A UN report observed that in the past century civilian fatalities in war rose from 5-percent to now 90-percent & concluded that civilians are now deliberate targets, not accidental “collateral damage,” as the Pentagon likes to call it. That may not be borne out by history but it is beyond dispute that high-tech militarism is scorched earth militarism, ruthlessly indiscriminate in the carnage it creates–from massive human fatalities to cultural, social, & environmental ruin.

Military regimes are indifferent that millions of civilians, including children, are displaced, disabled, & killed by bombers & high-tech weaponry. The US made that explicit when Madeleine Albright, speaking for president Bill Clinton, said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were “worth it” to achieve US strategic goals. Syria & Russia make that clear with indiscriminate bombing of entire cities in Syria. The Saudi-led, US & UK-backed coalition bombing Yemen make that clear as does the repeated US-bankrolled Israeli carpet bombing of Gaza.

What the UN has also observed–without lifting a finger to stop it–is that increasingly children are not “collateral” victims but the intended targets. Amira Hass wrote an article in Haaretz today about the deliberate kneecapping of Palestinian youth by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. They intentionally shoot Palestinians in the legs to permanently disable them. The frequent military invasions of refugee camps aren’t just for harassment but missions to disable more youth. In the recent Israeli military rampage in Al-Fawwar refugee camp, they injured 40 young people with live ammo & rubber bullets, many of them in the legs. Most of the injured have inadequate medical & surgical options due to the occupation so they will suffer disability & pain all their lives.

Amira Hass isn’t talking through her hat. There is overwhelming documentation, including over a thousand Palestinians in Gaza who were permanently disabled & who lost limbs in the 2014 Israeli bombing siege. Since Israel also bombed most of the hospitals & clinics, those suffering amputations do not have adequate surgical & medical assistance.

Now we know the exact same barbarism is going on in Kashmir where hundreds of children & youth are permanently blinded & disabled from the current siege by the Indian military. Those who are disabled from pellet injuries face a lifetime of unbearable suffering.

Militarism in every one of its forms must be opposed. There is no such thing as a just or a humanitarian military intervention, especially conducted by the US Pentagon or by the Israeli & Indian armies. Those who claim there are either are lying through their teeth or are too stupid to comment about war.

(Top photo is Israeli soldiers aiming at unarmed civilians in Al-Fawwar refugee camp on Aug 16th, by Majdi Mohammed/AP; bottom photo is Indian soldiers aiming at unarmed civilians in Srinagar on Aug 15th, by Mukhtar Khan/AP)

There is almost no news about the refugee crises either on the Turkey to Greece route or the Libya to Italy & Morocco to Spain routes. Remarkable when you realize that several European countries & Canada have military fleets in both the Mediterranean & Aegean Seas so the EU & UN know what’s going on.

What little we know is that France is violently razing refugee encampments, making thousands homeless. We know the traffic of refugees to Greece has slowed because of the military occupation of the Aegean Sea. We know at least 60,000 refugees in Greece are living in squalid barracks without sufficient sanitation. And we know that unaccompanied children are facing abuse & exploitation, especially in Italy.

From the UN refugee agency, which is better at counting than at advocacy, we know that so far this year nearly 162,730 refugees got from Turkey to Greece; 105,341 got from Libya to Italy; & 2,476 from Morocco to Spain. Of the 270,547 refugees in 2016 on all those routes, 30-percent are children, many unaccompanied minors; 18-percent are women; & 53-percent are men.

The UN counts 3,167 dead on the routes but how they know that is questionable since hundreds are packed into dinghies like this one off the coast of Libya & their lives counted as of no great value. The distressing thing is that so many drowned when the European Union has high-tech aerial surveillance out there & several navies are patrolling the coasts.

When history is written, the Mediterranean Sea will be understood as one of the worst crime scenes in the late 20th & early 21st centuries. Let those who commit the crimes not be the ones who write the histories & let those histories include the epitaphs & trial transcripts of those who did commit them.

Immigration is a human right. Open the damn borders.
(Photo by Giorgos Moutafis/Reuters)

Reposting this (slightly edited) from August 27th, 2013 because it addresses “mansplaining” of women’s rights, now so in vogue; the political bankruptcy of opposing “identity politics” for those oppressed precisely for their identities; & the supremacist fetish that considers the preoccupations of European & US women as feminist & more important than the massive struggles & revolutions led by women elsewhere in the world.
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When the hell did slut-shaming become a theoretical concept in feminism? Why is it that male progressives & some socialists discuss feminism only in terms of porno & prostitution & slut-shaming? Why are they preoccupied only with prostitutes & not much with sweatshop or office workers or underpaid & unemployed women or the serious challenges to reproductive rights? Quite frankly, it’s not only a disturbing development; it’s outright creepy. Not to mention completely misogynist.

When did the broad concerns & achievements of feminism start going down the tubes to a banal focus only on sexual exhibitionism & the prurient? And how the hell did raunch get all confused with female sexuality? Are male progressives watching too much MTV or reading too much porn? And then trying to justify it by long quotations from Marx & Engels?

Feminists who object are told with insular stupidity that we are sex-negative & politically passé. But bucko, there’s another explanation for our protests. We don’t like when men, who quite frankly don’t know a damn thing about feminist history or theoretics, try to control the renewal of feminism that is erupting like wildfire by taking hold of the debate & channeling it into their pornographic notions of our sexuality & human potentials. Imagine people who call themselves socialists who can’t imagine a world without prostitution, where women’s bodies are not considered commodities to be bought & sold!

They chide the women’s movement for lack of intersectionality & then consider the racist slut walks of half-naked women promoting prostitution as the epitome of feminist activism. They laud FEMEN for showing up bare-breasted even though they’re chanting racist crap against Arabs & Muslims. They ignore the veiled Arab women leading revolutions in Yemen & Bahrain; the Egyptian women fighting for their place in Tahrir Square; the Mayan women taking on a corrupt regime for genocide & rape; the Dalit & other oppressed castes in India standing up against rape & sexual violence, & against land grabs; the mothers of Bhopal continuing to fight for over 30 years for justice for their children; Palestinian & Kashmiri women so central to the struggle for self-determination. What about them, bucko? Do they have to show up naked to get your attention or your approval?

Let it never be said the Israeli propaganda machine is slow on the uptake. While there is little coverage of Israel’s violent land expropriations in the West Bank, razing whole villages, or bombing in Gaza, there are frequent photos of Israel trying to broker harmony with “Israeli Arabs” on camping trips & excursions for children.

A phony multiculturalism with Palestinian residents of Israel (who are massively discriminated against, as are African Israelis) is the latest thing in colonial image-making.

Here Reuters tells us “a Muslim woman wearing a hijab stands in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea as an Israeli stands nearby on the beach in Tel Aviv.” Israeli apartheid even has one up on France, the land of “liberté, egalité, fraternité. Not hard these days. And also my ass!

Answer this rubbish by building the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel (BDS).

(Photo by Baz Ratner/Reuters)

An Indian cartoonist shows once again that satire is the genre of the oppressed. Not content to talk truth to power (what good does a little sassing ever get you?) it prefers to ridicule & heap scorn as an expression of contempt & fearless opposition. It is intended to undermine the power relationship between oppressor & oppressed.
This Twitter post is about the Indian army taking over schools & colleges in Kashmir.

(Cartoon by V Arun Kumar)

The Times of India reported today that the use of pellet munitions, designated falsely as non-lethal, has created such controversy that an expert panel assembled by the Indian government is discussing their replacement with another non-lethal weapon called PAVA shells. The article says PAVA munitions are newly-developed by Indian researchers for use in crowd control but they have been used in England for several years as an alternative to tear gas.

The panel also discussed a “dye marker grenade with irritant” similar to the purple rain they shoot from water cannons against protesting government workers in Srinagar which leaves dye stains for identification but the new weapons would be propelled by grenades & also contain an irritant to the skin & eyes. According to the article, the Indian army suggested the panel consider non-lethal weapons like sound cannons (also called stun grenades), pepper spray shotguns & PAVA grenades (also called chili grenades because a key component comes from chili pepper). But except for the PAVA grenades, the army already uses all of them along with rubber bullets, plastic bullets, wooden bullets, & truncheons for beating the hell out of protesters.

The chemical components & the delivery systems of pepper spray, tear gas, & PAVA shells differ but unlike pepper spray & tear gas, PAVA grenades temporarily immobilize & paralyze the target. The chemical components of all are toxic, extremely painful in contact with eyes & skin, & damaging to vision. They are a particularly serious health hazard to those with respiratory or skin issues like asthma or psoriasis, or those who are taking medications. There is a risk of death in all of them. Many are killed just by being struck with a grenade in the head or chest.

The designation of non-lethal is completely fallacious military double-talk like “collateral damage.” Lethal does not just mean fatal but life-threatening, painful, disabling, poisonous, toxic, destructive to long-term health, harmful to psychological well-being. Pumping people full of hundreds of lead pellets that cannot be removed from internal organs, shooting their eyes out, disfiguring their faces & bodies, permanently disabling hundreds through blindness & extreme pain, does not qualify as non-lethal to anyone who is not completely deranged. They are monstrous human rights crimes of the first magnitude.

The Indian government is not trying to phase out pellet guns because their use is barbaric or even because they stand condemned before the world but only because they are worried about potential human rights crimes prosecutions, more exposure of the brutalities & greater opposition to the occupation of Kashmir

We make only one demand in solidarity with the freedom movement in Kashmir: End the occupation. Get the hell out of Kashmir. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photos from Kashmir Freedom on Twitter)

Former president of France Nicholas Sarkozy was bounced out of office in 2012 by Francois Hollande. If you can be defeated by that kind of turkey, you ought to give it up & go into hiding. But our man is coming back for more & has announced he will run for president in 2017.

It was so much fun describing his follies while president that some mistook my posts for sarcasm. But he is, in short, a detestable man without a single redeeming charm.

There are those who consider comparisons between Monsieurs Sarkozy (who I prefer to call Psychozy) & Pepe Le Pew undignified. Monsieur Le Pew could not agree more. In fact, he denounces the comparison as “merde” & threatens retribution against all who impugn his dignity by such an odious comparison.

While Monsieur Le Pew thinks a woman adores him when she physically assaults him, Monsieur Psychozy thinks citizens respect him even when he has to buy their votes.

We only point these troubling things out to understand what happened to the promise of the great French Revolution? How has it come down to Sarkozy & Hollande?

Today, France’s highest administrative court overturned the burkini ban implemented by 26 mayors along the Mediterranean coast. The international scorn & derision was getting too much for a country still reeling from the embarrassing presidency of Nicholas Sarkozy & sustaining the idiocies of Francois Hollande.

The overturn comes only a week after Manuel Valls, the prime minister (who once said more white people would give better image to a French city) described the burkini as an unpatriotic garment based “on the enslavement of women” which is “not compatible with the values of France & the Republic.” Democratic-minded people around the world breathed a sigh of relief at Valls’ dissociation of democratic principles from the practices of the French Republic.

The French government just couldn’t take looking like an ass anymore & cried “uncle.” The burkini ban will be forever known as the episode in French history that exposed what jackasses run the country. Weep when you realize that many of them, like Hollande & Valls, are rightwing socialist politicians.

(As a postscript to the story, the imam of Florence was banned from FB for a day for posting this photo of Christian nuns at the beach & suggesting a dialogue on the burkini ban.)

Reposting this from 2014: August 26th, 1970 is a hallmark day in the fight for women’s rights in the US. Feminism in that period was not specific to the US but was an international phenomenon that inspired millions of women around the world. As a social movement, it was never a white middle-class women’s thing as it is so viciously slandered. I was a secretary earning $2.00 an hour, living in a tenement in NYC, & there were many activists just like me.
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The women’s movement of the 1970s has taken quite a beating by people who draw their history from media & others who want to vilify feminism. Feminism erupted in the late 1960s from every niche of society; women from the Civil Rights Movement, from religious groups, students, working women, Black & Latino women, lesbians. Betty Friedan is attributed with starting the movement with her book “The Feminine Mystique” but many activists had never read her boring book which dealt with white middle class, well-educated women. Feminism was a much broader & deeper social rebellion than her book envisioned.

The movement is misrepresented as white & middle-class, racist, lesbians & spinsters, blue-nosed. That’s not history; that’s how media always portrayed the movement to deter women from identifying with feminism–which is a volatile force for social transformation. Media depiction of feminism is a punk caricature & regrettably the slanders have not been sufficiently countered by feminists of that era.

Feminism & the Vietnam War were my first political awakenings & both began to matter to me when I was a novice in a convent in the early 1960s. My brother was a soldier in the war & I was not allowed to read about it. Here I was a student of history & not allowed to be part of my own times. What rankled me most was the unequal treatment of men & women in the Catholic Church. While we were kept encaged & infantalized, the priests were out gallivanting without the constant supervision we were subjected to. So I made my break & within a year was involved in the antiwar movement.

There was no women’s movement yet so I read Catholic writers who identified with the new ideas of feminism; I’d actually never heard of Betty Friedan. When the women’s movement began to emerge, I headed for New York City to be part of it.

I arrived in time to build the first women’s liberation march of August 26, 1970. The demands of that march were: Equal pay; childcare; abortion rights & no forced sterilization. No forced sterilization was essential to distinguish feminism from the eugenics groups who wanted abortion rights for license to control the population of black & brown women. It was a major issue for Black, Latino, & Native American women who were routinely sterilized without their knowledge or consent. At the time, it was reported 30% of the women of Puerto Rico were force sterilized. It remains a problem in population control programs.

It was my personal & political history & I am writing a series of essays to correct the historical record about this magnificent movement which was only on the stage of history briefly before it was derailed into the Democratic Party.

I certainly wasn’t the star of the show but I played a small part by organizing the publicity for the march. One of our jobs was to go out every night with march posters & plastering brushes hidden in pizza boxes to wallpaper the city. We got hauled in by the cops a couple times; we got arrested postering the Playboy Club in Manhattan.

I accidentally came across this audio thingamajig on the internet of me giving a report on the plastering & answering an interviewer: http://www.wnyc.org/story/87675-celebrating-international-womens-day-a-look-at-how-we-got-here/. You can see I was still fumbling my way through an understanding of women’s oppression. I’m not a boastful soul but am very proud of my participation in the women’s movement & met some wonderful women. I continued activism primarily around abortion rights on the campus of NYU where I worked as a secretary.

Photo is August 26 1970 Women’s March for Equality down Fifth Avenue in NYC on the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment in the US Bill of Rights which gave women the right to vote.

(Photo by John Olsen)

On Tuesday, the US State Department issued a security alert to Americans in the Gaza Strip urging them to leave as soon as possible. They are not in danger from Hamas as the alert claims but from another surge of Israeli bombing.

We need to be ready to hit the streets with placards if Israel resumes bombing in Gaza. It’s unlikely Hamas set off a rocket to Israel (& there is no documentation by Israel to show they did) but even if a single rocket was set off, that does not justify collective punishment by carpet bombing Gaza.

Ready your placards & your marching shoes to demand “no bombing in Gaza” & “no US aid to Israel.”