http://www.msf.org/en/article/palestine-msf-teams-gaza-observe-unusually-severe-and-devastating-gunshot-injuries

This is a very damning report by Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders on the 500 people they treated for gunshot wounds inflicted by Israeli snipers on unarmed, peaceful protesters at the Great Return March in Gaza. This report predates yesterday when Israel killed four more Palestinians & injured 729, 100 of them by gunfire.

I have no objections to people speaking in their own language. Many feel more comfortable expressing themselves in their own tongue & many are not comfortable in English. But if you cloak abuse toward Kashmiris, Palestinians, Rohingya, women, etc. or toward a person I respect, that’s another issue entirely. If you’re called out, I’ll bounce your ass to Blockland–which judging by those I’ve already bounced, is a hellish place.

This piece is written by an Assad regime guppy, a disciple to Bartlett & Beeley, named Mindi Sitterud-McCluskey who once denounced the Rohingya & Kashmiri freedom struggles as “Saudi-backed Wahhabi/Salafi terrorists.” This is her comment rebutting the Mehdi Hasan article about the Assad regime in the Intercept. Tariq Ali also came out against the Hasan article & if you go to his wall, you will see that he has no more political coherence than this halfwitted Islamophobic gibberish:

“As ludicrous as it may sound, people like Mehdi gain a following largely by offering a psychological wage to establishment liberals who need to assure themselves they are not Islamophobes. Lol. So what if the Islamic militants are head chopping Salafi fanatics who would create a caliphate where no Western liberal would last a day, and so what if the majority of the people fighting these militants are Muslim. The idea is to ease some collective guilt left over from the Iraq War (because establishment liberals don’t seem to be bothered by Obama’s wars) by romanticizing the militants & demonizing the Syrian “regime.” I think there’s a bit of orientalism going on there, as well, as if head-chopping degenerate Salafis are more genuinely Middle Eastern than Assad’s secular, educated & progressive Syria. One of Medhi’s friends (based on their twitter interactions) is obsessed with digging up biographies of dead ISIS fighters, and in a very “lost civilization” kind of way. Lol”

Tariq Ali’s incoherent piece:
“What’s going on at Intercept re Syria? The Mehdi has arrived with his clutch of cliches and demagogy on the war. He opposed the Afghan war. Were the Taliban better than Assad? More tolerant, more democratic, more protective of minorities? And applauded by my old friend Roane Carey at The Nation who at the very least should understand the difference between primary and secondary contradictions in time of war. ….The Baathists in Iraq and Syria in their post-Kassem and Assad father and son reincarnations have been brutes. No doubt at all. Is that the reason the US is and did wage war on them? Why did we oppose the Iraq war? Because Saddam hadn’t obliged Washington with the odd massacre. Had he done so would the Iraq war have been justified. After all many liberals and former Communists argued for it (sometimes in private). The reality is that the US did try and encourage a Shia rebellion to coincide with their invasion of Iraq, but having been let down badly when the did in 1991 during the First Gulf War they were reluctant to do so. More importantly, talk to pro-war Iraqi intellectuals today and most of them say that it was ‘better under Saddam.’ The wretched Makiya doesn’t go that far but even he was shaken by the outcome and Hitchens in his last debate with me came close to admitting the same.
Questions to answer for Intercept:
(a) Do you sympathise withe the US-UK-French missile raids on Syria?
(b) If the West and Israel toppled Assad who would you like in its place. A Sunni dictatorship divided into Jihadi factions as in post-conquest Libya? Or an Iraqi model of de facto partition with Turkey making the Kurdish areas an effective protectorate? There is no third choice I’m afraid. The dilemma is terrible, but it must be faced. Imperialist petulance at being denied Syria is no excuse for progressives to crumble.”

A Palestinian senior in a makeshift gas mask: there’s an old adage that revolution is for the young. But that doesn’t operate when genocide is involved.

Stand with Palestinians. Honor BDS.

(Photo from The Palestinian Information Center)

We should take a moment to join Kashmiris in honoring the memory of Asiya Jeelani, a human rights activist & journalist who edited Voices Unheard, a magazine on women & the Kashmiri struggle. She was killed in an IED attack on April 20th, 2004 at the age of 30 while monitoring elections in Kupwara. Ghulam Nabi was also killed in that attack & human rights activist Khurram Parvez lost his leg. Her contributions are honored at a time when young women & others across Kashmir are taking to the streets to demand justice for Asifa & protest the use of militarized & caste sexual violence.

Her writings are archived by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society at:

https://jkccs.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/voices-unheardvol-1-1.pdf

Photo is Asiya Jeelani.

Omar Abdullah was the Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir for the Indian government between 2009 & 2015. He’s the thug who authorized the use of pellet guns against unarmed protesters in 2010. He has previously spoken at universities in the US & yesterday was invited by the Institute of International Studies & Institute for South Asia Studies to speak at the University of California, Berkeley on “The Path Forward in Kashmir.” He probably expected to be treated like an éminence grise but our man was met by Kashmiri protesters chanting “we will take you to international criminal court” & “you’re a war-criminal.”

This is his mug shot. If he shows up on your campus, greet him with the same disrespect he got from protesters at Berkeley.

(Photo from With Kashmir)

A lot of people unfriend me because my wall’s too full of sorrow. The world’s too full of sorrow. It’s often overwhelming & there’s no denying that. The way you keep your bearings against an overload of war, occupation, genocide is not to bury your head in Hallmark sentiments but to do something, even if modest, to stand with those taking the brunt & who can’t hide from sorrow. It really helps a lot if you focus on the kids & our responsibility for making this world suitable for them to live in.

Young boy wearing improvised gas mask at Great Return March today in Gaza. The tire is to burn to shield protesters from Israeli snipers. Imagine a young life spent fighting unarmed against superior military force, apartheid & genocide. It’s not conceivable to most of us.

(Photo from Great Return March on Twitter)

There’s something about this photo of unarmed Palestinian protesters running from Israeli snipers which is absolutely infuriating but it also exposes the reality of who are the real terrorists in the conflict between Palestinians & the state of Israel. Palestinians are waging a peaceful, well-organized campaign, including children, demanding the right of return for millions of refugees still living in refugee camps. Palestine is their homeland. Most of them living in Syria have been displaced by the counterrevolution which continues today at the Yarmouk refugee camp south of Damascus, now being pummeled by Syrian bombers. Jordan long ago closed its borders to Palestinian refugees from Syria so there aren’t many places for them to seek asylum. Meanwhile, Israel continues to recruit Zionists from around the world who have no connection to Palestine to become part of the settlement program & take Palestinian lands. They have no more claim to Palestine than Irish-Americans have to the Rhineland from whence their ancestors came 3,000 years ago. The right of return is a fundamental issue to Palestinians & must be supported.

Palestinians can only win against the ruthless behemoth of Israel backed by the US & Europe with consistent mobilized international solidarity actions. During this Great Return March campaign in Gaza, we should be holding rallies to support their demands & stand with them against Israeli violence.

(Photo from protest today from Great Return March)

Israeli snipers gunned down two unarmed Palestinians at the Great Return March today. The total number killed is 37 since the start of the campaign four Fridays ago. The two young men killed today are 23-year-old Ahmed Rashad Al Athamna (on the left) & 25-year-old Ahmed Abu Aqel (on the right). May they Rest In Peace.

There are sporadic rallies around the world against the execution of unarmed protesters in Gaza. There is a need for Palestinian supporters to hit the streets massively & in unison to demand that Israel stop the killing.

(Photo from Great Return March on Twitter)