The Times of India reported today that the use of pellet munitions, designated falsely as non-lethal, has created such controversy that an expert panel assembled by the Indian government is discussing their replacement with another non-lethal weapon called PAVA shells. The article says PAVA munitions are newly-developed by Indian researchers for use in crowd control but they have been used in England for several years as an alternative to tear gas.

The panel also discussed a “dye marker grenade with irritant” similar to the purple rain they shoot from water cannons against protesting government workers in Srinagar which leaves dye stains for identification but the new weapons would be propelled by grenades & also contain an irritant to the skin & eyes. According to the article, the Indian army suggested the panel consider non-lethal weapons like sound cannons (also called stun grenades), pepper spray shotguns & PAVA grenades (also called chili grenades because a key component comes from chili pepper). But except for the PAVA grenades, the army already uses all of them along with rubber bullets, plastic bullets, wooden bullets, & truncheons for beating the hell out of protesters.

The chemical components & the delivery systems of pepper spray, tear gas, & PAVA shells differ but unlike pepper spray & tear gas, PAVA grenades temporarily immobilize & paralyze the target. The chemical components of all are toxic, extremely painful in contact with eyes & skin, & damaging to vision. They are a particularly serious health hazard to those with respiratory or skin issues like asthma or psoriasis, or those who are taking medications. There is a risk of death in all of them. Many are killed just by being struck with a grenade in the head or chest.

The designation of non-lethal is completely fallacious military double-talk like “collateral damage.” Lethal does not just mean fatal but life-threatening, painful, disabling, poisonous, toxic, destructive to long-term health, harmful to psychological well-being. Pumping people full of hundreds of lead pellets that cannot be removed from internal organs, shooting their eyes out, disfiguring their faces & bodies, permanently disabling hundreds through blindness & extreme pain, does not qualify as non-lethal to anyone who is not completely deranged. They are monstrous human rights crimes of the first magnitude.

The Indian government is not trying to phase out pellet guns because their use is barbaric or even because they stand condemned before the world but only because they are worried about potential human rights crimes prosecutions, more exposure of the brutalities & greater opposition to the occupation of Kashmir

We make only one demand in solidarity with the freedom movement in Kashmir: End the occupation. Get the hell out of Kashmir. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photos from Kashmir Freedom on Twitter)

Former president of France Nicholas Sarkozy was bounced out of office in 2012 by Francois Hollande. If you can be defeated by that kind of turkey, you ought to give it up & go into hiding. But our man is coming back for more & has announced he will run for president in 2017.

It was so much fun describing his follies while president that some mistook my posts for sarcasm. But he is, in short, a detestable man without a single redeeming charm.

There are those who consider comparisons between Monsieurs Sarkozy (who I prefer to call Psychozy) & Pepe Le Pew undignified. Monsieur Le Pew could not agree more. In fact, he denounces the comparison as “merde” & threatens retribution against all who impugn his dignity by such an odious comparison.

While Monsieur Le Pew thinks a woman adores him when she physically assaults him, Monsieur Psychozy thinks citizens respect him even when he has to buy their votes.

We only point these troubling things out to understand what happened to the promise of the great French Revolution? How has it come down to Sarkozy & Hollande?

Today, France’s highest administrative court overturned the burkini ban implemented by 26 mayors along the Mediterranean coast. The international scorn & derision was getting too much for a country still reeling from the embarrassing presidency of Nicholas Sarkozy & sustaining the idiocies of Francois Hollande.

The overturn comes only a week after Manuel Valls, the prime minister (who once said more white people would give better image to a French city) described the burkini as an unpatriotic garment based “on the enslavement of women” which is “not compatible with the values of France & the Republic.” Democratic-minded people around the world breathed a sigh of relief at Valls’ dissociation of democratic principles from the practices of the French Republic.

The French government just couldn’t take looking like an ass anymore & cried “uncle.” The burkini ban will be forever known as the episode in French history that exposed what jackasses run the country. Weep when you realize that many of them, like Hollande & Valls, are rightwing socialist politicians.

(As a postscript to the story, the imam of Florence was banned from FB for a day for posting this photo of Christian nuns at the beach & suggesting a dialogue on the burkini ban.)

Reposting this from 2014: August 26th, 1970 is a hallmark day in the fight for women’s rights in the US. Feminism in that period was not specific to the US but was an international phenomenon that inspired millions of women around the world. As a social movement, it was never a white middle-class women’s thing as it is so viciously slandered. I was a secretary earning $2.00 an hour, living in a tenement in NYC, & there were many activists just like me.
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The women’s movement of the 1970s has taken quite a beating by people who draw their history from media & others who want to vilify feminism. Feminism erupted in the late 1960s from every niche of society; women from the Civil Rights Movement, from religious groups, students, working women, Black & Latino women, lesbians. Betty Friedan is attributed with starting the movement with her book “The Feminine Mystique” but many activists had never read her boring book which dealt with white middle class, well-educated women. Feminism was a much broader & deeper social rebellion than her book envisioned.

The movement is misrepresented as white & middle-class, racist, lesbians & spinsters, blue-nosed. That’s not history; that’s how media always portrayed the movement to deter women from identifying with feminism–which is a volatile force for social transformation. Media depiction of feminism is a punk caricature & regrettably the slanders have not been sufficiently countered by feminists of that era.

Feminism & the Vietnam War were my first political awakenings & both began to matter to me when I was a novice in a convent in the early 1960s. My brother was a soldier in the war & I was not allowed to read about it. Here I was a student of history & not allowed to be part of my own times. What rankled me most was the unequal treatment of men & women in the Catholic Church. While we were kept encaged & infantalized, the priests were out gallivanting without the constant supervision we were subjected to. So I made my break & within a year was involved in the antiwar movement.

There was no women’s movement yet so I read Catholic writers who identified with the new ideas of feminism; I’d actually never heard of Betty Friedan. When the women’s movement began to emerge, I headed for New York City to be part of it.

I arrived in time to build the first women’s liberation march of August 26, 1970. The demands of that march were: Equal pay; childcare; abortion rights & no forced sterilization. No forced sterilization was essential to distinguish feminism from the eugenics groups who wanted abortion rights for license to control the population of black & brown women. It was a major issue for Black, Latino, & Native American women who were routinely sterilized without their knowledge or consent. At the time, it was reported 30% of the women of Puerto Rico were force sterilized. It remains a problem in population control programs.

It was my personal & political history & I am writing a series of essays to correct the historical record about this magnificent movement which was only on the stage of history briefly before it was derailed into the Democratic Party.

I certainly wasn’t the star of the show but I played a small part by organizing the publicity for the march. One of our jobs was to go out every night with march posters & plastering brushes hidden in pizza boxes to wallpaper the city. We got hauled in by the cops a couple times; we got arrested postering the Playboy Club in Manhattan.

I accidentally came across this audio thingamajig on the internet of me giving a report on the plastering & answering an interviewer: http://www.wnyc.org/story/87675-celebrating-international-womens-day-a-look-at-how-we-got-here/. You can see I was still fumbling my way through an understanding of women’s oppression. I’m not a boastful soul but am very proud of my participation in the women’s movement & met some wonderful women. I continued activism primarily around abortion rights on the campus of NYU where I worked as a secretary.

Photo is August 26 1970 Women’s March for Equality down Fifth Avenue in NYC on the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment in the US Bill of Rights which gave women the right to vote.

(Photo by John Olsen)

On Tuesday, the US State Department issued a security alert to Americans in the Gaza Strip urging them to leave as soon as possible. They are not in danger from Hamas as the alert claims but from another surge of Israeli bombing.

We need to be ready to hit the streets with placards if Israel resumes bombing in Gaza. It’s unlikely Hamas set off a rocket to Israel (& there is no documentation by Israel to show they did) but even if a single rocket was set off, that does not justify collective punishment by carpet bombing Gaza.

Ready your placards & your marching shoes to demand “no bombing in Gaza” & “no US aid to Israel.”

Really wish would people would not refer to Clinton as a prostitute because it is outrageously misogynist & repugnant. If that’s the best you can do in anatomizing her politics, perhaps political commentary is best left to others with a broader grasp of her criminality & less of an axe to grind against her gender.

Many socialists argue their support for Jill Stein by saying her campaign ‘opens a space for discussion’. After 50 years in politics, I have no idea what that formulation means. But I do know that by endorsing her without regard or criticism for her conservative politics, they are not opening any spaces but precluding discussion on the essential questions of politics today.

After her interview on CNN, it’s hard to understand how Palestinian supporters can still enthusiastically endorse Jill Stein. But of course they do so with the same nonchalance they did Bernie Sanders & by accepting the same discounts on Palestinian self-determination.

In the interview, Stein admitted she is a left Zionist who as a Jew feels “a special connection to Israel” & her entire discussion of Israel argues for its legitimacy as a nation-state rather than a colonizing power. How can someone who understands the political character of Israel feel a special connection to it?

The Indian military is occupying colleges & schools in Srinagar, using them as barracks. Just as they have targeted youth & children with pellet guns & live ammo.

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

Steven Salaita tweet regarding Hillary Clinton & the Israeli bombing of Gaza: “Israel is bombing #Gaza again. Hillary Clinton will justify it, cheer it, encourage it. Gaza’s children are lucky she’s a lesser evil.”

Let those campaigning for Clinton so she will increase US military intervention in Syria take heed. If she does win & does increase US intervention it will be to destroy the popular forces against Assad–because the one thing for certain Assad & the US agree on is that revolution against tyranny must be destroyed.