In a departure from its usual dead silence about the occupation & current siege in Kashmir, Reuters published this photo of Kashmiri women grieving as they watch the body of 23-year-old Riyaz Ahmad Shah being carried to his funeral in Srinagar.

The young man was an ATM security guard riding his bike back home after coming off duty Tuesday night. A postmortem showed he had more than 300 pellets inside his abdomen fired from close range by Indian soldiers. His brother Zahoor Ahmad explained that there were no protests or stone pelting in the area at the time of his murder so it was a cold-blooded execution.

Most of that of course is not explained in the photo caption since media has found in Palestine & in Kashmir that brevity is the very soul of deceit.

Long live Kashmiri Intifada. End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo by Danish Ismail/Reuters)

Enough with the damnations of democracy as the problem in society. Somewhere along the line, democracy got confused with white supremacy & colonialism & identified as a western concept.

These are the antitheses of democracy. It is not a western concept. Struggling to achieve it has been the history of the human race, including preeminently the failures to achieve it. Those failures do not invalidate it nor show it to be a pipe dream. Misanthropy like that leads to the triumph of autocracy & tyranny with which we are all too familiar in the era of the barbaric phase of capitalism.

UN whimpered an appeal to India & Pakistan to “work constructively” to resolve the Kashmir issue. No say for Kashmiris? No demand to end the occupation?

Why don’t they whimper their way back under a rock?

Today on day 26 of the barbaric siege of Kashmir, Amnesty India has finally come out with a public criticism of pellet guns & the statement is a masterpiece of compromise, ambiguity, & cowardice–if not outright propagandistic allegiance with the siege:

“Pellet guns are inherently inaccurate & indiscriminate, & have no place in law enforcement. Amnesty International India calls on the Jammu & Kashmir government to immediately stop the use of pellet guns in policing protests. They cannot ensure well-targeted shots & risk causing serious injury, including to bystanders or other protesters not engaging in violence. These risks are almost impossible to control.”

What does that mean? If the guns were accurate they would not violate human rights laws about firing on unarmed protesters? Which protesters is it legitimate to mow down with buckshot? How can there be accuracy or anything but indiscrimination when firing pellets or any other kind of munitions at groups of protesters?

What about Amnesty India honoring its human rights mandate & campaigning against the Indian occupation of Kashmir?

The cover of Indian magazine Frontline & an image worth a thousand condemnations:

“I haven’t come across a more telling representation of India’s relationship with ‪#‎Kashmir‬.” –Mirza Waheed

Violence in Kashmir shows no sign of slowing down but is experiencing new surges, The most recent death toll is 68 with thousands of disabling & permanent injuries, particularly blindness from pellet injuries.

Solidarity is not just hand-wringing in sympathy or feeling their pain. It’s action on their behalf. It’s unknown to most of us who organized the many rallies held all over the world in the past weeks. It might have been organized out of mosques. If anyone does know that information it would be useful to share. If solidarity is to mean anything or become the political force it must become to render effective aid, then we need to collaborate & coordinate internationally. We have to take this occupation deadly seriously & incorporate it into our other political campaigns.