The redoubtable Gideon Levy on Ilhan Omar:
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.
–Khalil Gibran
Don’t know why a sweet-tempered old lady like myself pisses so many people off but the rate of turnover on my wall would be alarming if I were at all disposed to kissing butt for popularity. When you reach my age, staring down the barrel of mortality, what matters is doing the right thing, speaking truth as you see it, & letting the chips fall where they may. Do you agree other seniors?
A video of the national highway in Kashmir today, shut down to civilian & commercial traffic on Sundays & Wednesdays for the movement of military vehicles. This is an exercise in power, a show of force & military muscle & nothing more.
https://www.facebook.com/MaryScullyReports/videos/10216353662947253/
(Video by Waseem Bukhari)
This artwork by Dhrupadi Noor portrays an Indian coal miner suffering from black lung disease which is a gruesome affliction. Primarily that is because young mine workers are not provided safety gear or masks. How many generations has it been since doctors first identified black lung disease? It was diagnosed as far back as 1822–nearly 200 years! Black lung disease is caused by inhaling coal dust; it is debilitating, often fatal, & there is no cure. According to substantial data, people in coal mining communities have increased risk for many chronic illnesses, skin disease, kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), emphysema (that means they can’t breath), fibrosis & necrosis of lung tissue, high blood pressure, high mortality rates. All these health threats to people with little access to health care, eating inadequate diets, & living in poor housing conditions!
This isn’t just a problem with coal mine operations in India but among coal miners all over the world & the reckless disregard for their lives is getting worse. In the US, black lung disease kills over 1,000 coal miners a year (76,000 since 1968); in China it kills over 6,000 miners a year. In India, there is a 40-percent increase in miner deaths across the country from explosions, accidents, & mine collapses but there is no public accounting of the hundreds of young workers afflicted with black lung disease. All of these figures are probably underestimates.
Black lung cases in the US have more than doubled in the past 15 years because safety laws have been strip mined in the interests of increasing production. Coal mining isn’t just dirty energy; it’s dirty business all around when you subject millions of young workers to health problems & premature death. Wielding the scientific data as a weapon, unions need to do their job & mobilize their ranks to insure safety protections are a first priority. Keep in mind, in 2012 the coal operators in India got a $34 billion windfall from the Indian government when it allocated licenses without auctioning them. So they’re rolling in dough & more than able to provide young workers with safety gear.
Israeli has other plans than a bar & events hall for Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem which it intends to raze to the ground to create an imaginary history & temple to Zionism.
“It is funny how every rat joining collaborator politics in Kashmir is called as Lion by a handful of supporters. “Dekho Dekho Sher aaya” is a common slogan across party lines, such poverty of imagination is not unexpected but makes me laugh everytime. This despite the fact that the first genuinely popular “Lion of Kashmir” betrayed his people and was nothing but a self-centered coward whose grave continues to be guarded by police!”
–Mir Laieeq
Sibling day: taken with my mother at the death of my father in 1984. These are 15 of the 19 kids. One sister who has since died was not present; three had already died. The sister & brother on far right have also since died.
Last month, Trump tweeted a threat to have Saturday Night Live on NBC investigated by the Federal Election Commission or the Federal Communications Commission for the ongoing Alec Baldwin sketches mocking him. Carol Sughrue has just mocked Trump’s brain as a black hole & we want to assure her that we will defend her, or join her in rolling on the floor laughing, when Trump starts threatening legal action against her.
(Photo on top is Alec Baldwin & Trump; photo on bottom is Trump’s brain)
No one can be faulted for lacking enthusiasm about defending Assange against US prosecution. The guy’s a creep with stinking rotten politics who still faces prosecution for two outstanding rape charges in Sweden. But he’s not being hunted down for being a dirtball. He’s going to be prosecuted because Wikileaks exposed US war crimes in Iraq.
Loath is anyone except his Assadist & fascist supporters to build a defense case around him when high-principled journalists like Kashmir’s Aasif Sultan are sitting in jail for months with no international defense at all & Palestinian journalists are being executed by Israeli snipers at the Great Return March without any international outpouring of solidarity. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported last month that there are 251 journalists, including 33 women, in jails around the world–most of them subject to beatings, torture, invasive body searches, & sexual violence. Among the worst, but certainly not the only, offenders are Syria, Mexico, Russia, Colombia, Brazil, Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, Burma, Philippines, Vietnam.
What the Assange case highlights is the almost complete lack of support that imprisoned & disappeared journalists get. Rather than turn Assange into some kind of hero that he isn’t or turn our backs on defending him because he is so personally repulsive, we should use his case not to apotheosize Assange but to defend freedom of the press & to educate about the importance of defending all journalists from arrest, disappearance, & murder by tyrannical & repressive regimes.
(Photo of Aasif Sultan by CPJ Asia, November 2018)