Photojournalist coverage of the freedom struggles in Palestine & Kashmir & of the occupation of Afghanistan are a parody–almost laughable if they weren’t so damn outrageous & millions of human lives weren’t involved: sunsets over Gaza, women’s prayer rituals in Kashmir, balloon selling in Afghanistan. It isn’t necessarily what photojournalists submit but what gets published to fit the editorial stance.

The caption to this Associated Press photo typifies how the Palestinian struggle is misrepresented in media on the rare occasions when it isn’t those damn sunsets over Gaza. It reads: “Four Palestinian friends who were injured during conflicts walk by the sea at Gaza’s small fishing harbor. Fighting left thousands of people with disabilities or no limbs in this Palestinian enclave.”

Isn’t that a beauty!? “Injured during conflicts” & unspecified “fighting.” Were they involved in gang wars? Did they lose their legs in Parkour competitions? Is there a civil war in Gaza? Why won’t the media say outright that thousands of Palestinian children & youth have been permanently disabled & lost limbs as a result of repeated Israeli carpet bombing campaigns over Gaza? Just as the Indian army targets youth in Kashmir with pellet guns to disfigure, blind, & disable them to destroy Kashmiri Intifada.

Disability is a feature of modern war & occupation not just in Kashmir & Gaza but in Afghanistan where thousands have had limbs blown off by land mines planted in the Soviet invasion & from the US-NATO occupation.

End the occupations of Afghanistan, Palestine, Kashmir.

(Photo byHatem Moussa/AP)

There are many wrenching photos of the violent dismantling of the Jungle refugee camp at Calais, France. There was of course, resistance to eviction by the residents & racist accounts calling that resistance “riots.”

We should never take distance from the emotional trauma of those whose odysseys cover thousands of miles through countless dangers to make a better life for themselves & their families back home.

This is a 16-year-old Ethiopian boy waiting in the cold to board a bus to a detention center where he will be jailed indefinitely in squalid, overcrowded conditions to wait out deportation. Barbarism is the very nature of European Union refugee policy.

We should not take distance & should also not stand silent. Immigrant & refugee rights are one of the most important political issues of our day, yoked inextricably to war, occupation, genocide, neoliberal economic policies.

The mantra of the immigration rights movement is “No human being is illegal.” No human being is alien to us.

Immigration is a human right. Open the damn borders.

(Photo by Emilio Morenatti/AP)

Al-Qayyara, Iraq: Hard to tell emancipation US-style from Armageddon.

US out of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia. No to US wars.

(Photo by Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)