Posts Tagged ‘Police’
Bahrain, Libya, Saudi Arabia and The West.
In Bahrain we are witnessing Saudi Arabian imperialism as dictators join forces to shoot peaceful demonstrators, the video below is just one example.
Elsewhere, in Libya Gaddafi’s air power has proved decisive as his mercenaries and loyalists advance on Benghazi.
The West’s failure to aid the rebels or provide a counter to Gadaffi’s air power has sealed the fate of the rebels.
In all probability we will see a bloodbath in Benghazi as Gadaffi kills as many as possible to prove a point, and the West’s stupid sanctions will not stop him. Gaddafi was afraid of losing power and fought with that in mind, freezing his assets in the West was annoying but not uppermost in his thinking. He doesn’t care what the West thinks of him, rather what could have happened, his overthrow and demise.
That is unlikely to happen now, as any opposition will be brutally dealt with, after 42 years as a dictator he’s learnt a trick or two, to murder or exile his opponents and ignore what people say.
In Saudi Arabia, there are protests according to Bloomberg:
“About 1,000 people in Saudi Arabia’s eastern city of al-Qatif defied a ban on demonstrations yesterday and protested peacefully to demand the country’s troops end their incursion into Bahrain.
Protesters chanted and held signs that called on the government to stay out of Bahrain, according to Ali Hassan, 26, who took part in the march. He said the march veered away from security forces to avoid a confrontation. A separate protest was held in the city of Awwamiya, according to Jasim al-Awwami, 27, who participated in it.”
Shot, Protesting In Eastern Saudi Arabia.
Events have reached Saudi Arabia as the Washington Post reports:
“DAMMAM, SAUDI ARABIA – Three people were injured when police opened fire during a protest in eastern Saudi Arabia on Thursday, according to a witness and a Saudi official.
The witness, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals by authorities, said police at first fired over protesters’ heads but then began shooting directly at them during a march in central Qatif, a predominantly Shiite town in oil-rich Eastern Province.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said police fired over the heads of protesters after demonstrators attacked them, the Reuters news agency reported. He did not say how the injuries were caused but said one of those hurt was a policeman.
At the time of the shooting, “the police were maybe 50 meters away” from the protesters, who were calling for the release of prisoners, the witness said. It was not immediately clear whether the bullets were live or rubber.”
The BBC adds:
“Protests are illegal in Saudi Arabia, which has had an absolute monarchy since its unification in the 1930s. “
Bloomberg has more background information:
“Saudi Arabia has seen protests in the kingdom’s Eastern Province this month, though nothing approaching the size witnessed in Bahrain and Egypt.
Shiite Muslims held two demonstrations on March 3 to call for the release of prisoners. About 100 people staged the first protest in the Shiite Muslim village of Awwamiya in the Eastern Province, while a similar number of people later demonstrated in the neighboring city of Qatif.
Security forces broke up another protest yesterday in Qatif. Police fired above the crowd of 120-150 people to end the rally after a policeman taking video to document the event was attacked, Major General Mansour al-Turki, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said in an interview. Three people were injured, two protesters and one policeman, he said. “
Four Policemen And A Wheelchair.
In the 21st century we are increasingly jaded. We think we seen it all, every weird video, every crime, every shooting, nearly every atrocity and certainly all of the stupidly thuggish actions that the police can take.
Yet they have surpassed themselves.
Four big and extremely fit policemen tackled a wheelchair user.
Yes, that’s correct, FOUR policemen.
Precisely what crime the wheelchair user committed is unclear, and the aggressive interviewer on BBC news shows no sympathy for the plight of the wheelchair user.
Had the wheelchair user had an axe, or a machine gun you might have understood a sense of urgency, but all he had was his hands on the wheels, and as far as I can see was not in any way a threat to the police.
However, it is fairly clear that the Cameron government have let the police off their leash, so be you able-bodied, a wheelchair user, or blind I will bet that you will find nothing but a size 10 boot coming your way, if you decide to oppose the policies of the Tory government.
Update 1: Here’s Jody McIntyre explaining things in the Indy:
“Adding insult to injury is The Daily Mail, which found it appropriate to suggest I’m faking my disability and am mentally inept when it comes to making decisions about my actions. Highlighting a somewhat backwards attitude towards disabled people and their place in society, that over 500 people have already complained about Richard Littlejohn’s depiction of me as Andy from Little Britain (I don’t wear vests for a start), shows whose side the public are on when it comes to what’s acceptable where mocking disability is concerned.”
Update 2: Marko has more on the student that was attacked by the police and the Daily Mail.
Update 3: Jody Mcintyre’s blog is here.
Update 3: CiF Watch strays into the territory of political vitriol and character attacks, all completely irrelevant to the issue of Jody McIntyre’s appalling treatment by four big police officers.
I can’t help wondering if he had held different views, would the attack upon him, as a wheelchair user, instead be condemned?
It takes a certain moral turpitude not to see his manhandling by the police as wrong, it takes an entrenched ideologue to want to use that against a disabled person.
I can only imagine that *if* Jody had been blind then the excuse would have been that his labrador dog was about to attack some riot police, or some such nonsense.
That’s the level of this mindless maliciousness.
Update 4: Littlejohn’s rant against Jody McIntyre produce a reaction:
“The Press Complaints Commission said that they have so far received more than 500 complaints from members of the public, but have yet to make a decision on whether to launch a formal investigation.”
Update 5: I don’t often agree with Sunny Hundal, but his post, Littlejohn & Tories attack Jody McIntyre, and the comments below it make some very good points, particularly Carole-Anne Melia’s:
“As a wheelchair user myself, I’m not surprised to see Littlejohn’s cartoon. For people like me it is part of everyday life to come across such attitudes. I’m forever being treated as having ‘Learning difficulties’ or being shouted at because being in a wheelchair apparently makes you deaf (news to me). The point is that we as disabled people have just as much right to protest as everyone else, though I might not agree with everything that a small minority of protestors got up, but Jody had just as much right to be there. The point is the police dragged a disabled person out of their wheelchair, they had no idea what damage that could have done to him. There was other ways the police could have got him moved, for them it was an easy option. I can walk a bit like Jody but if I was dragged from a wheelchair like that I would have been in hospital with increased damage to my spine. Thank god this didn’t happen to Jody with the what the spineless police did to him.”
Update 6: More evidence is forthcoming, slightly better picture, about 01:16 you can see him being pushed along, then when the camera returns how he’s tossed out of the wheelchair and dragged across the road by the police:
Update 7: This slide show shows how he was pulled about by the police.
Update 8: Pickled Politics has posted on this issue as well, Now Jody McIntyre is being attacked for his pro-Palestinian views.
Update 9: I posed a few questions at Pickled Politics draw out the issues:
1. For those who are critical of Jody McIntyre, would you hold a different view, if Jodie McIntyre held different opinions? In other words, do you view his treatment as acceptable because you disagree with his political views?
2. Do you think it is acceptable for four big and burly policemen to manhandle a wheelchair user in that way?
3. Alternatively, would you think it is acceptable for those four policeman to have manhandled an elderly pensioner in such a fashion?
4. Finally, do you feel that wheelchair users should stay at home and not venture out, just in case ?
I would welcome some engagement with those particular points.
Update 10: Journalism.co.uk has a piece on the Beeb interview:
“An interview on the BBC News channel with Jody McIntyre, the student protestor who was allegedly pulled from his wheelchair during the student demonstrations, has received a “considerable” number of complaints, controller of the channel Kevin Bakhurst said on the BBC Editors blog yesterday.”
The Shape Of Things To Come.
Marko has a post on the Police’s treatment of demonstrators in London last night and he knows who is to blame:
“At one level, I was grateful it was the UK rather than, say, Italy or Russia, as individual officers showed a lot of discipline and restraint; things would have been a lot worse if individual officers had lashed out indiscriminately on their own initiative, as police in such circumstances have been known to do. But that is a tribute to the ordinary policeman – not the strategy of the police command, which put its own officers in harm’s way.
The police strategy did not serve to protect people or property from violence; on the contrary. Although there was a minority among the demonstrators that was actively seeking violence, the police strategy of keeping people ketted for hours in the cold, and preventing them from going home, appeared guaranteed to ensure that a riot would take place, and that even some demonstrators who hadn’t been out for trouble would be drawn into it. The strategy of not only keeping people kettled, but then inserting a phalanx of armed police into the kettle was sheer lunacy – what did they think would happen ? The moderate, peaceful majority was lumped together with the minority and treated as dangerous deviants, instead of what they were – citizens exercising their democratic right to protest. Those of us who wanted to move to the second demonstration were prevented from doing so – a violation of the right of freedom of assembly.”
I suspect the Police or their political masters, Cameron and Co, don’t really care about freedom of assembly or other freedoms.
The politicians who call the shots are preoccupied with pushing their policies through and anything else is a distraction. They will, naturally, do lipservice but they probably view anyone who is not a Tory or doesn’t vote Tory as a subversive.
My bet is that Cameron’s government will go down in history as one of the most ideologically bent ones, even exceeding what Thatcher did. They will use the full force of the State against anyone that actively opposes them and we would be naive to assume otherwise.
This is the shape of things to come in Britain.
Update 1: A young student was violently attacked by a policeman wielding a truncheon, AP reports:
“A student was left unconscious with bleeding on the brain after a police officer hit him on the head with a truncheon during the tuition fee protests in central London, his mother said.
Alfie Meadows, 20, a philosophy student at Middlesex University, was struck as he tried to leave the area outside Westminster Abbey during Thursday night’s demonstrations, his mother said.
After falling unconscious on the way to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, the second-year undergraduate underwent a three-hour operation for bleeding on the brain.
Susan Meadows, 55, an English literature lecturer at Roehampton University, said: “He was hit on the head by a police truncheon. He said it was the hugest blow he ever felt in his life.
“The surface wound wasn’t very big but three hours after the blow, he suffered bleeding to the brain. He survived the operation and he’s in the recovery room.”
Mr Meadows and his friends tried to leave the area where protesters were being held in a police “kettling” operation when he suffered a blow to the head.”
The Knock At The Door.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a writer, maybe a journalist, a trade unionist, a community activist, a plain letter writer or just a normal person
Imagine that you express your views on politicians and people in the public domain in a vigorous fashion.
Nothing offensive, no swearing, no abuse, just factual comment, backed up by evidence and a few pointed questions.
Suppose you do that.
You write letters, you make comment on society or life, would you expect a knock on your door while you’re still in your night-clothes?
Of course, not.
Still less would you expect to find Policemen knocking on your door questioning you about your writings.
That is unless you lived in a Fascist or Stalinist State.
The Policemen knocking at the door was always dreaded by citizens of those repressive regimes.
Citizens knew they had to watch their words.
They knew they could not express their contempt for their leaders or those in authority. They knew an unguarded word could lead them to a camp or Gulag. So the citizens of these awful regimes do, and have, tended to censor themselves, to be extra careful what they say and what they write, lest Policemen come knocking at their door.
And why should the Police become involved?
They shouldn’t be, unless it is a criminal matter, or there is criminal intent and activity.
The State should not intervened to control legitimate criticism, or intellectual discussions and political activities will become stifled as a result.
We do not want the days of self-censorship and stupefying debate to return, that should not happen in modern democracies.
We should not fear the knock at the door, as Seismic Shock experienced.
ModernityBlog 