This meme from Salman Rushdie is circulating on Facebook: “The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.” Such high-flown sentiment sounds so damn noble but it often masks a steaming pile of social hatred.

“Satire” when wielded by the elite against the oppressed is nothing but demeaning lies, ridicule, prejudices, stereotypes. It becomes abusive, violent, & the ideology of oppression. Blacks, women, Palestinians, Kashmiri, Dalits & other oppressed castes, Rohingya, Guarani & other indigenous peoples, & hundreds of other groups can testify to the psychological, economic, social, & political damage of that kind of satire. And to its utter repugnance.

The learning curve in politics can be a rocky one. Sometimes you have to learn from fools what you stand for & what you won’t. Years ago I knew a socialist fellow who was pretentious about his intellectual achievements so as to make others feel small. Done in by elitism, he went on to a respectable academic career writing tripe in defense of US wars & particularly odious crap in defense of Israeli apartheid. Advanced degrees couldn’t save his ass from the fatal flaw of thinking he was better than others & wanting to suck up to the status quo.

For a long while different memes have circulated showing photos of Robert De Niro with quotes condemning Israeli apartheid. They’re entirely fabricated, lying-assed things & whoever produces them should be held suspect–or at least in contempt. Palestinian solidarity only requires the ugly truth, not deceit.

De Niro is in fact a bold-faced, ardent supporter of Israel & a regular on the Hollywood pro-Israel circuit of fundraisers & private dinners with Netanyahu. He’s also a regular on the Democratic Party celebrity circuit. He often plays antisocial characters, which may not be far removed from type, & has never exhibited an iota of political rebellion against the status quo.

In December, the rightwing Breitbart tabloid published an article titled “EXCLUSIVE: Syrian Refugees Bringing Flesh-Eating Disease into US?” The question mark doesn’t make the xenophobic fear-mongering one bit more respectable.

The Breitbart article (with subheadings like “Volcano-like ulcers”) is about an infectious disease called Leishmaniasis caused by parasites & spread by sandflies. For over a year, health agencies, epidemiologists, & infectious disease specialists have been reporting an outbreak of Leishmaniasis starting in 2012 in Lebanon among Syrian refugees in the border region. The reports of medical personnel said the outbreak was treated with medications & contained.

The rightwing twitter world became abuzz with reports that ISIS was causing the “flesh-eating disease” to spread in Syria hoping it would wend its way with refugees to Europe & take out the population like the Black Plague. This likely came from the head of the Kurdish Red Crescent who in February 2015 claimed the leading factor behind the spread of the disease was ISIS dumping the corpses of their victims in the streets. But the sandflies which spread the disease don’t eat rotting bodies; they suck blood from living people.

Far more likely than ISIS intentionally spreading the disease–which would take out their own forces–is the complete destruction of the Syrian healthcare system as a result of Assad’s bombing. Recently, there are also reports of Russian bombers directly targeting hospitals & ambulances.

Health agencies (including the UN, World Health Organization, & the US Center for Disease Control) & epidemiologists report that Leishmaniasis is endemic to 16 of the 23 countries in the eastern Mediterranean region, including Afghanistan, Iraq, & Syria & is always a major health concern. They also pointed out that over four million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries are living in overcrowded makeshift settlements without sanitation, access to clean water, & thus increased exposure & vulnerability to disease.

The pathology of the disease, which varies by climate from Syria to India to Brazil to West Africa, is scary as hell. There are 20 different species of it. Some cause skin ulcers, some fatally attack visceral organs like liver & spleen, & children are the most frequent victims.

According to a WHO factsheet, the primary risk factors for Leishmaniasis are poverty, malnutrition, lack of health care, deforestation, urbanization. About 12 million people in 98 countries are currently infected with about 2 million new cases & up to 50,000 deaths every year. Because epidemics are among the world’s poorest people, pharmaceutical companies are not motivated to develop new drugs or vaccines & it is considered a neglected tropical disease. In other words, it’s a neoliberal pathology–caused by barbaric economic policies that destroy people’s livelihoods along with their healthcare systems.

Any reputable news service would do a little homework on Leishmaniasis before they started sending out red alerts. Breitbart isn’t that. But we will take advantage of their irresponsible, racist scare-mongering–what has been called “epidemiological xenophobia”–to learn about this disease & the pathology of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism.

Photo is a refugee in the Calais camp where thousands unable to move forward to the UK live in squalor without sanitation, access to clean water, or healthcare. Conditions are the same in Jordan, Lebanon, Greece, & elsewhere. To prevent the spread of infectious disease, the answer is simply open the damn borders & provide refugees healthcare & shelter.

(Photo by Philippe Huguen/Getty Images)

Yesterday marked the 207th birth anniversary of Louis Braille, the French inventor of the system now used by the blind in almost every language. Braille was blinded in both eyes at the age of three by playing with a tool in his father’s workshop. His parents went on to raise him without patronizing his disability or treating him as insufficient.

He attended one of the first schools for the blind & found the reading system then taught to be cumbersome. He was a creative, inventive person & at the age of 15 adapted a military code system into the braille reading system using an awl to create a raised dot pattern. An awl is the very tool which blinded him. Braille went on to teach history, geography, & algebra at the school but his reading system was not accepted in his lifetime. His lifetime however was brief & he died from respiratory illness at the age of 43.