Teaching children to grovel

Bill Gates worship in India (Reuters) Oct 28 2015

Schoolchildren in Chennai, India are here celebrating the 60th birthday of Bill Gates. This is so disturbing for so many reasons–beginning with worshipping false idols. The original sin is teaching small children to fawn & do hero worship.

It is particularly grotesque in India to teach children to grovel before an image of Bill Gates, not because of the banal slogan “Grow Rich-Help Others”–although that is bad enough. But primarily because the Gates Foundation is proud of its collaboration with the Indian government & USAID in population control/eugenics programs. These are not family planning centers with prenatal care, maternal & infant nutrition programs, birth control, & abortion services but forced sterilization camps with squalid, unhygienic conditions where women are sent home post-surgery contrary to sound medical practice or dumped in nearby fields to recover, & where there have been several deaths. Sterilization, including forced sterilization, is the cornerstone of India’s corrupt family planning system.

We don’t know who these kids are or why their parents would allow such indoctrination. Like in most countries, schools are places to fill children’s heads full of rubbish to make them subservient & politically stupid. It’s not unlike holding up Christopher Columbus as a hero in American schools or Junipero Serra as a saint in the Catholic church.

(Photo from Reuters)

Palestinian protesters shot at for demanding return of those executed by Israelis

IDF chasing Pal in Hebron (Mussa Qawasma:Reuters) Oct 28 2015

Just so we have the relationship of forces in the occupied West Bank clear in a picture worth a thousand lies:

Israeli soldiers with assault weapons & live ammo are chasing Palestinian protesters in Hebron to break up a protest demanding Israel return the bodies of Palestinians who allegedly stabbed Israelis (heavy emphasis on “allegedly” since no forensic evidence is provided) & were executed without due process by Israeli paramilitary police.

Israel, in violation of numerous international agreements, is now dumping the bodies of executed Palestinians in secret & refusing to return them to loved ones for respectful burial & honors. Once again, we could cite chapter & verse of international law, beginning with the Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of the dead, but Israel believes it is exempt from their mandates. That’s called barbarism. It is the legacy of racism, colonialism, apartheid, & ethnic cleansing.

Not to be daunted. Continue to build BDS, the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel (barcode beginning 729) & protest demanding no aid of any kind to apartheid Israel; stop the violence; end the occupation.

(Photo by Mussa Qawasma/Reuters)

The trauma of refugees with children

Syrian refugee mother and child (Giorgos Moutafis:Reuters) Oct 28 2015

This is a Syrian mother & child after arriving on a raft to the Greek island of Lesbos where the number of refugees is increasing in an attempt to beat the onset of blistering winter.

Are any words necessary? None. Except that if regard for human rights were any part of the refugee crisis wrought by war, they would be moved in passenger ships, trains, & buses & not subjected to the vagaries of inclement weather or barbaric refugee & immigration policies.

Immigration is a human right! Open the damn borders!

(Photo by Giorgos Moutafis/Reuters)

The debasement of U.S. electoral lesser evil politics

You know what’s a lot more disturbing than the politically unhinged Ben Carson now being the Republican frontrunner in the polls? That Bernie Sanders is still the leading candidate of the left. But it’s all of a piece in US electoral politics which are stripped of international content & where rhetoric reigns.

The hallmark of leftists who hail Sanders as the savior of US politics is elitism & indifference to international issues like war & ethnic cleansing–at heart an indifference to the lives of working people everywhere.

If you call yourself a leftist & don’t have a broader political vision than the two-party shell game, you might be the left’s version of a redneck & you’re way behind in the learning curve. The overwhelming majority of working people in this country haven’t voted in years because they know there is no difference between the two parties. Will the so-called left ever catch up to the people they claim to lead?