The differences around the Brexit vote are sharp & understandably the temperature of discussions gets hot. But how in the hell has the EU become associated with internationalism when its economic & political policies stink of racism–from its monstrous treatment of refugees to the forced removal of Roma in several countries to make way for EU infrastructure projects?

The differences in reaction to massacres in the US & most of Europe to those in Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq, & Saudi Arabia are so egregious & speak so stridently to the racism & Islamophobia involved that the NY Times felt compelled to write an article about it titled “After Attacks on Muslims, Many Ask: Where Is the Outpouring?”

Where are the displays of grief & solidarity, the vigils & rallies, the social media profile photos & landmarks lit up with flags, the photo montages of victims?

The NYT article is not a masterpiece of dissemblance. It’s a pathetic hack job that offers provincialism as an excuse & doesn’t address racism or Islamophobic war-mongering which create not just indifference but hostility to the lives of Muslims, Arabs, & others. Most malignantly, the article manages to turn it back on Muslims for religious sectarianism & for allegedly producing ISIS.

It does this hack analysis under the guise of ecumenism, of pretending it gives a rat’s ass about the indifference of mostly white people to the massacres of brown & black people.

The article explains nothing, especially why Muslims would blow up other Muslims during Ramadan. What it does do is show how pernicious & sly racism & war-mongering can be.

Photo is Bangladeshi vigil on Sunday to honor the victims killed in the attack at the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka.

(Photo from AP)

Eid is a holy, festive Muslim holiday of thanksgiving to celebrate the end of the month of Ramadan. Kashmiri Muslims celebrated it yesterday on the same day as Pakistan & many Arab countries. Over 100,000 people attended prayer services in three different venues in Srinagar.

You can see in this photo how the Indian occupying army respects the religious traditions & political freedom of Kashmiris. According to witnesses, they used tear gas & flashbangs (sound bombs) against protesters chanting freedom slogans after Eid prayers. As Kashmiri activists have pointed out: this is how Eid is celebrated under occupation.

Many of the protesters waved Pakistani flags either in political support or as a symbol of dissent against the occupation. It’s their country. They can wave any damn flag they like.

End the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Self-determination for Kashmir. Long live Kashmiri Intifada.
(Photo from AFP)

It is deeply sad to hear Chelsea Manning attempted suicide in her jail cell yesterday. She is serving a 35-year sentence for releasing classified documents detailing US war crimes.

Army officials did not inform her legal team of her condition & have denied them access to her until Friday.

Suicide is an act of despondency so profound that one can overcome the human instinct for survival. She was rushed to the hospital & is reportedly recovering. We send Chelsea solidarity & a sincere concern for her recovery.

Does anyone else think Boris Johnson & Donald Drumpf are a separated at birth item?

Rereading “The Chalice & The Blade” by Riane Eisler on the role of the matriarchy & women divinities in Paleolithic & Neolithic times is a refreshing return to feminist theoretics. It may seem blasphemous to many but in those eras covering tens of thousands of years of human history, the divine was female & the social structure matriarchal.

Of course in trying to reduce women to busty pin-ups or dowdy housewives, that history had remained unacknowledged, unexplored, even vigorously disputed & erased for centuries despite overwhelming anthropological evidence. The slanderous, demeaning notion that prostitution was the oldest profession for women took deep cultural root when in fact the oldest profession for women was farming in a universe reigned by goddesses.

With the emergence of feminism in the 1960s & 70s, female scholarship on that heritage began to get published & inspired other women to research the contributions of women to human civilization–as political figures, farmers & agriculturalists, inventors, writers, musicians, poets, scientists. It was the same kind of historical process as Black & Latino scholars retrieving the history of those nationalities in the Americas & as other scholars around the world refuting the narrative that made Europe the genesis of human civilization by writing off tens of thousands of years of contributions from Africa, Asia, & the Middle East.

The upshot of this process is that women took back our place in human history & asserted our contributions against the erasures of patriarchal dominance. But in the past few decades, a patriarchal backlash has developed disguised as progressive critique of feminism & trying to again silence the voices & presence of women.

Much of this backlash is led by leftists, including women, who are opposed to feminism. They promote prostitution as “sex work”; defend pornography as sexual freedom; herald bare-breasted protesting as the resurgence of feminism; lash out in incomprehensible screeds against “identity politics”; vilify feminists who disagree as TERFs & SWERFs; & in general try to shout down feminists who take issue to the backlash of opposition to feminism disguised as avant-garde politics.

One can see the same process of erasure, not just of feminist critique but of the female, in gender theoretics. Despite the fact that violence against women is an international horror putrefying every aspect of social life, we are supposed to deny that reality to accommodate a spectrum of genders that diminishes or does not include women.

You can call that progressive all you like; you can attempt to shout down women who object to erasure. But feminism is not going away because patriarchy is reasserting its claim against us. Been there for a millennia, done that. This is the era of female emancipation. And for the record, we are women. Not cis-women.

The suspension last May of Dilma Rousseff as president of Brazil was certainly the result of scheming between a cabal of extreme rightwing politicians & the Brazilian oligarchy. It was undemocratic beyond dispute. But the analyses, including by Glenn Greenwald, focused on the political character of Rousseff more than on what her removal represented.

Since assuming the presidency in 2011, Rousseff has presided over several neoliberal projects including massive land grabs from indigenous peoples (for purposes of multinational agribusiness), including violent military action against them; major infrastructure projects like the Belo Monte Dam involving land grabs & environmental destruction; millions spent on building stadia & infrastructure for the World Cup & Olympic games while there are millions of homeless children subject to vigilante violence, drug addiction, & sexual exploitation; military occupation of the favelas (urban slums); protests by millions against the neoliberal austerity measures imposed by her regime.

In 2015, while still president, Rousseff met with Henry Kissinger in NYC as well as with Rupert Murdoch & a number of bankers & CEOs, probably to lobby for more investment in Brazil. At that time, ignoring Kissinger’s malignant & notorious role in Latin American politics–particularly the murderous 1974 coup in Chile–Rousseff called him a “fantastic person, with a grand global vision.”

Whatever she was in her youth, her rebellion was long spent by her entry into capitalist politics in 2002. Her removal as president of Brazil is only of consequence because of what it represents–which appears to be that a conspiracy of rightwing politicians & the oligarchy think a more decisive, brutal, & repressive approach should be taken to the mass protests against neoliberal policies. Just as not that long ago, oligarchies across Latin America thought liberal democracies a more effective way to rule than through military juntas–& altered political rule accordingly. The career eclipse of Rousseff doesn’t matter a whit outside of that context.

Greenwald & others choose to interpret the protests as support for Rousseff’s policies but that’s because they think there are good capitalisms & bad ones. How they make that distinction in the barbaric phase of capitalism escapes analysis.

(Photo is Rousseff with Bill Clinton by Tânia Rêgo/Agência Brasil suggesting the character of her political allegiances)

Behind every rebel is (someone thought) a fool for believing in humanity’s deep-felt desire to live in harmony & in our creative capacities to accomplish that end.

https://www.facebook.com/tom.wiese/videos/1276623088715/?pnref=story

The US border patrol just rescued several undocumented immigrants who had been abandoned by their “coyote” (smuggler). They were rushed immediately to the hospital suffering from heatstroke & dehydration in the over 100 degree Fahrenheit temperatures here. When they recover they will likely be processed for deportation.

Many cross the Rio Grande River on the US-Mexico border into sugar cane fields which are suffocating & disorienting. They hide there from border patrols which often take mounted agents after them. This is also an area where many immigrants die & are buried in impromptu cemeteries set up caring residents.

This train named La Bestia is how thousands of Central American & Mexican immigrants travel north to the US border. They are subject to extreme violence from criminal thugs & from paramilitary death squads. They are robbed, raped, beaten, kidnapped, extorted, disappeared, murdered & dumped in mass graves. Many lose limbs from jumping on & off the moving trains & must return to countries without social security protections.

Even if they have money, they cannot travel on buses without being apprehended & deported by Mexican police & soldiers–even though the Mexican senate made it legal to transit to the US border.

Immigration is a human right. Open the damn borders.

CBS news is reporting a dramatic increase of anti-Muslim attacks across the US, including attacks on women. How can that be since we’ve had no vote here to leave the European Union?