This is the scene today at the Oceti Sakowin encampment in North Dakota with Standing Rock Sioux & “water protector” activists from around the country celebrating the announcement that the US Army Corps of Engineers & Obama administration have backed off routing the Dakota Access Pipeline under Lake Oahe. The Standing Rock Indian Reservation is on the western shoreline of Lake Oahe.
Lake Oahe is actually a large reservoir created by the Oahe Dam on the Missouri River. The US Army Corps of Engineers began constructing the dam in 1948 to provide electric power; it began generating power in 1962. The dam’s power plant now provides electricity for much of the north-central US.

Oahe was one of five dams the US Army Corps built on the Missouri River in that period which flooded out & forced thousands of Native Americans to relocate on their reservations. Over 200,000 acres of the Standing Rock Reservation & the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota were flooded out just by the Oahe Dam. So the Dakota Access Pipeline is not the first time the sovereignty of the Standing Rock Sioux & other Native American tribes has been violated by the US government in the Dakotas.

Last week the US Army Corps of Engineers ordered the dismantlement of the solidarity camp by tomorrow, December 5th, but it was clear the Standing Rock Sioux & solidarity protesters had no intention of leaving & were going to stand their ground. This decision to reroute around Lake Oahe is an important victory if it sticks & if it is not just an end run around tomorrow’s expected confrontation. Media in Fargo, North Dakota reports that the reroute decision could be reversed when Trump takes office in just over a month. No one wants to be a wet blanket on celebrations but this may be a stalling tactic by the US to head off the showdown & disperse the massive force of solidarity in North Dakota.

The pipeline begins in North Dakota but it still has 1,172-miles (1,886 km) to traverse through South Dakota where it well may again conflict with Indian sovereignty, will cross through private farmlands in Iowa where farmers will certainly protest the imposition of eminent domain, & also through farmland in Illinois to its terminal. In Iowa it will also cross under the Mississippi River & there are already protest encampments being set up.

The usurpation of Indian rights & environmental damage by the pipeline company & the US government is not likely to make the Dakota Access Pipeline an event-free enterprise. The struggle may have just begun.

(Photo by Lucas Jackson)

It was through Kashmiri activists badgering me on Facebook as far back as 2011 that I came to study, understand, & commit to their struggle. I don’t kid myself that I know the entire history or complexities of their struggle, even with all the information & links they pass on to me. I don’t have sufficient sources to assess the inter-dynamics of political forces in Kashmir. Some things you have to be Kashmiri to understand.

What I do know without a single reservation is that their struggle is one of the most important freedom struggles in the world–not because they’re a great big country with a great big economy & military might–like India–but because, like Palestinians, like the Syrian popular movement against Assad, like Guaranis in Brazil, & Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota, their relentless, committed struggle against tyranny shows suffering humanity the way forward to justice & peace against insuperable odds.

In the process, they’re teaching us all a thing or two about international solidarity–that the iron law of social transformation is “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

This delightful photo is Khurram Parvez reunited with his family after release from illegal imprisonment. It appeared in The Caravan, an Indian journal covering politics & culture, along with an interview with him published today.

It’s an important interview which makes quite clear why India jailed him: not for any criminal activity but for his effective political & human rights work not just in Kashmir but internationally.

Once again, the international defense campaign was central to his release & is a result of the work he did particularly around forced disappearance. The dawn of international solidarity with Kashmir has come–thanks to the unrelenting work of Kashmiri activists.

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/…/interview-khurram-parvez-ka…

Several days ago, I spent some time researching a post about the US siege on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq which will involve ISIS in Raqqa, Syria. Media misrepresents what is going on. However, for those who read many media sources & don’t eschew it all as fake news sources, it is possible to understand what is going on. We have, after all, over 25 years experience with the treacheries & barbarism of the US & its allies in Iraq.

The ghost haunting my machine ate up that post & I need to go back to research & rewrite. Glib doesn’t work for me. Nor does ranting about US treachery without explaining what is going on. Some can just hate on US militarism & call it antiwar but understanding US military strategy in Iraq & its relationship to the war in Syria is the only way most people can decide where they stand.

It appears that among Assad supporters a method of deflection from Syrian slaughter in east Aleppo is to bring up US slaughter in Mosul, Iraq. The comparison is of course entirely reasonable. But not when it is used to rationalize Syrian & Russian carpet bombing of civilians in Syria. The adroit maneuver is clever, even convincing to many. But how is it persuasive that what Syria is doing isn’t all that bad just because the US is doing it too? When did US militarism become a standard to measure anything but barbarism?

My piece on Mosul, Iraq which I am reconstructing does not fault in condemning US intervention in Iraq & Syria. But be assured I will not use Syrian & Russian bombing to rationalize US bombing of civilians in Mosul & Raqqa.

It’s curious why Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, confuses so many people. She has wretched extreme right-wing politics & publicly supports Assad & Russian militarism in Syria. She has public associations with the military dictator General Sisi in Egypt & Narendra Modi in India. She is also currently jockeying for a post in the Trump regime.

Her attraction to Modi is likely based on their shared rabidity toward Muslims, their racism, & nationalism. He is after all the orchestrator of the 2002 genocide of Muslims in Gujarat state, India & is conducting the murderous siege in predominantly Muslim Kashmir.

The fact that she endorsed Bernie Sanders & is grandstanding now in North Dakota with other veterans to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline appears to confuse some. This does not reflect her fundamental commitments since she is a shameless opportunist. Social hatred is the bedrock of her political platform.

If you don’t learn anything else on social media it should be to do some vetting before you hold people up as models. Unless you agree with her kind of crap.

Assad supporters I’ve never heard of have been laying siege to my posts all day. Harassment appears to be their preferred style of debate. Quite telling politically–& also pointless since most of the comments get deleted.

There’s nothing to be gained from pissing contests with those who defend dictatorship & carpet bombing. However I would be glad to debate or help organize a debate with any of their propagandists in a formal setting.

East Aleppo after Syrian airstrikes, November 30th 2016: those who defend this slaughter as liberation from “jihadists” have separated from the traditions of the antiwar movement.

The political ruptures between those who support & those who oppose this have not been as consequential since divisions among progressive forces over WWII. The integrity of the antiwar, Palestinian solidarity, & socialist movements are at stake. Where they stand & how they organize opposition to foreign intervention turning the Middle East into a killing field will determine the character of those movements.

One supporter of Syrian bombing said those who oppose this have been “bought off by the CIA.” There’s no purpose to poisoning the debate with such reckless & foolish imputations.

There are three prevailing perspectives: support for Syrian & Russian bombing but opposition to US bombing; support for US bombing but opposition to Syrian & Russian; opposition to Syrian bombing of civilians & to all foreign military intervention in Syria.

There is no purpose for the antiwar movement to demand the removal of Assad though many activists & organizations will hold that view. It is up to the Syrian people to dispatch Assad.

Those who are serious about rebuilding the antiwar movement against all wars should consider organized debates on campuses & other venues representing the three different currents of thought rather than pretend the number of “likes” on FB posts shows the strength of a position.

Some find English correspondent Robert Fisk a cogent observer of Middle East politics, especially the wars in Iraq & Syria, & he’s been feted up the wazoo in confirmation of that delusion. Many find his work too frequently shoddy & not carefully researched. Others haven’t been able to read him for years because of his serious orientalism & racism toward Arabs & Muslims & the sheer tonnage of idiocies & rubbish he publishes about them.

One of his idiotic assertions, out of a cornucopia of them, is that Muslim Arabs no longer believe in the nation-state & nearly a million refugees from Syria & elsewhere in the Middle East demonstrated that by trying to cross the borders of Europe. Is such wretched sarcasm worse than fake news–which he also produces in abundance?

His views about the 2011 Arab uprisings against dictatorships are rancid with contempt. He said Muslim Arabs (as if those countries had no other religions) did not oppose dictatorship in general but only those imposed by the west & that the millions of protesters in several countries beaten, arrested, tortured, disappeared, murdered were demanding dignity, not democracy. Fisk is irrefutable evidence that racism makes you stupid.

His admission that he doesn’t “understand fully what is happening in the Middle East” should be taken as understatement. After over 40 years of reporting from the Middle East he doesn’t understand squat & should be run out of the region on a rail. With dignity.

His credibility was not enhanced when he embedded up the ass of the Syrian army to cover the Syrian War but added new dimensions to his orientalism & has made him an ardent defender of Assad & Russia. He is often on the speaking circuits expressing his views about the barbarities of ISIS & al-Qaeda & denouncing the vandalism & destruction of artworks & antiquities by ISIS & al-Qaeda forces. No would disagree with that but with Fisk there is always a concern about where he gets his information.

Now as Syrian bombers pummel east Aleppo into oblivion, our man Fisk has outdone himself in insularity & idiocy. His column in The Independent on December 1st was titled “Does Aleppo prove that we westerners should keep the world’s antiquities?”

The most wretched thing about this stinking article is that Fisk is more concerned about artifacts than he is about the thousands of Syrian civilians being carpet bombed. The title reeks of supremacy; the shameful article justifies looting by western governments & accepts wars as necessary for Muslim Arabs who can’t distinguish dictatorship from dignity from democracy.

Fisk says he’s grateful German archaeologists from the 19th & early 20th centuries plundered artifacts in the Middle East (like the Aleppo Room built about 1600) & moved them to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin because otherwise they would now be rubble. Being a supporter of Syrian & Russian bombing he puts it so delicately: “If the Aleppo Room was still in Aleppo, & not a museum in Berlin, it might well have been destroyed, burned in the indulgence of fire which consumed much of the old city two years ago when even the great mosque & minaret of the Omayad crashed to the ground.”

“The indulgence of fire” & the great mosque that he says just fell to the ground is the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, one of Syria’s oldest & largest shrines that the Syrian army used as a base, defaced with graffiti, & burned to the ground in 2012 along with hundreds of shops & buildings in the area. Fisk just can’t bring himself to say it is Syrian & Russian bombing that endangers & is reducing historic & religious sites to rubble. He wasn’t coy about calling out ISIS so why ‘mum’s the word’ about calling out Assad & Putin?

This is a photo of the 6th century Ishtar Gate & Processional Way from the ancient city of Babylon which in 1902, during the Ottoman Empire, German archaeologists “discovered,” dismantled & reassembled also in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Fisk asks: “Would it have survived the 1991 war on Iraq? Or the 2003 invasion? Or the looters of 2004 & 2005 & 2006 who have gutted so much of Iraq’s southern archaeological heritage?”

Can Fisk bring himself to say the historic & cultural artifacts in Iraq were threatened by US bombers? What about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed? Do they count less than the monuments?
Since the US was occupying Iraq in 2004, 2005, & 2006 & ISIS didn’t exist, can Fisk tell us who did that widespread looting & what makes them more criminal that the archaeologists from Germany, other European countries & the US? The British Museum & other such institutions have storage facilities filled with booty from the Middle East, Africa, & Asia.

Fisk isn’t just a fool. He’s an ass & an Islamophobe.

(Photo of the Ishtar Gate from Shuttercock via The Independent)

It’s a rude awakening for monarchists who friend me on Facebook to learn I have a loathing for the king-queen crap. I don’t psychologize where it comes from but on the contrary nurture & indulge it.

When the old boy king Pumipon of Thailand died last October (even as a corpse with that contorted sneer on his face), I posted an unflattering, merciless obituary by a Thai political dissident now in exile for violating the draconian lèse majesté law against criticizing Pumipon.

An American Facebook friend protested saying he resented my insults to Pumipon, a beloved dictator. He was so incensed & used such intemperate language that if we lived in Thailand, I’d be waiting for the jackboots to arrive & arrest me under the lèse majesté law.

Our man says the repugnant sneer was because Pumipon had a glass prothetic eye. So did my grandmother but that didn’t contort her face. Then he said some think the sneer is because Pumipon “accidentally” killed his brother as a teen. Three servants were charged with the crime & executed. Pumipon could have pardoned them but chose not to.

When I did not find letting three servants hang for his crime persuasive about the character of the old boy, my erstwhile FB friend accused me of being “completely biased, ethnocentric & idiotic.” In a paroxysm of monarchist outrage, he said “Obviously you have never been to the country & you have your head well stuck up your ass & need a tractor to pull it out.”

So with that I rest my case against Pumipon & shall only dramatize it with this photo of his son Maha Vajiralongkorn, the new king of Thailand before they cleaned him up for duty.

Noppawan “Ploy” Bunluesilp, the woman who took this photo of the new king, was arrested under the lèse majesté law. She had been in Bangkok visiting & was hauled in by police with her child & father-in-law. She is married to a Scottish journalist which may explain why she has now been released.

So I ask you: who is it needs a tractor to pull his head out of someone’s ass?

Day 146 of the military siege in Kashmir: the Guardian-UK has published 4 photos in the past several weeks, including three evening boaters on Dal Lake in Srinagar & a bird perched overlooking the lake. Coverage used to be mostly prayer rituals of Kashmiri women.

Day 54 of the military genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar: the Guardian published a photo today of a festival outside Yangon celebrating 55 years of cultural relations between France & Myanmar.

It’s all the same genre of journalism as photos of sunsets in Gaza & balloon sellers in Afghanistan.