I am so honored to be invited to send a solidarity message to the BDS India convention this coming Sunday in New Delhi–honored & humbled to be part of building international unity in support of Palestinians. It’s one of the most important struggles of our era, in large part because of the intransigence of Palestinians in resisting colonialism.
If you live near New Delhi, please consider joining activists in charting a political program of solidarity.
Time to swing into action again for the political education of Bruce Springsteen who is slated to play Tel Aviv next July. It’s unclear if a contract has been signed yet but the venue is booked & it’s apparently in the works.
We want to give artists every chance to do the right thing. So we are not bullying them so much as educating them with a blunt instrument: information.
Jewish Voice for Peace has created an Action Sprout petition calling on Springsteen & the E Street Band to not play Israel. You can make a comment on the petition at this link: https://actionsprout.io/7C880E/thanks
Please also like & share this wall:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1519128221726761/?active_tab=posts
This picture is worth a thousand lies–which is at least the number pumped out daily by Israel & media to justify Israeli apartheid. How ever will the Israeli military explain it away? Did those Israeli soldiers shoot the unarmed boy? Will they claim the Palestinian man rushing to help the injured boy was brandishing a knife? How do they explain pointing assault weapons at unarmed people?
But in a rare moment of honesty, the Guardian-UK acknowledged without equivocations that the boy was injured by Israeli soldiers during a protest “against the expropriation of Palestinian land” near Nablus, West Bank.
This picture is the unvarnished reality of military occupation & expropriation.
Build & honor the economic & cultural boycott (BDS) of Israel. Buy nothing with a barcode beginning 729.
(Photo by Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty)
(A Facebook album showing the brutality of this encounter & putting the lie to the Israeli claim that Palestinians use their children as human shields: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1563462880631686&id=100009039664905&comment_id=1563489087295732¬if_t=mentions_comment&hc_location=ufi)
If it weren’t for the relentless efforts of Kashmiri activists on social media, most of us wouldn’t know anything about the Indian occupation of Kashmir because of the decades-long news blackout. (It is also true that social media has been key to education about the Palestinian struggle & to building solidarity.)
The slight, though skewed, increase in reporting about Kashmir is surely because media has to present a propaganda brief to counter information coming from activists. Indian prime minister Modi’s new buddy-buddy relationship with Mark Zuckerberg & periodic shutdowns of the internet in Kashmir are part of attempts to keep the world ignorant about the occupation. India & several other countries have a lot invested in that occupation.
In researching the considerable environmental problems caused by the Indian occupation of Kashmir (renowned for its natural beauty), one finds the occupation frequently called a “civil war” or a conflict “between separatist Muslim militants & Indian forces.” In the modern world, the term “Muslim militants” is intended to evoke images of terrorists, Al-Qaeda, & ISIS & immediately tunes out political curiosity or solidarity. What’s remarkable in even progressive journals is how little interest is expressed in investigating what’s going on.
This is a photo from the Guardian-UK a couple days ago. The caption reads, “Srinagar, India: A gardener works in the tulip garden on the banks of Dal Lake. The tulip season, which usually starts at about 21 March, has already begun.” Such a charming photo; it would be so appreciated in any number of gardening magazines. But when you investigate the wrenching conflict between Kashmiris & the Indian military around Dal Lake & the profligate environmental destruction of its beauty (especially through deforestation) & the forcible relocation of local residents, this charming little tulip bed becomes another place to bury the truth.
End the Indian occupation of Kashmir!
(Photo by Farooq Khan/EPA)
It’s likely that when Clinton wins the nomination, some Sanders supporters will consider voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein who will be on the ballot in several states. If Donald Drumpf is the Republican candidate, lesser evil will go into full orbit & most Sanders supporters will vote for Clinton.
Jill Stein doesn’t have a chance in hell of winning so it will be a protest vote. But those who vote for her should be clear about where she stands on those issues which are touchstones in US politics: war & militarism; US support for Israeli apartheid; civil rights & women’s rights; & immigration/refugee rights.
Her approach to politics differs from mine but generally her views are consistently progressive & liberal. She’s no iconoclastic thinker or pioneer but she’s on the right side. She doesn’t call for open borders or assert immigration is a human right but she is not hostile to undocumented immigrants. She just wants reform & new procedures. That’s generally how she approaches politics. She doesn’t challenge the economic system but wants more democratic procedures to govern. She doesn’t think in terms of systems but in terms of modifications & adjustments to make a system in profound crisis work better.
Where there are serious problems with her program are her views toward Israel & Palestinians. If you consider that a fundamental question in US foreign politics, you will find her equivocations & outright accommodations to Israeli colonialism unacceptable. Even more than that, you will see how limited her understanding of the US relationship to Israel, of the nature of US militarism, of Israel’s function in the Middle East as an armed fortress against democracy.
She is clear about Israel’s occupation, apartheid, illegal settlements, collective punishment of Palestinians. She supports BDS & the right of Palestinian refugees to return. But then she says: “On taking office, I will put all parties on notice – including the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, & the Hamas administration in Gaza – that future US support will depend on respect for human rights & compliance with international law. All three administrations will also be held responsible for preventing attacks by non-state actors on civilians or military personnel of any nationality. The parties will be given 60 days to each demonstrate unilateral material progress towards these ends….Should the end of US aid fail to cause a party to redirect its policies & to take steps resulting in sufficient material progress within an additional 60 days, I will direct my State Department to initiate diplomacy intended to isolate & pressure the offending party, including the use of economic sanctions & targeted boycott. In this way, US policy will begin to become consistent with its practices regarding other violators of human rights & international law in the region.”
Didn’t she say a mouthful! After you boil all that verbiage down, what you see is that Stein blames the conflict between Israel & Palestinians on both parties. She replaces Palestinian Intifada in her equation with their problematic current leadership & thereby manages to avoid condemning Israeli colonialism & military aggression. How the hell does that explain what Israel is doing to Gaza!? That’s because, as her campaign platform clearly states, she recognizes the rights of self-determination for both Israel & Palestinians & calls for a bantustate solution, that is, a return to the 1967 borders. Can she even conceive of a democratic, secular state where Jews & Palestinians live as brothers & sisters?
She does not challenge a Jewish-only state nor does she oppose Jewish immigration to Israel but accepts that as “self-determination” when it is nothing but arrant colonialism & theocracy. Zionists don’t get to preempt the achievements of human democratic civilization by claiming a special dispensation at the expense of Palestinians.
Her position isn’t just a massive compromise with Israeli colonialism & ethnic cleansing; it would be unbelievably naive for her to hold these views–unless in fact, it’s a betrayal of Palestinian justice in disguise of “a pox on both your houses’.
It’s a hard lesson to learn in politics, but you can’t have it both ways when it comes to justice. You either stand with Palestinian self-determination or you make a mealy-mouth retreat to compromise.
Some may think mine too hard-assed a view of the Palestinian struggle–whereas I consider Stein’s view a half-assed protestation against apartheid & ethnic cleansing. Tell us where it’s ever worked that way to end tyranny.
(Photo is Jill Stein)
Behold the ugly, stupid man with the morals of a rabid Rottweiler. There’s far too many of them running the world.
This one is EU Council President Donald Tusk (rhymes with Donald Drumpf) who warned refugees–who he called “illegal economic migrants”–not to come to Europe “for nothing.”
In a news conference during his tour of Greece & the Balkan states, he said his mission is the “total elimination” of the sea transit of refugees from Turkey to Greece. That’s why there are thousands of refugees on the Syrian-Turkish border unable to cross & 30,000 refugees stranded in Greece unable to move north. The Macedonian border which allowed in a few hundred Syrians & Iraqis per day now is only allowing a handful to pass through. Afghans who are fleeing a war zone are denied asylum.
The purpose of Tusk’s tour is to get agreement among the Balkan states for how to deal with refugees–that is, how to most effectively keep them out–because he fears the crisis could tear the EU apart. Others who are not ugly, stupid men with rabid morals think the demolition of the EU isn’t coming fast enough.
Use his ugly, stupid, rabid face to practice your horse manure shot.
Media coverage of the Indian occupation of Kashmir borrows on the bad journalistic habits & treachery of its usual coverage of Palestinian Intifada. There’s no real investigation or reporting but just a template repeated to pretend they’re reporting news when they’re peddling a particular version of events–the version called propaganda. Whenever there’s another execution of Kashmiri activists, they just plug in new names to a rehash. The problem is, the young people being hunted down & murdered are real people, not mannequins, not props in a narrative.
The template is sketchy & short on details: early this morning, three young men called “suspected militants” or “insurgents” were killed in a “gun battle” with Indian soldiers. (The Indian army involved in the shootouts is always the quoted authority–just like when Palestinians are shot dead by Israeli soldiers.) So according to these military officials, they launched a cordon & search operation in the Dadsara area of Tral last night after getting a tipoff “about the presence of militants.” The three men were shot dead when they tried to break through the cordon. Three AK-47 rifles were later recovered from the scene of the “gun battle.”
Now what is wrong with that story? What makes it smell like horse manure? Other than it’s exactly the same story told every time a Kashmiri activist is killed in an “encounter” with Indian soldiers? We can begin with the rule of law. Since when do soldiers move into an area, set up cordons, & start shooting on the basis of a tipoff? They were, according to the template, going after unidentified “militants.” Does an occupying army have exemptions from international law to stage a massacre on the basis of so little information? To start shooting when they don’t even know who they’re shooting at?
But of course, the template is a lie. Because of the 700,000 Indian military & paramilitary deployed in Kashmir, it is reported 100,000 of them are engaged in surveillance. It is one of the most surveilled places on the planet. That doesn’t mean they knew the three men they killed were guilty of any crime, including having AK-47s. But even if they were armed to the teeth, the criminals are not those who resist occupation (even if in a misguided way); the criminals are the occupiers.
The three men shot dead were Ashiq Hussain Bhat, Mohammad Isaq Parray & Asif Ahmed Mir. The top photo is the funeral of Ashiq Hussain, attended by thousands. (The Guardian-UK betrays its bias when it identifies the funeral location as Charsoo, India rather than Charsoo, Kashmir.) May our three brothers Rest In Peace.
The bottom photo from the FB wall of Rising Kashmir is described as the house in which the three deceased men “were holed up” & showing the damage of the gun battle. It looks like the Indian military took torpedoes after it while, according to Indian military officials, the three men only had AK-47s. That could be documentation of human rights crimes.
(Top photo by Danish Ismail/Reuters; bottom photo by Rising Kashmir/Sheikh Mashooq)
The pity of those campaigning for Bernie Sanders today is that, driven by the same panic, they’ll switch to campaigning for Clinton when Sanders loses the nomination. That’s the never-ending cycle of lesser evilism.
Panic is a poor guide in politics since it’s trajectory is a circle leading nowhere. You can’t substitute panic for political principles & think you’ll change things that way. What’s that cliche about insanity: ‘doing the same thing over & over again & expecting different results”?
Whatever will those Palestinian solidarity activists now campaigning for Sanders do when Clinton remains the choice? Is there any way in hell to parse her groveling support for Israel as the lesser evil?
A few days ago, I picked up this soulful little girl skulking down the street, looking bereft. She weighs a lot but I managed to get her into the car despite my dogs yapping at her out of fear.
She appeared at first to be pregnant but then I realized she had already given birth & that her teats were bloated with milk.
None of the usual rescue groups could take her & my little scruffy group was unreconciled to her presence. They constantly circled her & barked, though she only once displayed annoyance by snapping back. She was a beautiful, even-tempered girl.
It wasn’t possible to keep her & excluded that I would release her. So today I took them all to the dog park where I was sure to find someone who would know exactly what to do.
The only person there was Christina, a retiree, with her two rescue dogs. She & her husband also have 31 rescue cats. That’s her mission in life. She suggested I take the dog on a leash to the place I found her & let her lead me to her puppies. I could learn that way whether she had been abandoned or simply lost.
I took Christina’s advice & followed our girl until she stopped & wouldn’t go further.There was no gate on a rather shabby house so we walked to the backyard where a family was playing with six black puppies. Immediately, they recognized our girl as the mother & put the puppies on her to suckle. They think she may be a reluctant mother. They may not be so enthusiastic themselves since they had no name for her. But I’m hoping this rescue has a happy ending. They don’t all. Which is why I have 7 more dogs looking for a loving family.
Picture is our girl who we can call Serene.
Zionists take great umbrage at comparisons between Israel & Nazi Germany so they’ll probably really get bent out of joint by more than apt comparisons between forced resettlement policies of Palestinians by Israel & those of colonization in the Americas & of Joseph Stalin in the former Soviet Union. Bristle or not, the comparisons are inescapable in describing Israeli policy since the founding of the state of Israel toward Palestinian Bedouins, increasing after the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967.
Bedouins were nomadic people making their livelihood by seasonal migration & grazing livestock when the new state of Israel began forcibly relocating them to the West Bank & restricting their access to grazing lands. They had no recourse but to develop permanent settlements. There are many instances in the history of colonialism where nomadic peoples have been forced to abandon their way of life. It’s a profound cultural & economic devastation. Palestinian Bedouins have given wrenching testimony to that.
After the 1967 military occupation of the West Bank, Israel began moving in Zionist settlers to the region occupied by Bedouin settlements & displacing whole communities once again. After the massive swindle & outright betrayal of the Oslo Accords in 1995, Israel accelerated forced relocations of Bedouins. For the past several years, after Israel took over 60 percent of the West Bank, designated as Area C in the Oslo Accords, their treatment of Bedouins has been one ruthless human rights crime after another.
This is a photo of Palestinian Bedouin school children being taught al fresco since Israeli bulldozers demolished the caravans & shipping containers they used as school rooms. The Israeli army told school officials the containers were removed because they did not have an Israeli-issued construction permit to be in the area. What a mockery of international law since under several of its provisions, Israel has no right to occupy any part of Palestine. It is also in violation of the Oslo Accords which mandated Area C be handed back to Palestinian jurisdiction by 1999. But this class room is in Al-Eizariya, a village in Area B, which is under Israeli occupation but according to the Oslo Accords is administered by the Palestinian Authority. So why do Palestinian schools here require an Israeli building permit?
In the background of this photo is the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim founded in the 1970s by Gush Emunim, a rightwing Zionist movement committed to setting up Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands & committed to ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They claimed God deeded them Palestine in the Torah & as nuts as that claim is, it does not distinguish itself from justifications given for exterminating Native Americans or for Stalin’s massive relocations of entire nationalities.
Tens of thousands of Bedouins are being forcibly evicted to make room for expansion of Maale Adumim which is only a few miles from Jerusalem & has become a commuter suburb. For many years, at least twenty Bedouin communities near Maale Adumim have been demolished & residents forced to relocate to near the Abu Dis municipal garbage dump for Jerusalem in the village of Al-Eizariya, which is of course also occupied by Israel. What kind of corruption & cynicism would relocate people to near stinking mountains of trash!?
The apartheid wall crosses the main road of Al-Eizariya, affecting commerce & social life in a town which has become overcrowded as a result of Bedouin relocations. Palestinian agricultural land in the area has been confiscated or cut down by Israeli authorities to accommodate the expansion. But it isn’t explained whether that’s the expansion of Israeli settlements or that caused by forced relocations.
Honoring & building the economic & cultural boycott (BDS) of Israel is the most effective way to oppose Israeli colonialism. Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729.
(Photo by Ammar Awad/Reuters)