The US is hardly on the threshold of fascism since Trump is only in office thanks to the largesse of the Electoral College & the ruling elite that controls it. There is no mass popular fascist movement to sustain him & in fact the massive mobilizations of the past year which have involved hundreds of thousands just in the US have been against Trump’s policies. But we can watch how fascism develops as the leadership of organized labor sit on their asses & do nothing while working people come under sustained attack. The most consistent activists to defend Obamacare & oppose the tax reform benefitting billionaires & corporations have been disabled people–as they also played a role in the Arab uprisings & anti-austerity protests in Europe. The working poor, children, disabled, elderly will be the most immediately affected by these attacks but in the long-run they’re going for the jugular of all working people. It’s time for organized labor to get off its knees, dump the old hacks, & forge a new leadership that will fight for all.

Since “Western feminism” is the target of so much criticism, let me just say that it is not just white rich women & it never was. Feminism in Europe & North America from its inception included Black & Latino women, working women, & because of immigration, women of many nationalities who brought their own traditions of feminism with them. Islam alone has a long, rich tradition of feminism & substantial histories that document that. Muslims (& all other religious traditions) are part of “Western feminism.” So when you portray “Western feminism” as a movement of white socialites & debutantes, SWERFs & TERFs, xenophobes & racists, all caught up in “commodities & sex”, you merely join the chorus of misogynists attempting to destroy feminism by dividing women.

There are all sorts of goofy currents in feminism–as there are in any social movement. But what defines & unites all feminism is a commitment to stand together to end the systematic oppression & violence against women. The Women’s March of January 2017, where up to four million women marched on every continent, is a sign of that international solidarity.

This time last year was the height of Duterte’s vigilante executions of the poor at the rate of 1,000 every month & including teens & little kids. It’s long since time to revisit that as, well as his war against Muslims. I will try to do so very soon & would welcome any links from my Filipino friends & others who have been following this monster inflicted on working people.

Al Jazeera published this article by Shenila Khoja-Moolji titled “Why is the West praising Malala, but ignoring Ahed?” The article is useful except for two whopping problems. The first is that it doesn’t place the lack of political support for Ahed within the framework of Zionist influence & Israel’s role in world politics as a fortress against democracy in the Middle East. The problem is not an abstraction rooted in the psychology of Western supremacy, but in the realities of Zionist realpolitik.

The second problem is its tiresome attempt to stick it to Western feminism & portray it as preoccupied with “commodities & sex” rather than politics. It’s a cheap trick because there is no Western feminist movement–not to mention that feminist groups in non-Western countries have also not come to Ahed’s defense. Feminist bloggers do not constitute a social movement. What needs to be examined is the influence of Zionism on many leading feminists, at least in the remnants of the US movement, & the growing support for Palestinians among feminists around the world which was reflected strongly in the Women’s March of January 2017.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/west-praising-malala-ignoring-ahed-171227194606359.html

{Mondoweiss has a similar article titled “Where is the #MeToo movement for Ahed Tamimi” but that is a foolish reproach since that isn’t the nature of the MeToo movement. It’s not a political movement per se but personal attestation by women who have been sexually assaulted.}

The Assad school of falsification:

Vanessa Beeley subscribes to the method of throwing horse manure against a wall to see how much of it will stick. Now she claims, one year after the fall of east Aleppo, that the White Helmet rescue workers there supported unspecified “terrorist factions” abusing & using “mentally handicapped” people as suicide bombers. Her source of such rubbish? Fares Shebabi, a major industrialist & the Assad official for Aleppo. Not what an independent journalist would call an unimpeachable source but a propagandist’s primary source.

Some admire Trump’s inability to be controlled as though he embodied the ‘rugged individual’ of American mythology so evident in the cowboy & private eye genres. But you have to distinguish those who refuse to buckle to the prevailing winds, those who stand their grounds for justice, from those who are deranged & antisocial like Trump. If he hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he would be serving life without parole for any number of felonies & be featured on “America’s Dumbest Criminals.”

Mir Laieeq on India’s Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill 2017 which outlaws Triple Talaq. Triple Talaq is a procedure where Muslim men divorce by repeating “I divorce you” three times. As a Muslim, Mir’s criticism of Triple Talaq is not the same as the Indian government’s attempt to pit Muslim women & men against each other, as Heba Ahmed has pointed out.
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“Indian Muslim men in the positions of some power, be it religious scholars, intellectuals, politicians and thinkers, have collectively failed the larger Muslim community in india on the most pressing sociopolitical issues.

On the issue of gender justice, their failure has been colossal, simply because most of these prominent members hide behind thoughtless maxims like “islam has given women all the rights 1400 years ago”, they simply refuse to see the difference between ideals of islam and the practiced realities.

Triple Talaq is one such issue which prominent Muslim organisations dominated by Men did next to nothing to address. Such an openly atrocious misuse of Islamic principles which caused tremendous injustice to Muslim women in india for decades was left untouched in the name of protecting Muslim personal law. Most of these Muslim bodies have always proven tough to reform.

Now that an openly islamophobic regime in india, has criminalised Triple Talaq to corner, push and punish Muslims further, many Muslim men are blaming Muslim women who fought against the Triple Talaq for this cunningly dangerous move of the government. This is nothing but the classic case of blaming the victim (many of these people also blame Kashmiri Muslims for the atrocities committed against them by Indian occupying forces)

Many Muslim countries have decades back banned Triple Talaq on the grounds of it being a violent misinterpretation of Islamic law. What stopped Muslim leadership in india, dominated by men, to do exactly the same for all these decades? Instead of blaming the women, they should do some soul searching, and, stop opposing if not facilitate Muslim women to take the centre stage when it comes to issues of gender justice.”

“The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill 2017 is nothing but the Hindu state’s attempt to expand the penal categories into which Muslim men are already fitted into. Counter terrorism, cow protection, anti-conversion and ‘love jihad’, there are already many punitive measures to facilitate incarceration of Muslim men. And now the state has added one more excuse: use the Muslim woman against the Muslim man.”

–Heba Ahmed