All posts by BabakJoy2014

The father of Mir Jamsheed Jameel kindly notified all his son’s FB friends by message that Mir had died. Perhaps he doesn’t know how respected his son was & that many people, including myself, posted eulogies for Mir when he died. Those who know his father might assure him that his son was loved & honored. May he Rest In Peace.

There was a cogent article written not long ago about the problematic nature of saying Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingya, & other subjected to war & genocide suffer mental illness as a result. Of course they suffer psychologically. One would have to be a cement block not to. But identifying a rational response to genocide as mental illness skirts ‘blaming the victim’ which is grotesque. The psychological trauma of seeing loved ones arrested, disappeared, tortured, raped, assaulted, disfigured, disabled, demoralized is a heavy weight for any society to bear. For those who stand with Kashmiris blinded by pellet guns, it means redoubling our efforts to educate about India’s war crimes in Kashmir, campaigning internationally against the use of pellet guns, & campaigning against the occupation.

https://thekashmirwalla.com/2019/04/kashmirs-85-pellet-victims-diagnosed-with-a-psychiatric-disorder-study/?

The ICC is backing down from investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan. They blame it on US government stonewalling & the denial of a visa to the primary investigator but what’s to stop them from going to Afghanistan where the crimes were committed & interviewing those subjected to torture or who saw their loved ones & neighbors massacred, tortured, or bombed to death? Don’t the voices of Afghans count for anything in that investigation? What did they think they’d get out of officials in DC? A confession?

They still don’t have forensics from the terrible fire at Notre Dame but there is a groundswell on social media blaming it on Muslims. Why not? Using their same method of jumping to conclusions based on hatred of Muslims, they could find direct connections between Islam & halitosis, adult-onset diabetes, or male-pattern baldness. It’s all there in the Quran which few of these fools have read.

Fox News is running an appeal to raise money for poor Israelis & the images are quite distressing, like images from a ‘third-world’ country. The ad cites the reason as terrorism but that doesn’t explain how apartheid & genocide have created so many elderly poor people in Israel. Likely it’s the same problem that a bloated military budget causes in the US where there’s always enough money for war but none for social security & the poor must go begging.

The US war in Afghanistan is now the longest US war: going on 18 years. The few war crimes we know about are too gruesome to describe. The Pentagon & State Department don’t want us to know the scale of war crimes from torture, massacres, indiscriminate carpet bombing so they barred the ICC investigator from getting a visa.

The corrupted antiwar movement is up to its eyeballs campaigning for the Assad regime & Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians & hasn’t been able to mobilize against the wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, or for that matter, Syria. Some anti-Assadists choose to ignore other US wars & the entire history of US militarism & call for a humanitarian US bombing campaign in Syria. Drawing from the cesspool of Orientalism, they say ‘Syrians want US intervention so how can anyone disagree?’ After asking which Syrians do not understand US militarism, we can answer that the most compelling reason for scorning the very notion of a humanitarian bombing campaign is that it is Syrian civilians who will die & American young people who are turned into trained killers, who lose their psychological bearings, who commit war crimes, lose their lives & limbs, come home to suicide, homelessness, PTSD, incarceration, brain damage, disability, psychological misery.

How did it happen that so many took their distance from the realities of war & begin to glorify it as liberation against a ‘regime change operation’ or as humanitarian? How did the principles against war get so twisted into service to war mongering? How can we begin to rebuild the antiwar movement rooted in principles, not of pacifism, but of opposition to colonial wars?

Mehbooba Mufti has moved from being India’s Chief Minister over Kashmir to stand-up comedy. Here she asks “What wrong I did that stones were pelted?” Shall we present her with the staggering figures of injuries just from pellet guns alone? Ignore her tears. She had none for those disfigured, disabled, blinded, & killed by pellet guns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=17&v=rUzctGwpmRk&fbclid=IwAR2hj32yUuJYIXU2lnQgkNUrlwbPSps-uPsSk8og1HTHr6QD_nSf2hpqScI

It used to be common on my wall (but since I have ungraciously discouraged it, it is less common) that people want to debate the ethnicity of Jews & parse the legitimacy of the term ‘anti-Semitic.” Like the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is not the best term but regardless, it is the term we are bequeathed to describe the phenomenon that led to pogroms, persecution, & the holocaust. In that regard, it’s as weak as ‘Islamophobia’ for the persecution, pogroms, genocides against Muslims. The etymology of these terms is a matter of scholarship but their popular usage is something we’re stuck with until someone comes up with more powerful terms to describe the scale of criminality & violence against Muslims & Jews.

As for the ethnicity of Jews, my observation is that those who engage in that discussion are the same people who blither about the Greater Israel Plan, post memes about the Rothschild bankers, & are often disciples of David Icke who believe the world is run by shape-shifting extraterrestrials morphed into Jewish bankers called the Illuminati. That discussion will not be held on my wall. The ethnic heritage of Jews is of little interest to me since most of the human race is ethnically diverse & all of us are related. The reason I won’t engage in those discussions is because they lend themselves to anti-Jewish vituperations. My issues about Israel will never be about Jews, whatever their ethnicity. It is solely about the hold of Zionism, an ideology held by all sorts of ethnic, national, & religious groups.