Media has such a way with words, such delicacy in telling the truth when it comes to Palestinians. They don’t always lie but they never tell the truth. This is 3-year-old Shareef al-Namla who lost his foot “during the conflict between Israel & Hamas last summer.” So deftly, Operation Ethnic Cleansing becomes “the conflict”–like there was any kind of military symmetry between Gaza under embargo & Israel with one of the mightiest military machines in the world.

Those who don’t understand the ebbs & flows of social movements are bewailing that mass protests against Israeli barbarism have subsided & they assume this means a return to political indifference & continuing isolation for Palestinians. On the contrary. Political movements can’t stay mobilized without respite–though this can be a hard thing to accept. There will continue to be rallies around the world but the focus now is on building the cultural & economic boycott (BDS) of Israel, on broadening educational work so that mobilizations in the future will be even more massive.

Pensions & education are two of the things targeted by neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism. All over the world, there are pitched battles over these issues with seniors, students & teachers arrayed against regimes. Both are central to why Mexico disappeared 43 student teachers.

In the US, where higher education has always been expensive, it wasn’t until the early 1960s that working class kids had a shot at going to college. They needed more workers with high-tech learning & made student loans more readily available. It still wasn’t easy, but it was possible.

Apparently Bono (the minstrel name for Paul Hewson) sustained more serious injuries in that bike accident than at first thought–when they say he swerved to avoid hitting another biker. Given the reception for the last U2 album, foul play may be involved. Either that or a publicity stunt.

When they were producing the album earlier this year, Bono admitted “We felt like we were on the verge of irrelevance a lot in our lives.” Musical fans have been feeling the same thing for a long time now. Political observers are more damning & eschew the judgement of irrelevant for that of obsequious before power. What other self-respecting Irish citizen would accept an honorary knighthood from Betty Windsor for humanitarian service to Africa? The British moochocracy & former colonial power wouldn’t know humanitarian if it came up & kicked them in the ass. And neither would Bono.

A UN Commission of Inquiry has laid out a slate of accusations against North Korea for wide-spread human rights abuses & crimes against humanity including torture, political repression, executions, labor camps. Based on interviews with unspecified witnesses, the commission claims North Koreans face “unspeakable atrocities” & it’s trying to get the UN Security Council to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court.

Wow! Things must really be bad over there. We didn’t realize the UN could take such drastic action on the basis of second-hand information. It does make you wonder though why the US isn’t charged with something for shooting hundreds of unarmed Black kids down in the streets, for tossing thousands of them into prison for minor offenses like scratching their asses in public? Why aren’t they charging Mexico with some heavy accusations for disappearing at least 30,000 people in the past 8 years & for the deaths of 100,000 civilians in their so-called war on drugs? What about Israel & Operation Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza & the violent land expropriations in the West Bank? And come to think about it, what about Brazil, Congo, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq & a dozen later places? They wouldn’t even have to rely on second-hand testimony for those countries.

The one thing you can say for sure about Pope Francis is that he knows how to play both sides of the street. He’s been stringing gays along for a while now with equivocal comments about gay sexuality, same-sex marriage, & their place within the church. But equivocation is reaching its limits & the one thing that has become certain is that the pope will remain Catholic.

A few weeks ago he convened The Synod on the Family, a meeting of cardinals in Rome to reconsider the church’s traditional views on same-sex & divorced families. They concluded that God likes things just the way they are, in accordance with the prejudices of the College of Cardinals.

Now this week Pope Francis convened an ecumenical Vatican conference called Complementarity of Man & Woman. Well it’s ecumenical only in the religious sense with Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Mormons, Hindus, Muslims, & a pile of Catholic prelates. But that ecumenical thing really takes a beating when it comes to politics since most of those attending are about as right wing as they come. They’re the “traditional family values” crowd.

That complementarity thing has other limits, since of the 30 speakers asked to address relations between men & women, only six were women. One of them was a nun named Sr. M. Prudence Allen. Sr. Mary Prudence is an advocate of the New Feminism based on the teachings of Pope John Paul II who tried to root the complementarity stuff in his Theology of the Body–which looks to most like Sex Education 101: the physical make-up of the genders makes it appear they’re made for each other. How astute an observation! But from physiology John Paul II leapt to the social conclusion that women should reject male models of “domination”, value their roles as mothers & caretakers, & honor the “feminine genius” of empathy, emotive capacity, subjectivity, communication, intuition, interpersonal relations. And he thought he was being so original! When you translate that from Vatican Latin, it means the pope wants things too stay just like they were in 1952. Well you can take that empathy stuff as an excuse to deny women justice & shove it. John Paul is not the first to pull that stunt & he won’t be the last.

The big quote from Pope Francis coming out of the complementarity conference is that “children have the right to grow up in a family with a father & a mother.” Well that’s a problem in the real world. Because if neoliberal barbarism has done anything, it has smashed the foundations of stable social life, including family relations. War, immigration, unemployment devastate social life, separate families in the most wrenching ways. For example, it would have been good if Pope Francis had thought about the affects of Israeli ethnic cleansing on families in Gaza & it’s not too late for him to speak out.

Pope Francis has really taken up the mantle of New Feminism–which is the old family values schtick–& will be attending another conference on complementarity in the US next year. A lot of people hold out hope for the pope but he’s proving more & more that the new Vatican is very much like the old Vatican.

(Photo of Pope Francis from Fox News)

This little Afghan girl is harvesting cotton in the Balkh province, considered one of the most peaceful in the country. Of course, in a US-NATO occupied country, peaceful is a relative term signifying only that presently they’re not bombing it into smithereens & doesn’t include the barbaric conditions in the local coal mines. The tranquility here is only apparent.

Mazar-i-Sharif is the capital of the province & was the first city to fall to US forces in 2001. US Special Forces rounded up 8,000 Taliban fighters who had surrendered & massacred them. An Irish documentary titled “Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death” investigated those allegations & the filmmaker claims mass graves of thousands of victims were found by UN investigators. The Bush regime tried to block the investigation of what is an extremely gruesome war crime.

When Hillary Clinton, whose personality is wooden, if not robotic & whose politics reek of corruption & criminality, is considered not just the lesser of two evils but a desirable candidate, the US political system stands indicted. Her conduct as the shill of US foreign policy was despicable in so many countries but perhaps most evident in Palestine & Haiti. US policy in Palestine bankrolls apartheid & ethnic cleansing & she collaborated with Netanyahu to enforce them. She collaborated as Secretary of State with her husband who was freebooting in Haiti to set up that country as a sweatshop haven for US businesses.

The Russian dissident group Pussy Riot responded to the Maher-Affleck dust-up over Islamophobia by posting “We love Bill Maher – he is always extremely funny & smart.”

Has something been lost in translation? And going both ways? Have they misunderstood Maher & have we misunderstood them? Or does it all just signify the shallowness of political iconoclasm & grandstanding stunts?

In 2012, they walked into a cathedral wearing neon masks, stood on the pulpit & screamed punk songs with lyrics like “Virgin Mary drive Putin away!” They certainly shouldn’t have been prosecuted & sent to jail. And they certainly should have been defended. But they might want to spend some time developing a deeper social critique lest they end up a caricature like FEMEN–& also in the camp of Islamophobia.

Everyone is on edge awaiting the grand jury verdict in Ferguson. The governor of Missouri has declared a state of emergency & deployed the National Guard. The state & local police are all stockpiled with armored vehicles, tear gas, high-powered weapons. The FBI is putting out alerts about possible unrest.

The last time there was such tension & anticipation over a court verdict was the 1995 trial of O. J. Simpson. When the verdict of innocence came down, media went into high gear with jeremiads about Black & white polarization. Racism & cynicism were emboldened & people spoke openly of social harmony as a pipe dream. It was a scary time. Serendipitously, about a week after the verdict there was a scheduled Million Man March in Washington, DC led by Louis Farrakhan. The politics of the march were fairly conservative but attracted between half a million to a million Black protesters. The racism that was crescendoing & becoming voluble became mute in a flash. The exercise of power is a mighty force for social change–& intimidation.

This is the logo of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) which is now on a major fund-raising campaign. It’s Henry Kissinger’s “charity”. The Board of Directors includes Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Eely-Oily Weasel, magnates from JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, including Felix Rohatyn (who presided over the dismantling of social services in NYC during the 1970s) & James Wolfensohn (past president of the World Bank dismantling social services on several continents) & the usual cosmetic array of celebrities.