A young man in Gaza, undaunted by tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers, carries the Palestinian flag at a protest in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli military jails.
(Photo by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters)
The US Department of Health & Human Services & US Justice Department received over 5,800 complaints of sexual abuse of unaccompanied children refugees being held in US detention centers between 2014 & 2018. The documentation, released in February of this year, came not from either government department but from Congressman Ted Deutch of Florida who said the documents “detail an environment of systemic sexual assaults by staff on unaccompanied children.” The allegations include children forcibly strapped to chairs, subjected to pornographic videos, molested, raped, denied medical care. There are nearly 16,000 refugee children held in US concentration camps, all of them living in inhumane conditions with over one-third of them subjected to sexual assault.
These conditions will not end until the immigration rights movement severs all financial relationships & political commitments to the Democratic Party & organizes an independent movement to demand ‘open the damn borders’, ‘no concentration camps’.
This unaccompanied nine-year-old girl from Guatemala is in the back of a US Border Patrol vehicle waiting to be incarcerated for crossing the border into New Mexico (in June 2018). Her fate is very scary indeed.
(Photo by Adrees Latif/Reuters)
In November 2018, Save the Children (the NGO which in 2014 gave a “global legacy award” to war criminal Tony Blair) estimated that 85,000 children under the age of five have starved to death “over the last three years” as a result of Yemen’s civil war. UN estimates of acute malnutrition among small children are considerably higher at 1.3 million children & 14 million people overall. There certainly is a catastrophic civil war in Yemen but does Save the Children not consider the now four years (since March 2015) of Saudi-coalition carpet bombing an even more compelling reason for mass starvation as well as thousands of other deaths? Is it because the UK & US are involved up to their eyeballs in that bombing?
The international antiwar movement is so busy defending Syrian & Russian bombing in Syria that it hasn’t been able to mobilize antiwar opposition to the carnage in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, or even Syria.
You have to be an unthinking fool to come of age hating on or looking down on others because of gender, ethnicity, religion, or class & yet so many do & we’re supposed to see the reason in it when in large part it’s profoundly stupid, in every way supremacist, & leads to pogroms, massacres, genocides, & wars. Let me add that you have to be a complete pinhead if you think I will let you express such idiocies on my wall. It’s hasta la vista baby & another one bites the dust! You can’t reason with stupid nor supremacist. Political power is the only thing either understands.
(Prompted by another guy who tried to post crap against Jews on my wall.)
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is calling for an accounting of the disappearances & deaths in Assad’s gulag of Ali Mahmoud Othman & other journalists. Syria ranks as one of the most dangerous countries on RSF’s annual World Press Freedom Index: 174 out of 180. Meanwhile Assad propagandists like Bartlett & Beeley & pro-Assad journalists like Robert Fisk travel freely in Syria embedded up the ass of the Syrian Army.
https://rsf.org/en/news/syria-well-known-syrian-citizen-journalist-probably-died-detention-2013?
Among world leaders condemning the attacks in Sri Lanka are Trump (commander-in-chief of several wars), Modi (genocidaire of Muslims & commander-in-chief of occupation in Kashmir), Netanyahu (presiding over the genocide of Palestinians), Zarif of Iran (with militias on the ground fighting the Syrian Arab Spring), Erdogan (who violently represses Kurds, journalists, & democratic rights), May & Merkel (both opposing refugee rights). Those condemnations mean nothing. Nor do ours unless we stand in active solidarity against war, occupation, genocide.
“We may have different religions, different language, different coloured skin. But we all belong to one HUMAN race thus we have to fight against terrorism together.
#SriLanka 💔”
–Muddaththir Maqsood
Somebody in Canada invited Slavoj Zizek to represent socialists in a debate with a rightwing blowhard named Jordan Peterson. It was billed like a Rolling Stone concert. Now there you have it in a nutshell! Zizek has been completely discredited as a xenophobic windbag after so much hateful & racist flatulence against refugees & immigrants. That anyone would consider him a representative of the highest ideals of socialism speaks only to the abject corruption of a movement that now promotes Assad, Putin, & Maduro as champions of democracy.
Had a brief bout of the blues so I spent a couple days scrubbing my house clean to work those blues away. Self-pity doesn’t work well with my DNA so I snapped out of them fighting dust bunnies. But it really helped to return to Facebook with so many messages of good will. The massacre in Sri Lanka put my blues in perspective in a heartbeat. The majority of the human race wants to live in peace & harmony with each other. We have to out-mobilize the haters, supremacists, & psychopaths who want to destroy human solidarity & embrace the differences requiring identity politics because it is possible to create societies suitable for human beings to live & love in.
Mehbooba Mufti, India’s former Chief Minister for Jammu & Kashmir, dropping crocodile tears: what can she expect but mockery after allowing the arrest of hundreds of activists, the repression of journalists, & the disfigurement, disability, blindness, & deaths of thousands of young people from pellet guns? Cry us a river since you shed no tears for them.