Is it true that both the New Testament & the Quran tell you to turn the other cheek? “Vengeance is mine, I shall repay” saith the Lord in the Old Testament. But why should God have all the fun? Maybe saints are made by long-suffering abuse but I say forego the halo since it is never sane nor healthy for the oppressed to tolerate indignity & insult. It makes you feel small to stand there taking abuse without standing up for yourself. If you think about the times in your life that you regret, it is usually when you let someone run you around the block. I’m not disagreeing with God but just saying that maybe when those books were written he had no idea just how bad things were gonna get. Think of standing your ground not so much vengeance as pedagogy of the hard-scrabble kind.

There were reportedly massive anti-Putin protests in Russia in at least 90 cities but media coverage has been appalling. That’s probably due to repression of journalists & perhaps restrictions on foreign media access. Russian working people are a sleeping behemoth which when roused to action are a formidable force for change. Same with China. Same with the US.

It would be wise for people to distinguish between the Arab regimes & the Arab peoples whose interests in every single country are at odds. Or what were the Arab Spring uprisings all about? Assad propagandists have resurrected a skewed pan-Arabist mythology about the Syrian people being of one mind & breathing in sync with Assad–except for the head-chopping Wahhabi/Salafi terrorists, of course–but in autocratic & capitalist societies there is an unbreachable chasm between working people & rulers.

Why is Israel bombing Syria?

Israel hitting Damascus May 9 2018 (AP)
If you’re not a military strategist or what Assad propagandists call a geopolitical analyst, there are no glib explanations for why Iran launched rockets from Syria at the Golan Heights which is illegally occupied by Israel or why Israel retaliated with risky bombing sorties over military targets in Syria. With so many military forces operating in Syria, all with conflicting military & political goals–except for destroying the Syrian Arab Spring uprising–it’s a risky business they’re all engaged in. The possibility of Armageddon comes to mind. It does appear Israel is taking an independent course from the US-coalition because of how it sees the threat from Iran. This is a complicated, contradictory scenario & sustained study & analysis is required, not off the cuff vituperations.

We don’t have to understand what the hell is going on in the mind of the Iranian regime or of Netanyahu, who is presently in Russia collaborating with Putin. As principled antiwar people, our response is to denounce & oppose Iranian & Israeli bombing & to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.

This photo, supplied by Syrian state media, allegedly shows Israeli missiles hitting military targets in Damascus, Syria.

(Photo from Syrian state media via AP)

When I see a former ally in the antiwar movement post an article from Global Research, an Assadist & libertarian journal, or from fascists Bartlett or Beeley, I must admit to feeling kind of sad. At least before my adrenalin acts up. But then I remember many of them were latecomers to antiwar politics & got sucked into the orbit of Stalinist socialist groups who were part of the Minneapolis antiwar movement–& not an easy part to deal with. The attraction to Stalinism has always escaped me even in my most naive days. Just before I retired to Texas from Minnesota, a group of those antiwar activists formed a study group & the first readings were from the collected writings of Joseph Stalin–not to understand autocracy & tyranny but as though he were a political teacher. It’s no wonder they became supporters of Assad since Assadism is very much the grotesque amalgam of fascism with Stalinism. That isn’t where those naive activists hoped to end up. But it’s where they are. Because you can’t short-circuit democracy & you can’t justify dictatorship.

Indian Army chief General Bipin Rawat
“The Chief of the Indian Army has stated that ‘Aazadi’, which means freedom, is not possible in Kashmir as long as his soldiers are stationed there. This means he has tacitly admitted the fact that the Indian Army is an instrument that keeps the population of Kashmir subjugated and unfree. An honest soldier has spoken.”

–Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Indian artist & writer

(Photo is Indian army chief General Bipin Rawat)

The CIA, FBI, & Pentagon officials who lead the US antiwar movement

Rowley, Wright & McGovern May 10 2018

The US antiwar movement is not going to be right so long as it supports Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians & only opposes US-coalition bombing. Misleaders of the corrupt movement have justified support for Syrian & Russian bombers by saying Assad invited Russian bombers to help him so they are not intervening illegally like the US-coalition. They also pioneered the twisted nationalist notion that the antiwar movement only opposes interventions by its own governments, not those of other countries. They forget that the anti-Vietnam War movement would not have been so powerful had it not been coordinated in hundreds of cities on every single continent. For these corrupt activists, it is all about the national sovereignty of a dictator; the cultist Jeff Mackler even calls it Assad’s right of self-determination when the concept of self-determination has never adhered to a dictator but only to an oppressed people. When Mackler, et al, endorse the sovereignty of a dictator against a popular uprising for democracy, they make theoretical asses of themselves. And not for the first time.

The antiwar movement is never going to be right so long as it is led by “retired” CIA, FBI, & Pentagon officials like Coleen Rowley, Ray McGovern, Ann Wright. It is “retired” in quotes because McGovern openly admits they consult regularly with active duty CIA, FBI, & Pentagon officials. McGovern is making headlines in Russian media now because of his grandstanding display at the Gina Haspel hearings. It’s good that at the age of 78 McGovern has become opposed to CIA use of torture but it’s just not believable when he never spoke out against torture between 1963 & 1990 when he was a high-level operative in the CIA operating out of the White House. He can’t even try to play stupid about CIA torture in those years because CIA recruiters were being driven off US campuses by antiwar & human rights activists–especially after exposés in the 1970s that the CIA trained SAVAK, the Iranian secret service under the Shah of Iran, in the most unspeakable forms of torture including of children in front of their parents.

As for Rowley, it was in 2003, less than three years after she flagged my criminal record for using a WMD & after she was retired from the FBI, that she came out as a whistleblower opposed to the Iraq War. Today she posted an Islamophobic article by a screwball libertarian claiming John Bolton is an advocate of Islamic terrorism in the White House. That rancid idiocy is fully in accord with the US war on terror where the battle cry is nothing but the rise of Islamic terrorism.

Ann Wright is a retired US army colonel (29 years) & diplomat for the State Department (16 years) who operated in Grenada after the US invasion, Nicaragua, Somalia, Afghanistan, & in several US wars before her retirement in 2003 when she came out against the invasion of Iraq. She suddenly grew a repugnance to war at the age of 66 after serving in several brutal wars without question? She is a supporter of US politician Tulsi Gabbard, an Islamophobe who supports Modi, General Sisi in Egypt, & Assad. Wright just published an article in the Assadist rag Consortium News that Syria & Russia did not use chemical weapons in Douma but that the well-documented attacks were in fact carried out by unspecified armed militias. On what evidence does the hard-nosed military colonel make this claim? None, but a list of US “false flag” operations that she probably peddled during her military tenure. She may not stand with Bartlett & Beeley & the Kremlin in claiming the children filmed foaming at the mouth were crisis actors chosen from among kidnapped children but she still stands with the Assad dictatorship against the Syrian Arab Spring uprising.

How do McGovern, Rowley, & Wright serve US military interests despite their faux-whistleblowing & grandstanding? By confusing the hell out of what is going on & by fostering nihilism, the belief that nothing can be known, that everything–even that which is documented–is fake news & false flags. Nihilism cuts both ways: when Syria & Russia bomb civilians, it is just MSM fake news; when the US-coalition bombs civilians, it is only credible if it appears in state-owned alternative media like RT, Sputnik News, TeleSur because nothing “Zionist-controlled MSM” reports can be trusted. All three of them seek legitimacy in Palestinian solidarity when in over four decades of service to the US government, none of them uttered a peep about Palestinians. Mostly, these reprobate functionaries of the US military serve by misleading the US antiwar movement into being an appendage of Assad & Putin, by legitimizing Islamophobia, & by fomenting anti-Semitism rather than educating about Zionism.

The principled antiwar movement that must be built will have no place for the likes of these characters. It will be a day of good riddance to them.

(Photo is Rowley on left, Wright in middle, McGovern on right)

-a poem (my mode of resistance)
my mode of resistance is silence.
silence, silence and silence.
far i know silence lies
on the opposite lane of
revolutions.
so , in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to count.
count, count and count.
far i know count will
include
dead and
martyred children of
revolutions.
so, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to escape.
escape, escape and escape.
to high mountains and deep valleys.
for i know high mountains and
deep valleys are
all occupied by the tyrants.
So, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to pray.
pray, pray and pray.
for I know
God will never help,
God helps those
who help themselves.
so, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to write.
write, write and write.
for I know
they will never understand
my poetry.
So, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to educate.
educate, educate and educate
for I know
my tyrant is snared
in the sewer of baser minds.
Evil lunatic is its king.
hate and killing is the objective
so, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to educate
educate, educate and educate.

–Zafar Iqbal

“It is reported that the person who recorded the deliberate mowing down of a young boy by the police truck has been arrested. If the reports are confirmed it won’t be a surprise. The driver who committed this atrocious crime will soon be rewarded, perhaps with cash, promotion and even a gallantry award! That is what is expected. Justice will remain elusive in kashmir as long as the occupation persists. Meanwhile the brigade of “kashmiri killing kashmiri” is in deep coma, may they never come out of it.”

–Mir Laieeq

There are enough reputable exposés of Assad propagandists Bartlett & Beeley for their guppies to start questioning their narratives about Syria–if the arrant Islamophobia & anti-Semitism didn’t already disquiet them. But wouldn’t you think Bartlett & Beeley’s support for Duterte’s vigilante death squad war against the poor & their emphatic support for the Rohingya genocide would give some pause? The fact that they haven’t tells us who these guppies are politically. Basically, they are detritus from the US war on terror & in that regard are not just politically worthless but concerning Syria they have proven to be poison.