Editors are not writing a book when they caption a news photo but they are reporting news & ought to offer a coherent explanation of what’s in the photo. After identifying these women as relatives of “missing Kashmiri youth” attending a rally yesterday, the editors said according to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) who organized the rally, “more than 8,000 people have allegedly disappeared in the conflict-ridden Himalayan territory.”

It’s a damn good thing we know what’s going on otherwise we might be left to wonder why so many young people are disappearing. Are they just walking off into the sunset? Are they running away from home? Are they running off to join the circus or see the world? Why is it alleged? Do they think the kids could be hiding out somewhere? Is there some reason to suspect the parents are lying & in fact their kids are home watching television? And what’s with the “conflict-ridden Himalayan territory”? Is it “conflict-ridden” because kids just can’t get along with their parents? Are these Kashmiris a testy, irascible lot who can’t get along with each other?

The Indian occupation of Kashmir is often called a “low intensity conflict,” a military concept that came into vogue in the 1980s during US wars in Central America. It wasn’t really a new way of waging war but a military public relations gimmick devised to circumvent massive international antiwar sentiment prevailing from the Vietnam War. That opposition called the “Vietnam Syndrome” was considered a pathology that needed to be overcome & such gimmicks were part of that.

There’s no way in hell over 700,000 Indian troops in Kashmir with a population of 4 million people can be considered low intensity warfare any more than US use of Israeli-armed death squads & proxy guerrilla forces were in Central America. The only military element that seems to be missing is aerial bombing. By that definition, the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem & the West Bank are also low intensity conflicts–though not of course Gaza. There’s nothing low intensity for those subjected daily to occupation & barbarisms like extrajudicial executions, torture, mass rapes, mass incarcerations without due process, an estimated 70,000 murdered, & thousands kidnapped & disappeared by Indian forces.

One of the most active political forces in Kashmir is the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) co-founded in 1995 & led by Parveena Ahangar, known as “the iron lady of Kashmir” for her fearless & steely determination mobilizing family members of the disappeared. Ahangar, who was married quite young & has no formal education, became an activist in 1990 when her 17-year-old son Javed Ahmad Ahangar was picked up by the Indian army during a night raid & disappeared.

The APDP estimates that between 8,000 & 10,000 have been disappeared in Kashmir since 1989. They hold monthly rallies in Srinagar demanding the Indian government cease this monstrous practice & answer for those arrested, tortured, murdered, & dumped in unmarked mass graves. They recently released a 2016 calendar with sketches for each month showcasing one of the young men disappeared. The photo here is three pages from that calendar.

The APDP was part of The International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights & Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir (ITPK) which issued a report titled “Buried Evidence” about their investigation between November 2006 & November 2009 of 2,700 unmarked mass graves. It’s an absolutely gruesome report where the investigators report being intimidated & threatened by Indian military personnel; were refused access to entire districts to examine unmarked graves; were unable to identify many bodies because of evidence of disfiguring torture; interviewed gravediggers commandeered by the Indian military who remained traumatized at what they witnessed & were forced to do. The ITPK interviewed community people who saw bodies thrown in rivers & found evidence that many disappeared were transported to places like Gujarat in India proper & executed & buried there.

The Kashmiri struggle for self-determination is vilified by Indian government claims that foreign militants & terrorists are crossing the border & infiltrating, especially from Pakistan. They use this to justify summary executions & explain away the numbers of those in unmarked graves. Even if they were foreign operatives, whatever happened to due process? The idiocy of the claim is exposed by the presence of 700,000 military personnel not against foreign militants but against the Kashmiri people.

The investigation found that most victims of disappearance were men & young boys & found only a few women victims. It’s a particular form of social control & malignancy that targets males to terrify & leave vulnerable children & women. What’s remarkable is that Kashmiri women have been so steely in standing up against mass rapes by the Indian military (as another form of social control) & against disappearances.

Our deepest respect & fullest solidarity with the struggle for self-determination in Kashmir.

For those who would like to read the ITPK report:http://www.kashmirprocess.org/…/g…/BuriedEvidenceKashmir.pdf

(Photo of 2016 APDP calendar from Hindustan Times)

The Powerball draw is going to be $1.5 billion this coming Wednesday & I bought myself a two buck ticket. I’m gonna come clean with you. If I win I’ll send all those who like my posts a couple thousand bucks each. But that won’t be till I get back from a long shopping spree in Rome & a vacation in St. Tropez.

Those of you who never like my posts can just hang it up with dreaming for some largesse. I’m a vengeful woman–growing more so as I age. And it’ll be too late to make up for lost “likes.”

What will I do with the $1.4 billion left after my shopping spree? My commitments won’t change, I assure you, but my manner of honoring them will be much lazier–involving mostly a check book. My marching days will be over while I try to finesse my way into the ruling class despite my FBI dossier.

This is the funeral cortege yesterday in the village of Sae’er for four Palestinians shot dead by Israeli troops near Hebron in the West Bank. The reporting on their deaths is a travesty of journalism & shows what debasement happens when journalism becomes the groveling minion to power–in this instance to Israeli apartheid.

Some reports say the fatal shootings were on Thursday; most say Saturday. Only one report mentions the deceased are men; none give their names. Most of the accounts say according to the Israeli military the Palestinians were shot dead in two separate stabbing incidents in the West Bank & include statements like this from the Associated Press report: “The incident is the latest in more than three months of near-daily Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians & soldiers that have killed 21 people, mostly in stabbings, shootings & car-ramming assaults.”

The media reports are what you might call generic–collective, non-specific, no-name. Some Palestinian guys got out of line; Israeli soldiers had to take them out. Their names don’t matter. They don’t matter. Because if any serious journalism was actually done of these shootings, the monstrous truth of Israeli apartheid & colonialism would be exposed for all the world to see.

Reuters is the one media source, & only in one sketchy report, that gave any details to the execution of two of the four men. Reuters made the declarative statement that Israeli soldiers shot dead two Palestinian men when they tried to stab soldiers at the Bekaot checkpoint. However, the report goes on to say a Palestinian taxi driver “who asked not to be identified” refuted this story. Reuters might have asked him why he declined to be identified. Was he afraid of retaliation by Israeli authorities? Anyway, according to the cabbie, three cars were in line at the checkpoint waiting to cross. Soldiers signaled the two men in the car ahead of him to move forward & when they did soldiers opened fire on them. There was no provocation; they never got out of the car or brandished knives. Reuter’s intrepid reporter adds, “A military spokeswoman asked about the taxi driver’s account said the army was still looking into the incident.”

Reuters then added the de rigueur mantra: “Since Oct. 1st Israeli forces or armed civilians have killed at least 139 Palestinians, 89 of whom authorities described as assailants. Most others have been killed in clashes with security forces.” What kind of respectable media relies on what authorities say? Especially when the authorities are the ones accused of murder? What the hell is the point of investigative reporting if your only source is the occupying military & Palestinians aren’t even asked their version of events? Isn’t that the very definition of propaganda?

As for the other two executed Palestinians, no media source thought to ask any of the mourners what happened, who were the two people shot, what were the circumstances. Because media reporting of Israeli apartheid & Palestinian Intifada is a con, a travesty of journalism, nothing more than propagandistic horse manure. So the less you tell, the less likely you’ll get caught talking through a horse’s ass.

The only way to thwart propaganda is to build the economic, cultural, academic boycott of Israel (BDS) & demand no aid of any kind to apartheid Israel.

(Photo by Majdi Mohammed/AP)

Recently, several media sources, including rightwing Zionist media, have circulated a poll taken in the West Bank by an outfit called the Palestinian Center for Policy & Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah. The headlines read “Poll shows Palestinians support violence not diplomacy”; “Poll: 2/3 of Palestinians back stabbing attacks, armed uprising”; “Majority of Palestinians support knife attacks against Israelis, unless the attacker is a young girl”.

The director of PSR, Dr. Khalil Shikaki, said in an interview that he found the results of his poll “very frightening & pessimistic.” Since he only issued the poll as a press release, the methodology used is not available for scrutiny. However, it’s based on uncritical acceptance of Israeli claims that Palestinians are on a knifing spree while Palestinians claim knives are being planted on executed activists–a much likelier scenario.

Actually, when you look at the summary of the poll, it doesn’t seem at all frightening or pessimistic but in fact quite promising in several ways: Palestinian activists reject their politically corrupt & geriatric official leadership like Mahmoud Abbas–they want him out; a majority oppose the Oslo Accords; they don’t trust peace negotiations like the phony ones brokered by the US State Department & they prefer the popular resistance of Intifada. What’s such a downer about such clear political vision?

But there’s something not quite right about a research institute that would release this kind of inflammatory data at a time when Palestinians are being massively assailed by the Israeli military & settlers. Something even worse than not quite right, but outright treasonous to Palestinians.

A little closer look at who this reckless Dr. Shikaki is explains everything. He has an unsavory political history of collaboration. He once did a poll showing 4.3 million Palestinian refugees in their majority were willing to bargain away the right of return. Such a conclusion is not based on a scientific poll. He’s talking through his ass & we know that because it belies 68 years of Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonialism.

Not only is Shikaki director in absentia of the PSR, but he is a fellow at the Brandeis University Crown Center for Middle East Studies. The Crown Center was formed in 2005 by Dr. Shai Feldman, a former Israeli intelligence guy from the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (now named Institute for National Security Studies) in Tel Aviv. Feldman, Shikaki, & an Egyptian fellow named Abdel Monem Said Aly coauthored a book titled “Arabs & Israelis: Conflict & Peacemaking in the Middle East.” Doesn’t that just sound so collegial & peaceful coexistence-like?

Our man Feldman has given lengthy interviews about his views & his approach to conflict resolution & peaceful coexistence. He believes in the impossible dream that Israel can be a Jewish state & democratic too; he changed the subject to French-trained chefs & fiction writers in Tel Aviv when asked about Israeli settlers now controlling over 46% of the occupied West Bank; he defends the apartheid wall & the military occupation; he justifies turning Gaza into an open air prison. He’s a staunch rightwing Zionist who starts to blither when challenged about the contradictions of Zionist-think & resorts to cliches like “it takes two to tango” to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians.

If Shikaki & Feldman are colleagues, it can only be on the basis of betrayal by Shikaki. When his institute released this data, it was intended to discredit Palestinian Intifada, to make them look like knife-wielding terrorists rather than freedom fighters against apartheid, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, & terrorism.

Betrayers are a dime a dozen in politics. There’s big money in it. The only way to respond is to honor & build the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel. Buy nothing with a barcode beginning 729.

While Shikaki is doing his peaceful coexistence thing, these Palestinians in Nablus, West Bank are conducting Intifada against Israeli settlements in Qadomem.

(Photo by Alaa Badarneh/EPA)

This Palestinian artist in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, is painting a picture in tribute to Yahya Ayyash, the chief bomb maker of Hamas & member of the al-Qassam Brigades. Ayyash built bombs used in several attacks in Israel in the early 90s where about 90 people were killed. He was 30-years-old in 1996 when he was executed by Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service, who booby-trapped a cell phone that blew his head off.

Terrorism is a deplorable indiscriminate political method. Paramilitary terrorism & death squads are the very foundation of the state of Israel which displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians & drove them into diaspora & refugee camps. It continues as the chief method used against Palestinians by the Israeli military & settlers moving in on Palestinian lands.

For a brief period in the 1980s & 1990s, some Palestinians resorted to terrorist tactics against the behemoth of Israeli military might. It was a regrettable period, born of political desperation, because it punished civilians for Israeli state crimes & made it easy for Israel to take attention off terrorist expropriation of Palestinians & instead make them look like the aggressors.

The philosopher Spinoza once said “We study the past neither to laugh nor to cry, but to understand.” We also don’t study it to cook up apologetics for a bad strategy, which terrorism is in spades. But if we want to understand why some Palestinians would be disoriented & attracted to terrorism, we need to look at the context–including Israel’s successful use of terrorism. The early 1990s was the era of the Oslo Accords when respected leader Yassir Arafat signed an agreement brokered by Bill Clinton’s administration surrendering Palestinian self-determination. The agreement was not so much a bantustate proposal as the terms of Palestinian surrender which expressly rejected the return of Palestinian refugees.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians knew exactly what those Accords meant but overwhelming world opinion was against them because Arafat & Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed them to thunderous applause. Arafat, Rabin, & Shimon Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize in reward for the betrayal.

It was also the period when Israeli settler terrorism against Palestinians was escalating. In February 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a rightwing settler from Brooklyn, NY, entered a mosque in Hebron & massacred 29 praying Palestinians & injured 125 others.

In such a situation, Palestinians unwilling to surrender self-determination felt powerless, isolated, defeated. In such a political environment, desperate strategies were resorted to. That’s not an apologetic but an explanation.

Tens of thousands attended the funeral of Ayyash & he has been honored in many ways, including having streets named after him. When the US State Department & Israel, whose policies are based in state terrorism, object to what they call a ‘glorification of terrorists’, they display a colossal & contemptible mendacity.

The tribute to Ayyash was for a Hamas rally in Gaza to honor the families of dead Hamas activists. We stand with them without apology. Palestinians no longer stand alone & have the battalions of BDS lining up in their support.

(Photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

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.