The Psychology of Desperate People: 15 Dead, 40 Injured in Food Stampede in Morocco

This report was originally published by Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper

In prepper lore, there is a theory about how badly desperate people are likely to behave. Many folks outside the community scoff at this theory. They believe that we have become more civilized than to utilize violent measures when hunger strikes.

But an incident in Morocco the other day showed us exactly how hungry people behave. And it isn’t pretty.

Food was being distributed in a rural market in Sidi Boulaalam, a poor village. Women had come to the market with baskets to get food for their families, when suddenly, what could only be described as a stampede erupted.

At least 15 women died and five were wounded in a stampede during a food distribution operation on Sunday morning in rural Morocco, government officials said.

The victims were crushed as hundreds of people, mostly women, gathered to collect baskets of food at the market…

…In the aftermath of the stampede, clothes and other personal items were left scattered across the ground. (source)

That number was later updated to 40 people who were injured in the crush.

Witnesses told local media that this year’s annual food aid distribution at a local market in Sidi Boulaalam, an impoverished town with just over 8,000 inhabitants, attracted a larger crowd than usual.

“This year there were lots of people, several hundred people,” a witness who asked to remain anonymous told AFP news agency.

“People shoved, they broke down the barriers,” he said, adding that the injured had been evacuated to a hospital in Marrakesh. (source)

Here’s a video of the aftermath in this Tweet. (If it won’t play for you, go here.)

Food delivery was supposed to bring relief. Instead, it caused a deadly stampede in drought-stricken Morocco. pic.twitter.com/QslXgLZEfu

— AJ+ (@ajplus) November 21, 2017

The value of the food being handed out? $16

15 families were left without mothers over $16 of food. To be fair, villagers in that part of the world live on about $3 per day, but still – this shows what desperation can do.

It’s not just Morocco.

It happens somewhere in the world every day. Here are some acts of desperation that have happened just in recent months.

• A North Korean soldier got shot 7 times and still kept running to get to freedom.


• Venezuelan women are becoming prostitutes in exchange for food.


• People with the plague are fleeing the hospital (and life-saving treatment) because of fear.


• Roving gangs were fighting for food and water in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico.


• On St. Martin, people were “fighting on the streets” for what food was left after Hurricane Irma.

When you are desperate, the normal rules do not apply.

Every year, we get a glimpse of this kind of insanity in America.

Every year, on “Black Friday” we get a glimpse of the kind of behavior that causes people to be crushed to death and assaulted. The day after Thanksgiving (ironically) people get up before daylight, stand in line, and shove their way through a crowd to get the best deals. (Stay tuned this weekend for the 2017 Black Friday Hall of Shame.)

And they aren’t even hungry.

People climb all over each other for cheap electronics. Fistfights erupt over vegetable steamers. People are ready to throw down and do battle for sale priced bath towels and televisions.

I’d hazard a guess that folks who spend time and money fighting over electronics are not the kind of people who prep. That means that these are the people who will be hungry in a long-term disaster. Look at those people, stampeding to get to a sale on things that they don’t actually need to survive. Their inhibitions are loosened because those around them are behaving in the same way.

You have to look at the psychology of this.

People can justify pretty much anything when they or their children are starving. And I can understand that to a large degree – who could stand to watch their babies suffering? But if someone can devolve to the above degree just to because everyone else is doing it, the chaos we saw above is only a tiny sample of what could come if people were truly hungry.

The line between civilization and THIS is very thin.

Desperate people do desperate things.

We need to be prepared by having the essential supplies on hand to keep us from becoming one of those desperate people in the middle of a stampede for a few days’ worth of food, but what’s more, we need to be prepared for the prospect of those desperate people. Keeping a low profile is the best defense but sometimes it’s not enough.

In a desperate situation, you have to be ready for desperate people to behave in a desperate manner. It happens in real life all the time. Somewhere on this planet, someone is desperate and they will do anything to meet their needs.

It only takes one person to start the charge in a tense scenario, and when that happens, the others will follow.

Don’t count on the rules of “civilization” to save you.

Please feel free to share any information from this article in part or in full, giving credit to the author and including a link to The Organic Prepper and the following bio.

Daisy Luther is the author of The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide To Whole Food on a Half Price Budget.  Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

Think Banning Refugees Is Bad? Then You Need to Know How They Were Created

January 30, 2017   |   Darius Shahtahmasebi

(ANTIMEDIA) On Saturday, Reuters obtained a report conducted by U.N. experts advising the U.N. Security Council that the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition’s attacks in Yemen “may amount to war crimes.” The report investigated ten coalition air strikes between March and October that killed over 292 civilians, including some 100 women and children.

“In eight of the 10 investigations, the panel found no evidence that the air strikes had targeted legitimate military objectives,” the experts wrote. “For all 10 investigations, the panel considers it almost certain that the coalition did not meet international humanitarian law requirements of proportionality and precautions in attack…The panel considers that some of the attacks may amount to war crimes.”

Saudi Arabia is leading a military coalition made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Sudan. Out of all of these countries wreaking havoc on Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, only Sudan makes Trump’s ban list of refugees. Yemen, the victim of the onslaught, also makes the list.

Even before the start of the Saudi-led war in March 2015, Yemen was already suffering a humanitarian crisis, including widespread hunger and poverty. Over 14 million people are starving, and seven million of them do not know where they will get their next meal.

To date, the Saudi-led coalition has struck over 100 hospitals, including MSF (Doctors without Borders)-run hospitals. The coalition has struck wedding parties; factories; food trucks; funerals; schools; refugee camps; and residential communities.

According to Martha Mundy, professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, the Saudi coalition has also been hitting agricultural land. Noting just 2.8 percent of Yemen’s land is cultivated, she argued that “[t]o hit that small amount of agricultural land, you have to target it.”

Further, she pointed out that the Saudi coalition “was and is targeting intentionally food production, not simply agriculture in the fields.” This direct attack on civilian infrastructure comes in tandem with a blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia that has created a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions.

The coalition has also been caught using banned munitions, including British-made cluster bombs, meaning that unnecessary losses and excessive suffering have been exacted (another apparent war crime).

As a result, more than three million Yemeni civilians have been displaced, according to the U.N. This is exactly how and why refugee crises happen in the first place — unnecessary war and suffering at the hands of the rich and powerful players on the world stage.

But what does this have to do with the United States? This is Saudi Arabia’s problem, not America’s. Right?

The support the U.S. has given to Saudi Arabia to enable these war crimes is quite extensive. According to the Saudi Arabian foreign minister, U.S. and U.K. officials sit in the command and control center to coordinate air strikes on Yemen. They have access to lists of targets. The Obama administration provided airborne fuel tankers and thousands of advanced munitions.

In addition to regularly drone-striking Yemen, killing countless civilians in the process, the U.S. has also provided intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition that has been gathered from reconnaissance drones flying over Yemen. In arms sales, the U.S. has made an absolute killing – quite literally. So much so that in December 2016 the Obama administration was forced to halt a planned arms sale to Saudi Arabia because of the mounting civilian death toll. It is hard to get an exact figure on the amount of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, but as it stands, it was well over $115 billion during just Obama’s eight years as president .

The Obama administration was also well aware of the inexperience of the Saudi-led coalition in conducting wartime operations. As the New York Times reported:

“The first problem was the ability of Saudi pilots, who were inexperienced in flying missions over Yemen and fearful of enemy ground fire. As a result, they flew at high altitudes to avoid the threat below. But flying high also reduced the accuracy of their bombing and increased civilian casualties, American officials said.

“American advisers suggested how the pilots could safely fly lower, among other tactics. But the airstrikes still landed on markets, homes, hospitals, factories and ports, and are responsible for the majority of the 3,000 civilian deaths during the yearlong war, according to the United Nations.”

America has played its part in this war. But what about Iran? They are allegedly arming the rebels in Yemen to provoke Saudi Arabia, so they should face some of the blame — right?

According to the U.N. experts, this highly perpetuated propaganda is not even remotely true.

“The panel has not seen sufficient evidence to confirm any direct large-scale supply of arms from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, although there are indicators that anti-tank guided weapons being supplied to the Houthi or Saleh forces are of Iranian manufacture,” the experts stated.

Okay, fine. But that was Obama. Donald J. Trump clearly has new and improved plans for foreign policy and immigration and for dealing with refugees across the board. Correct?

Well, not really. Barely hours after his inauguration, the military conducted drone strikes in Yemen. This is in light of the fact that former drone operators wrote an open letter to Barack Obama claiming the drone program is the single most effective recruitment tool for groups like ISIS. Then, on top of these drone strikes, Trump ordered a raid involving Navy SEALs that reportedly killed at least one eight-year-old girl, as well.

Refugees don’t appear out of thin air. While Trump uses refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations as a scapegoat for the inner turmoil facing the United States and other Western nations, his policies will only help exacerbate the refugee crisis, leaving parts of Europe and the wider Middle East to deal with the fallout.

By all means, close your doors to Yemen — but only after you withdraw all your personnel, equipment, aircraft, and material and financial support for war crimes committed in one of the world’s poorest countries. Until then, the least one can do is welcome with open arms those who are fleeing a horrific war conducted by an inexperienced, cowardly, violent coalition to avoid further radicalization of those civilians innocently caught up in geopolitically motivated wars.

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This article (Think Banning Refugees Is Bad? Then You Need to Know How They Were Created) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Darius Shahtahmasebi and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.

Bill And Hillary Clinton, Inc.: For Sale At The Right Price

(image credit: Getty)

After announcing her presidential bid last year, Hillary tried getting Moroccan King Mohammed VI to donate $12 million to the Clinton Foundation in return for a face-to-face meeting and speaking engagement.

Nice work if you can get it. Easy if you’re Bill or Hillary Clinton, money from Morocco’s king one of many examples of their corrupt practices.

Reporting on email content revealed by WikiLeaks, Fox News Ed Henry, said the following:

“Just hours after Hillary Clinton dodged a question at the final presidential debate about charges of ‘pay to play’ at the Clinton Foundation, a new batch of WikiLeaks emails surfaced with stunning charges that the candidate herself was at the center of negotiating a $12 million commitment from King Mohammed VI of Morocco.”

In an email to Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign manager Robby Mook, close Hillary aide Huma Abedin said “this was HRC’s idea.”

“She created this mess and she knows it” – referring to scheduling a pay-to-play deal one month after launching her presidential bid, certain to raise red flags if revealed.

Her advisors were concerned. Abedin emailed “(j)ust to give you some context, the condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting (of the Clinton Global Initiative) was her participation. If hrc was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter.”

“This was HRC’s idea. Our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting.”

A compromise was reached. Bill and Chelsea participated, representing Hillary. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace pressed Robby Mook for an explanation.

Wallace: “Why wasn’t that classic pay-to-play,” he asked?

Mook: “There’s nothing new here” – only in terms of it being commonplace Bill and Hillary practice.

Wallace: “But, Robby, there is some new stuff. Emails show, and I’m going to go through some of them, you were not happy at all (about) the idea of this meeting and her going there.”

Mook: Calling it a scheduling issue, he claimed “(w)e didn’t want her going overseas…before the campaign was kicking off.”

Journalist Bob Woodward called Clinton Foundation practices “corrupt…a scandal. The mixing of speech fees, the Clinton Foundation, and actions by the State Department which she ran are all intertwined…You can’t just say it’s unsavory.”

It’s the kind of stuff landing ordinary people in prison. Bill and Hillary remain unaccountable for years of illegal practices.

Instead of long overdue prosecution, they’re returning to the White House in January for a third co-presidential term as things now stand – apparently rigged to assure it.