The rebel-held Douma neighborhood of Damascus, Syria has 100,000 civilian residents forced to live most of their lives in underground shelters because of heavy shelling from Syrian ground forces & Syrian airstrikes.

The justification given by the Assad dictatorship & his supporters is that the military bombardment is to take out “throat-cutting jihadists.” It must be asked by serious political people if bombing cities with 100,000 civilians is an appropriate military strategy for destroying paramilitary militias bunkered there? Or is the opposition to Assad broader than the paramilitary groups?

Trump Apocalypse alarmists need be reminded of the parable of Chicken Little. Similar tales go back centuries in many cultures because prophecies of doom are such effective gimmicks for social control & also provide so much fodder for satirists & comedy clubs.

In the fable, Chicken Little is a dim-witted, low-paid white worker who once attended a Bernie Sanders rally. When an acorn falls on his head, he is convinced by Foxy Loxy, a manipulative conman with an MBA from the Wharton School, that the sky is falling.

Most people are deeply & justifiably troubled by what the presidency of Trump will mean for human rights in the US & for war in the Middle East. The rightward shift in US politics will accelerate. Of that we can be sure. Our perspectives must be to join the youth already protesting against that shift, to help build that movement, & to rebuild the international antiwar movement to reverse this rightward shift—as the antiwar & social movements of the 1960s-1970s attempted.

There are analysts claiming Trump’s attitude toward Putin, endorsement by Assad, & collegiality with Netanyahu forebode a more aggressive US military role in the Middle East, especially in Syria & toward the Palestinians. That view is based on middle-school social studies lessons, not an understanding of how the US government is run, & is an especially embarrassing credulity, coming from sophisticated commentators like Gilbert Achcar.

Have the sore losers & Trump Apocalypse crowd considered that the elections might have been rigged? That it wasn’t third parties, Sanders supporters, or low-paid white workers at all? Or does that suspicion get too close to criticizing the US government?

The musician Leonard Cohen died yesterday at the age of 82. Like most of my generation, I loved & still listen to his music; it was the soundtrack to our loves & life.

But I won’t grieve his loss though, not for a moment, because in 2009 he defied the cultural boycott of Israel (BDS) called by Palestinians & performed in Tel Aviv just 45 miles away from Gaza where nine months earlier Israeli warplanes carpet bombed for three weeks & killed 1,150 people.

He was a modest & gentle man they say, yet It was okay by him to be the soundtrack to ethnic cleansing in 2009. In the 1973 Israeli war with Arab countries over the Golan Heights & Sinai, our man performed for Israeli troops at the front lines. Hard to understand a gentility that can live with those contradictions.

That campaign went on for what seemed an eternity of hell. And the postmortem writers think they’re gonna drag it out another couple years? In a pig’s eye! Call me anti-intellectual, but you read one postmortem on the Trump election, you’ve read ’em all.

The sore losers gotta let go of their recriminations, blaming everybody under the sun for Clinton’s loss–from third parties to Sanders supporters to low-paid white workers. You’re bringing yourself down. Face up to it: she was no prize package as a candidate. Just ask the Haitian people.

Usually on Facebook, I see tirades & hatchet-jobs against “the left,” as if it were a monolith of theoretical conformity rather than a cacophony of disparate voices including everything from crazy-pants kooks to war-mongers to the marvelous activists involved in building antiwar protests, Palestinian solidarity, women’s rights, LGBT rights, civil rights, immigrant rights. There just isn’t much cohesion among them—at least not consistently & not nationally & most don’t operate in groups but as freelance activists.

Activists don’t get much respect so those considered the authoritative voices of the left are celebrity academics & journalists who usually don’t have more than forty hours of activism between them & just as often talk through their hats—just because they can & still get honoraria.

There hasn’t been a current on the left for a long time—we’re talking decades–that is rooted in theory, committed to activism, & democratic to the marrow. That’s just a fact which for the present has no resolution. So when I read the damnations of “the left,” I always wonder who the hell from all of the above are they talking about? Usually it’s the one who don’t agree with them.

Overnight, with the election of Trump, commentators from “the left” are taking their revenge with a fury. There’s an overload today of attacks on liberals, inexplicably indicting them without mercy for the presidency of Trump, for having the temerity to be as shocked as the rest of us that Trump won & for protesting yesterday against him. One left commentator called the teen protesters the “Zombie Apocalypse Protesters” & demanded to know where they were in 2008. Eight years ago, most of them were in grade school, that’s where they were.

You kind of give yourself away when you go after liberals like that. Anyone active in the social movements knows that liberals make up the majority of activists. That’s true of civil rights, women’s rights, & all the social movements. Not only do they make up the majority of activists, but they’re the ones who bankroll those movements through donations, large & small. It gets worse. When you organize a demonstration, the majority of those showing up to oppose war or defend human rights are none other than liberals. They’re everywhere in social justice movements. You can’t shake them. They’re determined to change the world. Damn fools!

So while those Zombies were out protesting the social hatreds promoted by Trump, “the left” were denouncing them for all manner of crimes committed before the Zombies were even born.

I think I’m getting it now. I think I want to be a liberal.

Day 124 of the brutal unrelenting siege in Kashmir: protests & resistance continue against extreme repression.

This is also day 56 of the incarceration of Khurram Parvez.

The US election has taken my attention but I will catch up & report on developments in Kashmir. Our solidarity & commitment will not waver.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

There were thousands out across the US yesterday protesting the election of Trump. One cannot tell sufficiently from photojournalist accounts, but it appears many, if not most were young, including teenagers, & based on their placards represented those most threatened by Trump’s hateful rhetoric: Blacks, Latinos, women, LGBTs, Muslims, immigrants. These were anti-racist marches, pro-women’s rights, against Muslim-hating, for immigrant rights & against deportations, for LGBT rights.

Twitter, where it seems the most volatile go to vent their wrath, has posts castigating the protesters for not being active except about the election. It’s an odd charge, based solely on uninformed assumptions, since most protesters appear to be very young, were probably little kids during the Occupy movement of 2011, & have every reason to fear the hateful political rhetoric of Trump.

It’s also an odd charge because tens of thousands of young & old of every nationality have repeatedly mobilized in civil rights protests across the US since the vigilante execution of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February 2012. Many among the protesters yesterday may well have participated in those civil rights protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter.

An apparent & significant lack is the absence of international & antiwar sentiment in the protests—judging that only from the placards & banners. But what’s more significant is that the weakened antiwar movement has not provided national leadership & organization because of disunity. The movement is further weakened by divisions about support by some for the Assad dictatorship & Russian military intervention in Syria. Surely young people cannot be faulted for lack of antiwar consciousness when veteran activists are so disoriented as to support Russian bombing of civilians.

It seems apparent to everyone after the election of Trump, that a rightward shift in American politics is brewing. When thousands who will be directly affected come out to protest & express their anxieties about that, it is something to be lauded, encouraged, joined, built, & not something to sniff at as an inferior expression of discontent.

The next time these protests are called, antiwar activists should enthusiastically support & join them in force with antiwar placards tying the racism in the US to the racism of war. It may be time for veteran antiwar activists to follow the inspiration of their youth & not to try to lead or take over what is bigger than them.

(Top photo is Oakland, California march by Noah Berger/Reuters; bottom photo is 16-year-old Ariana Melton at Berkeley High School rally in Berkeley, California by Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)