Someone actually dared come to my wall & comment that “Feminism is a cancer to the International Communist Movement.” When he says ‘International Communist Movement’, does he mean the hundreds of little deranged sects, Lilliputian cults, & half-baked grouplets who cite the mass murderer Stalin as their guru, are guppies to the Assad dictatorship & support Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians, believe Jews are behind every evil in world politics, deny the Tiananmen Square massacre, denounce all the Arab Spring uprisings, Hong Kong protests, Venezuelan protests as fascist uprisings orchestrated by Mossad & the CIA, are torn between denying or defending the Rohingya & Uyghur genocides, support Duterte’s vigilante war against the urban poor? Since feminism is the ideology of women & children’s freedom from violence & degradation, opposition to feminism is on a continuum of stupidity & corruption that eventually leads to political irrelevancy.

There’s been a spate of articles in Indian media posted on FB recently about social problems like domestic violence in Kashmir. Anyone above the age of reason would know that Kashmir, like every other human society, has social problems. Anyone with half a brain ought to have the good sense to know that Kashmiris don’t need anyone’s help in addressing those issues. When those articles come from India, we should smell a stinking propaganda rat, not just meddling where they don’t belong & are certainly not welcome.
The US, India, & every other country have enough social problems to keep their citizens busy for several decades. So why are they so damn concerned about Kashmiri problems? The only social problem in Kashmir that Indian writers should be concerned about is Indian colonialism & military occupation & building a social movement to oppose that.

It’s not that social problems like domestic violence in Kashmir or anywhere else are not all our concerns. But when those articles are about Rohingya refugees, Palestinians & Kashmiris under occupation, Central American refugees in the US, & there are no spates of articles about the oppression they sustain, the intention can only be malicious to cast aspersions suggesting they are unworthy of political defense & solidarity.

Stuff the sociological analyses. Focus political energies on building movements to oppose the abuse & vilification of those sustaining war, occupation, genocide. If at any time Kashmiris, Rohingya, Palestinians, or Central Americans solicit outside advice, it’s likely to be a cold day in hell.

Socialist Action (SA), a cult around the figure of a blowhard named Jeff Mackler, has just announced his candidacy for US president 2020. In the 2016 elections, I endorsed all the other socialist candidates running, not seeing them as competition but, despite our differences, on the same side. But I will not be endorsing this loser in 2020 since he is instrumental in the corruption of the US antiwar movement into an Assadist guppy cult which supports Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians. He’s the political schmuck who toured fascist propagandist Eva Bartlett as an “independent journalist” & coined the aberration calling for self-determination for the Assad dictatorship.

Let me tell tales out of school: I once attended an SA national convention where Mackler was scheduled to give a 1-1/2 hour presentation on Venezuela. He blithered on for 1-1/2 hours without notes & then had the undisciplined temerity to ask for a 1-1/2 hour extension to blither on some more. That extra 1-1/2 hour was subtracted from time allotted for membership discussion. Not a peep of objection from his cult because in a cult kissing the ass of the grand Poobah is the norm. Another time, I was speaking to him on the phone for several minutes when he informed me he had to be quick since Hugo Chávez, then alive & president of Venezuela, was on hold to consult with him about Venezuelan politics. Really!? You want that kind of corrupt blowhard to represent socialism?

(Photo of Bartlett with Mackler (standing) & two other Assadists, February 2017, from SA newspaper)

A White Helmet rescue worker after early morning bombing by Russian war planes on the city of Jisr al-Shughour: the British TV network Channel 4 video documented how Syrian & Russian war planes are targeting White Helmets & ambulances in double tap strikes in Idlib although they have been using that tactic since the siege of Aleppo in 2016. In the attack on Jisr al-Shughour, a hospital & essential medical equipment were damaged.

A double tap strike is a military tactic launching two successive strikes against the same target. The first strike is to damage or destroy the ambulance & the second is to injure or kill medics & other first responders. Assadist propagandists & their guppy cult denounce the White Helmets as “al-Qaeda affiliated Salafi-jihadi terrorists” & we won’t ask them to explain how bombing ambulances fits into that scenario. They’ll just blow another Islamophobic justification out their ass. At this point they’re beyond hope.

End the bombing of Idlib. All foreign military forces & mercenaries out of Syria.

Channel 4 documentation of double tap strike on White Helmet ambulance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=lFCC3W1uNDw

(Photo by Mustafa Al-Ahmad)

A Kashmiri man cries & is consoled by friends & neighbors after the occupying Indian army destroyed his family home in a hunt to kill operation in Gund village, North Kashmir. Why it was necessary to destroy his home is part of the strategy of occupation & not because he was harboring militants. It functions somewhat differently than the occupying Israeli army in the West Bank which razes homes & entire villages for purposes of ethnic cleansing. But it remains a weapon of occupation, intended to demoralize & punish resistance.
End the occupation of Kashmir. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo is screenshot from video on Twitter)

Seven-year-old Palestinian Tareq Dhabanya was intentionally run over & killed by a rabid Zionist settler in the West Bank. Some of those settlers are so violent, deranged, & supremacist that they may never be able to accommodate to a democratic, secular state. But in a democratic state, they will be prosecuted for acts of violence, especially for the murder of children, not given impunity as they are now by apartheid Israel.

May our little brother Rest In Peace.

(Photo from The Palestine Information Center)

The word used to describe combative (in the dignified sense of that word) women is “feisty.” I don’t go for it since it diminishes our indignations. I like “badass” since it suggests you ought to tremble in fear when you get one of our dirty looks.

“many kashmiris are dead uncomfortable with feminism in all its forms, good or bad, that is quite telling, and therefore, nothing should be done to mitigate this discomfort. this discomfort is good, as it will pave way for deeper thinking, which may lead to the realisation that our fight against colonial oppression cannot be divorced from the oppression of women within our homes, workplaces, streets and everywhere. for a healthy internal debate on this, indians, irrespective of political views, should stay away, and if they don’t we are quite capable of elbowing them out, vehemently. we have nothing to learn from them, they must put their own house in order and we should not allow them to relish these important debates in kashmir to further their own saviour agenda.”

–Mir Laieeq

(I’m not posting this to intrude into the debate on feminism among Kashmiris but because it’s such an excellent statement of the relationship between women’s oppression & the broader struggles against war, occupation, genocide.)

The fact that so many of the 37 regimes which endorsed China’s genocide of Uyghur Muslims (along with Cuba, Syria, & Venezuela) are so-called ‘Muslim nations’ should finally lay to rest the notion that those nations are guided by Islam or by human rights. They are tyrannies which misuse Islam to justify their barbarities. They are regimes that do not reflect the commitments & aspirations of their citizens, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, or other, but only the vested interests of the oppressors. To associate those regimes with Islam is to play into the hands of the Islamophobic ‘war on terror’, the consequences of which we see in Assadism.

By Palestinian artist Malak Mattar, a tribute to a six-year-old Palestinian child murdered by Israeli violence.