On September 26th, 2014, a busload of student teachers who were political activists was attacked by armed men in Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. Reports about who attacked differ between the corrupt Mexican government who blame the police & parents of the students who claim, with evidence, that it was an action by Mexican soldiers garrisoned in Iguala.

Four students & three bystanders were killed in the attack; 43 students were disappeared & their whereabouts are still not known. One of the students killed was 22-year-old Julio Cesar Mondragon whose body was later found on an Iguala street with his face peeled off & eyes gouged out. The photo here is a poster of his face at a January 26th protest in Mexico City commemorating the 16-month anniversary of the deaths & disappearances & demanding the government of president Enrique Peña Nieto stop lying & trying to cover up the crimes. The disappeared students are known as the Ayotzinapa 43 & their families & human rights groups have waged a relentless campaign for justice.

Pope Francis is going to be visiting Mexico for 5 days starting Friday. In preparation for his visit, the Vatican released his video statement saying Mexico’s patron saint, Our Lady of Guadalupe, would not approve of the corruption, violence, drug trafficking, & crime cartels. Mexico’s Cardinal Norberto Rivera told media the Pope will call for justice for victims of violence & humane treatment for Central American refugees.

It’s estimated that in the past 7 or 8 years, up to 30,000 people have been disappeared in Mexico & up to 100,000 murdered. Much of the violence is attributed to drug cartels; just as much to the Mexican military which occupies most of the country as brutally as a foreign army. So the Pope is promising to address the most important questions in Mexican politics. Sounds so heartening but here’s where things get hairy.

The Pope’s itinerary will include some of the poorest & most violent districts of Mexico like Ecatepec, a poor, rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Mexico City where hundreds of women & young girls are disappeared or mutilated & murdered every year & most of the crimes are reportedly not investigated by authorities. Enrique Peña Nieto governed the state of Mexico before he became Mexico’s president.

So is the Pope going to Mexico & places like Ecatepec to address the issue of femicide & politically motivated murders–or is he going there to address homicide as a personal crime & chide the murderers to stop being evil? There’s some confusion in the media about that which needs to be cleared up. The caption to this photo of Julio Mondragon said, “On the eve of the visit by Pope Francis, homicides rose 9 percent in Mexico during 2015, according to government statistics.” The problem is that the murder of young Julio was not a personal homicide but a political crime. So maybe the Pope should skip the poor neighborhoods (unless he’s going there to rally for investigations of the femicides) & sit down with government officials who are criminally culpable either through neglect in personal murders or collusion in political murders.

According to an attorney for parents of the Ayotzinapa 43, they requested a private meeting with the Pope. Because of the political importance of their campaign which garnered international outrage & support, meeting with the parents would have been a compelling gesture of solidarity & put immense political pressure on the Mexican government to address justice for the Ayotzinapa 43. But Cardinal Rivera, talking with marbles in his mouth, said the meeting was declined because over 26,000 people had been disappeared & families of hundreds of other missing people had also requested a meeting. In such circumstances, he claimed it would be “very hard” to have a meeting. Just how hard is it to rent a hall & allow all of them to come to a private meeting to discuss one of the most important questions in Mexican politics?

One can defend the Pope’s political timidity & equivocations by saying he has to play politics if he wants to be allowed to enter a country. Let’s get real! If the Pope can’t speak his mind & publicly solidarize with the victims of political treachery, what’s the point of being pope? If you were sincerely, deeply committed to human rights, you wouldn’t accept a position that made you put a muzzle on your outrage. The Pope has got an international pulpit with millions of people he could influence to stand against political injustice & violence. Why doesn’t he use that authority? If he isn’t allowed to enter a country with a murderous regime, he could rally thousands at the border & make an international clamor for justice. That’s what a committed human rights advocate would do with the same resources.

It’s suggested the Pope could still agree to meet with the Ayotzinapa 43 families. Since he found time on his US trip to meet with the Kentucky county clerk who wouldn’t issue marriage licenses to gay couples, he sure as hell can find time. If he wants to. There are plenty of human rights activists in Mexico willing to brave a murderous regime who would handle the logistics, rent a hall, & notify those who lost loved ones to the gulag. If the Pope wants to address the issue of violence in Mexico, that is exactly what he will do instead of grandstanding treks into poor neighborhoods.

Our deepest respect for the families of the Ayotzinapa 43 & Mexican human rights activists who are determined to get justice for young men murdered because they were committed to a better world.

(Photo by Eduardo Verdugo/AP)

Media is having problems identifying whose national parliament this is. The US Senate has been ruled out since it has no one last-named Gingernutt. The closest is Senator Numbnuts. They thought the French Senat or British parliament good possibilities or even the European Union parliament. But throughout Europe no one’s willing to claim them.

There’s likely a reward involved for anyone willing to claim them as their elected leaders so try to put dignity aside long enough to grab the check. And let us know who they are before you go into hiding. We understand your dilemma. Consider the shame of living in the US during this election cycle.

(Photo Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

I am prompted to re-post this piece from February 7, 2013, three years ago, but apropos Hillary Clinton. It is an indictment of her politics & corruption but goes way too easy on her & leaves out her proclivities to grand larceny.

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As Hillary Clinton exits the State Department the retrospectives begin on her legacy. There really isn’t much to say about a woman who took orders & defended US policy around the world–except we have a much clearer view of her venality & corruption. She came of age during the tumultuous 1960s & 1970s when millions of people were protesting for civil rights, women’s rights, & against the Vietnam war. She was a young Republican in that era & played no role whatsoever in social protest. In other words, early in her life she sided with the status quo & the powers that be–and that allegiance has never wavered.

One of the most repugnant & shameful things in US politics is that former Secretary of State Madeline Albright can show her face in public (& even collect honoraria) after saying the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it” to achieve US policy goals. So it says everything you need to know about Hillary Clinton that Albright is out campaigning for her. Birds of a feather & all that.

In urging women to vote for Clinton, Albright said “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” The dishonesty of that appeal is only matched by the repugnancy of the sarcasm. What about the Iraqi women, the mothers, sisters, grandmothers, & aunties of those 500,000 precious children?

I did not mean to be inhospitable when I closed my blog to comments. My Facebook wall is full of interesting discussion which I have found so educational. But my blog was spammed constantly with commercial ads & mountains of abuse from Zionist supporters of Israel. I’m a tough cookie but that stuff wears thin real fast–especially the low level of abuse they employed to bring me to my knees in defeat. Mostly it took me hours to get rid of. So it was easier to just close down the comment gizmo.

If you have anything you want to tell me, email or find me on Facebook. Unless you’re a right-winger.  Then just go away.

It’s always so heartening to see the response to posts about Kashmir because there’s long been a news blackout about India’s occupation & like most of us, I knew nothing about it. After being on Facebook, several Kashmiri friends badgered me to post about their freedom struggle. I had every intention but put them off for a long while. They’re a relentless crowd & they drove me nuts with the badgering. I would give them deadlines, fail to meet them, & they would start a new round of badgering. They won’t be faulted for persistence. India should take note.

A distinctive feature of occupation in both Kashmir & Palestine is the ruthless targeting of young people by occupation forces. It’s not an accident, or that hundreds of young people just get in the way of bullets; it’s a strategy to demoralize & terrorize by murdering youth. Grief becomes a prevailing emotion feeding rebellion because you cannot get away with killing the young & expect subservience. There’s a price to pay for barbarism.

This is the mother of Syed Mufeed Bashir who was killed yesterday in Kashmir. His death is reported with the same tiresome scenario dished out by Indian military officials to justify assassinations of youth in what they call “encounters”: They claim he was a “militant” on the run. They received a tip he was in a certain town so they cordoned the entire area & began shooting & lobbing grenades. Even from a military standpoint, it doesn’t make sense. Though from the point of view of occupation, it’s the modus operandi.

Some people think me intolerant in my judgements of feudal moochocracy. They’ve misunderstood me then since I mean to ridicule & excoriate the abominations of feudalism in the harshest, cruelest terms, leaving no contempt unexpressed. No puny intolerance for me on that score.

Any system based on inequality, subservience, autocracy, serfdom which takes money from the poor to sustain the indolent & bends the knee to people in tiaras needs to be blasted decisively off this planet & equality among human beings deeply rooted. Inequality is the root of all evil; human solidarity the foundation of peace & justice.

Not to belabor my disdain, but then again why not!? This is the unseemly sight of Van Morrison being knighted a second time by a bored Charlie Windsor who would rather be at the horse track.

Behold the ignominy & try to imagine this is the same guy who wrote “Tupelo Honey,” “Into the Mystic,” & “Moondance.” Feudalism is all about groveling & even Van the Man can’t make it look dignified.

(Photographer unidentified; thanks to Maggie Gordon for this regrettable documentation.)

Overnight, I got flagged in two different posts on Facebook denouncing me in rather crazy-assed terms for defending the hijab–something I’ve done consistently, if not also belligerently, since Islamophobia (& specifically the hijab & burqa) began to be used to justify US wars & military actions.

One of the criticisms was that I dared to address cultures I know nothing about. I’m an American; most of us don’t know squat about most cultures. But I was not talking about other cultures since I try not to talk through my hat. I was talking about feminism & its use in war propaganda & those are things I do know something about. There is little culturally specific about manipulations & scare-mongering for war.

I didn’t stick around the vituperations against me for long; I try to preserve adrenalin for the things that matter. But what was observable among the comments was the liberal veneer to peddle intolerance–a style they learned from the rightwing crap they read.

There were criticisms like “Will she support if Chinese girls start binding their feet just because they wish to?” & a comment that I had “blood on my hands” for naming the woman I was criticizing for her attack on women who wear the hijab–though she wrote her banal article for The Nation, with a readership of thousands. Her opening sentence in the article stated her own reactionary politics about the Indian occupation of Kashmir when she said: “… the attitudes towards females covering up for modesty were always conservative but turned quite ugly in 1990 with the breakout of the Pakistan-backed Islamist insurgency in Kashmir against the Indian State.” So now we know which side she’s on in the Indian occupation of Kashmir & why Indian nationalists were so supportive of her & insulting of my critique.

In the two posts I was denounced for speaking from white privilege & called, by men & women: a moron; drug-addled from the 60s; having a psychiatric past; dubbed Mary Scurrilous; called a bitch, “Osama’s ho”, a “puta” (whore or prostitute in Spanish). Sorry, but none of that rang true. I’m something of a prude in my personal style.

Several people involved in these posts wanted to make sure I read their vituperations so they tagged me. Some were my FB friends–but are now regrettably in FB hell after I booted them. Let me be frank: you don’t stay a woman activist if you cry every time somebody calls you a naughty name.

My favorite comment has to be the guy who posted that he informed “Dr. Phyllis Chesler” about my polemics against her. I’ve wanted to kick her ass for nearly 50 years now–beginning with those boring books she wrote about women’s psychology & mostly for the racist crap she writes ad nauseam about Palestinians & Islam–particularly targeting Muslim women & the hijab. If he could provoke her into a debate with me, making chopped liver out of her would be child’s play. She’s so hateful she could be taken out with a feather.

You gotta wonder why my defense of hijab evokes such ugly outbursts. But not really. They want to hoodwink feminists into supporting Islamophobia & when we don’t buy their crap, they go ballistic. No big deal. Just don’t tag me so I have to read it.

(For those who have time to kill & want to read the stupid article, here is the link; don’t blame me if you wind up regretting the waste of time. Just use it for toilet paper: http://nation.com.pk/blogs/24-Dec-2015/it-s-hard-to-accept-hijab-as-a-symbol-of-liberation-in-free-societies-when-millions-are-oppressed