Last week, thousands of Syrian refugees surged at the Turkish border at Akcakale fleeing from fighting between ISIS, Kurds, the Assad regime, & US bombers. The Turkish regime met them with water cannons & kept them standing behind barbed wire fences for days without shelter, water, or food while they tried to figure out a way to keep them out.

Yesterday, photos from Akcakale show refugees pushing through the barbed wire, breaking down the fences, passing infants & children across the fence while the Turkish military bombarded them with water cannons. This photo, also from yesterday, shows ISIS thugs railroading Syrians back from the fences to the city they fled. What more need be said in condemnation of the Turkish regime?

As the largest military component of NATO, Turkey has received billions of dollars in US economic & military aid for decades, ostensibly for counterterrorism & “regional stability.” The US has hundreds of military personnel permanently stationed in Turkey & has negotiate to  use Turkey for assaults across Iraq’s border. Turkey itself plans on deploying troops into Iraq, not to engage in combat they claim, but to “marshal refugees & safeguard an ethnic Turkish Turkmen minority in the Kurdish controlled region.”

So while they’re driving thousands of Syrian refugees back into the clutches of ISIS they’ll be rescuing Iraqi, Turkish, & Kurdish refugees from ISIS in Iraq? That’s the biggest pile of horse manure they’ve tried to peddle since the last time the Turkish regime opened its trap. That’s called Pentagon-speak.

Nothing speaks more loudly to the regional destabilization in the entire Middle East, caused by US-NATO, than the millions of refugees trying desperately to escape war & bombing.
No to US-NATO wars! Open the borders!

(Photo by Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)

This is a Kuna mother surrounded by her children (family not named in articles). The Kuna (also called Guna) are an indigenous people who live in Guna Yala, an autonomous archipelago off the coasts of Panama & Colombia. They have the highest rate of albinism in the world.

In some countries like Tanzania & Uganda, albinos sustain threatening, even deadly discrimination & persecution & are considered a curse on the family. In countries like the US, such social tensions are avoided by making people with disability invisible. They’re expected to stay out of public view & live in a parallel universe so the rest of society is not uncomfortable.

Traditionally, Kuna albinos were viewed as sacred, venerated, & gifted as Children of the Moon or Grandchildren of the Sun. With outside intervention from European cultures, that heritage is not always honored.

Albinos are of course not a curse but they do have special health problems, especially in the tropical sun where they suffer high rates of skin cancer & vision problems.

The contrast between viewing those with disability as sacred or a curse or invisible highlights the compelling need for humanity to stop constructing false explanations & hateful solutions for those born different but the same. To paraphrase the Roman writer Terence, “no human being is alien to us.”

(Photo from Reuters)