Enough with the melodrama about the strained relationship between Netanpsycho & Obama! To reduce the politics of Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing to a personality conflict is worse than banal. It’s political deceit.

It is possible the US objects to rhetorical excesses from Netanpsycho opposing the bantustate solution in Palestine & making it clear Israel wants all of Palestine–not because they disagree with Israel’s plans for the West Bank & Gaza, but because US neoliberal capitalism has long-term plans for Israel in the Middle East that Zionist irrationality & incitement threaten.

Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is US policy. The two countries are in cahoots & complete agreement. And the way we know that is because the entire Zionist assault on Palestinians would collapse without massive military & financial backing from the US. Is Obama squeamish about carpet bombing Gaza? After Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, that’s almost a stupid question. And the answer is, not in the least–or he wouldn’t have given millions more in military aid to Israel to carry out Operation Ethnic Cleansing last summer. Does he object to Israeli settlements in the West Bank? Not for a moment, because if he did he would cut off US funding to build them & for the Israeli occupation to make sure they get built. And he’d stop paying for settlers to move there. It’s the old “follow the money” thing. Or more aptly, follow the bombers & the tanks.

Israel is part of the US military phalanx in the Middle East & Netanpsycho understands that very well. He can blow smoke out his ass but the US will not cut the money or weapons flow. So he can blow hot but it’s just the neoliberal version of “good cop/bad cop.” Because in the end, what the US & Israel both want is the destruction of Palestine & the establishment of Israel as a military encampment. And in that regard, not just Palestinians now but Israeli Jews later are only the sacrificial lambs of neoliberal predation.

The most imperative historic mission is to build the hell out of the economic & cultural boycott of Israel & to demand no aid of any kind of Israel.

(Photo of the two schnooks from archives)

My neighbor stopped me today when I went to get the mail & told me she saw me she saw me interviewed on Spanish language television. This was news to me. At the Tuesday rally for the Aotzinapa 43 in front of the Mexican consulate I was interviewed & talked about the need to build international solidarity. The part on TV in English said “these parents are never going to see their kids again” but cut off as I continued with “without the broadest international solidarity” but in Spanish the reporter finished that thought.

I am hardly the center of this clip; it’s a very important event protesting at the Mexican consulate with the family members speaking and being interviewed here. It’s the first of many such rallies that will be held across the US as part of Caravana 43 to build the necessary solidarity movement.

I don’t believe I was so vain as to mention my blog www.maryscullyreports.com but the reporter must have googled it & showed it on the news segment. This is good.

Here’s the news segment: http://www.knvotv48.com/incrementan-las-llamadas-de-auxilio-en-la-ciudad-de-palmview/

(Photo is still shot from the video)

Media (& not just the lowbrow tabloids) are reporting the gruesome murder of a mentally ill woman in Kabul, Afghanistan yesterday for allegedly burning a copy of the Quran. It was such a monstrous crime that one wishes they could get the story straight. She was beaten to death by a mob, set on fire, & dumped in the river. Most accounts say she was also lynched. Was she lynched before she was beaten to death? Or after she was set on fire? Some accounts say the mob included “thousands” despite video evidence to the contrary.

The photo of the Shahi Doshamshira mosque accompanying the story seems to have no relationship to the crime except proximity & use value in war propaganda. Weren’t there other landmarks in the neighborhood? Why couldn’t they just describe the crime since it wasn’t ordered by the imam?

There isn’t much value in comparisons pointing out that of the fifty cities in the world with the highest homicide rate, none are in Afghanistan while the US has four. It’s not even useful to point out that according to the World Health Organization the cost of personal violence in the US is more than $300 billion annually. Violence is so routine here it no longer makes the headlines. Such comparisons, however, do not minimize the horrors of this crime against a young woman.

What’s not irrelevant is the $642 billion (only up to 2013) the US has spent in Afghanistan bombing the place to smithereens & terrorizing the people under the guise of emancipating women. Isn’t that beauty salon in Kabul working for them? Reportedly, Kabul police have arrested seven of the perpetrators. There weren’t over a thousand but there were several more than seven, including those psychos who took videos while the murder was going on. One only wishes media was as assiduous in reporting US war violence as they are in operating as crime reporters in Kabul.

Our deepest condolences to the family of this young woman. And our continued opposition to the US war in Afghanistan.

US out of Afghanistan! US out of Iraq!

(Photo by Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)

Neoliberal waste management in Cambodia: this is Seu, a 13-year-old boy who earns 25 cents a day scavenging the Anlong Pi dump site, the main landfill for the city of Siem Reap. In the US you can’t even buy a piece of candy for 25 cents; he’d have to work four days for a gum drop. In Cambodia he’d have to work two & a half days to buy a liter of water, five & a half days to buy a potato. And child labor may not even be the worst of this story.

Anlong Pi has become one of the pity stops on the colonial slum tour cycle & everyday bus loads of voyeuristic tourists show up from around world to snap photos of the scavengers. A lot of photojournalists show up too. One of the more obtuse who might better stick to photographing flowers said: “They can’t seem to understand that a better life is possible. In that world where Jasmine flowers cannot grow, nothing has any worth but the daily wage. Poisoned environment, rusty nails, or buzzing flies don’t bother them.” In what universe is that cement-headed photographer living!? Does he think poverty means you’re too stupid to distinguish the smell of flowers from rotting food & feces? “Buzzing flies don’t bother them”?

In fact, in 1998, when Taiwan dumped a mountain of mercury-laden toxic waste in Cambodia, residents began protesting & fled their homes en masse. Several hundred of them had fallen sick from mercury poisoning after scavenging. Cambodian government officials who had accepted bribes from Taiwan for the dump then arrested & imprisoned the two human rights activists who alerted residents to the danger. They were both charged with inciting riot.

This dumping of hazardous waste, including radioactive & hospital waste, is often illegal according to country laws. But there is an entire international industry built on it, not of mafia enterprises but multinational corporations. By bribing government officials, fraud, & flagrant criminal irresponsibility, plundering countries dump megatons of toxic waste in the plundered countries. There are established routes: the US to Mexico & Bangladesh; Japan to the Philippines; Hong Kong to China; Taiwan to Cambodia; Italy to Somalia, Nigeria, Lebanon; the UK & other European countries to Nigeria & other African countries. Just to cite a few.

Criminal irresponsibility is here indistinguishable from the most stinking malevolent racism & elitism that considers some human beings inferior & disposable. The only toxic waste dump worth a damn is the one where we quarantine neoliberalism, the barbaric, toxic phase of capitalism.

(Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)

Feminists around the world engaged in the titanic struggles against female oppression, who fight the state for reproductive freedom, against eugenics, employment discrimination, & barbaric violence against women are outraged at media misrepresentation of the movement as a white, middle-class, elitist project to break something called the “glass ceiling.” Most women are trying to get out of the minimum wage classification. We’re outraged that radicals demean & attempt to turn feminism into a campaign to legitimize prostitution, porn, & naked protests. But mostly we’re outraged that governments attempt to use women’s rights to justify war & genocide & use Islamophobia as a key element in that campaign.

Right-wing feminists, many of them huddled behind MS magazine, attempt to portray US wars as a crusade to liberate women. It’s no accident that many of them are also Zionists. The struggle against racism & social hatred is part of feminism, not at odds with it. But reactionary forces, connected to power through the Democratic Party, try to associate feminism with elitism, Islamophobia & war. Those feminists who reject social hatred must wrench the movement back from those who use it to serve neoliberal barbarism.

Today, Zionists are boasting of advances for women’s rights in Israel because 28 women were elected to the Knesset. Do those 28 women have the same politics as Netanpsycho? Do they stand with women’s rights for Palestinian as well as Israeli women or are they also racist up to their eyeballs? Do they make the face of Israeli apartheid a kinder, gentler thing or do they oppose it? Where do they stand on the embargo & carpet bombing of Gaza & on the settlements in the West Bank?

Last week, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, gave a touching speech to the General Assembly on women’s empowerment. Well if would have been touching if he didn’t include snide Islamophobic slurs & didn’t lie through his teeth about the status of women in Israel. He brought up stoning & honor killings & asked “Where else in the Middle East do you see women’s empowerment like you do in Israel?” Does he mean because women soldiers carry guns & participate in occupying Palestine? Because if you look at the reality of women’s lives in Israel, you can see our man is talking through his ass.

In the speech that would have been touching if there was an ounce of truth to it, Prosor said Israeli women “didn’t just break the glass ceiling; they shattered it.” But statistics speak louder than baloney: they show that Israeli women at the executive level earn 30% less than males & among ordinary working women, 25% less. And that doesn’t even address unemployment among Palestinian Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, & African refugees due to discrimination. Overall one in five Israelis live below the poverty line, giving Israel the highest poverty rate & one of the biggest income disparities between rich & poor of all the plundering countries.

It’s the same story with reproductive freedom in Israel. Abortion is only legal under certain circumstances & requires the approval of a committee. That’s bad enough but in 2013 Israel admitted to giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth control injections without their knowledge or consent, i.e., forced sterilization. As for prenatal care, for the past few years, Israel has been instituting austerity policies cutting back even more on social services–most importantly in health care for the poorest. With racism & ethnic cleansing as state policy, Bedouin Israelis are completely denied access to prenatal care, explaining their sky-high infant mortality rate.

There is one growth industry for women which Prosor didn’t mention: prostitution in Israel is a $500 million a year business. And homelessness is growing because Israel has a bloated military budget to sustain rather than build affordable housing.

So will the 28 women in the Knesset address the racism & misogyny of Israeli politics? Will they oppose apartheid, militarism, austerity, inequity, & genocide & forge alliances with Palestinians & African refugees against the regime? Because if they stand with apartheid, genocide, & neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, who gives a damn what gender they are!?

This photo is an Israeli homeless woman & her child in Jerusalem, Israel (2012) where there was an encampment of homeless people.

(Photo by Abir Sultan/EPA)

The Israeli elections weigh heavy on those who believe strongly in human rights so we need to step back to gain perspective & nourish our spirit with the things that make the human race so worth fighting for.

This magnificent photo is from an album called “The Roma Journeys” taken in India in 2001. Joakim Eskildsen, the photojournalist, traveled to several countries (between 2000 & 2006) including Finland, France, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Russia, India to gain “insight into the life of the Roma & the conditions they face.” The history of Roma always begins with their origins in northern India but few accounts report that many still live there.

Eskildsen said he didn’t know what triggered his interest in the Roma but after spending considerable time with them & getting to know them, the more his interest & affection for them grew.
There’s something very special about young girls at this age. They’re independent, feisty, often lippy, & full of exuberance before the weight of misogyny begins to bear down on them. Their names are Kamla, Mariam, Zarina, Manissa, & Sabnam. They’re in their twenties now. May their lives be blessed in every way.

(Photo by Joakim Eskildsen)

After election results in Israel today, Gideon Levy, the Israeli journalist, wrote an article in Haaretz entitled, “Netanyahu deserves the Israeli people, & they deserve him: If after everything, the Israeli phoenix succeeded in rising from the ashes & getting reelected, something is truly broken, possibly beyond repair.”

The article is more than plaintive; it’s a jeremiad. Levy says “The results are indicative of the direction the country is headed: A significant proportion of Israelis has finally grown detached from reality. This is the result of years’ worth of brainwashing & incitement.”

We knew that when we saw people pulling up easy chairs in the hills of Sderot to watch genocide in Gaza like it was a spectator sport. We understand Levy’s grief since he is a long-time impassioned opponent of Zionist settlements & ethnic cleansing. He calls himself a “patriotic Israeli” but rejects the bantustate solution as apartheid & calls for a democratic secular state but views it almost like a hopeless cause because of racism & rancor. He’s got a lot of evidence to support that cynicism.

One cannot deny the profound racism & mass psychosis of applauding genocide. One cannot pretend away the irrationality that insists opposition to Zionism is social hatred of Jews. But whatever their political dissonance, Israeli working people are not living in the promised land. Zionism is coming up empty handed for them. The concentrated fury directed at Palestinians is an attempt to resolve the deadly combination of Zionist false hopes & neoliberal austerity on the backs of Palestinians.

You can’t address that problem with sermons & pieties; it must be met with power, massive power–the power of Intifada combined with international solidarity, the power of BDS that extracts consequences for siding with genocide & apartheid. When you stand with the oppressed there’s no room for equivocations or mollycoddling the obtuse.

Will achieving this be easy? When has wrenching social transformation ever been easy? There was no sicker society than the US in the era of Jim Crow (the US form of apartheid). It was putrid with social hatred. The history is one of the ugliest in all of human history. The power of the Civil Rights Movement cut through that crap & transformed society. There’s been a regression which needs to be studied by the erupting civil rights movement but what’s important is that power & not bending to tyranny can change people. The social mysticism & hatred that blinds seems to fall away.

We should not buckle one iota to Zionism or let Israelis off the hook for supporting it in Netanpsycho. We need to build massive political pressure on them through exposing the lies & building BDS. But it’s way too early to give up on them. That’s not wishful thinking but a political perspective.

The caption to this photo read “Israeli border policemen & soldiers detain a Palestinian protester during a protest against what Palestinians say is land confiscation by Israel for Jewish settlements, near the West Bank town of Abu Dis near Jerusalem March 17, 2015.”

“What Palestinians say is land confiscation”–just like Gaza was bombed to smithereens ‘according to witnesses or Hamas officials who claim it was done by Israeli bombers’. Toying with language is another way of lying & making an ass of yourself at the same time. In 67 years of Zionist colonialism they can’t just say outright that Palestinians are protesting because Zionist settlers guarded by Israeli soldiers are destroying their olive trees, poisoning their water wells, beating up & arresting their kids, taking over their farm lands?

Who the hell does media think they’re kidding when they’re also full of accounts about settlements in the West Bank? When Netanpsycho made more settlements a selling point in his campaign? Whose land are they building those settlements on in occupied Palestine? Are they going to claim some patriarch was buried there 3,000 years ago & they have a Biblical land grant to the property?

Get real! And build the economic & cultural boycott (BDS) of Israel.

(Photo by Mohamad Torokman/Reuters)

Netanpsycho reportedly swept the Israeli elections & this is a very bad sign. Not because the alternatives would have rejected apartheid & ethnic cleansing but because it signifies popular support for extreme barbarism against Palestinians.

Media reports that this puts Israel at sharper odds with US policy, especially over accelerated Zionist settlements in the West Bank. How do they explain away the press release out of the Obama White House just a few weeks ago where his regime boasted they gave millions more of military aid to Israel during Operation Ethnic Cleansing last summer? Where they explained they gave millions to transport Zionist settlers to Israel, for temporary housing when they arrived, & for Hebrew language courses in Palestine where Arabic is the first language?

We cannot be daunted by this regrettable election result but only more determined to build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel (BDS) & to demand no aid of any kind to that barbarous colonial state.

Long live Intifada! Take it international! Build BDS!

These students & activists in Mogadishu, Somalia are protesting the illegal poaching operation of Italian fishing vessels in Somali waters. For years, all we read about was the threat of Somali pirates to international shipping by hijacking ships & demanding ransom for their return. But much of the “piracy” was directed at foreign vessels over-fishing Somali waters & destroying the livelihood of local fishermen.

Somalia is located in the Horn of Africa on the Gulf of Aden entering the Red Sea leading to the Suez Canal–a major international shipping route with an estimated 25,000 ships transiting annually to the Suez Canal. Its strategic location in Africa & in proximity to the Arabian Peninsula has given it special importance in colonialism (it was both British & Italian colonies), in the Cold War conflict between the US & Soviet Union, & in modern neoliberal plunder. And of course, the US claims it is now an “Islamist” & Al-Qaeda stronghold to justify drone bombing the country. If you look at a map, you can see it forms something of a military phalanx (including Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, & Bahrain) for advancing US military interests in the Middle East.

The World Bank & IMF have been there since the 1980s jacking around their economic & political life & prepping it for the devastation of endless US military incursions. Those barbaric incursions were glorified in the book & film “Black Hawk Down” about a battle between the US & Somali forces to portray colonial depredation as battlefield glory. (Those familiar with WWII movies will know the score.) For no apparent reason other than racism & to create a primitive image, local political leaders in Somalia who oppose US incursions are referred to as “warlords.”

According to a 1997 Greenpeace report & other investigations, Swiss & Italian companies brokered for European companies dumping hazardous waste in Somali waters. They worked with corrupt Somali government officials & other criminal elements called “warlords” to dump the waste in coastal waters or bury it along the coastline. According to that report, just between 1994 & 1998 there were over 10 million tons of hazardous waste dumps, including radioactive material. The Ecologist journal reported in 2009 that since 1991, 35 million tons of waste had been exported to Somalia in exchange for $6.6 billion dollars to government officials & “warlords.”

When the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit, waste containers washed up on the shores of Somalia. A 2005 UN environmental report said the hazardous waste deposits stirred up by the tsunami contaminated groundwater & caused health problems in the surrounding fishing communities, including respiratory infections, dry heavy coughing & mouth bleeding, abdominal hemorrhages, skin infections, & sudden death from inhaling toxic fumes.

Somali pirates originally formed as coastguard militia to protect fishing waters from foreign vessels taking advantage of the anarchy & chaos created by World Bank & IMF plunder & US military incursions to illegally fish & dump toxic waste. Media often refers to them as vigilantes but when the US destroyed the Somali government, that included an effective coast guard to protect Somali waters from poaching & toxic waste dumping. Of course what really rankled the US & European regimes about Somali pirates from the outset was their armed self-defense against colonial depredations. Such a thing could easily get out of hand & turn to effective armed insurrection against the US military.

From available reports, which are often laden with racism & vested interests, it’s hard to tell what is going on with Somali piracy today. With millions of ransom extracted on hijacked ships (an estimated $1 to 2 million per boat), it’s likely bigger forces of Somali & foreign capitalism got involved. Pirate fleets are now reportedly equipped with rocket launchers, GPS systems & satellite equipment & you have to ask who is supplying that equipment. Reportedly the insurance industry for shipping has found Somali piracy quite a bonanza by jacking up the premiums.

It’s estimated that Somali piracy employs thousands who go to sea, repair boats, supply food but they’re still coming out on the short end. Somalis may collect up to $100 million annually from extracting ransoms on hijacked ships but European & Asian trawlers poach an estimated $300 million annually in fish from Somali waters.

The US & European Union navies run counter-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden & have arrested dozens of Somalis who get prosecuted in European & US courts & are handed draconian sentences. Since colonialism has destroyed the court & legal system in Somali they are tried in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Yemen, Belgium, the US where they can’t possibly get a fair trial.

Justice demands we stand with the students & activists in Mogadishu not just in opposing poaching & waste dumping but in demanding the US get the hell out of Somalia–lock, stock, & bomber.

(Photo by Feisal Omar/Reuters)