On the charges against Khurram Parvez of inciting stone pelting & protests

The kangaroo courts of the Indian occupying army will have a difficult time documenting the charge of encouraging stone pelting against Khurram Parvez since he has a substantial body of postings both on Facebook & on Twitter. Those who follow him know there isn’t a single post Indian authorities can point to. On the contrary, his posts concern human rights for Kashmiris.

As for inciting people to protest? Isn’t the right to assemble a basic democratic right? Isn’t massive protest one of the ways India gained its independence from Britain?

As for stone pelting, since I cannot be tried in an Indian court, let me say honestly that people under military occupation have a right to defend themselves by any means necessary. It is a travesty that stone pelting is prosecuted & not the use of pellet guns, tear gas & sound grenades, & live ammunition.

Crises on Libya to Italy mid-Mediterranean route taken by African reufgees

African refugees in punctured dinghy (Santi Palacios:AP) Sept 17 2016

Media doesn’t often report the details of what’s going on with the refugee crises in the Mediterranean. There’s complete silence about what NATO ships are doing in the Aegean Sea to thwart Syrian, Afghan, & other refugees on the Turkey to Greece route. They call that mission “stemming illegal trafficking & illegal migration.”

This week, in a breach of the usual silence, Reuters reported that Libyan patrol boats have intercepted & turned back more than 11,000 refugees so far this year. Just in the past few days they turned back 1,425 refugees, including children. They report that 120,000 have managed to reach Italy where another set of horrors awaits them, including rampant sexual abuse of unaccompanied children.

Reuters also breaks the silence on the number of fatalities on the Libya to Italy route. As of September 6th, nearly 3,200 sub-Saharan refugees have drowned this year according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). UN refugee officials reported in May that drownings in the Mediterranean are up 35-percent this year. How does Frontex (the European Union’s naval operation against refugees) explain that when for over a year they’ve had fleets of European warships & sophisticated aerial surveillance equipment monitoring that route? How have drownings increased when rescue ships are on the spot?

How is forcing them back to Libya a solution to the refugee crisis when the country is the center of a new war between ISIS & US special forces?

The worst part is that this crisis isn’t going to end. The UN refugee agency reports this week that the number of South Sudanese fleeing civil war is now over one million, including many orphaned children. Keep that in mind the next time you read panegyrics on the humanitarian work of George Clooney & his associate (& likely CIA agent) John Prendergast. Clooney, Prendergast, Jimmy Carter & Kofi Annan played a role for the US in brokering the secession of South Sudan from Sudan which has proven a humanitarian tragedy of civil war, starvation, repression.

These refugees awaiting rescue & return to Libya are in a partially punctured dinghy about 13 miles off the coast of Libya.

(Photo by Santi Palacios/AP)

Islamophobic cartoon in Le Monde

Metamorphose cartoon in Le Monde Sept 16 2016

Was chasing down the source of this Islamophobic cartoon on Twitter which the tweeter said was from Le Monde. It resonates with Charlie Hebdo’s so-called satiric genre & it would be alarming, though not surprising, if that genre became the acceptable norm. Maybe losing that burkini battle really inflamed Islamophobic editors in France.

Incidentally in my search, I came across an archive of 129,000 articles debating whether Hebdo is racist or satiric. To my mind, “Charlie Hebdo est raide mort” (that’s “dead as a doornail” to google translate) so I hate to add another paragraph to the debate. But let me say that if you have to explicate every one of their cartoons to persuade us they are not racist but in fact hilarious social commentary, perhaps you need to consider where your purpose in life is taking you. Off the deep end, if you ask my opinion.

Isn’t there an ancient canard going as far back as the first bum joke by Homo Erectus that if you have to explain the joke, maybe the problem is not its subtlety but its lack of wit? Readers still laugh themselves silly at Greek & Roman satirists. The Canterbury Tales is over 600 years old & it’s been a while since I read it but its fart jokes remain among the most memorable moments in world literature: “No deeper toot was ever heard in hell.” Nobody has to explain that even to a ten-year-old.

One of the most worthless arguments is that Hebdo’s humor is particularly French, meaning ‘oh so sophisticated.’ If the magazine itself leaves you cold, those defending it with that argument will have you in stitches. Moliere doesn’t need 129,000 articles to explicate his wit; Daumier doesn’t need professorial tracts to make us laugh. They’re brilliant & even though I’m an unsophisticated rube from the American Midwest, I really get their wit. They make Hebdo look like trash.

There was one defense of Hebdo that rankled & did not amuse me & that’s the one by Katha Pollitt in The Nation titled “The Courage of Charlie Hebdo.” I don’t find The Nation a particularly insightful magazine & as a feminist I have a lot of problems with Pollitt’s politics on the issue of targeting Muslim women. She’s an Islamophobe & at least once, maybe twice in the past few years I have responded to her articles to protest her prejudice pawned off as feminism. Only Pollitt could turn loud-mouthed racism into courage.

After that trip down bad memory lane, I was unable to verify that this cartoon came from Le Monde. I post it because Muslim women are particularly targeted by the haters & war-mongers. Satire is to skewer the debaucheries of the oppressor, not make a laughing stock of the oppressed.