Posts Tagged ‘Israel Gaza Palestine racism’
For the Israeli soldier who has everything…
…T-shirts with vicious slogans being worn by some young Israeli soldiers. According to reports in the Israeli media, and BBC news, one of the T-shirts has the slogan ‘Bet you got Raped!’ over a picture of a bruised woman in a head-scarf. Another shows the picture of a clearly pregnant head-scarved woman with the words, ‘One shot two kills.’
Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques – IDF fashion 2009
By Uri Blau
Tags: Israel News, IDF, Gaza
The office at the Adiv fabric-printing shop in south Tel Aviv handles a constant stream of customers, many of them soldiers in uniform, who come to order custom clothing featuring their unit’s insignia, usually accompanied by a slogan and drawing of their choosing.
Elsewhere on the premises, the sketches are turned into plates used for imprinting the ordered items, mainly T-shirts and baseball caps, but also hoodies, fleece jackets and pants.
A young Arab man from Jaffa supervises the workers who imprint the words and pictures, and afterward hands over the finished product.
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty.
The slogans accompanying the
drawings are not exactly anaemic either:
A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription “Better use Durex,” next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him.
A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, “1 shot, 2 kills.”
A “graduation” shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.”
There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages.
For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, “Bet you got raped!”
A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies – such as “confirming the kill” (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim’s head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.
In many cases, the content is submitted for approval to one of the unit’s commanders.
The latter, however, do not always have control over what gets printed, because the artwork is a private initiative of soldiers that they never hear about.
Drawings or slogans previously banned in certain units have been approved for distribution elsewhere.
For example, shirts declaring, “We won’t chill ’til we confirm the kill” were banned in the past
(the IDF claims that the practice doesn’t exist),
yet the Haruv battalion printed some last year.
The slogan “Let every Arab mother know that her son’s fate is in my hands!”
had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit’s shirt.
A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.
“It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town,” he explains.
“The text was very powerful.
The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him.”
Does the design go to the commanders for approval?
The Givati soldier:
“Usually the shirts undergo a selection process by some officer, but in this case, they were approved at the level of platoon sergeant.
We ordered shirts for 30 soldiers and they were really into it, and everyone wanted several items and paid NIS 200 on average.”
What do you think of the slogan that was printed?
“I didn’t like it so much, but most of the soldiers wanted it.”
Many controversial shirts have been
ordered by graduates of snipers courses,
which bring together soldiers from various units.
Peta Bellamy has stuff to say, but you don't have to listen 