Photojournalism used to be a valuable source–not for getting the full story of events but for indicating where in the world journalists headed because of the importance of events. The use of the photos was not lost on editors who often used captions to misrepresent social struggles, particularly, but not only, the struggle of Palestinians.

It appears photojournalism is changing in a censorship kind of way, particularly in the Guardian-UK which now focuses on sports moments, festivals like the medieval jousting festival in Australia, flowers, sunsets, & their mainstay, Hindu religious rites in an anthropological way. Their recent coverage of Kashmir ignored the occupation & violence & focused on Muslim women’s prayer rituals.
This photo from yesterday takes the cake for insularity about Kashmir. It’s not that the editors are indifferent but that they are censoring, as FB does, all news about the violent military occupation of Kashmir.

The caption reads: “Kashmir–A man holding an umbrella fishes from a weed-covered part of the Dal Lake while standing on a wooden bridge in Srinagar.” The picture wouldn’t be interesting even if there were no occupation going on–at least any more than the photo of the woman walking in the rain in Gabon.

It is certain photojournalists are submitting photos of the many protests against the occupation & of the brutalities against protesters but instead of publishing them, the Guardian chooses to publish a man fishing off a bridge.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo by Mukhtar Khan/AP)

Those campaigning for Clinton should be alarmed at her recent endorsement by Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq War. We would have expected her vaunted friend Kissinger to already have endorsed her since he was the chief architect of the war behind the scenes.

Perhaps Kissinger will let Paul Bremer, his protégé & former director at Kissinger Associates, endorse in his stead since Bremer was the brutal administrator of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It has been suggested by some that the US occupation authority in Iraq under Bremer led to the formation of ISIS, whose top command are former Hussein military officers, when he shut them out of civil service jobs. Bremer is now campaigning for US troops in Iraq to fight ISIS, the monster his & Kissinger’s policies helped create.

Three years after the US invasion in 2003, The Lancet, a British medical journal, estimated that over 655,000 Iraqis had died & the UN reported the displacement of 1.5 million Iraqis inside the country. Estimates of Iraqi deaths are now nearly a million & the war is no way near ending. That does not include those who who died as a result of the First Gulf War in 1990-91 & the sanctions that followed, including the 500,000 children who died from sanctions imposed under Clinton’s presidency.

If you campaign for Clinton or if you campaign for US humanitarian military intervention in Syria, one hopes it a result of ignorance about US militarism & not indifference to the lives of other people. The criminal consequences of either will be the same. Why live with shame when you can stand against war & those who make it?

Even in revenge, I can’t bring myself to reveal the name of the halfwit who posted this in a discussion about the burkini:

“We should express outrage at any religion whose primitive & delusional beliefs require that women be denigrated & oppressed. Wrapping women in fabric is a profound evil. This isn’t really a police matter, but we should condemn the wrapping of women in fabric at every opportunity.”

Fabric stores & clothing retailers will be laid waste by the condemnation. But does divesting of all fabrics & going naked prevail for men too? And in 20 below zero temperatures? Can people at the Arctic get a dispensation? Will the Pope agree? Will Christian nuns have to go cloistered? For that matter, will seniors & the modest have to join a convent. Does it include curtains & bedding?

When does your desire to see naked women conflict with our desire to tell you to screw? Can’t you just keep watching your porn & leave the rest of us alone?

August 28 2016

This is one of the hundreds of photos of Syrian children targeted by Syrian & Russian bombers which did not go viral. The little boys here are near the debris of a building bombed by Syrian warplanes in a district of Damascus on August 12th. Twenty-seven people were killed & 100 wounded in that airstrike.

The disagreements between those who support the Assad regime & those who oppose it & between those who support US military intervention against Assad & those who oppose it are not a platonic matter to be worked out in counter-narratives & vituperative exchanges on social media.

The death toll in five years of civil war is nearly half a million people & the estimated number of refugees nearly three-million. That makes it one of the most horrific & monstrous wars of this historic period.

Instead of pissing contests on social media, what is needed is teach-ins, debates, & panels representing all the conflicting points of view so that antiwar & human rights activists around the world understand what is happening & what politically must be done to end the war. That is an imperative not resolved in mutual exchanges of insult on FB & Twitter.

(Photo from Getty Images)

August 28, 2016

Today is the 51st day the Indian army has imposed a curfew & other martial law restrictions on Kashmir. Curfews are a total lockdown placing the entire population under house arrest & restricting freedom of movement. It’s used frequently & flagrantly by the Israeli occupying army in the West Bank.

International law doesn’t adjudicate much about curfews which are collective punishment, but it does about restrictions on military occupations–as if international law restrained barbarism in any of the several countries under foreign occupation by the US, Israel, Russia, & India in Kashmir. Long-term occupation is a military norm under neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism.

The death toll in Kashmir is now 68 with one media source reporting up to 11,000 injured. The curfew has not deterred Kashmiris from coming out in the streets to protest. This photo is one of the many protests against the occupation in Kashmir.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo from Kashmir Global on Twitter)

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.
*****
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)