From Gaza to Ferguson, “an injury to one is an injury to all”

Ferguson protester August 18 2014 (Scott Olson:Getty Images)

If life were even reasonably fair, Ferguson police & Missouri officials would go down not only as violent racists but among America’s dumbest criminals. Lawyers prep their lying clients to present a coherent alibi when they hit the courts. The Ferguson police department improvised a story about the murder of Michael Brown nobody could make head or tail of & presented it to media. It took a few days for media to chase down the young guy walking with Brown to hear his version which disagrees with the cop version & has somehow gotten lost in the revisions offered by police officials. They finally hit on the version (& obvious lie) where Brown was a suspect in a convenience store robbery but admit the cop who murdered Brown didn’t know that. There’s a simple rule to follow in life: a story that doesn’t add up is usually baloney. A kid can tell his teacher “the dog ate my homework” but when you murder an unarmed young man (known to everyone as a good kid) that kind of idiocy doesn’t cut it.

What we’re seeing now played out in Ferguson is the dog & pony show of the US war against the Black community & its kids. First they removed the white police chief & replaced him with the Black state trooper. The white cop was undeniably stupid but that isn’t why he was replaced. The trooper came on with the apologies & the commiserations; he had cops marching for justice against police brutality, photographed hugging other protesters, & solemnly bowing their heads at the prayer services for Michael Brown. It’s called street theater & it’s intended to mollify national outrage at a brutal execution.

As for using a Black cop against the Black community, that’s a device as old as the violent colonialization of the Americas & the extermination of native peoples. The US Army hired “Indian scouts” to pursue fleeing tribes & established Indian police forces on reservations. It’s still neoliberal colonial policy & the plundering war in DR Congo is the most ruthless instance of such treachery–where foreign mining companies hire militias among the Congolese to cover for their plunder.

The Democratic Party, whose primary function is to control popular unrest, hustled in Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson, the DP apparatchiki they thought most able to pull the wool over people’s eyes. If they get their way, the massive uprising against police violence will be contained in prayer meetings & drowned out by “praise the lords” when a Black leadership not bought & sold to the highest bidder would be demanding national solidarity mobilizations to take back the streets of Ferguson & demand justice for Michael Brown.

While the state trooper is putting on the dog & pony show for media, the Missouri governor is deploying the National Guard, laying out a curfew as if the Black community was a lawless band of hooligans & looters. What happened to the Bill of Rights & the right to assemble & the right to protest? All the news now is about looters & molotov cocktails. Maybe a couple stores did get hit. So what? The only purpose for media focus on looting is to justify the continuing excessive use of force against thousands of unarmed, peaceful protesters who have had it up to their eyeballs with police brutality.

They’re using tear gas canisters & souped up humvees against unarmed protesters, assaulting & arresting people who by all reports remain peaceful but defiant of the curfew & determined to stand their ground against police violence. We cannot take our attention off Ferguson & we cannot stand silent any longer. Palestinians in Gaza, still recovering from genocide, have rendered solidarity to the Black community in Ferguson. The similarities between their struggles are not at all incidental.

“An injury to one is an injury to all”: that is our international clarion call to stand actively with the Black community in defense of their children against police violence.

This young man is in a demonstration to demand the end of police violence & the right for Blacks to assemble; he is wearing the mask against the police use of excessive tear gas.

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Hasbara burlesque

Our two jihadists August 17 2014

Clearly the US is crescendoing with the Islamophobia thing. You can see it in US foreign policy but also in things like Hillary Clinton’s distinct move to the right in a play for the presidency, sucking up to Zionism in even more unseemly ways than when she was US Secretary of State. But do they have to go bananas? You’d think by now they’d have worn that al-Qaeda thing to death since nobody believes it anymore–other than those who believe space aliens built the pyramids & the ones who read supermarket tabloids for news.

Anyone who lived through the Cold War of the 1950s & the McCarthy witchhunt in the US grew up on this kind of stuff: commies put fluoride in the water to corrupt the morals of youth; they were “masters of deceit” who believed in “free love” & infiltrated Hollywood, government, universitites, even the weather bureau. “Pinkos” were everywhere. The TV series “I led Three Lives” (de rigueur family viewing in the 1950s) had children trembling for fear of encountering a communist who would monkey with their morals & turn them into body snatchers or the “living dead”. So when they try to bring all that crap back under the guise of “jihadists”–the modern rendition of body snatchers–pardon us if we have a good laugh before we excoriate it.

The Gatestone Institute is described as a think tank but when you see who it publishes (Alan Dershowitz) & who runs the joint, you’ll see they give thinking a bad name & make it indistinguishable from stinking. It’s an unseemly lot altogether but then Zionism is sucking on the dregs; beggars can’t be choosers. The leadership includes: John Bolton; he’s the working class guy with the funny mustache who got straight A’s in school so he could worm his way into being on the goon squad for the White House. And in that position he’s served admirably if not also meriting an ignominious place in history. If you look up his curriculum vitae it has “high paid bouncer” written all over it.

Then there’s Amir Taheri, an Iranian guy, whose curricumlum vitae is mostly a list of denunciations by scholars of his forgeries & falsifications of history. There is also Robert J. Woolsey, Jr., who claims in his CV that he was prominently active in the anti-Vietnam War movement though not a single person present through it’s entire history has any recollection of his participation. He later served as head of the CIA so perhaps his presence at antiwar events wasn’t so much prominent as it was undercover. Last, but not least, there is Eely-Oily Weasel who has disgraced himself more than any man should in one lifetime. After his recent public spectacle accusing Palestinian parents of child sacrifice, he really ought to consider a rabbinical monastery somewhere–not for penance & reflection (that’s beyond him) but to hide out for a while.

The owner of the stink tank is Nina Rosenwald, who calls herself “an ardent Zionist” & whose family has deep roots in American Zionism; her father was a founding member of the United Jewish Appeal in 1939 which eventually amalgamated with several other groups in 1999 to become United Jewish Communities, an unabashedly Zionist alliance.

So under the leadership of these bozos the Gatestone Institute just published an alarmist article titled “Islamic State: “We Will Take Spain Back” by Soeren Kern, a right-wing “analyst” living in Spain. Senor Kern has an entire body of works on such subjects as the kebab shops in Spain financing global jihad, Muslims demanding the “right of return” to Spain, & the underage Muslim marriage wars. Get the picture? His theoretical pièce de résistance is “Minarets Are Our Bayonets”: The Swiss Vote To Ban Them” about right-wingers in Switzerland trying to outlaw minarets because Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan once implied the construction of mosques & minarets is part of a strategy for the Islamization of Europe. According to Erdogan: “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks & the faithful our army.” Hasn’t the Pope said worse? We stand in awe. How can you excoriate what is completely indistinguishable from burlesque?

What our man Kern is so exercised about is that a couple pranksters posted a 20-second video of a guy in a phony beard & mustache wearing an Arab keffiyeh. Speaking Spanish “with a heavy North African accent” the guy said: “I say to the entire world as a warning: We are living under the Islamic flag, the Islamic caliphate. We will die for it until we liberate those occupied lands, from Jakarta to Andalusia. And I declare: Spain is the land of our forefathers & we are going to take it back with the power of Allah.” There’s a second jihadist sitting in the wings laughing his butt off.

Kern opens the article claiming “Calls to reconquer al-Andalus are becoming more frequent & more strident.” He quotes Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz that “”Clearly Spain forms part of the strategic objectives of global jihad.” They neglect to mention the calls are not coming from jihadists in North Africa but from Spanish activists who want delivery from the EU & IMF austerity programs.

What is not at all amusing about this rubbish is that Spanish authorities claim these jihadists are coming in through Melilla, the Spanish territory in North Africa adjacent to Morocco where thousands of African immigrants attempt to enter Europe. In the past ten years they’ve arrested nearly 500 “suspected Islamic extremists” (whatever the hell that means) so they easily dovetail Islamophobic repression with attacks on immigrants.

Like we say, Zionism is scraping the bottom of the barrel & the dregs of 19th century racism & colonialism. If the best you can do is Weasel & Kern & the rest of this rogue’s gallery, bend over & kiss your ass goodbye.

(Image is screen shot of two “jihadists)

Gazan diaspora

Humans of NY; Palestinian boy August 17 2014

From “Humans of New York” album”:

“He lived with his mother in Gaza when he was very young. One night, I talked to him on the phone before bedtime, and he told me he was wearing three pairs of pants to bed. I said: ‘Three pairs of pants? Why aren’t you in your pajamas?’ He told me: ‘Because I want my body to hold together if a bomb falls on me.’”

This boy, no older than 9 or 10-years-old now, indicted Israel for several war & human rights crimes in a few simple words without need for UN or Human Rights Watch investigations & without the legalese & sophistry that lets Israel go scot-free after every phase of Operation Ethnic Cleansing.

(Petra, Jordan)

Exodus to nowhere in Gaza

Exodus in Gaza August 16 2014

Israel has temporarily abated Operation Ethnic Cleansing but solidarity activitists cannot be deceived, nor our protests ended. As long as the Israeli blockade prevails, Gaza will be unable to get equipment to remove the mountains of cement, will be unable to rebuild, thousands will be homeless with no place to live or go the toilet, will have insufficient food, no medicines or medical equipment to address life-threatening injuries reportedly sustained by over 10,000 people–& no rest from continued bombing sorties.

Media coverage of the Israeli rampage is like dispatches from a parallel universe. The US Pentagon always waited a respectable amount of time (at least a couple months each time) before they shifted explanations for the US-NATO war in Afghanistan, later echoed in media. Israel is more impetuous in their deceits. Reuters now reports: “Israel launched its Gaza offensive on July 8 in response to a surge of rocket attacks by Gaza’s dominant Hamas Islamists.” This is the first we’ve heard of those rockets in July. Wasn’t the stated reason on July 8th that the assault was retaliation for the Hamas kidnapping of three Zionist kids in the West Bank? A kidnapping we (& Israel) always knew Hamas did not commit?

Israel needs the specter of “Hamas terrorism” to maintain apartheid & conduct ethnic cleansing. If Hamas did not exit, Israel would have to invent it as a foil for their barbarism. On the slight chance the unity agreement signed in April between the Palestinian Authority (PA) led by traitor Mahmoud Abbas & Hamas worked out, Israel launched a bombing assault on northern Gaza–a little over two months before Operation Protective Edge–& there were no Hamas rockets even alleged. Netan-psycho threatened Abbas: “Does he want peace with Hamas or peace with Israel? You can have one but not the other.” To make Abbas’s choice for him & to maintain the specter of Hamas terrorism, Israel used whatever artifice it could to prevent Palestinian unity.

The crisis of leadership plagues social movements around the world. It has stature as the greatest political dilemma of our era–& has been for a very long time. We see it played out in every political venue from the labor movement to social justice movements to the great struggles for self-determination like in Palestine–& Ferguson. The political weaknesses of Hamas or the PA are not reason to truncate support for the just demands of the Palestinian people. We render them solidarity & trust them to resolve their own leadership problems.

Gruesome images that continue to circulate remind us of the horrors Gaza just endured & we witnessed. It’s a reminder not to retreat from solidarity now that the worst of bombing has abated. The bombing will not cease & the blockade will not end without our continued active solidarity.

This little girl waits in a minibus as her family prepares to leave their neighborhood in Gaza City where the homes are now rubble.

Continue marching, continue educating; build the hell out of the economic boycott of Israel (barcode beginning 729). As schools open up this fall (though church halls are just as good a place), it’s an ideal time for speak-outs, forums, teach-ins as part of evangelizing for justice.

(Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters)

No human being is illegal: open the damn borders!

Guatemalan immigrants August 16 2014

While manicured officials in the Obama regime utter pious sentiments about the “humanitarian crisis” on the US-Mexico border, they adjudicate the quickest way to deport tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, including small children. They wouldn’t know humanitarian if it came up & hit them in their ugly mugs.

These two Guatemalan men sleeping on the train track in Arriaga, Chiapas (the first Mexican state on their journey north) show us the squalor & humiliation, not to mention terror, millions of people around the globe endure simply to find work.

These young guys have over a thousand miles yet to go riding on “La Bestia” or “the death train”, a freight train they ride north that doesn’t stop for them to board or dismount. Hundreds lose limbs in the process. Paramilitary & criminal gangs (if a distinction can be made) prey on immigrants, subjecting them to robbery, kidnapping, extortion, assault, rape, murder, disappearance.

Immigration is a central part of human history; it’s what makes humanity so beautiful & varied. If corporations can move their capital, sweatshops, & plundering operations wherever they want on this globe, working people have the right to go where they want. Immigration is a human right.

Open the damn borders! No human being is illegal! Solidarity & Godspeed to these young men.

(Photo by Jorge Dan Lopez/Reuters)

The world you save will be your own.

Wash. DC rally:solidarity with Ferguson (Gabriella Demczuk:NYT)

There are lots of photos now of Ferguson solidarity rallies around the US. There’s a lot of militance expressed because so many families have lost beloved to police violence. Being a political activist in the Black community can be extremely dangerous because just being a Black teen is so dangerous–& because any time kids get together to play ball or make time with each other or go to the convenience store to get Skittles they’re considered a threatening gang.

This photo is at a solidarity rally in Washington, D.C., where the police department has distinguished itself for the racist treatment of Blacks. There’s something particularly compelling about this young boy with his tee-shirt of Trayvon Martin when you remember that the US war on Black youth is directed at this good looking kid & his peers.

Racism is so pivotal to capitalist rule & military policy they’re willing to destroy this young boy’s life; they socially engineer him out of opportunity, try to maneuver him out of school & into the prison system, vilify him & try to demoralize him with a thousand vicious lies pumped out of universities & think tanks.

This could only happen because Black political leadership (like Al Sharpton) is completely bankrupt & hogtied to the Democratic Party & because whites believe the slanders & ignore that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” And of course, that means everybody is going down together.

It’s long since time for that “old time religion” that understands the mantras of solidarity are not just ceremonial but the iron laws of social transformation.

If there’s a Ferguson solidarity rally in your town, grab a placard & hit the streets. The world you save will be your own.

(Photo by Gabriella Demczuk/NY Times)

The future of a free Palestine

Palestinian children August 15 2014

Do you think a word of commentary is necessary–or is our elation for the surviving children of Gaza quite enough? Did we just go through hell over their fate only to see the little rascals playing games where they could break their necks?

These little ones are playing in the courtyard of a school the UN uses as a refugee center in Gaza City. They’ve been through hell & it’s only just begun but with the immense international solidarity movement now standing with them, they will grow to be the future of a free Palestine.

(Photo by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP)

The mass psychology of ethnic cleansing

Israeli psychosis August 15 2014

Evidence mounts of mass psychosis in Israel, which is the full flowering of Zionist supremacist & colonial ideology. Zionists used to boast they made the desert bloom in Palestine. But bloom with what? Racism & social hatred so profound the society is disintegrating & rotting from cultural dry rot?

This sicko was photographed in a Jerusalem pub Wednesday morning. It’s unconfirmed that he is an Israeli army reservist. Most US combat veterans come home with psychosis, addiction, & other mental health problems; thousands commit suicide over guilt & grief at what they saw & did. Juicing it up in the morning might mean this guy has a shred of humanity left but when you flaunt ethnic cleansing on your shirt & drown your sorrows in a pint while psycho politicians praise you for your crimes, chances are there isn’t much left–& what is left isn’t worth the bother.

Keep marching for Palestine & evangelize for the economic boycott of all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729).

(Photo by AP)

Low hung pants & Black rebellion

Ferguson long slung pants August 14 2014

The national obsession with how low Black kids wear their pants crescendoes into more ordinances & school bans all the time. Concern about Black teens showing their underwear is not matched by how much cleavage women show. Ain’t that curious!? But it’s not about modesty; it’s about civil rights & it’s certain many kids ride their pants low just to challenge social hatred. In truth, those pants defy the laws of gravity & physics might want to investigate rather than let blue-nosed racists ban them.

Here a young civil rights activist in Ferguson leaflets outside a community meeting to discuss the murder of Michael Brown. Can his underwear possibly be of interest to anyone when he’s in the front lines of making history?

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)