Category Archives: News

Indian army continues savage use of pellet munitions against Kashmiris

Abdul Rasheed Wani (50) of Sumbal, Kashmir May 11 2018 (Greater Kashmir) May 25 2018
This is an extremely gruesome photo of 50-year-old Abdul Rasheed Wani, a shopkeeper in Sumbal, Kashmir who sustained severe damage to his eye & face when occupying forces used pellet guns & tear gas shells on unarmed students protesting the killing of eight militants & seven civilians in Srinagar & the Shopian districts earlier this month. India uses pellet munitions for the same reason Israeli snipers target the legs of youth in their murderous assaults on unarmed protesters: to inflict maximum harm without killing; to disfigure, disable, demoralize, & defeat political resistance to occupation.

The violence & savagery of modern war, occupation, genocide is extreme & unbridled by the volumes of international law attempting the impossible task of making violence against unarmed civilians humane. Activists need to begin thinking out & organizing structures of international collaboration to coordinate campaigns & mobilizations tying these struggles together to strengthen them. There are no humane weapons in war but several of them are intended to brutalize & torture without necessarily killing. Pellet guns, like the military use of rape, is one of those. Campaigning internationally against the use of pellet guns is critical to stop their use in Kashmir & to prevent other governments from taking them up. We should keep in mind they were also used against protesters in the Bahraini Arab Spring uprising of 2011.

Our sincere wishes that Abdul Rasheed Wani will recover from his injuries without permanent damage as so many others have sustained.

(Photo from Greater Kashmir)

McAllen, Texas rally for Palestinians

We had a very moving Palestinian solidarity rally tonight attended by about 30 people. It would have been more did it not conflict with Iftar. It was beautifully coordinated with a man from Gaza reading off the names of those Palestinians killed in the Trump embassy massacre while their photos were held up. Activists did a brilliant job of explaining & promoting BDS. Attendees were from the local mosques, including one of the Imams, students from the local university, & activists like me. Thirty may sound like peanuts compared to the large metropolitan centers but all who attended expressed support for Palestinians & linked that struggle to that of immigrants & refugees here. We ended by making a video message to the local congressman who wants BDS & criticism of Israel made illegal. Thank you Ava Leal, a Native American who talked about their support for Palestinians; to Mariam El-Haj for a wonderful presentation on BDS; & to John-Michael Torres for inclusively presiding so that everyone could participate in some way.

It seems to me we should more than tip our hats to the hotel staff in Srinagar who made a stink & got Major Gogoi arrested when he tried to book a room with a minor girl. God bless them for protecting our children.

Josef Korbel (1909-1977), a former Czech diplomat, US college professor, & chair of the UN Commission on India & Pakistan, is the father of Madeleine Albright & the mentor of Condoleezza Rice. In other words, politically a practitioner of realpolitik & no prize package. He applied for asylum in the US after communists took power in Czechoslovakia. In 1954, he wrote “Danger in Kashmir” which predicted Kashmir would be the first ‘Indian State’ to embrace communism. Has anyone ever heard of or read the book?

When Kashmiri activists urged me to study & write about their struggle, I used the University of Texas library here which was filled with US State Department analyses & found them to be absolutely useless from the point of view of Kashmiri self-determination. They were all power politics between India & Pakistan with no discussion of the freedom struggle. His book was not among them which leads me to suspect it is deemed worthless even as a State Department analysis.

Farooq Ahmad Dar, Kashmiri man used as human shield, protests for justice

Farooq Ahmad Dar (human shield man) May 24 2018
Farooq Ahmad Dar–the young man humiliated & endangered when Major Leetul Gogoi used him as a human shield on the front of a military jeep–is protesting in Kashmir to get justice still denied by India. We stand with him 100% in his fight against military impunity for human rights crimes they commit while deployed in Kashmir. No one understands this young man’s fury better than other Kashmiris or those in US war zones subject to the same impunity for war crimes.

(Photographer not identified)

Israeli settlers continue to invade Al Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem

Settlers at Al Aqsa mosque today (DOAM) May 25 2018
About 100 Israeli settlers invaded Al Aqsa mosque today in Ramadan under the protection of Israeli security forces. This has become an almost daily event in defiance of the Jordanian trust which governs the mosque compound in East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, there is video documentation of Israeli security forces at the mosque violently beating a young Palestinian boy & an older man. Protests must continue in solidarity with Palestinian religious freedom which they are denied as part of the military occupation.

(Photo from DOAM–Documenting Oppression Against Muslims)

How to stop verbal abuse & bullying

http://thegirlgod.blogspot.no/2015/09/ending-verbal-abuse-by-mary-scully.html

My dear friend Trista Hendren has shared this again & so I shall too. It’s a piece I wrote about how to stop others from verbal abuse & bullying. They are lessons I learned from being a woman, from political activism & in working in a male-dominated environment. If you suffer from others trying to push you around or put you down & don’t know the skills to end that, then you might be interested in this. It’s not so much aggressiveness training as how to stand on your self-respect because you cannot be at peace with yourself in a hardscrabble world if you don’t demand respect–first by not blaming yourself for abuse.

Is this little girl the price of a Assad’s national sovereignty?

Ruqiya from Yarmouk May 24 2018
This little girl named Ruqiya came alone on a convoy of refugees fleeing Yarmouk refugee camp to Qalaat Mudiq where she is now in hospital. Meanwhile, Assad’s supporters in Damascus are dancing in the streets that Syrian & Russian bombers & Iranian artillery have cleared Yarmouk of terrorists. Is this little girl the price of a dictator’s national sovereignty?

(Photo from Ayesha Zara on Twitter)

Indian army officer blackmailed minor girl for sex in exchange for release of her arrested brother

Farooq Ahmad Dar as human shield on jeep
Anees Hyder Zaidi of CPI stated on television that Major Leetul Gogoi of the occupying Indian Army in Kashmir “blackmailed the little girl for the release of her brother who was arrested by the Major.” Indian Army chief General Bipin Rawat defended Major Gogoi when he used this young man as a human shield saying it was an innovative way to fight the ‘dirty war’ in Kashmir. How will he defend the major in an instance of rape, pedophilia, & blackmail? Will impunity prevail?