Category: Atrocities

ISIS, the Yazidis, and Atrocities

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, History1 Comment

Yazidi Girl Poses
Yazidi Girl in Refugee Camp [picture credit: Simon Tomlinson and Tom Mctague]
Check out this photo essay by Simon Tomlinson and Tom Mctague in MailOnline which illustrates the plight of the Yazidis under the threat of Muslim extremists.

Fears are growing for the 300 Yazidi women reportedly kidnapped by Islamic State fighters last week amid claims they would be used to bear children to break up the ancient sect’s bloodline.

The minority group is originally Aryan and has retained a fairer complexion, blonde hair and blue eyes by only marrying within the community.

But in a furious bid to convert all non-Muslims, ISIS jihadists have vowed to impregnate the hostages.

This is why I don’t have much respect for religions. What kind of god is this that allows young men to think they have the right to take women and children, like the girls on the photos of this post, and “impregnate them” just to destroy their “blood lines?”

Yazidi Girl Rests
Yazidi Girl in Refugee Camp [picture credit: Simon Tomlinson and Tom Mctague]
What kind of people are these ISIS guys that smile on TV while talking about killing innocent little girls like these – or impregnating them?

What kind of society is this that accepts this behavior as acceptable, as in the case of these ISIS people, interprets it as god’s will?

What kind of country are we that we really think we are going to make a difference with guns in societies that have persecuted each other in the name of their gods, be that Zoroaster 4,000 years ago, or the “prophet” Muhammad 1,300 years ago, and all the whacky dogma he brought along and passed on to an entire geographic region?

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, when you want to contribute in a shooting war, you have to pick one side or the other. Right now, in Syria and Iraq, we can’t seem to figure out which side we want to back. All sides seem to have “terrorist” threads within them. No matter which side we arm, we end up arming people we used to shoot at or who used to shoot at us.

Atrocities everywhere. Let’s send in American soldiers so there can be more confusion. It reminds me of one of those bad heist movies where the mob, the law and the marks all shoot at each other in an Italian restaurant, until everyone is moaning and bleeding on the black and white tile floors under red and white checkered tablecloths.

Great idea.

 

John McCain in Vietnam

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Books, Commentaries, Cool PeopleLeave a comment

McCain in Vietnam

Here is John McCain shaking hands with Vietnam’s Defense Minister, Gen. Phung Quang Thanh. Apparently McCain is on a visit to Vietnam.

This must be strange and difficult. McCain was a prisoner in North Vietnam for years in the early 1970s. He was humiliated, tortured and beaten, kept in solitary confinement, deprived of medical aid and nourishment.

I learned about McCain’s journey in his book Faith of my Fathers which I reviewed here.

I just re-read that review and this was my closing paragraph:

As I was reading this, enthralled in the story, amazed how any man could endure such hardships and make such sacrifices, I kept having to remind myself that this man I was reading about, and his time in the 1960ies, was the same man that was all over the news right now as the nominee of the Republican Party for president. It didn’t seem real, or possible.

I highly recommend reading Faith of my Fathers to anyone wanting to understand the man John McCain and the experiences of a prisoner of war. If you only read one chapter, read the one about “John McCain’s Towel.”

I can only imagine that going back to Vietnam after the tortures he has endured there must be very challenging.

You can buy the book here.

A Short History Lesson on Israel

On By Norbert HauptIn AtrocitiesLeave a comment

Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world. We give Israel over $3 billion a year. $10 million of our tax dollars a day go to Israel. Yet, when the Israelis kill women and children in Palestine by the hundreds, we don’t seem to be alarmed. Only when Russians or Arabs do that, we’re worried.

Here is a map that shows what Israel has done to Palestine. It looks a little like what European settlers in North America have done to the Native Americans, doesn’t it.

It won’t be long now before Israel can tear down the walls around Palestine and bulldoze everything Arab and build shopping malls, schools and military bases – as there will be no more Palestinians left. A few more decades at this pace, and it’ll be over.

One people without a state (the Jews) will have totally ousted another people without a state (the Palestinians). One persecuted people against another persecuted people.

four-panel-map
[click for photo credit]
Here is a six-minute history lesson of the background of the situation.

 

If this is all about religion, God must be great.

 

Looting and the Tenuousness of Civilization

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities1 Comment

News abound about looting going on at the crash site of MH17 in the Ukraine. People are going through luggage, taking electronics, any valuables they like, wallets and money. To me, this is astonishing on many levels:

1. The local government and law enforcement does not have their act together sufficiently to secure the crash site and perform a proper investigation. I must be naïve about the integrity of the area as it relates to the “almost” civil war.  Make a ring of troops around this area – we know you have enough manpower, and lock the place down!

2. Human beings living in the local area are poor and desperate enough to rifle through other people’s stuff, people who boarded an airplane in far away Amsterdam to go to far away Malaysia and just happened to pass through. Their moral code is lacking the concept that this stuff lying on the ground belongs to other people who, in this case, were extremely unfortunate and had very bad luck by being killed. They don’t understand that these objects might be very important to the relatives of the victims and that they might want them back. There are thousands of people who lost somebody in this disaster. Every one of those people is cringing in pain knowing that looters are going through the wreckage, disgracing their loved ones and their belongings.

3. Shooting down an airliner is one of the most heinous terrorist acts or mass murder imaginable. It does not happen very often, but when it does, the entire world usually grieves. I grieve for the victims. My world is not quite right, and I am thousands of miles away, safe and removed from the reality. However, people living in the villages right there obviously are not grieving, since they have the strength to scour the site and take away other people’s stuff as theirs.

I don’t think we’re any holier than the Ukrainians. If a plane went down in the rural United States, I can imagine that there could be looting, too, if the authorities didn’t lock down the site. The difference is, the authorities do lock down the sites pretty quickly here, so this does not happen. But remember Katrina, remember hurricane Sandy and the images of people carrying television sets out of stores.

The fact that our moral codes break down as soon as “the law” can no longer enforce a code shows how weak our civilization is. The smallest upset in the order of things, like a natural disaster or a terror strike, can remove the shackles of normal civilized ethics, and the concept of property disappears.

The frightening thing is: it’s not just the concept of property. The next step is that without “the law” bullies with guns will start extorting food, water and ammunition from others that don’t have guns, and they will pillage and rape. I am not saying that everyone becomes lawless, but it does not have to be everyone. If only one in a hundred thinks that they now have rights over other people’s properties or bodies, that’s sufficient to plunge us back into the Bronze Age.

Disasters like the MK17 terror strike brings out the worst in us.

Airliner Shot Down – 100 Top AIDS Researchers Killed

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities1 Comment

As it turns out, a large percentage of the people onboard Malaysian flight 17 were top AIDS researchers on the way to Melbourne, Australia for a conference.

The conference will have a somber mood, with so many participants missing this year. This article in the Sydney Morning Herald shows details.

The insanity of ethnic strife and suppression, as evidenced in Ukraine, and of course going in on Syria and Iraq, is both depressing and agonizing.

Put the guns down, people!

And the rockets!

Humanity’s Elephants in the Room

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Climate Change, Economy, Nature, Political, Religion, Science, SlaveryLeave a comment

Korean Concentration Camps

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that North Korea holds as many as 120,000 people in its system of concentration and detention camps, and that 400,000 people have died in these camps from torture, starvation, disease, and execution.

Some reports indicate that they also practice generational imprisonment:

Many prisoners of the camp were born there under North Korea’s “three generations of punishment”. This means anyone found guilty of committing a crime, which could be as simple as trying to escape North Korea, would be sent to the camp along with that person’s entire family. The subsequent two generations of family members would be born in the camp and must also live their entire lives and die there.

— Source Wikipidia

See this Wikipedia article for more details and links.

If you are unlucky enough to be born the grandchild of a person who tried to escape the country, you will serve slave labor for your entire life. Imagine the world-view you would have under those circumstances?

And we, in 2014, allow this to go on, while the baby face dictator gets media coverage.

Bees are Dying

In North America alone, the National Agriculture Statistics Service reported that there were 2.44 million honey-producing hives in the United States in February 2008, down from 4.5 million in 1980, and 5.9 million in 1947. This is also happening in similar proportions in Europe and the rest of the world. We don’t exactly know what is causing it, but we suspect pesticides. Our agriculture depends on bees to a large degree, and entire crops are in peril without sufficient numbers of bees available.

Overfishing the Oceans

Faced with the collapse of large-fish populations, commercial fleets are going deeper in the ocean and father down the food chain for viable catches. This so-called “fishing down” is triggering a chain reaction that is upsetting the ancient and delicate balance of the sea’s biologic system.

A study of catch data published in 2006 in the journal Science grimly predicted that if fishing rates continue apace, all the world’s fisheries will have collapsed by the year 2048.

— National Geographic

Anthropogenic Climate Change

97% of climate scientists agree that human activity is causing climate change.  We are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at rates that will result in global warming to a degree that the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica will melt, causing a rise of sea levels and overall changed in weather, resulting in droughts and many other climate related disasters, all within the next 100 years.

Most of the educated world agrees with this assessment. In the United States, however, there is a strong movement of “climate deniers” particularly in the conservative population that is well-funded by the oil and coal industries, putting the general consensus in question. Since the U.S. is by far the largest polluter in the world, this strong anti-climate-change sentiment has global implications. One of the arguments of deniers is that since China and India are just starting to pump pollution into the air, whatever we do will not offset that, so we might as well not even try. A significant percentage of the U.S. population seems to have bought into this philosophy.

We didn’t want to face that smoking was dangerous to our health, until the first generations of smokers started dying early in the millions in the 1960s and 1970, so the inevitable evidence eventually came and changed our attitude. This will happen with climate change, but the nature of the problem is much more calamitous in the event that climate scientists are right. We could ruin the planet for centuries or millennia – before it can recover again.

We are playing a big-stakes game of dice. Our conservatives are not even willing to hedge their bets – they’re betting the planet in exchange of jobs and profits.

Mass Extinction

Human beings are currently causing the greatest mass extinction of species since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If present trends continue, one half of all species of life on earth will be extinct in less than 100 years, as a result of habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species,
 and climate change.

— Source Link Here

Depletion of Fossil Fuels

Oil companies are making record profits, and did so during the hard years of 2007, 2008 and 2009. Right now, the United States has surpassed Saudi Arabia as the largest oil producer in the world. Oil companies are raking it in while they can, because they know the gravy train is coming to an end. The International Energy Agency announced in 2006 that the world had hit “Peak Oil” meaning that oil production worldwide had hit the maximum. Going forward from Peak Oil, it will be harder and more expensive to extract and deliver oil, and new supplies will lag behind new demand.

The evidence for is, of course, is the price we are now paying at the pump, which is more than twice what it was just five years ago. The free market speaks the ultimate truth here. Oil is in more demand than can be fulfilled.

There is a lot of controversy about the Peak Oil theory. People argue that the Peak Oil crowd does not know what they are talking about. So, for a moment, let’s put aside all studies and all science, and especially all American politics.

It took about 450 million years to make all the oil in the world. Oil is basically the end-result of millions of years of sunshine (solar energy) being trapped in organic material, mostly plants. The earth is not making any more of the stuff at an appreciable rate. About a hundred years ago we started using it up by burning it and as ingredients for manufacturing, and we have made a measurable dent in our supply. If you trust the doom-sayers, we have about 20 years of oil left at the current consumption. Some say 20 to 50 years. Wild and crazy optimists say 100 years. But it’s limited, very limited, and we will run out.

The question is not if Peak Oil is real. The only question we may ask is if it really happened in 2006, or if it’s still off in the future, perhaps in 2016 or 2026.

I once calculated [see formula here] that roughly every day we are using up as much fuel as it took nature 5,000 years to create.

We. Will. Run. Out. Of. Oil.

When the time finally comes, perhaps centuries hence, our descendants will have figured out how to make do without it. But there are legitimate uses of fossil fuels in reasonable amounts, and they will wish we had not squandered it to make plastic grocery bags or plastic forks for one time use; or for teenagers to drive to the mall. Fossil fuels are a limited resource, and when they are all gone, we’ll have to wait another 450 million years to get more, and haul them here from another planet with life on it.

Our strategy is pretty weird, isn’t it?

Slavery

There are more people in slavery today than any time in previous history. Slavery has many faces. Keeping people trapped in sweatshops in Bangladesh so we can buy cheap shirts at the mall in the United States is a form of slavery. Holding young girls as sex objects is a form of slavery. Bringing laborers from Pakistan to work in construction in Dubai and taking away their passports is a form of slavery.

We are making it possible and we let it happen by our willingness to consume the products of the various forms of slavery – at Wal-Mart and all the other retail stores in our neighborhoods. Go to the mall and try to find a shirt made in the United States, and you will recognize what I mean.

Wars over Religion

It’s 2014 and we are still bickering and shooting each other over whose god is right and whose is wrong. It’s been going on for thousands of years, and we’re still willing to die for stuff written in books in the bronze age or in medieval times. I know people in and from Israel, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. They are all good human beings, people who only want to make their lives and the lives of their children better. That’s what everybody wants. If we just stopped bringing gods into the picture, we’d all get along just fine.

The gods are propped up by those that get fat off of them. The religious leaders wearing Rolexes and driving Bentleys. The politicians who build palaces. The kings who tax the rest of their countrymen. And the whole religious food chain below them, all the way down to the basket that’s passed down the rows of pews on Sunday morning.

I say we just abolish religion and save humanity in the process. But I am naïve.

 

 

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – And Due Process

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, HistoryLeave a comment

George Takei, the actor/activist who calls himself a “proud gay Japanese-American” tells the story of how he and his family were taken from their home in 1942, and put in a prison camp.

Takei’s parents were both born in America. One in Sacramento, the other in San Francisco. They lived in Los Angeles and had two children. Takei was 5 years old in 1942.

The U.S. government simply rounded up all “Japanese-Americans” as “enemy non-aliens” and put them in prison camps. Their only crimes: The looked like Japanese, the enemy that had attacked Pearl Harbor and waged a war of conquest in the Pacific.

Just like the Germans rounded up Jews as “enemies of the state” and put them into prison camps, Americans did the same.

It’s shocking how easily we are willing to undermine our own Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our freedom, give up due process, — so we can hate and abuse those that we decide, as a group, we don’t like anymore. It happened in 1942, and it can easily happen again today.

Here is Takei’s inspiring story in his own words:

Book Review: Unbroken – by Laura Hillenbrand

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Books, Four Stars6 Comments

On June 6, 2014, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, I saw a photograph of an old man with a walker, kissing the ground on Omaha Beach.

return-to-d-day-1

Presumably, he landed here on June 4, 1944 when he was a young man. All his life he has grieved for this friends who lost their lives right here on this sand so many years ago. What was it that spared him and allowed him to live a full life? Was it all just luck?

World War II veterans are now all much over 90 years old. There are very few left who have seen the atrocities with their own eyes, who have had to live with the memories of terrible loss and pain. One of those men is Louie Zamperini. He was born in 1916, grew up in Torrance, California, and he is now 98 years old. He has outlived everyone he knew. And he told his story.

unbrokenUnbroken is the story of the life of Louie Zamperini. Written by Laura Hillenbrand and first published in 2010, the book tells the story of a troubled youth growing up in Southern California. Louie found that he had a knack for running, and promptly proceeded to break many records. The apex of his running career was when he participated in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where he actually met Hitler. When America joined the war after Pearl Harbor, Louie was a bombardier stationed in the Pacific theater. He was shot down, survived many weeks on a raft and eventually was captured by the Japanese. He endured unimaginable abuse for two years as a POW of the Japanese.

One of the guards, Mutsushiro Watanabe, nicknamed “the Bird,” was the most brutal and sadistic abuser of all. He targeted Louie and brutalized and beat him daily, for years.

The book Unbroken is one of the most powerful, shattering, nightmarish books I have read in a long time. I have read many books about World War II and the atrocities committed by the Nazis. From that perspective, the war in the Pacific was just a footnote. Yes, the Japanese were waging war, too. I had no idea that the Japanese were so brutal, so abusive, and so reckless with human life and dignity. The Nazi death camps seem mild in comparison.

Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four. Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan , 12,935— more than 37 percent—died. By comparison , only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate.

– (Kindle Locations 5081-5092)

Unbroken is a testimony to the human spirit. How much pain and suffering and loss of dignity and humanity can a person endure before breaking, before dying? Unbroken shows how much in graphic, painful, chilling, frightening detail.

And to top it all off, Louie Zamperini is alive today to confirm his story. We may never forget.

I didn’t know how brutal the Japanese were. How did they change so quickly after the war? It seems right after the surrender, they went into high gear searching for their own countrymen war criminals. It’s hard for me to reconcile that these brutal, bestial people are the same ones that are now building my Toyota.

Here is an interview in 60 Minutes with “the Bird.” This will not be meaningful to you if you have not read the book. I recommend you read the book first, and then come back here and check out the interview of “the Bird.” It will give you cold chills.

Here is a video of a 60 Minutes interview with Watanabe, “the Bird.”

Louie Zamperini is a remarkable man. Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken is a remarkable book.

Rating: ****

Zamperini2
Louie Zamperini at age 22 and 95.

Finally, for more information about World War II in the Pacific, there is a great blog, which I have been following, called Pacific Paratrooper. Please check it out!

Ruminations on Guantanamo

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities1 Comment

In World War II, the Japanese kept a secret camp called Ofuna:

This wasn’t a POW camp. It was a secret interrogation center called Ofuna, where “high-value” captured men were housed in solitary confinement, starved, tormented, and tortured to divulge military secrets. Because Ofuna was kept secret from the outside world, the Japanese operated with an absolutely free hand. The men in Ofuna, said the Japanese, weren’t POWs; they were “unarmed combatants” at war against Japan and, as such, didn’t have the rights that international law accorded POWs. In fact, they had no rights at all. If captives “confessed their crimes against Japan,” they’d be treated “as well as regulations permit.” Over the course of the war, some one thousand Allied captives would be hauled into Ofuna, and many would be held there for years.

— Unbroken – by Laura Hillenbrand (Kindle Locations 3055-3059)

After World War II, at the trial of the Nazis:

Justice Jackson: Protective custody meant that you were taking people into custody who had not committed any crimes but who, you thought, might possibly commit a crime?

Hermann Goering: Yes. People were arrested and taking into protective custody who had not yet committed any crime, but who could be expected to do so if they remained free … the original reason for creating the concentration camps was to keep there such people whom we rightfully considered enemies of the state.

— The Trial of Hermann Goering, Nuremberg, 1946

From Wikipedia on Guantanamo:

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, also referred to as Guantánamo or Gitmo, is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which fronts on Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. At the time of its establishment in January 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said the prison camp was established to detain extraordinarily dangerous prisoners, to interrogate prisoners in an optimal setting, and to prosecute prisoners for war crimes. Detainees captured in the War on Terror, most of them from Afghanistan and much smaller numbers later from Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia were transported to the prison.

After Bush political appointees at the U.S. Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice advised the Bush administration that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp could be considered outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, military guards took the first twenty detainees to Guantanamo on 11 January 2002. The Bush administration asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

— Wikipedia

 

More Military Action in Iraq – Really?

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, PoliticalLeave a comment

There are rumors that the USS George H.W. Bush is en route to the Persian Gulf. John McCain, who revealed his immense power of good judgment when he appointed Sarah Palin as a candidate for vice president, seems to want us to send troops back to Iraq. The U.S. is considering sending drones.

Agreed, Iraq is going down – again. It hasn’t been “up” since we destroyed its infrastructure and fragile government in 2003. The destruction and destabilization was the easy part. That took only weeks. Nation building proved impossible. We tried for almost ten years.

The war in Iraq was as futile as the war in Vietnam. Don’t we ever learn?

Yes, Iraq will break up into pieces and the pieces will be medieval theocracies. Women’s rights will vanish. Girls will be denied education. Large sections of the country will live in slavery. That seems to be the Muslim way.

Who are we, to believe we can change that? Sure, drone strikes can hurt some ISIS lunatics, but they will hurt ten times as many innocent civilians as collateral damage.

I do not want another dollar of U.S. money spent on Iraq. The last ten years were full of bad money spent.

Enough!

Comparing Shootings by German and U.S. Police

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Political2 Comments

German_Police
[click for photo credit]
According to Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s premier political magazines, German policemen fired 85 bullets in 2011. 49 of those were warning shots. 36 were aimed at humans. From those shots, 15 people were injured and six died. Germany has 80 million people, which is about a quarter of the population of the United States (317 million people in 2014).

In comparison, in April of 2011 in the U.S., police fired 84 shots at one murder suspect in Harlem. In another case, they fired 90 shots at one fleeing unarmed man in Los Angeles. I am not sure it is even possible to find out how many bullets American policemen fired in one year. Please comment if you know.

In this country, we associate guns with freedom and safety. How did that happen?

German citizens are allowed to have guns, under certain conditions. Germans actually have more guns than any European nation. However, gun registration laws are extremely strict and background checks apply.

The firearm related death rate per 100,000 population in the U.S. (in 2011) was 10.3. For Germany, the rate (in 2010) was 1.24.

Which country is safer? The one with strict gun laws, or the United States?

Empirical evidence comparing statistics with just one other modern country suggests that strict gun laws result in a much lower death rate due to guns.

I do not see how stricter laws, registration requirements and background checks adversely affect our freedom or our rights.

Come and check me out!

How To Make Your House Unsellable

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Crack-Ups, HistoryLeave a comment
[click for photo credit]

Excellent tile work, though. Nobody has ever accused Nazis of not being good tradesmen.

Now I really want to see pictures of the rest of the house.

Crimes of America in Iraq

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Political1 Comment

American policy in Iraq, causing disease, destruction, poverty and destitution over a period of decades, reaching back into the 1980s, has helped cause the basket case that country is today. Our leaders do not work on our behalf for lofty goals of freedom and justice in the Middle East. They are meddling with entire countries, playing them against each other, for economic interests. Our soldiers die not because they are protecting the freedom of other people, or our security, our soldiers die because the American military industrial complex has an interest in unrest in the Middle East.

Here is an article titled They Don’t Mean Well by Sheldon Richman that elaborates on this topic.

It is our own rogue government that fans the flames of terrorism. To stop terrorism, all we have to do is stop meddling in the Middle East and let these countries breathe.

Dolphin / Pilot Whale Slaughter in the Faroe Islands

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Cetaceans11 Comments

In recent weeks, headlines about the slaughter of dolphins by the Japanese have surfaced again. This slaughter was made famous, or rather infamous, by the movie The Cove, which I have reviewed here. The Japanese have routinely and systematically slaughtered dolphins and whales, treating them as meat animals. In their defense, they point to the American slaughter of chickens, cattle and pigs by the millions. On the surface, this looks like a valid argument, painting us as hypocrites.

I just happen to believe that cetaceans are sentient and therefore not a subservient species to man, but an equal that we should treat as such. My standards for dolphins are different from those for cattle. I know not everyone will agree with me on that.

faroe-islands-whale1

The picture above, however, is not from Japan, but from the Faroe Islands, a part of Denmark. And yes, the red in the water is blood from the slaughter of pilot whales by the villagers for meat and sport.

Warning – Pictures of Shocking Animal Abuse and Slaughter

This picture, with others linked to here, has been called an email hoax.

However, I have found corroboration by Hoax-Slayer, a site dedicated to debunking email hoaxes, and they have confirmed that the story is true. This has been going on for centuries and it’s part of their culture. The males do the killing, while the females look on.

The whales are herded into bays by boats and even jet skis, where they are dragged onto the beach by hooks into the blow holes. Then the men cut their spinal chords. Earth First gives much more gruesome details in this online article.

Someone from Sweden commented on this post and pointed out that the Faroe Islands were self-ruling since 1948, all laws are local under the Faroe Home Rule Act.  Denmark has sovereignty on some things regarding the Faroe Islands, but not local laws, which are made 100% by the Faroese themselves. He points out that it’s for meat, and not sport.

The Faroe Islanders kill pilot whales for meat, and ritual, as it seems to me. It’s not just the Japanese.

And where are the Faroe Islands?

Faroe Islands