International Men’s Day came & went yesterday; I knew humanity was moving forward when not a single person posted on it–though it’s celebrated in about 70 countries by at least 70 political halfwits, assuming they all showed up. It’s a commemoration born of petulance & political infantilism from men’s liberation types who just don’t get the relationship of forces under patriarchy. Color them stupid.

It’s not misandrous to hold such a commemoration in contempt. Not all men prosper under patriarchy–to make an understatement. We do not hold all men in contempt but consider most our brothers. The impulse driving this silly-assed event is a denial of the unspeakable violence faced by women all over this planet & the need to organize against it.

It’s foolish to expect truth from media about Israel & Palestinians. We’re long past that disappointment. But in today’s world of internet & social media, corporate media ought at least tip its hat to reality because information can be cross-checked & is verifiable.

The Guardian-UK published this little dropping on November 11th: “An upsurge in violence between Israelis & Palestinians in the last month has claimed 90 lives, including Palestinians involved in attacks on Jews.”

The article would more honestly have reported that the current Israeli pogrom against Palestinians has summarily executed 86 Palestinians. The Guardian has all the resources required to cross-check & verify but it prefers to cover for Israeli ethnic cleansing.

While in Israel, Boris Johnson, mayor of London & buffoon extraordinaire, gave the inaugural annual Winston Churchill Lecture–probably an unnecessary diplomatic attempt by Israel to suck up to England & to honor Churchill for his ignominious support for Zionist paramilitary colonization of Palestine.

The full text of Johnson’s speech is not available. But there is this dropping reported that exposes Johnson not just as a fool but as a contemptible racist (& still Palestinian National Authority officials met with him): “When [Churchill] wrote his 1922 white paper that paved the way for accelerated Jewish entry into Palestine, Churchill imagined Jews & Arabs living side by side, with technically expert Jewish farmers helping the Arabs to drive tractors.”

We always have to keep in mind that anti-immigration policies are fundamental to modern capitalism & are coordinated internationally while making allowances for national particularities. The massive refugee crises from the Middle East & Africa challenge those policies & what different regimes are doing is trying to jockey between maintaining those policies & avoiding public condemnation for human rights abuses of refugees.

There’s a real shell game going in the US–a hard cop/soft cop thing. Republicans play the xenophobes (not a stretch) & Obama calls for humanitarian acceptance of Syrian refugees (ignoring there are also Afghan, Pakistani, African, & other refugees). In actual Obama policy, just over 23,000 Syrians have petitioned the US for asylum since 2011. The Obama regime has only accepted just over 2,000. Another instance of Obama talking out of both sides of his ass. Were the other 21,000 vetted out to be terrorists? What could possibly disqualify them from asylum rights?

This fellow speaks for all of us as he flips the bird to Boris Johnson, mayor of London, who just returned from a trade trip to Israel to drum up business. While there, Johnson called the boycott of Israel “foolish” & caricatured the BDS movement as “a bunch of snaggle-toothed, corduroy-jacketed lefty academics.”

Ignoring the Israeli carpet bombing siege of Gaza in 2014 & the current pogrom in the West Bank, Johnson called Israel “the only democracy in the region.” The man will say anything when he’s groveling.

Between October 1st & November 13th, 86 Palestinians–mostly young protesters–were killed by Israeli fire. Israeli journalist Amira Haas published an article in Haaretz challenging the “stabbing Intifada” narrative peddled by Israel, the US, & media. She suggested–what is really beyond dispute–that knives were planted after summary execution of activists by Israeli forces.

Je suis Palestinian. Build BDS (barcode beginning 729).

It isn’t that the requiems over Paris are overwrought. It hasn’t been a week yet & the horror deepens. But soon they’ll be going on longer than grief over the school shootings at Sandy Hook. No one wants to sound the cynic but the selective character of grief has a political character: not just that white lives are more valued & terrorism thought more shocking in Paris than Beirut, but that more poignant the grief depending on who the terrorists are.

There are French & Russian war planes over Raqqa, Syria–a city where 220,000 people live. This is being applauded by some of those weeping over Paris. If they don’t believe the lives of Arab peoples matter, they can just say that outright–because their selective requiems betray.