Many think of Tariq Ali as an elder statesman of the left. Actually he’s more like a dried up petrified prune. There’s no energy left in his politics. It’s like the living dead to listen to him. His betrayals on Syria are beyond the pale: the great revolutionist marching with David Icke in defense of Assad’s dictatorship & in defense of Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians.

Now he posts that banal sorry-assed objection of Ajamu Baraka to the White Helmets winning an Oscar. Baraka, like Ali, supports Assad & Russian bombing but gets on his high horse because those pulling bodies & survivors out of the rubble of bombing are not a “neutral humanitarian group” but partisans of the revolution against Assad. So Ali & Baraka can be partisans of counter-revolution but the Syrian White Helmets should go through the trauma of being bombed & watching people die in their arms & stay neutral?

Those two schnooks are considered leaders of the western left? In a pig’s eye. They’re leaders of the lefts degeneration.

CBS reported that several states are preparing legislation to use RICO racketeering laws against protestors. RICO is used for hardened criminals & mafia types for crimes like murder, kidnapping, drug & human trafficking. It would be pioneering legal territory to use it against peaceful protesters.

This is where those damn anarchists who love to break the windows of banks & businesses are a problem that will have be addressed by protest organizers. They think of protests not as social movements to make change but as a demolition derby or a place to work out their unresolved aggression problems.

This is the time to shape up for the cynics & misanthropes who natter on about the political insufficiencies of protesters because they haven’t protested wars going back 100 years. Either you stand with protesters to defend the rights of free speech & assembly or you sit at your computer indulging your hostilities against the protesters. It’s not more complicated than that.

https://twitter.com/Musa_Kashmiri/status/838072395965599745

An encounter between the occupying army & militants is ongoing in a village in the Tral area, about 33 km / 20 miles from Srinagar. Based on a tip from its extensive surveillance network, special forces moved into the area, cordoned the area & targeted the house where three to five militants were hiding.

The encounter seems to be ongoing so reports are still incomplete & contradictory. According to some reports, there is heavy gunfire going on; according to another report, troops used improvised explosive devices to flatten the house while the militants were inside. The gunfire is likely one-sided, more of a massacre than a gunfight, since it’s a few militants against a battalion of special forces.

Although the army imposed a curfew to keep protesters away, they are coming from at least 15 different villages in the district to support the militants despite being assaulted with tear gas. This video shows men & women coming out to chase away armored vehicles moving in on the militants.

Our fullest solidarity with the stone-throwers who a nationalist pea-brain referred to as “jihadi stone throwers.”

Rania Khalek is struggling to salvage her career as an “independent” journalist after embedding herself with the Syrian army last year & traveling to Aleppo with Bartlett & Beeley. That hasn’t hurt their careers much but they’re professional propagandists on Assad’s payroll while she has no idea what the hell she’s doing.

While on the road back to Damascus accompanied by Syrian soldiers, Khalek got sick & wondered aloud on social media if she had been poisoned by the Syrian army since they were so controlling. This outraged Bartlett & Beeley who roasted her for impugning their beloved Syrian army & the Assad regime. A falling out between ardent Assadist ideologues & groveling, inept wannabes can get pretty nasty.

RT apparently has not given up on Khalek yet since they often enough interview her as an expert on Syrian politics based on her one week under close supervision “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” kind of tour. The network seems to be testing her out for a full-time gig. Her latest is an interview on RT by Sean Stone, the actor & son of Oliver Stone who already has a regular gig on RT. Not unlike his father, Sean Stone is a full-blown libertarian conspiracy thinker who navigates complex political issues by intuition & paranoia & doesn’t appear to have cracked a book since high school. He is just as ignorant as Khalek on the issue of Syria & just as ardent a supporter of Assad’s dictatorship & Russian military intervention.

Stone, who four years ago was dismissive about terrorism & called the so-called war on terror “constant fear mongering & aggression,” interviewed Khalek about the White Helmets & was now feeding her lines about the Syrian army liberating Syrians from “jihadist terrorists.” Neither has the investigative integrity considered de rigueur to an honest 7th grader. Watching Stone interview Khalek brings to mind the phrase “the worst are full of passionate intensity” from The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats because what they lack in understanding, they try to make up for with feigned ardor.

Some Assadist media (that not run by Bartlett & Beeley) like Mint Press News publish Khalek’s endless laments about the hit her career has taken since her ill-fated whirlwind tour of Syria intended to give her credentials but which has brought her shame. For Khalek, revolution & counter-revolution in Syria is all about her; it’s happening 6,000 miles from her wounded ego that no one will publish her articles or pay her honoraria to speak. She complains that she’s being silenced & smeared, “marginalized & ostracized” by opponents of Assad’s dictatorship when actually her career is tanking because no one gives a damn what she has to say; she doesn’t know anything. Her recent writings on media coverage of Syria & the refugee crisis are an embarrassment of groveling apologetics, perhaps hoping Assad will take notice & put her on the payroll too.

Alas, poor Rania! Thou hast undone thine own career by thinking you can wing it & play lightly with the life & death questions of revolution & counter-revolution in Syria. Thou hath wrought this upon thyself & will have to live with oblivion which many before you have preferred to shame.

Full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtNL_nYuD3Y

Yesterday, a concert in tribute to the White Helmets at Grand Central Station in NYC was aggressively interrupted by a handful of activists led by Sara Flounders from the Hands Off Syria Coalition. Flounders belongs to Workers World, a lilliputian left group with Stalinist politics. She’s been involved in antiwar work since the 1990s where her most enduring efforts have been in maintaining sectarian control rather than building a broad-based democratic movement open to all.

Flounders belongs to the Hands Off Syria Coalition, an amalgam including Stalinist groups, misguided antiwar activists, washed-up left groups, former CIA & FBI agents & US military officials (born again after retirement with pensions), & professional Assad propagandists like Tim Anderson, Eva Bartlett, & Vanessa Beeley.

Resorting to aggressive action against those who disagree with you typifies a certain kind of politics: Brownshirt politics like the thugs Nazis used to break up the rallies & meetings of opposing parties & to intimidate Jews & Romani. This is not to suggest that Flounders & all members of the Hands Off Syria Coalition are fascists–though some members are. It is to suggest the trajectory of a political method using coercion of any kind against those you see as political opponents. (Self-defense against occupying armies is a different matter entirely.) But interrupting a musical tribute to the White Helmets? Does the Hands Off Syria Coalition find rescue workers that threatening to their politics? Are they willing to follow this trajectory to its inevitable use of violence?

In the early 1970s, a small left group led by Lyndon LaRouche, made the same transition as Workers World & Socialist Action (also in the Syria coalition) from socialism to libertarianism. The LaRouche group launched a campaign to physically liquidate the Communist Party (CP) by attacking their events with nunchuk martial art weapons. The CP had detestable politics (still does) but violence against them was absolutely excluded by activists as a method to oppose them or anyone else for that matter. Other socialist activists came to the defense of the CP by helping to protect meetings where they were attacked & many defenders were injured in doing so. Workers World was not involved in that defense.

The LaRouche group became a cult, complete with obedience training, brainwashing, libraries of conspiracy theories. Many members became well-known libertarians & are leading Assadist ideologues. Most prominent is F. William Engdahl who is frequently interviewed on RT, The Real News, Press TV (the Iranian news source), & regularly makes the rounds of Assadist media, including Global Research (where he is a research associate), Sputnik News, SOTT (a David Icke publication edited by Eva Bartlett), Voltaire Network (a hotbed of libertarian pro-Assad propaganda). It took socialist members of the Hands Off Syria Coalition over 40 years to arrive at the place pioneered by Lyndon LaRouche: the stinking landfill of history. If they have any good sense left, that should give them pause.

Assadists are boasting of the disruption of the White Helmet concert at the same time as they denounce the youth protests against Trump, the Women’s March, & the protests against the Muslim ban. That’s because their right-wing, hate-filled political perspectives are only able to gather handfuls to support Assad’s dictatorship & Russian military intervention in Syria so they resort to grandstanding stunts. That does not make their action less reprehensible nor less dangerous as we know from how Brownshirts became Nazi Storm Troopers.

Principled antiwar activists condemn this action by the Hands Off Syria Coalition. There is no place for such aggression in the antiwar movement–although of course, it is hard for the Coalition to call itself antiwar when it supports Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians. We should demand a public statement by the Coalition condemning this action by Flounders & other activists & disassociating from this kind of politics.

Video of disruption at Grand Central Station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6j74m5e80Y

(Photo is Flounders talking to police)

Accepted a friend request from a guy with several common friends. Checked out his posts today & found a cornucopia of rubbish about “sheeple,” “Satanic Israel,” chemtrails, several Assadist memes, several posts about the imaginary science of NASA because the earth is flat & motionless, several alerts about the Rothschild Illuminati who run the world, a claim that ISIS was created by the “Roman Papacy” & Jesuits (who are described as “a satanic organization headed by the fallen angel Lucifer”) & is armed by the CIA, Mossad, & Saudis, a video on how the Vatican created Islam; other anti-Muslim rubbish, & a video on how Pope Francis declared Lucifer as God.

Lots of racist crap, lots of the occult, all straight out of David Icke & the sickest current of libertarianism which drives Assadism. Color me intolerant but why be friends with right-wing creepy when there are so many sane people in the world?

A brilliant excoriation of Israeli apartheid by Israeli comedian Assaf Harel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyyUvxHLYr4

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.774663

This is Part One of my article on Aung San Suu Kyi in Pakistan Today.

Part Two will deal with her denial of the Rohingya genocide.

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/03/03/the-legend-of-aung-san-suu-kyi/

This fellow was rescued from a dinghy in the Mediterranean & is arriving in the port at Malaga, Spain in a rescue ship run by a private humanitarian organization.

One can only imagine the physical & psychic tension & exhaustion refugees feel on their journey & the release in these transitory moments when someone has reached out to help, not thwart them or endanger their lives.

We wish this man Godspeed on his journey to a more tranquil life.
No human being is illegal.

(Photo by Jon Nazca/Reuters)

This woman is part of a group that taxied to the US border with Canada near Quebec hoping to find asylum from Trump’s crackdown on Muslims & refugees. It appears that while Trump’s executive order was nullified by a court, his administration is implementing its provisions through administrative action & in hunting down undocumented immigrants.

Asylum for refugees, whether fleeing war or sweatshop economics, is one of the epic human rights issues of our times. Either we get human solidarity right or all humanity will pay the piper for a very long time. The good news is that hundreds of thousands around the world are rousing from political torpor to say in thunderous chorus: no human being is illegal.

(Photo by Dario Ayala/Reuters)