The state legislature of Illinois has passed a bill to blacklist companies from state pension funds if they honor the economic boycott of Israel. Please sign & share the petition because the fight for BDS has now become a fight for civil liberties & the Bill of Right.

http://palestinelegalsupport.org/…/take-action-before-illi…/

Did you ever feel like this? There’s an allegory here & if that lion gets out of there alive he can tell us his side of the story. This photo of a lion escaping an angry herd of buffalo is taken in Maasai Mara, Kenya. Buffaloes are the primary prey of lions, tigers, & crocodiles. So it looks a lot like the allegory is all about the power of unity & numbers against the guy with the bigger jaws. At least some prefer to read it that way.

(Photo by Charles Comyn/Barcroft Media)

This is a bird covered in oil from the 100,000 gallons spilled by an abandoned pipeline into the Pacific Ocean off Goleta, California (near Santa Barbara). There’s always a different reason for oil spills: ruptured pipelines, sabotage or piracy on the line (by criminal gangs, & even the drug cartels in Mexico), typhoons & hurricanes, war & bombing, drunken captains, lack of maintenance. It’s always something with those oil companies, isn’t it!?

These oil spills have happened all over the world, on every continent, in every ocean. Plunder usually disastrously affects just the plundered countries but the oil companies have changed all that. They saw no reason to leave the plundering countries out of their catastrophes–not just with oil spills but with fracking contamination. And that would be the hallmark of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism: “chickens coming home to roost”.

The CBS drama Madam Secretary does such a good job of cleaning up how the US Secretary of State conducts business with foreign governments. A down-to-earth woman played by Téa Leoni wrestles with her conscience in negotiating treaties while spatting with her kids & necking with her high-principled professor husband.

Are they modeling the character on Secretary of State Madeline Albright who said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi kids were “worth it” to achieve US policy goals? Or are we talking Hillary Clinton who collaborated with Bill Clinton to turn Haiti into a sweatshop haven for US businesses & a personal ATM machine for themselves? Who turned a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Myanmar to advance US investments in the country? Who brokered arms to the Egyptian military to use against the Egyptian uprising & advocated US military intervention in Libya? Who supported Israeli carpet bombing in Gaza last summer claiming Hamas “provoked” Israel?

This is a little Rohingya boy waiting to take a shower at the temporary shelter in Bayeun, Aceh province, Indonesia. It takes a goofy kid with what looks like a sauce pan on his head to highlight how irrational social hatred is–& to make us laugh at a very somber moment in time. Thank heavens for the kids.

(Photo by Tatan Syuflana/AP)

Zionism is a right-wing ideology which in its inception rejected the broader struggle against racism & colonialism. It’s an elitist doctrine which cannot resolve issues of persecution or address the problems of Jewish working people because social hatreds like racism & antisemitism can only be rooted out of human society through solidarity. That’s the iron law of social transformation which Zionism rebuffed.

Now in an interview with Atlantic magazine, Obama pulled one of his fast ones by linking Zionist Israel’s colonial right to exist by dispossessing Palestinians to the struggle for Black civil rights in the US–a movement he has no credentials in as an activist or supporter.

This is a Rohingya mother waiting as her child drinks water after getting off the boat in Julok village in Kura Binje, Indonesia. Some of the arrivals reported they were drifting at sea nearly four months with very little food & water.

We should take a moment to honor these parents & to imagine what it must have been like to go through months not knowing if your child or children would survive. There were likely those who did not. Terror, stoicism, & grief for your children must combine with your own starvation in a complex of psychological misery & take a terrible, lasting toll on these young parents.

Just because you’re poor & undocumented doesn’t mean you don’t know when you’re being treated like cattle–or that it’s okay to treat you like that. These are Rohingya men & boys rescued in Bayeun, Aceh province, Indonesia being transported in a truck to a detention center.

Indonesia has a great big military with all sorts of personnel carriers. Couldn’t they have commandeered a couple of those to transport the immigrants with some measure of comfort & dignity? Or at the very least couldn’t they have cleaned the manure out of this truck before they loaded it up with exhausted, malnourished people?

There are some very troubling signs in several countries indicating collusion between governments & the Zionist movement in the political containment of BDS & intimidation of the growing Palestinian solidarity movement. There have been several initiatives under the guise of identifying anti-Zionism with antisemitism: one is the lawsuit against the Palestinian Authority in a NY court by Shurat HaDin, the Israeli law firm associated with Mossad, for aiding & abetting terrorism; there are legislative initiatives in the US against companies honoring BDS; a Palestinian support event was banned on a university campus in England; a professor in Australia is being prosecuted for supporting BDS; a Canadian official is talking about making BDS activity illegal;

The Palestine Solidarity Legal Support (Palestine Legal), in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), released a report this week saying in the US they had 102 requests for legal assistance from campus solidarity activists just in the first four months of 2015 after being harassed & intimidated as antisemitic or supporters of terrorism.

Shurat HaDin, which received training from the Southern Poverty Law Center, has on its masthead: “Bankrupting terrorism–one lawsuit at a time.” And that is certain to be a method they will employ against BDS groups to tie up resources & personnel in civil liberties law suits.

Shurat HaDin calls itself a civil rights organization. They would not be the first organization to identify their purpose with high principles to carry out anti-democratic & politically reactionary work.

Now in an interview in Atlantic magazine, Obama linked Israel’s right to exist with the struggle for civil rights in the US–which he hasn’t lifted a finger to advance. “There’s a direct line,” he said, “between supporting the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland & to feel safe & free of discrimination & persecution, & the right of African-Americans to vote & have equal protection under the law.” There’s a direct line between colonialism & voting rights? We only wish our man would allocate as many resources to protecting the US Black community from police violence & discrimination as he does to an apartheid state engaged in ethnic cleansing.

What concerns Obama & Israel & all their Zionist front groups is not civil rights for Black Americans but the new political solidarity forged between Palestinians & the Black community after Ferguson. Such a dynamic would be disastrous for Israel’s apartheid project. That’s why Zionist groups organized buses to attend rallies in Baltimore. Civil rights for Blacks is only to cover their ulterior motive of linking Zionism to justice–with which it is absolutely incompatible since Zionism is based on a rejection of the broader struggle against colonialism & racism. Zionism is racism & it has been unable to contain that reality within Israel itself by discrimination against Palestinians, Ethiopians, African refugees, & occupation of the West Bank & Gaza.

There is no reason to be daunted by the crescendo of Zionist attacks. They only emphasize the importance & the power of BDS. What they signify so clearly is the historical importance of the Palestinian struggle. It is surely one of, if not the most important political struggle in the world today. Palestinian Intifada stands as a beacon to suffering humanity. It is, for the US, not just a matter of controlling the Middle East but of destroying the exemplar of popular struggle against tyranny & colonialism which the Palestinians represent.

Our commitment must continue to be building the economic, cultural, & educational boycott of Israel so that we may contribute to forging a democratic, secular state where Jews & Palestinians live as brothers & sisters–& stand united against colonialism, racism, & social hatreds of all kinds.

(Photo from Electronic Intifada)

There are so few stories coming out of the immigration crises in the Andaman & Mediterranean Seas that aren’t tragic because it is the suffering of so many confronting the barbaric indifference of governments. Whoever called the poor “the wretched of the earth” hadn’t yet met neoliberal politicians willing to let thousands drown & starve to death without lifting a finger. Actually such crimes were always a part of colonial history but now they stand exposed & humanity (individually & collectively) must choose where we stand: with human solidarity or with barbarism.

Lampedusa (which has an immigrant detention center & is a transit point to Europe), is a tiny island under 8 square miles (20.2 square kilometers) with a population of 4,500 people engaged primarily in fishing & farming with tourism a thriving business. After the Arab uprisings & US-NATO war against Libya, the island was deluged with upwards of 60,000 refugees, mainly from Tunisia & Libya. Those most concerned about refugees were small shopkeepers afraid refugees would deter tourism & who attempted to prevent immigrant boats from landing. The coast guard had to create a landing area behind a phalanx of armed police.

Most immigrants lived in the streets & there were riots because the 850 bed detention facility was an overcrowded hellhole. The mayor then (2011), Bernardino de Rubeis, was inflammatory & led the campaign against immigrants for ruining the island. What does it say that in 2013 our man De Rubeis was jailed for over five years & disqualified from public office for life for extortion & accepting bribes in exchange for illegal dumping of waste? If you want to hurt the tourist industry, there’s nothing like mountains of stinking garbage.

All that has changed under the present woman mayor of Lampedusa named Giusy Nicolini, an outspoken advocate for immigrants. In 2013, off the coast of Lampedusa local fishermen rescued people from a capsized immigrant boat. The residents of Lampedusa, led by Nicolini, compassionately welcomed the survivors & continue to provide shelter in churches, blankets, & food. Nicolini publicly criticized the Italian coast guard for botching the rescue & continues to speak out against EU immigration policy.

In the Andaman Sea, Thai, Malaysian, & Indonesian navies prevented immigrant boats from landing & pushed them further out to sea–adrift without food, water, or engines, many in need of emergency medical care. The headlines today read that after Indonesia agreed to temporary sanctuary, Indonesian fisherman rescued & towed the boats to shore. One fisherman who led the rescue was Razali Puteh who after spotting a drifting boat of refugees rallied other fishing boats to help bring immigrants to shore. When the refugees landed photos show Acehnese residents carrying those who are sick to shore. That was while Indonesia’s foreign minister was saying the country had “given more than it should” to help Rohingya & Bangladeshi refugees.

There’s no reason to draw cynical conclusions about the human race from these immigration crises. But there is every reason to question the character of political leadership. What seems an insurmountable crisis to the politicians was managed quite simply by working people. This might suggest that the people running this world are the wrong class of people, that they are truly the wretched of the earth. And the human race deserves far better.

The photo is an Acehnese fisherman rescuing refugees at sea. Our deepest respect.

Immigration is a human right. Open the borders.

(Photo by Binsar Bakkara/AP)