Bill O’Reilly was meeting the pope today when Fox News announced his firing for sexual harassment. This is actually the second time several women have accused him of sexual harassment but Fox let it pass the first time.

We wish he would have been publicly humiliated in a courtroom & forever banned from ever opening his big fat mouth again but firing is good. It will be a matter of time before some other media picks him up: Global Research or Mint Press, maybe even RT, since their politics are indistinguishable.

Asma Al-Assad is so classy, so Euro that she’d fit right in to London or New York socialite circles. Her & Bashar make such an adorable couple & they’re so in love. How could anyone say mean things about them?

It took a few weeks of adjustment, but now torturing dissidents, hanging them, & bombing civilians isn’t unnerving if they stay on their medications & only talk about revolutionists as jihadi head-choppers. All the adulation from libertarians around the world, the memes from Tim Anderson, the videos from Syrian Girl, the support of old CIA & FBI agents, really help with the psycho stuff. Even Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersh, Patrick Cockburn are in their corner now.

What could go wrong?

There’s no point in my attempting a scientific rebuttal to Theodore Postol, the retired MIT professor who claims Assad did not use sarin gas on civilians in August 2013 or on April 4th, 2017, but that civilians on the ground gassed themselves. The guy knows physics, nuclear engineering, neutrons, molecular dynamics, anti-ballistic missile systems, & other stuff like that. You can’t take him down with scientific rebuttals if you flunked Physics 101.

Of course the Assadists & libertarians passing the guy’s articles around explaining how Assad couldn’t have done it don’t know any more science than I do. They’re just clinging for dear life to a guy with credentials so their claims that the attack never happened or that White Helmets murdered their own children to make a “snuff movie of dead kids” will seem less deranged.

Nuclear physics & anti-ballistic missile systems aren’t my forte but political investigation is so I’m gonna take a go at the old boy my way. We can dispense with journalist apologists for Assad like Seymour Hersh who deny the gassing; he doesn’t know much about politics anymore, let alone physics. My first encounter with Hersh was with antiwar activists reaming him in Minneapolis in 1970 when he tried to blame the My Lai massacre entirely on Lt. Calley’s psychology & excluded the US government from his indictment.

Postol’s most authoritative allies include Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a small US group of retired CIA agents, FBI agents, military officers, & US diplomats, including Ray McGovern, Ann Wright, Coleen Rowley who now presume authority & leadership of the US antiwar movement. Their leadership explains why the antiwar movement is lilliputian, libertarian, pro-Assad’s dictatorship, & why no sane people want to associate with it.

It may be time to interrogate why so many spies & military officials are playing principled antiwar advocates. That’s a new one for me in 51 years of antiwar activism. Why the hell did the antiwar movement, even in its weakened state, give such disreputable people authority & a platform to peddle their libertarian approach to politics? Of course they oppose the Syrian revolution; for heaven’s sakes, they conducted US wars against revolutions & spied on antiwar & other political activists for all their working lives. If they’re sincere in their post-retirement transubstantiation to rebels, they should learn to take the bleachers like every new activist to listen & learn & stop pretending they have something to teach. If they don’t come clean on what they did as spies & generals, who can trust them anyway?

One of Postol’s longtime champions is David Icke who’s been publishing the guy’s rubbish since 2013. Who knows? Maybe their association began with Postol’s conversion to Icke’s ideology of obscurantism, anti-papism, obsessions with Lucifer, reptilian Jewish bankers & the Illuminati. The writer Alice Walker seemed sane until we knew she went along with all this crap.

Our man Postol isn’t leaving any paper trails back to David Icke but his association & collaboration with Syrian Girl, an outspoken disciple of Icke, doesn’t do his scientific credentials any service. Just because you have a PhD in physics doesn’t mean you haven’t lost your marbles some where along the way. David Duke has a PhD. So do Henry Kissinger & Madeleine Albright.

This photo is a man carrying the body of a child after Assad’s sarin gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun, April 4, 2017. If there are any authorities about who gassed civilians, let the civilian survivors speak & denounce Assad.

(Photo by Ammar Abdullah/Reuters)

Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who flagged my criminal record in 2001 for using a weapon of mass destruction (making me unemployable) is a keynote speaker at a May Day conference in Minneapolis titled “What Would You Do?: Mass Surveillance & the Citizen.”

She became famous for opposing the Iraq War after her pension was secured. She’s now an Assadist, Trump supporter, libertarian wing-nut, & leader of pro-Assad dementos in the US.

If you ask me, she may still be on someone’s payroll.

Say what you like about the burqa (don’t say it here; enough already) but it’s an attire made for revolution & the women of Yemen & Bahrain have maximized the possibilities.

In this photo from 2013, Bahraini women are burning tires as barriers against the riot police who’ve been trained by supercops from the UK & US in the use of pellet munitions & other barbaric crowd control methods. The women are protesting in a village near Manama against the imprisonment of thousands of political activists.

There are many photos of Bahraini women engaged in political activities indistinguishable from their kids. When they run from police, catch ’em if you can. Try to identify which one is the arsonist who set the tires aflame.

No disrespect intended, but the burqa should be adapted by protesters across the globe.

Something else might be mentioned: Assadists always support Assad’s regime by referring to its secular character, by which they mean he’s too western, too haute couture, too repressive of the Muslim veil to be a monstrous dictator. That exposes their counter-revolutionary loyalties since in both Bahrain & Yemen veiled women led those revolutions & in Egypt they played a significant role. Let it be said again: revolution is a come-as-you-are affair.

The women of Bahrain are the standard bearers of women’s liberation & revolution against dictatorship & we stand with them no matter what the hell they wear.

(Photo by Mohammed Al-shaikh/AFP/Getty Images)

The caption to this photo in the Guardian-UK identified the location as “Srinagar, India.” Such a concession to Indian colonialism in a British newspaper isn’t surprising since when Britain ended colonial rule over India in 1947, its partition scheme maximized potential conflicts between regions, religions, ethnic groups & cultures.

Britain pulled the same malicious political stunts in Africa & the Middle East so that today the stinking legacy of British & European colonialism as a whole has not yet been decisively uprooted & defeated. Self-determination for Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingya, & so many others has not yet been realized because their freedom struggles challenge the political (dis)order engineered by colonialism to leave inequality & exploitation intact. Syria is every bit a part of that struggle.

This particular photo is of concern in a more specific way. Indian occupying forces shown here are standing in a flow of “purple rain,” a colored water shot from high-velocity water cannons which they used to disperse unarmed student protesters. The soldier in the foreground is dragging away a metal sheet used as a shield by student protesters.

High velocity water cannons are assaultive & extremely dangerous in several ways: by knocking people down, internal organs are damaged & bones broken, eye injuries & blindness, skin reactions & allergies, respiratory problems, panic, & death. They were first used to disperse protesters in 1930s Germany under Hitler. The US used them against the civil rights movement in the 1960s & England used them with dye added in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

India has used water cannons with purple dye for years in occupied Kashmir against striking public service workers, teachers, health workers demanding payment of wages in arrears, regularizing their temporary jobs, & raising the retirement age by two years since India provides no social security.

England was the first to experiment with adding dyes to water cannons but it was made notorious by the apartheid regime in South Africa. At the now-named Purple Rain Protest in Cape Town in 1989, police turned purple water cannons on thousands of peaceful protesters who stood their ground politically by getting on their knees rather than back down against the assault. One of the protesters leapt on to the water cannon vehicle, seized the nozzle, turned it away from protesters, & sprayed the facades of nearby buildings. After that, purple rain became a symbol of protest against apartheid & graffiti proclaiming “The Purple Shall Govern” appeared everywhere.

Many repressive regimes use high-velocity water cannons against protesters, including in subzero temperatures. Many add the colored dyes; Indonesia once added ammonia (in 1996); Turkey added liquid tear gas (in 2013); Israel routinely adds Skunk additive which one journalist said smells like “you mixed dirty diapers with with not-so-fresh road kill & left them all in the sun for a few days.” Like skunk spray, it is an ordeal to eliminate the odor from those hit with the spray.

It’s alarming that Indian military forces are expanding the use of purple rain from unarmed striking workers to unarmed protesting students. Water cannons cause serious injuries & deaths & that is exactly why the Indian military is employing them. This must be denounced & actively opposed as vigorously as their use of pellet munitions, tear gas grenades, live ammo, & human shields.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo by Mukhtar Khan/AP)

So I’m standing in line at the post office for quite a while when a postal clerk ordered me in the rudest way to leave with little Lukey, the tiny dog I’d be taking to the vet after the post office. “The sign clearly says no dogs,” she growled.

I’m usually riding a crest of human kindness so I answered her, “But the little guy is sick, on his way to a vet, & it’s 100 degrees in the car. We’ll only be a moment.” No matter she said, “The sign clearly says no dogs.”

An elegant woman a few places behind me in line stepped up to me & said “Give me the dog; I’ll hold him outside till you’re finished.” But he’s sick, I told her, & he smells like hell. “No problem,” she said & off they went.

Wouldn’t you know when it was my turn, I got the surly postal clerk. “No thank you,” I told her. “I’ll wait.” The man who waited on me graciously asked about the dog, probably less from interest than an expression of kindness–a man who knows some rules are made to be broken. But the best part was another woman postal clerk leaned over to me & said “When the woman holding your dog comes back in, tell her not to wait in line. Tell her to come right to me & I’ll take care of her without delay.”

The kindness of strangers & many friends too.

The hallmark of the libertarian is hating on liberals more than one condemns US wars. It’s a genre of misanthropy & elitism & holds working people in contempt.

Kashmiris have enough to worry about without anxiety that India closing down the internet will create again the long international news blackout of the past decades. The brutalities & barbarity of the Indian occupation stand exposed before the world. Pellet munitions against children & unarmed protesters was a titanic shift India should never have made.

Aung San Suu Kyi & the military junta of Myanmar, Bashar Assad of Syria, the Australian, European, Turkish, US, & other governments have attempted to blackout all news of their monstrous human rights & war crimes, including against refugees by allowing thousands to drown or live rough in subzero temperatures. Reporters from around the world have been murdered by the thousands to silence the voices of the oppressed.

You have allies now around the world to stand with you. Believe me, we will beat the bushes to report what is going on in Kashmir. Your struggle is our struggle. It’s no longer possible to silence your voices.

Je suis Kashmir.

(Photo thanks to Satyadeep Satya)

This is 17-year-old Iqra, a student lying in the neurosurgery ward of a Kashmiri hospital with a fractured skull & brain hemorrhage after occupying forces attacking peaceful protesters catapulted a rock at her head.

Other students were also seriously injured & their lives endangered when the occupying army attacked them with pellet munitions, tear gas, & truncheons. Mind you, tens of thousands of students were rightfully protesting Kashmiris being used as human shields, being executed just walking down the road, being beaten to a pulp by gangs of soldiers, being denied their democratic & civil rights to protest occupation & violence against them.

Now Indian media reports government plans to shut down FB & WhatsApp in Kashmir to “clamp down on rumour-mongering” & “stop videos & pictures of alleged atrocities by security forces from going viral.” You can’t say the Modi regime hasn’t learned anything from the Assad regime.

If the Indian army of 700,000 soldiers (one to every 17 Kashmiris) is not committing human rights crimes in Kashmir, it would have nothing to fear from those videos & photos or from Kashmiri activists on social media. It’s threatening to close down the internet for the exact same reason Aung San Suu Kyi will not allow human rights monitors & journalists into Arakan state & that Assad denies access to journalists who aren’t embedded up the ass of his military like Bartlett, Beeley, & Fisk.

It must be overwhelming for Kashmiris to sustain such relentless violence, to see beloved classmates, neighbors, friends, family disfigured, disabled, executed before their very eyes.

International solidarity has never been more urgent or compelling & should begin to take organizational form with solidarity committees that can coordinate educational forums, call rallies, mobilize human rights activists to stand with Kashmiris.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo of Iqra is from Kashmir Today)