Not to be petulant at a time like this for Palestinians, but if you call yourself a leftist & continue to support Bernie Sanders, knowing he supports Israel in its monstrous pogroms against Palestinians (& if he does not speak out vehemently against what’s going on, he supports it), you’re either a François Hollande-Hosni Mubarak kind of socialist, possibly completely stupid, or hopelessly unprincipled. There’s no nice way to say that. Sometimes the truth is ugly. And by the way, shame on you.

The fatal shooting of an Israeli settler couple in the West Bank (last Thursday) has unleashed an alarming maelstrom of settler & military violence against Palestinians–even though Israeli authorities don’t know who committed the crime. If people recall, the carpet bombing siege of Gaza in 2014 was initially justified by the kidnapping of three settler teens in the West Bank. Israel immediately attributed the crime to Hamas when we later learned they knew that to be false.

When we look at the provocations at Al-Aqsa mosque in conjunction with the pogrom launched against Palestinians in the West Bank, we might conclude Israel is deliberately provoking Palestinians so they are accused of perpetrating violence when they defend themselves against it.

This Israeli cop is using pepper spray on a Palestinian activist defending Al-Aqsa mosque. It should be noted that when a campus cop at the University of California (UC) pulled this on students during the Occupy movement in 2011, photos & videos of the incident went viral because it is so egregious & gratuitous in aggression. One of the UC students sprayed that day said the pain is like “thousands of pieces of glass shooting into your eyes.” There are also deleterious health affects from pepper spray, especially for those with respiratory problems.

Since the death of evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould in 2002, there’s been no scientist of his intellectual stature & political clarity to answer the intellectual flatulence & pomposities of Richard Dawkins. Gould was always more than collegial in debates about Dawkins’ mechanical views of evolution–as befits two elite university professors. But some still think he should have used a meat cleaver as a more suitable instrument for the paltry-assed ideas expressed in Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene.”

Wednesday, October 7th, is the 14th anniversary of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan. As we know–from mostly alternative media’s altogether scanty reporting–bombing continues & Green Beret atrocities continue against civilians. Obama lies about the war winding down–& Afghans continue to die & suffer.

The international antiwar movement, including in the US, is weak at a time when US bombing & wars are expanding at an alarming pace. You can’t magically wish an antiwar movement into existence–no matter how imperative the need for solidarity with the people of Afghanistan & elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to that political default.

As an antiwar activist since the Vietnam War, I am accustomed to marking the end of personal friendships by the beginning of a war. Many of my family estrangements have not yet healed from the Vietnam War. It wasn’t me who cast off friends but they found it intolerable I would oppose US militarism. That’s life. If we allow personal friendships or kinship to determine our politics, we would become apolitical rag dolls.

Now, with catastrophe looming in Syria, there is a list of people who found FB friendship intolerable with me. FB friendships can be fickle because people feel deeply about politics. Again, that’s life.

French president François Hollande is the same kind of socialist as Bernie Sanders–the racist, xenophobic kind that oppose immigration & support war. His regime has shamefully been razing the shanty towns of Roma & deporting them to Romania in direct violation of the Schengen Agreement allowing working people free movement across borders within EU countries. France & Romania are both EU members. Actually many of them never lived in Romania but grew up in France.

So it comes as no surprise that Hollande’s regime has been less than hospitable to refugees–using police violence against them at Calais & demolishing refugee camps set up near Paris under train trestles & elevated metro lines, in outlying areas, & across the county.

It cannot be recommended highly enough that people adopt rescued animals. The gratitude of an abandoned dog for his/her new family is something to behold. Cats always want you to understand it was you who was rescued.

PBS did a special report tonight on the 10th anniversary of the Muhammad cartoon controversy when a Danish newspaper published twelve editorial cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in demeaning & outrageous ways. The publication set off protests by Muslims around the world–which media characterized as violent riots.

The PBS report interviewed the editor of the paper & two of the cartoonists who all live under guard because of death threats. The entire coverage was about the right of blasphemy in democratic societies & included homilies about how Muslims have to learn tolerance & put up with ridicule in the interests of democracy. The assumption is that all Muslims are involved in the threats rather than just some extremists–because of course, all Muslims are terrorists.

Iconoclasm is an old tradition in art. Dada art in Weimar Germany used it to pillory the corruption of the power elite & did not exempt religion in their sarcasms. But just as old as that artistic tradition are protests & even vandalism by religious groups against insults to their beliefs. There are thousands of protests by Christians against films like The Exorcist, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, The Passion of the Christ; protests against art exhibits like that of Robert Mapplethorpe (for pornography), Chris Ofili & Andres Serrano (for blasphemy), even Picasso for Guernica; protests against writers like Salman Rushdie, Henry Miller, even Gustave Flaubert for Madam Bovary.

Much of the stuff is offensive if you consider respect for religion important even if you don’t agree with the beliefs. Many people don’t have that respect & want to push the limits of free speech with insult. Others are just working out psychological conflicts in their break from religion or over sexuality. Iconoclasm is risky art & hardly all worthy. If you’re going to produce it, you probably hope it will offend–which doesn’t mean you deserve a death sentence but does mean you’re going to get some flak.

The difference with the Muhammad cartoons, like the Charlie Hebdo crap, is that the works are not directed at abuses of authority but intended to offend the believers themselves & are an act of aggression & contempt. Satire directed against power is a weapon of the oppressed but against the marginalized & persecuted is nothing but lowlife ridicule to make them feel small & powerless.

In 2005, when the Danish paper published the cartoons, the US was using Islamophobic social hatred to justify its barbarisms in Afghanistan & Iraq. While Christians are not persecuted in most places, Muslims were & are sustaining ethnic cleansing in several countries like India, Kashmir, Burma, China, Bosnia, Sri Lanka.

Those who defend this iconoclasm against Muslims point to Islamic fundamentalism & repressive Islamist regimes. There are compelling social, economic, & political reasons for the emergence of Muslim fundamentalism & these need to be studied. Shooting your mouth off in one genre or another contributes to persecution & violence against Muslims & has precious little to do with free speech.

This is not a defense of fatwas or vandalism against artists but a simple assertion that when the target of blasphemy & insult are people whose practices are being outlawed, mosques torched, & countries bombed, then iconoclasm in art becomes a weapon of oppression & not an expression of human freedom.

The photo is The Holy Virgin Mary by British artist Chris Ofili which provoked protests & threats when it was hung in the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 because it includes elephant dung. It was eventually vandalized.

Can someone explain, to those of us who are confused, what Palestinian state that flag now flying at the UN represents? Is it the bantustate of Gaza which the UN says could be uninhabitable in less than five years? Where half a million people are displaced, homeless, & living in cement rubble? Where 75 percent of the households are “food insecure” & which Israel still controls with an economic blockade?

Or is it the West Bank bantustate under military occupation by Israel–the one surrounded by a cement wall where Palestinians have no rights, where settlers torch homes & mosques, poison water wells, uproot olive trees, brutalize & murder children with impunity? Where Israel keeps confiscating lands for Zionist settlements? Where Palestinian protesters are incarcerated for at least four years for throwing rocks against rubber bullets, grenades, tear gas, armored vehicles?