One of life’s earliest disappointments is learning that many of the poets, writers, & musicians you admire for the art they create are complete washouts as human beings or deplorable politically. It seems an incongruence, something at odds with nature. It wasn’t easy in my youth facing that the avuncular-looking & sensitive poet of estrangement, Robert Frost, was mean as the devil. And of course, it’s all down hill with the rock stars.

Still, it don’t come easy. Lady Gaga’s performance at the Grammys was indisputably marvelous. But I just couldn’t be entertained knowing she’s an enthusiastic supporter of Israel who flouted the cultural boycott with disdain & also performed for the dictator of Azerbaijan.

Those who live in the US have an opportunity to express solidarity with Palestinians on March 20th in Washington, DC. This march comes at a time when the Obama administration, the UK, & other regimes are attempting to make the economic & cultural boycott of Israel illegal. That means Palestinian solidarity has become a central civil liberties issue & makes this protest all the more important.

You can get info, donate, find out how to participate at this FB site.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1647286998884566/

We’re supposed to really get into this drama between Republicans & Obama about his appointing a Supreme Court justice to replace Scalia. Republican senators warn Obama “in no uncertain terms’ against doing so & he talks tough back, saying “watch me, fools.” It’ll be played out on the news for weeks & exhaust itself long after it’s become a complete bore (which was yesterday).

There are those who will think me a shameless cynic, but what kind of political system, what kind of democracy allows nine politically appointed judicial hacks to decide their fate? It’s a misunderstanding of democracy to allow that even though that’s how the US system is rigged.

This is Kashmir Awareness Week called by London activists to focus on education about the Indian occupation of Kashmir. The systematic use of torture & other human rights crimes are a feature of the occupation (which I am preparing a post about for tomorrow).

This BBC documentary titled “The Torture Trail” interviews Kashmiri lawyer Parvez Imroz who documented cases of torture despite being shot & having his home attacked by Indian security forces. Imroz has documented 1,500cases of men becoming impotent after their genitals were electrocuted & hundreds of other cases involving the systematic use of rape & sexual violence against imprisoned activists. The documentary briefly discusses the systematic mass use of rape against women in Kashmir. The most gruesome case cited here is of a 60-year-old man held in solitary confinement & forced to eat flesh cut from his own body.

http://tune.pk/video/198282/Kashmirs-Torture-Trail-BBC-Documentaryhttp://tune.pk/video/198282/Kashmirs-Torture-Trail-BBC-Documentary

There is no question media is reporting more frequently about the Indian occupation of Kashmir. It isn’t because they’ve just learned about the conflict between Kashmir & India (which goes back to the 1947 partition engineered by England for maximum dissension) or the Indian military occupation which began in 1989 & now has a ratio of nearly one Indian soldier to every four Kashmiris.

What can explain US media’s dead silence for so long, since reporting on Indian barbarism in Kashmir could take the heat off US barbarism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, & so many other countries? According to USAID data, India has been the largest recipient of US military aid since 1946, followed by Israel after its formation in 1948, & Pakistan. The only reason for that assistance is the economic, political, & military importance of those countries to the US–which is why the US feigns neutrality on the conflict in Kashmir & plays both sides against the middle.

There was a slight increase in non-US media attention after 2010 with the eruption of the Kashmiri Intifada of stone-throwing youth against India’s massive arsenal. It’s likely the only reason there is an itsy-bitsy increase in US media coverage now is because of the role of Kashmiri activists on social media who are getting out the truth about their struggle against occupation. That’s why Indian prime minister Modi is cozying up to FB mogul Mark Zuckerberg. That’s why India periodically closes down the internet in Kashmir.

Media wants to get ahead of the story so they can present their own version of the occupation’s reality. We expect Indian media to lie about the character of the occupation–just like US media does about its wars & occupations. The hallmark of this tendentious kind of coverage is incoherence. You can’t figure out what the hell happened unless you have the investigative skills of a police detective & you root through every mangled report looking for the kernels of reliable information.

When Indian soldiers ambushed & executed unnamed Kashmiri “guerrillas,” this past Sunday, apparently (as in other such incidents) a crowd gathered near the cordoned off ambush site to protect those being shot at & to protest through rock-throwing. An Indian media source reported: ”To quell the mob, security forces fired in the air during which a protesting civilian sustained a gunshot injury in his leg.” What idiocy! Can they explain how you shoot someone in the leg when you’re aiming in the air? In fact, two young people were murdered in that protest–19-year-old Danish Farooq Mir, an engineering student playing cricket nearby, & 22-year-old Shaista Hameed, a young woman student.

ABC News in the US reported on the curfew India imposed in Kashmir to deter protests against the murders. They described that hundreds of Indian troops patrolled the streets of Srinagar & other towns, warning people to stay indoors. This is the relevant part of that report:

“Protests by stone-throwing youths & clashes with government forces have become routine in Kashmir, where anti-India sentiment runs deep among the mostly Muslim population.

“Rebel groups have fought since 1989 for either independence or a merger with neighboring Pakistan. India & Pakistan each administer a portion of Kashmir. Both claim the region in its entirety.

“Since 1989, an armed uprising & an ensuing Indian crackdown in the region have killed an estimated 68,000 people.”

Such half-assed reporting, which never mentions the Indian occupation of Kashmir or the tens of thousands of disappeared, tortured, murdered, is exactly like the reporting about Israel’s occupation & Palestinian Intifada. The only reason media is breaking their dead silence is to get ahead of the story to counterpose it to the narratives all over social media as a result of the work of Kashmiri activists.

This is a photo of a Kashmiri youth in Srinagar yesterday protesting the Indian-imposed curfew & in support of a general strike called by Kashmiri political groups to protest the murders of the young boy & young woman on Sunday.

Our deepest respect & fullest solidarity with the Kashmiri Intifada.

India out of Kashmir!

(Photo by Mukhtar Khan/AP)

The X-Files revival on Fox is dreadful. That’s before you even slam it for racism & Islamophobia. Here today, cancelled tomorrow since it fails as drama more than it does as war propaganda.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), the establishment human rights group, issued a report yesterday titled, “Yemen: Cluster Munitions Wounding Civilians; US Supplied Weapon Banned by 2008 Treaty.” The report cites the Saudi-led bombing coalition for using cluster munitions in “civilian areas” & criticizes the US for supplying the weapons–in particular the CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapon manufactured by Textron Systems Corporation in Wilmington, Massachusetts (just outside of Boston).

It’s on the one hand a valuable report for its exposures of war crimes by the Saudi coalition & Obama regime, but it’s politically schizophrenic, consistent with HRW politics generally in reporting on war. The problems begin with the designation of “civilian areas.” Of course, HRW means residential areas, schools, hospitals, mosques. But what are legitimate bombing sites in Yemen, according to this designation? Power plants, bridges, highways, agricultural fields? Are those designated “military areas,” as they are by the US, Russian, Israeli bombers when they take out a country?

The CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed cluster bomb is a monstrous weapon but if HRW took a poll of Yemenis about which type of bomb they would rather be killed by, it’s unlikely they would parse the distinctions. It’s true, cluster munitions are indiscriminate; the CBU-105 reportedly has a high failure rate & does not “meet the reliability standard required for US export of the weapons.” That means they don’t explode & like land mines in Afghanistan (& elsewhere) remain a problem after the endless wars end.

Why can’t HRW bring itself to opposing & denouncing these monstrous wars? Why does it have to parse distinctions in weaponry & promote a kinder, gentler form of military savagery? This is where HRW diverges from the antiwar movement which demands not different kinds of weapons for bombing people to death but the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all military personnel & materiel & brokers no discounts on savagery.

The HRW report is valuable because it exposes war crimes & the countries perpetrating them & because it puts political pressure on the Obama administration. HRW previously protested in a letter to Obama under the aegis of the Cluster Munition Coalition which they are part of & sent a copy of the current report to the US State Department. Good work, but it’s not as if Obama & the State Department don’t know what Saudi Arabian bombers are doing with the cluster bombs sold them by the Pentagon. It’s not as if the US doesn’t know “civilian areas” are being targeted since the US is providing intelligence & logistical support to the Saudi regime.

HRW’s report is valuable but it is politically compromised because it is based on a pipe dream that war can be conducted in a civilized way according to human rights standards when by its very nature it is savagery. The antiwar movement must be rebuilt around the demand for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all military forces from Yemen, Syria, Iraq, & everywhere else they are.

This photo taken in Sana’a, Yemen is of a bombed-out sewing workshop where two factory workers were bombed to death. May they RIP.

The historic imperative remains: rebuild the international antiwar movement.

(Photo by Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images)

Indian political activists or those who would like to get involved in building the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel (BDS) will be interested in this event on March 6th in New Delhi: https://www.facebook.com/events/221477674864672/

This coming week is Kashmir Awareness Week called by activists in London. Because of the systematic news blackout going back years, most people around the world know very little about India’s brutal occupation of Kashmir, let alone have developed activities or organizations for international solidarity. So this week is an important education event.

Regrettably, this has also been a very difficult week in Kashmir, with the commemoration of martyrs’ deaths & summary executions of more young people by Indian military forces. So this educational event also takes on the character of protest against the occupation.

Protestors around the world are facing extreme violence from riot cops, particularly assaultive weapons like rubber bullets, water cannons, stun grenade canisters–& in some places like Palestine & Kashmir, live ammunition. The Indian army has used pellet guns in Kashmir since 2010, a watershed year in the Kashmiri struggle against occupation. They claim they use pellet guns as “non-lethal weapons” to quell anti-India protests. But pellet guns use hydraulic force to pump out hundreds of pellets at a time which become embedded & can cause permanent blindness & disfigurement as well as fatal injuries by destroying vital organs. The pellets are made of lead & the deleterious health effects of that metal are not mitigated in pellet form. There are actually restrictions in the US on the use of lead pellets in hunting because of its negative impact on birds & the environment. Because of the scattershot nature of buckshot, many children & passersby are also blinded & injured. The lethality & barbarism of the weapons are beyond dispute.

Let it be noted that the Egyptian activist, Shaimaa el-Sabbagh, was shot to death (on January 24th, 2015) by a pellet gun when the buckshot pierced her vital organs. Pellet guns were also used in the 2011 Bahrain uprising when the regime hired two super-cops, one from the UK & one from the US, to organize security. Pellet guns were part of their arsenal & there are dozens of photos of Bahraini protesters riddled with buckshot which cannot be removed.

The photo is an X-ray of Amir Kabir Beigh, a 22-year-old Kashmiri, showing dozens of lead pellets embedded in his skull. It appears they were directing the pellet gun directly at this eyes & head–& it looks like more documentation for human rights crimes against Kashmiris by the Indian army.

Today Kashmir is considered the most densely militarized zone in the world, administered & occupied by over 700,000 Indian soldiers. Since the 1990s, the death toll from political conflict has risen to 70,000, with an estimated 100,000 tortured & 10,000 disappeared.

Things are not going to improve for Kashmiri justice under Modi, India’s reactionary prime minister. His close political association with apartheid Israel bodes very badly. Colonial wars eat at the very soul of a society, engendering extreme violence at home & abroad unless they are actively opposed & international solidarity extended to the people of Kashmir.

Our fullest solidarity with the people of Kashmir.

(Photo by Abid Bhat)