordan and NATO is yet another reminder that it is time Jordanians are fully informed about the global role of their nation and its global alliances. It will be good for everybody's business and would create more trust between citizens and the government.
According to the Acting Director of the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research, global opposition to the operation in Afghanistan is minimal, compared to other operations such as Iraq. More information about media and the global war on terrorism here, and to put things in context, here's some background from my own exchanges with Professor Noam Chomsky.
I left more comments on 7iber, where a "retired officer" replied: "Rami is a drummer and a veteran politician, I don't get why he thinks he's better than anyone else". So, to the "officers" dissecting my blog, I will save you the benefit of doubt: I am an independent journalist, I don't work for anyone but myself. There you go, a lot easier than having to go through 4 years of blog posts (as seen here).
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