What a charming & bucolic scene in the occupied West Bank. The Yahoo caption reads: “Israelis cool themselves in a water spring located near the Jewish settlement of Givat Ze’ev in the West Bank, north of Jerusalem….Temperatures in parts of Israel & Palestine rose to 50 degrees Celsius as a heat wave visits the region.”

We’re going to be seeing a lot of this romantic rubbish as Israel’s settlement projects expand & Zionist settlers become more belligerent against Palestinians–like torching mosques, tearing up olive trees & poisoning water wells on Palestinian lands–like torching homes where Palestinians sleep & killing baby Ali & his father Saad Dawabsheh. So we better get a grasp of what’s going on.

A Facebook friend sent me a message chastising me for not writing about Palestine & Israeli atrocities. I wasn’t sure what planet he was flying in from so I checked his wall & it’s full of chemtrail stuff. He must be getting a snoot full of the stuff before he lands.

Ancestry.com, the site where you trace your family lineage, advertises with a guy who thought he was German but did a DNA test & found out he was Irish & Scottish. Color me skeptical that a DNA test can tell a German from a Celt–especially since the Celts derive from somewhere in the Rhineland. What would the DNA show in someone like me who is both Irish & German?

The same thing is true all over the planet. How do you tell an Indian from a Pakistani? Or a Mexican from a Guatemalan? Or a Palestinian from a Jordanian? Or a Ugandan from a Nigerian?

The UN Relief & Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was founded in 1949 to address the crises of refugees created when Zionist paramilitary terrorist groups in league with the US & UK stole most of Palestine & called it Israel. The UNRWA deals only with Palestinian refugees in 58 registered camps in five countries & is distinct from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which deals with all other refugees.

UNRWA is funded by voluntary contributions from the UN Secretariat, several governments, & some NGOs. The largest single donors are the US & European Union whose contributions make up nearly 50 percent of the total income. The money is not used to run the refugee camps but to provide health & education services to now 5.5 million refugees unable to return to their homeland whilst Israel recruits Zionist settlers to take their lands. There is increasing political pressure from Zionists & right-wing groups to eliminate UNRWA–which means eliminating health care & education for the refugees.

In a statement issued on July 25th–just one month before school opens–UNRWA announced it was financially strapped to the tune of $101 million “due to lack of funding by international donors” & might have to delay the start of school in 703 overcrowded schools in Palestinian refugee camps across the Middle East, affecting 500,000 students: 50,000 students in the West Bank, nearly 32,000 in Lebanon, 115,000 in Jordan, over 67,000 in Syria, & 225,000 in Gaza. That would also lay off 22,000 teachers.

Since the announcement, parents, teachers, & students in Gaza & in Jordan refugee camps have held rallies at UNRWA headquarters protesting the education cutbacks. One teacher in Gaza told an Al Jazeera reporter it wasn’t possible a big operation like UNRWA would discover the financial crisis just weeks before school opening. Protesters demanded the “international community” immediately come up with the dough because Palestinians should not be forced to give up their right to an education along with their right to return to their homeland.

When we consider the crisis of Palestinian refugees, particularly in Gaza under the Israeli embargo & in Syria under war; when we consider the housing & humanitarian crises in Gaza as a result of Israeli carpet bombing, including the bombing of schools used as UNRWA refugee centers; when we look at the recent UNRWA study showing the infant mortality rate in Gaza has risen for the first time in five decades, then, like the protesters in Gaza, we begin to smell a rat about the cutbacks in UNRWA funding that would force 500,000 children out of school.

Several human rights groups acknowledge that Israel directly targeted children in its murderous bombing siege last summer. Those who are pulling back their funding of UNRWA are proving complicit in that criminality. UNRWA publicly posted the names & amounts of 2014 contributions & we think it politically essential that they publicly identify those contributors who are withholding funds & willfully denying education to 500,000 Palestinian children in refugee camps.

The photo is Palestinian school children in Gaza City protesting outside UNRWA headquarters. Our fullest solidarity with their protests.

Defend Palestinian children & their right to education by building the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel. Demand no military aid to Israel but money for education, health care, & housing.

(Photo by Khalil Hamra/AP)

The 2016 US presidential campaign should mark the spot in history when the utter bankruptcy & banality of the two-party system & the corruption & sputtering ineptitude of US politicians was exposed for all the world to see. When Joe Biden is considered as a way to save the Democratic party from Clinton; when Huckabee & Trump, & the other clowns are even offered as options; when Sanders can support Israeli apartheid & talk like Trump on immigration & be considered the choice of radicals; & when serious political people like Scully & Bach are ignored by most radicals & excluded from debates, you know the system is in trouble.

American capitalism has a crisis of leadership that Donald Trump can sputter out the most racist & misogynist rubbish & still be a front contender. We wish that spoke to the latitude of the Bill of Rights rather than the power of social hatred in the US. It’s no longer certain elections aren’t staged every so often simply to make asses & a mockery of the electorate.

After Trump’s vituperations against women garnered such big headlines, he now feels he can pull his head out of his ass & say anything he wants without consequences. Talking to hog farmers in Iowa & assuming them as racist & stupid as himself, he now demands the end of the constitutional right to citizenship for all children born in the United States. Coherence isn’t his strong point; presumably he means denying automatic citizenship to those children born to undocumented immigrants.

When it comes to blowing smoke, Trump is second to none–not even Clinton or Sanders. He promises, if elected, to deport all undocumented immigrants. Obama has been trying to do that & he hasn’t succeeded. And neither would Trump because undocumented immigrants are essential to the US economy. If they were deported, all of agribusiness would collapse since it depends on the super-exploitation of immigrants & their children as farmworkers. The Obama regime assured the super-exploitation when he outlawed any further attempts by the Department of Labor to implement safety & protection laws for small children farmworkers in 2012.

Trump also repeats the vilifying charge that immigrants have an exorbitant crime rate, when studies done by innumerable reputable institutions going back a century prove their crime rate is significantly lower than those native born.

That this fool is even in the running does not speak to democracy of the US electoral system when Scully & Bach are excluded & unable to attain ballot status without hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s a rigged system; it’s a bought system & hasn’t a damn thing to do with democracy.

Immigration is a human right. Open the damn borders. Deport Donald Trump to an insane asylum in the Arctic region.

(May I add in a personal note that my father was an undocumented immigrant his entire life. His parents born here, homesteaded in Saskatchewan, Canada & had to relinquish US citizenship to take Native American land there. So under Trump’s proposals I should be deported to Canada. This gives me double pleasure to be running against his sorry ass.)

(Caricature of the fool by Don KeyHotez)

Gymnastics in the US used to be a lily-white sport. Now it’s dominated by Black athletes–both female & male. There still isn’t a level playing field since most Black families can’t afford the years of training required. And just like Serena & Venus Williams in tennis, the athletes sustain a lot of racism from competitors being left in the dust. But it’s like gymnastics has come into the real world.

FB prompted me to re-share this post from two years ago. It was written just over a month after Sisi & the military bounced president Morsi & openly took over Egypt. I would write it quite differently today but still stand by my assertion that defending the Muslim Brotherhood against massacres by the Sisi regime was not just the humane & democratic thing to do (regardless of the politics of the MB) but was a defense of the Egyptian revolution.

The military junta had worked with & manipulated the MB leadership under Morsi but turned on the MB to behead the revolution & protect military rule. Bloodbaths are not the method of social transformation but of tyranny. That distinction is never going to change.

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A propaganda war is on to justify the massacres & brutal military siege against the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt. How anyone who claims to stand for democracy & social transformation can defend these barbarities is one of the unfathomable enigmas of politics. (And that would be giving defense of barbarism its most charitable twist.) What is happening is a political process separating the wheat from the chaff in revolution & the revolutionist from the Islamophobe.

Palestinian protesters near the Al-Aqsa mosque last Friday hold up a placard of political prisoner Mohammed Allan who went into a coma after nine weeks of a hunger strike to protest his illegal incarceration. The Arabic on the placard reads, “No to the detention of Mohammed Allan”.

Allan was arrested last November in the West Bank as an alleged Islamic Jihad activist & placed in administrative detention, which means indefinitely without charges. It’s one of the many barbarisms of the Israeli occupation. His father, Naser Allan, said his son was expecting to be released June 6 & was “crushed” when Israel extended his detention for another six months. Under administrative detention, Israel can go on extending till the cows come home without formal charges. Palestinians have no rights in Israeli prisons. In protest, Allan went on a hunger strike as other Palestinian prisoners have.

When his condition worsened last month, Allan was admitted to Soroka Medical Center in the Israeli city of Beersheba but was recently transferred to the intensive care unit at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon. Under another Israeli barbarism approved July 30th by the Israeli parliament, the prison service can get permission from a judge to force-feed prisoners. This contradicts the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), the UN Human Rights Commission, & the World Medical Association which all consider force-feeding to be torture specifically prohibited under international law.

Lawyers & family members believe Allan was transferred from Soroka to Barzilai because Soroka medical personnel refused to comply with the new law & with a recommendation from Soroka’s ethics committee to treat Allan against his will, including performing blood tests or force-feeding. Two days after the Knesset passed the force-feeding law, Dr. Tamar Karni, head of the IMA’s ethics committee, showed up at Soroka to support the physicians defying the order. Karni later told Israel Radio that “Forcefully feeding him at this stage can kill him. We will not treat our patients forcefully. We are not jailers, we are not torturers.” Of course, the Israel Knesset is following the well-trodden path of the US & Obama regime at Guantanamo by flouting international law opposing force-feeding prisoners.

According to his father, Allan went on the hunger strike because he thought it was “the only way he can win his freedom.” He added that “Force-feeding means premeditated execution of the prisoner. This is a crime, & no doctor will be willing to be involved in that.” Not unless like US doctors involved in Guantanamo, they have political & psychotic affinities with Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele.

Like the hunger strikers of Northern Ireland under the Thatcher regime, Allan & other hunger strikers are posing a public relations problem for Israel & exposing the barbarism of Israeli apartheid & occupation. If Allan dies in their custody, Israel worries about an international backlash–& should be. His life is clearly of no consequence to them. But it is to us.

Our political response must be to demand the end of arbitrary arrests, the end of the occupation, the end of military aid to Israel. Building the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel is the most powerful solidarity we can express.

(Photo by Ammar Awad/Reuters)

Children are the only males allowed to live in Umoja, Kenya, the women-only sanctuary for victims of sexual & domestic violence. The village runs a school for the kids & it’s apparent from this delightful photo they are thriving in an environment free of violence–at least in the confines of the village.

(Photo by Georgina Goodwin for the Observer)

Umoja (“unity in Swahili) is a women-only village of 48 women & their children in Samburu Country, Kenya. It was founded as a sanctuary for women in 1990 by Rebecca Lolosoli, a feminist, & 14 other women she advocated for when they were raped by British soldiers garrisoned in the district. When she spoke up for the rape victims (who were stigmatized, some beaten & others accused of prostituting by their husbands & family) she was beaten by men in her village. When her husband did not protest the assault, she left him & founded Umoja with the other women.

The Guardian-UK is not the first to write on Umoja. More importantly, it’s not the first to completely misrepresent the story & turn it into a feel-good morality tale in the genre of white supremacy. As endless accounts going back years portray it, the rapes which set off the chain of events are an incidental part of the story. Some accounts don’t even mention them. What’s highlighted is the rebellion against the “traditional subordinate position of women” in Kenya, including forced & child marriage, female genital mutilation, domestic violence, rape–“all of which are cultural norms among the Samburu” people. It’s true most of the founding women of Umoja were socially ostracized & shunned by their husbands when they reported the rapes & the village now accepts women fleeing sexual & domestic violence of every kind. There’s no denying Kenya has widespread violence against women. It’s hard to find a corner of the planet that doesn’t.

Umoja is a marvelous countercultural initiative providing sanctuary to women but it is hardly a feel-good project. It relies for survival on charitable contributions & still only accommodates a small number of women–nothing compared to the actual number of women & children raped by British soldiers or sustaining violence. It is also surrounded by continuing violence under a repressive regime. Media reports that spiteful Kenyan men set up a village nearby by to harass & keep surveillance on the women. They don’t mention that England still maintains five military training facilities for over 3,000 soldiers in the region–which it has for 50 years. During that time, there have been hundreds of documented rapes by British soldiers. There are undoubtedly hundreds more unreported because the women are afraid of the social consequences. There is no current information on rape statistics by British soldiers in the region.

Communities in the region are pastoral & isolated victims would be attacked by soldiers in broad daylight while grazing animals, doing errands, walking; others were attacked in their homes. The rapes, including of children, were brutal–involving torture, beating, injuries; women say they were hunted down in packs & often gang raped. Many women had children born as a result of these rapes who also suffer humiliation & stigmatizing.

As early as 1972, village elders & district officers began reporting the rapes to senior Kenyan officials & to the British Army. The Kenyan government refused to intervene & the British government looked the other way, allowing widespread rape to continue with complete impunity. That situation prevails to this day. In 2003, 650 Masai & Samburu women rape victims took legal action against the British government. The British government accused the hundreds of litigants of forging hospital & police reports. Nothing has come of that suit to date.

In June of this year, Kenya & the UK negotiated a new military cooperation deal currently valued at about £58 million (Sh7.9 billion or US $91 million) a year. The pact allows up to 10,000 British troops a year to train in Kenya before they’re deployed to Afghanistan & Iraq. Britain wants a deal like the US has with Afghanistan & Iraq where English soldiers who commit crimes in Kenya fall under the jurisdiction of UK military law. Kenya wants them tried in local courts so the deal was only renewed until October. The rapes apparently were not mentioned in negotiations–only the murder of a herdsman by a British soldier.

The photo is the women of Umoja. Nineteen-year-old Judia (in the center) came six years ago to avoid being sold into marriage.

(Photo by Georgina Goodwin for the Observer)