The Kashmir High Court abrogated the indefinite detention of Khurram Parvez on Thursday & ordered his release from jail. Shouldn’t he be home by now?

How long does it take him to pack his suitcase of those “foreign clothes” that so concerned the government & sign the release papers?

Are they looking for another way to illegally detain him?

#Kashmir
#FreeKhurramParvez

The Myanmar military junta have been on a genocidal rampage in Arakan state for 48 days–torching villages, raping women, beating, torturing, arresting hundreds, killing & injuring hundreds, displacing 40,000 Rohingya Muslims & forcing them to flee to Bangladesh for asylum.

The pretext for the siege was the killing of nine border guards at Myanmar-Bangladesh border stations. The assailants remain unknown. But the junta blamed Rohingya Muslim terrorists linked to foreign operatives (presumably ISIS or al-Qaeda) with no evidence of their existence. The junta justifies their violence as the hunt for those terrorist cells.

What is known now is the complicity of Aung San Suu Kyi with the genocide. When the historical record is corrected, Suu Kyi will not be known for the title & sinecure she held in the regime but as the face of genocide. Her Nobel Peace Prize will be regarded as one of the sarcasms of politics in the barbaric phase of capitalism.

They report tens of thousands of Israelis are fleeing from the wildfires–including children, elderly, disabled, infirm. We have irreconcilable differences with them over apartheid & ethnic cleansing but not over wishing for the safety of all of them against these fires.

The hope is that someday Palestinians & Jews will live in harmony in a democratic, secular state. When Palestinians rushed to help put out the fires, it was an expression of that aspiration & their shared humanity.

An Israeli terrorism expert is calling the wildfires a “fire intifada.” This comes a year after the “knifing intifada” last November.

The knives were of course mostly planted on Palestinians executed by Israeli settlers or soldiers. But when it comes to arson as a weapon of ethnic cleansing, Israeli settlers in the West Bank wrote the book. Israel better start hauling in Israeli settlers to see if any of them tried to torch Palestinian property & ended up torching Israel.

The defense of Palestinians against false charges & imprisonment for arson is certain to come.

Social media is awash in accusations that 800,000 Arabs have tweeted jubilation about the fires in Israel. Their elation is going viral according to the reports. Others are retweeting this unsubstantiated charge with disgust, like it was the gospel truth. The source of the story is Vocativ, a media company founded & run by an Israeli who once published an article about ISIS links to Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli media is reporting that Israeli government officials & Shin Bet are already accusing Palestinians of arson for political purposes. They will use that charge without investigation to victimize Palestinians & they will do so despite the countless Palestinians who rushed to help Israel put out the fires.

One jamoke from California who claims to be a supporter of Palestinians said about the fires: “Hey karma is karma.” He can take that kind of solidarity & stuff it where the sun don’t shine because it discredits Palestinian solidarity as hateful. His pathology of social hatred for Jews & the arrant disregard for the tens of thousands of Israelis fleeing for their lives is not an expression of solidarity but of political derangement.

Palestinians intend to defeat Israel politically, not by torching thousands of people to death.

Noam Chomsky thinks Trump is the greater evil; Slavoj Žižek thinks Clinton was more dangerous & they’re both right-wing on other important questions like Israel & refugees. Now do you see why the left is in the final stages of decay?

Khurram Parvez’s legal counsel announced that the administrative detention order against him has been quashed by a High Court & authorities have been ordered to release him from jail in Jammu. When he was originally arrested without charge in September, a magistrate ordered his release but Indian authorities then held him under the Public Safety Act allowing indefinite detention.

The Jammu & Kashmir government submitted an affidavit to the court opposing his release saying Parvez was “an anti-social element known for his anti-national activities,” uses his human rights work as a cover for his “secessionist ideology & inclination towards secessionism,” & most damning of all, wears “foreign clothes” which he carried in a suitcase with him to jail.

He is in jail only for his human rights activities in Kashmir investigating & exposing the forcible disappearance of thousands, their murders & mass graves & for his work strengthening bonds of collaboration with organizations of the disappeared around the world.

#FreeKhurramParvez

Emancipation Russian-style: this is an unexploded Russian missile in an east Aleppo neighborhood. When Russia bombs schools, hospitals, & municipal housing in cities of 250,000 civilians it isn’t war crimes because they’re doing it for a higher purpose: a secular & democratic dictatorship.

We are assured by many writers who support Syrian & Russian bombing that getting bombed to death by Syria’s barrel bombs filled with chlorine are not a more painful way to die than by one of these Russian missiles or by US missiles. We wonder where Craig Murray, Paul Larudee, Margaret Kimberley, & others get that information because to many it seems utterly callous, if not deranged. Since when do those who claim they’re antiwar make that kind of determination instead of vociferously opposing the use of any weapons against unarmed civilians?

The only principled antiwar demands: the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians; the immediate cessation of US bombing; the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military operatives from Syria.

If it didn’t foretell a crackdown on freedom of speech, this campaign about fake news would take the cake for sarcasm. Yesterday, the Washington Post had an article about how sophisticated Russian propaganda machinery flooded social media with fake news & may have effected the outcome of the election.

That’s probably the source of all the nonsense about growing Russophobia in the US & a lot of the war-mongering for Russia in Syria.

In response to the fake news from Russia panic, only three words are required: Radio Free Europe. It’s a US broadcasting network & CIA front that blasted propaganda into Eastern Europe & the former USSR since the heart of the Cold War in 1953 & is still operating in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, & the Middle East.

Reading a long article calling for self-determination for Syria as an oppressed nation withstanding a “US imperialist onslaught” & defending Russian intervention as Assad’s right to invite other countries to defend his dictatorship–which the writer does not deny.

To the writer’s mind, the war in Syria is all about US-backed Islamist militias threatening a legitimate dictatorship & he dismisses the popular movement against Assad with the flick of a wrist.

The article included this August 2016 photo of a wounded child being rescued in east Aleppo which Syrian & Russian bombers have been carpet bombing, including with chlorine-filled barrel bombs. It never dawns on the writer to question the military strategy of bombing a city with 250,000 civilians to get at those US-backed militias?

He calls this a socialist analysis. In a pig’s eye! We could find similar apologia in the archives of Stalinism.

Young girl is wounded in August 2016 bombing attack on eastern Aleppo by Syrian government planes.

(Photo by Ameer al-Halbi / AFP / Getty Images)