It has to be said that too often Palestinians are spoken for & rendered invisible–as if the brains & the theoretics of Intifada were in diaspora. But Intifada has not survived for over 67 years by blowing in the wind theoretically. Their political leadership is written off as either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas which both have substantial political problems that allow some to equivocate or weasel out of solidarity. Many anti-Zionist Jews are among the most cogent voices of solidarity but the most powerful are Palestinians themselves & the boycott (BDS) movement has begun to familiarize activists with their voices.
This video has an interview with Ronnie Barkan, an Israeli anti-Zionist activist, & with Haidar Eid, a Palestinian professor who lives in Gaza, who here gives a powerful elaboration of a democratic secular state which he counterposes to the racist two-state proposal. His explanation makes all the paltry apologetics for a Palestinian bantustate pale in comparison.
Another episode of “Law & Order”; another Iranian bad guy. It’s getting hard to tell them apart from outright propaganda. It used to be all Arab bad guys all the time. Either that or natural health practitioners peddling snake oil. But now it’s hating on Iran time.
A man just unfriended me in a huff when I objected to his use of the word “tard” as an epithet. I don’t like being a pain in the ass but I have a commitment to my deceased younger brother with a learning disability who visibly winced every time he heard that word & to those in the self advocacy movement of those with learning disabilities.
Self advocates consider the word “retarded” as hate language & work to eliminate its usage in any form. The proof of that is its constant use as an epithet to insult someone.
My experience in the self advocacy movement has convinced me “retardation” is a social construct that stigmatizes, shames, & isolates. It’s not that people don’t have disabilities, even incapacitating ones, but there is no reason to label them as if they’re afflicted rather than just challenged.
This is a rather poignant photo of the Karama-Gaza Human Rights Film Festival (Red Carpet) being held in the Shuja’ia neighborhood of Gaza City on top of the rubble created by Israeli bombing last summer. The festival on May 12th through 14th is for documentary films on the theme of human rights not just in Palestine & the Middle East but throughout the world.
The Karama (an Arabic word for dignity) Human Rights Film Festival was established in 2009 in Amman, Jordan to use film & culture for advancing social & political change in the Middle East since it’s one of the most dynamic & besieged regions on the planet. Along with the film festival, they sponsor other cultural events for theater, art, music, & educational programs for youth to advance human rights for children, women, refugees, & political, economic, social, & civic rights.
The education from reading Zionist walls is priceless–like a university of magical thinking & horse you-know-what: Hummus (an Arabic word) is an Israeli invention; Hamas goaded the Israeli military into killing civilians in Gaza last summer to discredit Israel; ISIS is now “competing” with Hamas in Gaza. No word on how they entered unless Israel airlifted them in. Or why ISIS would show up in Gaza after their barbarism in Yarmouk.
Zionists take great umbrage at recent exposure of Israeli war crimes in Gaza by the Israeli veteran & human rights group Breaking the Silence because the unidentified soldiers deployed in Gaza & testifying “could not have known the entire situation.” They were being demonized because “the IDF maintains the highest standard of ethics in wartime.”
And they’re blistering mad that Israeli military brigades to Kathmandu for disaster relief were dismissed as propaganda to deflect attention “from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank & the humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip.” There’s a lot of face palming going on over this report. Wait till they read about charges of Israeli baby trafficking from Nepal.
Social hatred like racism & misogyny change political discourse in ways that need to be examined. The big international (now tiresome) dispute is whether Charlie Hebdo is satire or racism. There may be those who think portraying African immigrants as fish-lipped pickaninnies passes as sarcasm but none who lived through Jim Crow (US apartheid) are so obtuse.
This comes up often in discussions around Obama & Hillary Clinton. Targeting his ethnicity or her gender are not political critique & the fact that they are corrupt politicians is no cause to let the dogs out. Their corruption is rooted in the system they represent & nothing else.
One of the ways it manifests with Obama is that discussion of his pandering to racism often leads to references to his own ethnicity. His ethnicity has nothing to do with his politics & no one has made that clearer than himself. People have to find another way to express incredulity that a Black politician would pander to racist stereotypes than drawing on old racist stereotypes like Uncle Tom or constant talk about his ethnicity.
Clinton may or may not be the Democrat’s candidate for president but she will be in the game for several months. Her vicious & dishonest politics should lay to rest the stereotype that women’s compassion makes them ideal leaders–a notion that should have gone out with Indira Gandhi & Margaret Thatcher. But criticisms, even excoriations, of her politics need no reference to her gender.
If social hatred weren’t a problem, this would not be an issue. But if the Charlie Hebdo travesty has taught us nothing else, it should be that satire will have to develop beyond stereotype. Satire is the genre of the oppressed; in the hands of the oppressor, it is nothing but garden-variety contempt.
Many people claim the Guardian-UK puts US media to shame for its political coverage. Well maybe it does, but that’s not saying much. How good do you have to be to eclipse Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, Jodi Rudoren, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd? That’s journalistic child’s play. They’re not media celebrities because they can think & write but because they can’t.
Now, however, the Guardian has shown itself to be a champion of civil liberties & freedom of the press. For the NY Times, it was the Pentagon Papers; for the Guardian, it’s the “black spider memos.” It fought hard-driving legal battles for ten years for the public release of the memos which are secret letters Chucky Windsor wrote (called “black spider” because of his distinctively puerile handwriting) to ministers in the British government expressing his views on various matters of state. To give this nonsense more gravity than it deserves, they claim the letters undermine the political neutrality required of the moochocracy.
Does this mean that under feudalism moochocracy is barred from freedom of speech? Does it mean English taxpayers are paying Betty & her indolent clan nearly $40 million a year for nothing? What the hell does it mean? And more important, why does anyone give a rat’s ass?
