It’s hard to get the story straight about what happened (on September 26th) in Iguala, Mexico in the state of Guerrero (where Acapulco is located). There are a few different versions & the least reliable & most contradictory come from Guerrero state officials who are likely involved up to their eyeballs in the deadly assault on busloads of student teachers.

We can dismiss with contempt suggestions the students were linked to drug traffickers or leftist guerilla groups. Almost no one, even in the state & federal governments, denies that corrupt local cops linked to the drug cartels ambushed the students, murdered six, injured 17, & handed 43 students over to criminal thugs. We can only shudder at the fate of those students, given what Mexican military, paramilitary, & criminal thugs have done to undocumented immigrants from Central America attempting to get to the US. They are often tortured, mutilated, executed, dismembered, & dumped in mass graves.

A mass grave holding 28 incinerated bodies was found (on Oct 4th) near the ambush site & many suspected they were among the 43 missing students. Originally, the Guerrero state attorney said it probable the remains were some of the missing students but DNA testing to confirm their identities could take a couple months. Only a few days later the state Governor Ángel Aguirre Rivero told the press, “I can confirm that some of the bodies recovered are not those of the normalistas,” but he was unable to say how many had been identified. Just hours later, Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam contradicted Aguirre Rivero & said, “I don’t know what information the governor claims to have. I’m monitoring this case closely, & I can tell you that none of the recovered remains have been identified.” Who the hell is in charge there? Now on Tuesday, Murillo Karam announced that DNA testing conclusively proved the incinerated human bodies were not the students. Raising several questions: how did the DNA testing expected to take several weeks get done so fast? And if it wasn’t the student teachers, who were the 28 so mercilessly executed?

No media source has explained why the student teachers would be targeted except to describe the violent political climate in Guerrero due to drug trafficking. It has the highest homicide rate in Mexico & in August 2014 the US State Department issued a travel advisory to US citizens calling Guerrero “the most violent state in Mexico in 2013.” Guerrero is also a center for the emerging civilian self-defense movement in Mexico in response to state & drug cartel violence. Some of these armed citizen groups claim government forces sent to reinforce their efforts against organized crime have sided with the cartels.

Government officials are falling over themselves blaming the ambush on drug cartels but of course for the Mexican government “drug cartels r us”. As part of the three-ring-circus to evade culpability, the federal government opened an investigation into who ordered the hit. All guilty fingers are pointing at organized crime & Iguala mayor, José Luis Abarca, who has long been accused of sharing municipal authority with the local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos. He must have expected the accusation since he immediately claimed he was out dancing with his wife, who is also associated with organized crime, & then both went on the lam & are nowhere to be found.

But that still doesn’t answer why the student teachers were targeted. The students were from Escuela Normal de Ayotzinapa, a rural teachers college with a radical & activist student tradition. The ambush came as students returned to their campus from a day in Iguala soliciting donations for school supplies & raising money to get to Mexico City for the October 2nd memorial protest against a government massacre of students in 1968. One unsubstantiated report claims they were also at a protest against government education reforms.

While not substantiated, that connection to teacher & student protests against the education reforms points to another possible reason the student teachers would be attacked. The reforms instituted by the Mexican government in September 2013 are a major assault on public education, teachers, & teachers unions. Under the guise of professionalizing & standardizing education, they are an attempt to privatize public schools & break the teachers unions & would leave the teachers completely vulnerable before the state. Guerrero teachers & student teachers have been in the forefront of national opposition to those reforms. Just a few weeks ago, at least 50,000 people protested those reforms in a march in Mexico City so the opposition remains a dynamic movement.

Teachers in Guerrero have been out in force protesting the executions & disappearance of the 43 students. With fury & courage they are protesting, occupying government buildings, & set fire to municipal headquarters in Chilpancingo, the state capital of Guerrero only 55 miles from Acapulco. They’re blocking major highways & have taken control of the tollbooths all over the state in what is called a major civil meltdown. Today they called a protest in Acapulco where thousands from all over Mexico were expected to participate. Organizers said their goal was to “paralyze” Guerrero by seizing control of every one of the state’s 81 county headquarters, the state highways, & the airport.

There have been tens of thousands protesting in 19 more of Mexico’s 32 states & at Mexican embassies in nine other countries. It has snowballed into a major national crisis for the corrupt Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto who has been twittering condolences up a storm to cover his own ass for culpability.
The stakes are high for the Mexican government, organized crime, international banks laundering drug money, & neoliberal profiteers so the teachers & broader forces of justice in Mexico are up against a mighty edifice. Their strength is in numbers, in justice, & in international solidarity.

Photo of the Ayotzinapa campus suggests the political character of the school which educates mostly rural & indigenous students.

(Photo by Melissa del Pozo)

Something momentous & historical is emerging in Ferguson, Missouri: the rebirth of Black power after two unarmed Black teens were gunned down by police. There are hundreds of Black kids across this country murdered by police in a governmental war on Black youth which includes massive incarceration for minor offenses. But media ignores all this & masks racism with pity in stories about “Black on Black violence”, teen pregnancy, drug gangs, & fatherless families–adding up to an image of lawless dysfunction in the Black community.

Prominent Black civil rights organizations like the NAACP, Rainbow/PUSH (Jesse Jackson’s group) & Urban League sold their political souls a long time ago when they began accepting & soliciting financial support from Wall Street. They now rely heavily on donations from Microsoft, Exxon, Kodak, Wachovia, PepsiCo, Comcast-NBC, AT&T, Verizon, Time-Warner, ABC-Disney, Sprint, T-Mobile. Corporate & foundation funding is the main way civil rights (& immigrant rights) organizations become tamed & no longer responsive to violence against & vilification of the Black community.

Black “leaders” like (Reverends, my ass!) Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson rush to outbursts in the Black community not to lead opposition to systemic racism but to peddle voting as an alternative to independent Black political action that would drive these assaults back. Black power is what is needed, not another wimpy-assed, mealy-mouthed Democrat in Congress, like the kind that make up the Black Congressional Caucus.

What makes the Black community of Ferguson so momentous & historic is that despite the intervention of Sharpton & Jackson to rein in militance, they are forging a Black power movement & turning their backs on compromise & those who counsel it. Not only do they continue protests & legal challenges to the cops, but at a meeting last weekend, 3,000 people gathered in a St. Louis arena to hear the NAACP & other Black mis-leaders speak. A section of that crowd, described as the youth, stood up & turned their backs on the president of the NAACP & started chanting opposition. Some commentators have called this an “intergenerational” conflict & it may well be lead by youth. But these establishment civil rights organizations have been dormant for a few interminable decades & there are plenty of older people just itching to engage in struggle against the violent assaults on their kids.

Media reporting of the emerging movement in Ferguson has been grotesque, as usual when reporting on the Black community. They claim protests become violent “when demonstrators & police clash.” That’s like saying cops murder unarmed Black teens when they put their heads up against the barrel of their guns. Protestors are unarmed & demanding their rights under the US Bill of Rights to protest on-going police brutality. The caption to this photo read: “The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson following Brown’s death.” Riots!? That’s what they call exercising your rights in the Black community to justify police assault. “Struggling to heal?” You send phalanxes of riot cops to a healing!? Is that like Obama sending marines to address the Ebola epidemic?

Missouri officials & media are extremely concerned about those “outside agitators” converging on Ferguson. They damn well better get used to it. St. Louis is the epicenter of an emerging Black power movement. Political resistance in the Black community has always been countered with extreme police violence, as we witnessed in the Civil Rights & Black power movements. This emerging social movement is of the greatest consequence to overcoming violent systemic racism in the US & like the Civil Rights movement, it is a call to arms demanding active solidarity across this country. Those who can, should hot foot it to Ferguson to stand with the Black community; those who can’t, should help organize rallies, speak-outs, protests in their own cities.

There will be no social transformation in the US without the leadership of Black activists, including Black women, steeled in uncompromising struggle against racism & every form of social hatred. To be part of that momentous cause requires standing with the Bill of Rights & with the Black community in Ferguson, Missouri.

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Homeless in Gaza City: this little girl is looking through the sheet that now serves as a door in her families bombed-out home. Delegates from 50 countries & 20 NGOs attended a donor conference in Cairo on Sunday to raise contributions to rebuild Gaza, which would include thousands of destroyed homes. Just removing the mountains of cement rubble will require millions in heavy equipment like bull dozers & back hoes.

Billions were pledged at the donor conference but no one should hold out high hopes all (or even most) of the money will actually be dispersed. Although it’s reported, no media has thought to investigate why billions are pledged for catastrophe & war zones like Haiti & Afghanistan & either it never gets dispersed or it’s used for other purposes like bribery & outright theft.

The media caption to this photo said the destruction is from “the war between Israel & Gaza’s militant Islamic group Hamas.” They’ll need a few extra back hoes just to take out the mountain of lies. This wasn’t a war; it was a genocide. And Hamas may be militant but they’re not psychopathic like the Israeli leadership.

This is where the massive international solidarity movement comes in. We need to evangelize the hell out of the economic & cultural boycott of Israel (BDS). If you want to make politicians in any country listen you have to squeeze their little pea brains until it hurts. BDS is already having a powerful affect on the Israeli economy & it’s international reputation. If Palestinians are to stand a chance of justice, intifada has to go international & exert massive economic & political pressure on Israel. That’s what solidarity is all about.

(Photo by Adel Hana/AP)

Last May, when Pope Francis stopped his entourage to pray briefly at the apartheid wall separating the West Bank from Israel, many heralded that as a symbolic, even unprecedented, gesture. He made another symbolic unprecedented gesture a couple days later when he stopped to pay tribute at the grave of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. The question arises: which symbolic unprecedented gesture carries more weight? Or it might be better to ask: which one is more useless? Judging from his silence during Israel’s Operation Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza, it could be argued the pope threw a couple good prayers away at that wall because symbolic doesn’t cut it when there’s a genocide involved. Neither does silence.

This symbolic gesture thing is getting carried way too far. Now we’re supposed to get all excited that Sweden & the British parliament have “recognized the state of Palestine”. Which state is that? Or more aptly, which bantustate is that? Gaza? Which Israel just spent seven weeks bombing to smithereens; which Israel holds in the grip of a murderous blockade; where Israel just maneuvered a leadership change as a condition to stop it’s genocidal rampage? Or is it the West Bank, while Israel continues expropriating Palestinian lands & moving in thousands of Zionist settlers from all over kingdom come to take over those expropriated lands?

Are Palestinians expected to be satisfied, even jubilant, over that kind of recognition & just symbolic kinds of victories? What about justice? What about self-determination? These phony-assed recognitions are a political scam. Sweden & Britain didn’t utter a peep of objection against Operation Ethnic Cleansing; in 66 years, neither has rendered even a modicum of meaningful support to Palestinians. What about the several million Palestinians still living in refugee camps? What about the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails for resisting land expropriations? What about standing up against Israel for war crimes in Gaza & for reconstruction of Gaza? What about using the immense resources of Sweden & Britain to stay the hand of Israeli genocide & mobilize international support for Palestinians? What about doing something real & not just symbolic?

The two-state solution is dead as a door nail & has been for a very long time. It is definitively buried in mountains of cement rubble that now cover the landscape of Gaza. In order to survive, Palestinians have to compromise & make temporary concessions in negotiations with Israel. But solidarity activists around the world do not have a gun to their heads. Every time one of these nations throw up another symbolic gesture–even of the unprecedented kind–we should stand steadfast for Palestinian justice–which is not a bombed out bantustate or an outpost in the West Bank. It is not the 1967 borders either. It is all of Palestine & a democratic secular state where Jews & Palestinians can live in peace. Some call that a pipe dream. It is more aptly called justice. And it is possible.

This photo is Gaza City which Sweden & Britain so proudly recognized as a Palestinian state. The pipe dream is thinking a bantustate could ever be a worthy alternative to justice.

(Photo by Adel Hana/AP)

From the annals of the US Civil Rights Movement: a 1963 protest by Black Muslims against police brutality. The viral spread of Islamophobia in the US within the context of the war on Black youth raises questions about the history & political role of the Black Muslim movement here. Not all of that history is inspiring. Louis Farrakhan, the leading Black Muslim today, represents the right-wing trend within that movement. Malcolm X, who was murdered by government agents in 1965, represents the best of that tradition. His powerful speeches lacerating the racist power structure in this country remain the most incisive & uncompromising political critique of systemic racism. He spoke for Black working people & would not bend an inch in his mission. Nor did he ever fawn before power. That’s why they murdered him.

A new civil rights movement is forging in Ferguson, Missouri, where police gunned down another unarmed Black teen after Michael Brown. Protests have not ceased nor fearless challenges by activists to the racist power structure. It’s certain many of those activists are inspired by Malcolm X’s words which still resonate powerfully nearly 50 years after his murder & will continue to resonate until racism is destroyed–however long that takes & by whatever means are necessary.

It’s certain his words are educating the new generation of Black freedom fighters who will take the fearless, uncompromising political path he forged & reject the sniveling mis-leadership of people like Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson shilling for the racist power structure. Like Che Guevara, Malcolm X will always be on the front lines of the struggle against racist violence & tyranny.

So while Islamophobes vituperate & denounce Islam as a religion of hate, Muslims can point to Malcolm X who was a fearless apostle of justice. Anger & hatred against injustice can never be maligned; they are the very soul of social transformation.

(Photo by Gordon Parks)

Most Christians are hard-pressed to explain much of their own theology let alone that of other Christian sects & denominations. There are hundreds (thousands?) of sects that parse the Bible into infinity & then there are the Catholics who never even read the book. Some groups have supplementary theological texts (like the Mormons); some wear uniforms (like the Salvation Army); some spend all the Sabbath in church & some hot foot it out after a half hour mass. Some of those sects are just plain wacky. The exact same thing is true of Judaism. Or what’s a Talmudic scholar for?

So when media goes hog wild with the accusations about Islam, you have to know they’re talking through their asses. They don’t have a clue if the Qu’ran is even published in English. Or is it in Arabic? Or Swahili? Or Polish? Are there different versions of it as there are of the Bible? They don’t know the difference between a Sunni & a Shia. They still can’t believe there are white Muslims or African ones; they thought it was just an Arab thing. And what the hell are Black Muslims in the US all about? They don’t know so they just make things up. Because the campaign is not about Islamic theology; it’s about vilifying a religion & fostering social hatred to justify military occupations, drone bombings, neoliberal colonialism & barbarism. And political repression.

It’s one thing to deal with the low-level crap of Islamophobia. We’ve heard it all before a thousand times because racism, prejudice, & stereotype all have a certain monotonous & moronic pattern. Every time they (& we should not have to identify who “they” are) want us to hate on another group, the chorus of media & academia start droning scary tales chalk full of boogie men. A lot of people still can’t see through that stuff. It usually can’t be reasoned with but there’s no need to get on a high horse about it because the learning curve to overcome social hatred is a tough one to navigate. And what isn’t responsive to reason folds like a paper tiger before the power of a massive social movement. The US Civil Rights Movement is only one case in point.

The good news is there is no high-level to this stuff. Even when it’s published in places like the NY Times or Washington Post or debated at Harvard or Oxford, it’s the cacophony of fools. Ignorant, stupid fools. The Washington Post published an article on October 6th titled “Ben Affleck & Bill Maher are both wrong about Islamic fundamentalism” which discusses a 2013 Pew Research Center poll of 38,000 Muslims about Sharia law, honor killings, stoning of adulterers, “death for apostates”, the role of women in society. The poll concludes, contrary to the title, that Bill Maher is in fact absolutely correct & Muslims are a dangerous homicidal lot. All 1.6 billion of them. If reports coming out of Israel about the massive support for Operation Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza are at all accurate, that means Muslims have a lot in common with Zionists.

You can parse that damn Pew poll as scrupulously as some evangelicals do the Bible but what’s the point!? It’s horse manure masking itself as social science. They have a section describing a methodology so paltry it would get flunked in a middle school social studies class. No distinctions are made between social classes, Muslim denominations, rural/urban differences, whether or not the country is currently under occupation or bombing, if there have been persecutions or pogroms against them, or if they live in a country like Egypt which had a revolution pulled out from underneath them by the Egyptian military & US Pentagon. We’re supposed to believe Islamic theology not politics produces terrorists because by nature it is hateful & bellicose when in fact it’s the producers of this crap who are hateful & bellicose–& stupid. Supremely stupid.

Read the damn thing if you like; do it on an empty stomach so there are no regrettable mishaps as a result. And be aware the Washington Post article represents Muslims much more unfavorably & succinctly than the report itself–even though it’s hard to be succinct about what 1.6 billion people think & feel.

http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/06/ben-affleck-and-bill-maher-are-both-wrong-about-islamic-fundamentalism/

But then watch this video of Mehdi Hasan, a British Muslim & political journalist taking out some academic Islamophobes at Oxford University student union. When he’s finished with them, they’re drooling spittle into their crotches & their disgrace alone is worth the viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahPQSsvqbyY

(Photo is still shot from video of Mehdi Hasan at Oxford debate)

What’s to say about Malala Yousafzai & Kailash Satyarthi jointly winning the Nobel Peace Prize for their “struggle against the suppression of children & young people”? Their reputations may never recover from receiving this odious honorific. It’s hard to tell what either one has actually done for kids but one hopes it’s a lot more than Henry Kissinger (who won the damn thing in 1973) has done for peace or Obama (who got it in 2009) who is orchestrating seven wars.

Since it’s inauguration as a prestigious award the thing has been tainted & full of baloney but when Kissinger got it whilst the US was raining bombs on Vietnam it became the moral equivalent of used toilet paper. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee owes this year’s two winners an apology. We send our condolences. From now on they won’t be welcome in the better venues.

We cannot let the 47th anniversary of the murder of Ernesto “Che” Guevara pass without tribute to the contributions he made to human freedom. His murder in Bolivia on October 9, 1967 by CIA agents is documented & not a matter of speculation.

Whether to cash in on his glory or neutralize him as a pop cultural icon, his image gave rise to a fashion called “Che chic” & his image has for years appeared on tee shirts & other garments. This has created controversy among less than great thinkers who want him denounced in the most scurrilous way or by those who think a tee shirt image unworthy of his contributions. To the former, we say “Eat your heart out!” & to the latter we say, “Lighten up!”

One of the most inspiring things about his tee shirt image is that it appears on the front lines of struggles across this globe over & over again–because whatever political misjudgments he might have had (& guerrilla warfare would be the first of them), he stood for & he championed the very best in human beings & he acted on his convictions. He believed in social transformation & in the ability of human beings to achieve it. And for that, he will always be honored.

Here his image shows up on a banner at a march in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico on October 8th. The Zapatista movement mobilized tens of thousands of Mayan farmers, teachers, students, & others to stand in solidarity & demand justice for the six murdered & 43 missing students in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The banners read “Your Pain is Ours”, “Your Dignified Outrage is also Ours”, & “You are not alone”. That is the heritage of Che Guevara & that is why his image will always be on the front lines of struggles against tyranny.

(Photo from Schools for Chiapas / Escuelas para Chiapas)

An unspeakable crime has been committed in the city of Iguala, Mexico in the state of Guerrero. On September 26th, municipal cops & members of a criminal gang (the distinction is false) ambushed & opened fire on buses of students from a local teachers college returning from a class trip to solicit donations for school supplies. It is likely not an irony that the students were also raising funds to finance a trip to Mexico City to participate in the annual protest commemorating the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968 when Mexican troops gunned down 300 protesting students in Mexico City.

It was a gruesome attack in Iguala & after the initial gunfire, dozens of students reportedly fled. Those who didn’t flee & waited for authorities to arrive were fired on three hours later by another vigilante group. A nearby busload of soccer players was also fired on, apparently mistaken for the same group of students. Six students were murdered (one of them was 15-years-old) & 43 remain missing from a massacre Guerrero authorities claim has no known motive. The mayor of Iguala, previously accused of links to criminal vigilantes, claimed on radio he knew nothing about the attacks because he & his wife were dancing. It’s uncertain why the Los Angeles Times reported on October 8th that the 43 students vanished “after clashing with police.” How does an ambush constitute a clash?

Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto dispatched federal troops to take over Iguala & arrested 22 municipal cops. (They ought to dance that mayor off to jail with them.) One media report suggests the vigilantes are linked to leftist guerrilla movements. Some tried to impute the students in drug trafficking. Nothing like grasping at straws for explanation. There is other media speculation the vigilantes were drug traffickers but the distinction between drug traffickers, Mexican cops, the Mexican government, US Banks, & the US Pentagon is becoming difficult to make. Even the governor of Guerrero acknowledged that the majority of cops in the state were coopted or infiltrated by organized crime. Why he excluded Pena Nieto from that indictment is less a matter of speculation than self-preservation.

Since the massacre, 28 bodies have been recovered from several mass graves. The perpetrators had doused the graves & set them on fire so it is uncertain if the remains are among the 43 missing. No quick assumptions can be made without forensic investigation & DNA evidence since mass murder & burial of undocumented immigrants from Central America by vigilantes is so common in Mexico.

The anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre might have been the worst political timing for another student massacre. Thousands of people, including teachers in the capital of Guerrero, protested in cities all over Mexico with banners proclaiming “Indignation takes the streets” & with images (as in this photo) of the 43 missing students.

Our fullest solidarity with the protestors in their demand for justice for the students murdered & missing.

(Photo by Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images)

We should take a moment to honor the doctors & nurses treating the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone, & Guinea. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) has 2,000, including 200 volunteers; last week Cuba dispatched 165 medical staff to Sierra Leone & will be sending 296 more to Guinea & Liberia when they finish training in how to deal with Ebola.

A medical degree in almost any country affords a comfortable life & for men & women to put that aside for dangerous humanitarian missions merits only the highest respect. With the exception of a photojournalist & Thomas Duncan, the man who contracted Ebola & died in a Dallas hospital, those affected thus far are medical personnel. We witnessed the same extraordinary humanity among doctors & nurses in Gaza during Israel’s barbarous Operation Ethnic Cleansing.

In ignominious contrast, Israel at first refused to send medical personnel to West Africa for fear of contamination. After realizing this only added to their growing image problem, they reneged & will be sending a few mobile units. The US feels no shame in sending 4,000 men with guns in place of doctors & nurses.

Rebukes aside to the hundreds of countries who haven’t lifted a finger to address the epidemic, we honor those men & women who express the most decent & glorious qualities of humankind by risking their own lives to serve.

This is a Doctors Without Borders health worker in Paynesville, Liberia. The little girl & her mother showed symptoms of Ebola & are waiting test results.

(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)