New Zealand singer Lorde canceled her scheduled gig in Tel Aviv after an open letter asked her to honor the cultural boycott of Israel. Merry Christmas, Palestine.

Do you remember this extraordinary photo? It was taken on April 7, 2016 by Kashmiri Javaid Naikoo at the funeral prayers for militant Waseem Malla. The men in the trees are watching the funeral protest/cortege of 70,000 mourners pass by.

The photo has since been the cover of the book “Scattered Souls” by Shahnaz Bashir & in articles by journalist Alana Hunt. It’s really award-worthy photojournalism.

(Photo by Javaid Naikoo)

Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans still without power & water. But corporations & millionaires have their tax reductions. See how capitalism works?

An unspoken condemnation of evo psycho ideology & its ruthless standards for human beauty. Symmetry required, my ass!

Prominent Israeli journalist Ben Caspit on how to deal with Ahed Tamimi & other female Palestinian freedom fighters:

“In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras.”

A damning juxtaposition:

On the left, Ahed Tamimi, an icon of fearless Palestinian resistance to occupation, apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, now incarcerated in an Israeli military prison.

On the right, Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress who played the comic book patriarchal version of Wonder Woman, who accused Palestinians in Gaza of using women & children as human shields against Israeli bombers, & who celebrates the occupation & slaughter of Palestinians.

–Image tweeted by Algerian_PalestineV@AlgerianPalest

“Dear Arabs,
If you sneeze in a plane, don’t say ‘alhamdulilah’ or any Arabic word. Say ‘spongebob’ or something to avoid being kicked out.”

–by Omar Imran, reposted from Dec 2016

Please like & share this Facebook wall in defense of leading Palestinian activists Nour Tamimi, Nariman Tamimi & her 17-year-old daughter Ahed Tamimi who have been arrested by Israeli occupying soldiers.

https://www.facebook.com/FreeTamimiWomen/?pnref=story

Emancipation US-style in Raqqa, Syria: the photojournalist who recently took this photo wrote favorably about US-coalition carpet bombing in October to “liberate” the city from ISIS fighters. Russia & Syria condemned the US-coalition for carpet bombing to “wipe Raqqa off the face of the earth” although in the past few years the city of over 220,000 people has sustained bombing by Syria, Russia, France, & the US coalition. The photojournalist argued that ISIS fighters had mined most of the buildings before their defeat. The question remains: who supplied them with those mines & how were they delivered to Raqqa?

Russia & Syria are now engaged in operations against revolutionary resistance in East Ghouta where they combine airstrikes to wipe the revolution off the face of the earth with a siege to starve the population, deny humanitarian aid, & prevent civilians from leaving.

That there is no international antiwar movement to stand with the Syrian people is one of the great tragedies & political crimes of this historic period. The only principled demand is for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military operations from Syria. Let the Assad dictatorship stand alone against the Syrian people & let them finish off tyranny.

(Photo by Delil Souleiman/AFP)

Every time I make a new Kashmiri friend, they ask how I know so much about Kashmir. So I ask, how have I managed to fool so many people? Actually, I never knew anything about Kashmir until Kashmiri activists on FB began badgering me (there is no more apt word) to study & write about their struggle as I did about Palestinians. Repeatedly I put them off & repeatedly they would send me photos & articles accompanied with more badgering. Eventually I buckled to their endearing pressure & spent some months in the local university library trying to understand what was going on. As you can imagine, the available resources were most often from a US State Department point of view & not very useful except in understanding how the US viewed Kashmir. But slowly I began to understand what was going on & the political importance of the Kashmiri struggle against occupation & for self-determination. Most of my real education has come from Kashmiris &–dare I say–Kashmiri & Indian MSM.

I am truly honored to be part of building solidarity with the Kashmiri freedom struggle but I don’t presume to more knowledge about Kashmiri culture & society than one can get from studying their freedom struggle. What I know for sure is that their dogged persistence, humanity, & humor are an invincible force that will eventually triumph. That will be a glorious day for all of humankind.