Let me tell you I am bursting with pride that my article in Pakistan Today titled “The Legend of Aung San Suu Kyi” was reposted in Rohingya Blogger which I consider one of the two best sources of reliable & important news about the Rohingya struggle in Myanmar & in exile.
I’ll get humble in a minute again but just let me savor the glory for a bit.
http://www.rohingyablogger.com/2017/03/the-legend-of-aung-san-suu-kyi.html
Drawing conclusions from two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax return is like trying to divine the entire jurisprudence system of Mesopotamia from a shard of stone age pottery found 10,000 years later.
Trying to figure out the ratio of security forces in the West Bank to the population of Palestinians. The number of Israeli soldiers is confidential but I found one estimate of 7,800 & don’t know if that includes undercover, the border police, etc. Estimates of Palestinian Authority security forces which serve as an auxiliary to the Israeli army go from 40,000 to over 80,000.
All that for a Palestinian population of 2,700,000 (per 2016 CIA World Factbook) in an area 2,270 square miles. Not being a statistician & calculating very conservatively, that would be a ratio of about one security officer to every 40 Palestinians.
There are also 386,000 settlers but let’s not kid ourselves that they are being over-policed. Most are armed & serve as the thug brigade to the army.
That’s a scary situation for Palestinians to handle just with rocks.
A new UN report accuses Israel of being “an apartheid regime that oppresses & dominates the Palestinian people as a whole” & it calls on governments to “support boycott, divestment & sanctions (BDS) activities”.
https://www.unescwa.org/publications/israeli-practices-palestinian-people-apartheid-occupation
Mosul, Iraq: woman with her daughters cowering from gunshots in their neighborhood which was “recently liberated by Iraqi security forces.”
See how US-led liberation works? This is where the Pentagon came up with that collateral damage crap. But then again, civilians aren’t just in the way of getting at ISIS fighters. Civilians are the intended target.
US out of Iraq & Syria! There are antiwar protests this month. Find a rally or call one.
(Photo by Felipe Dana/AP)
Remind us again why the Saudi coalition, armed & supported by the UK & US, have been bombing Yemen to smithereens for now two years?
Saying it’s to thwart Iran & defeat the Houthis as Iran’s proxy fighting force sounds impressive but it’s more likely to destroy every shred of the powerful Yemen uprising in 2011 which still defies Saudi bombers by marching by the tens of thousands. Otherwise why are they bombing weddings, funerals, homes, schools?
This little girl is the victim of a Saudi bombing strike in the city of Saada, yesterday. What does she have to do with Iran?
End the bombing of Yemen. No military aid to Saudi Arabia & all of the countries involved. UK stop arming the coalition. US get the hell out of the Middle East.
(Photo by Naif Rahmah/Reuters)
Several weeks back I said I was preparing a post about bans on the hijab, niqab, or burqa in countries around the world because the development was quite alarming in terms of religious freedom & the use of Muslim-hating to justify discrimination, exclusion, war, occupation, counter-revolution.
War-mongering incorporated women’s rights & Islamophobia hiding behind condemnations of the veil with the 2001 war against Afghanistan & has descended into the bowels of hell with support for Assad’s counter-revolution in Syria, becoming indistinguishable from fascism.
Regrettably, I am always days behind in studying & writing so I haven’t finished that post. But now the European Court of Justice ruling that employers can bar women from wearing veils to work essentially enshrines discrimination against Muslims & will embolden the growing nationalist & fascist movements in Europe. The political reverberations are alarming so finishing that post is important. I have a few to get to first but will try to get it done within the next few weeks.
Margaret Kimberley from Black Agenda Report says opposing Trump’s policies is useless without first denouncing Obama & “without exposure of past & present Democratic Party treachery against their voters.”
It’s not good enough people don’t like refugees & Muslims being persecuted? They need to do a loyalty test now to march for justice?
When did Margaret become a crank? More importantly, when did she become a Trump supporter & when will she just come out & admit that?
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A grieving mother standing before photos of the forcibly disappeared at a protest in Kashmir:
The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Kashmir estimates that between 8,000 & 10,000 people have disappeared in Kashmir since 1989. Young & old were picked up, interrogated, starved, beaten, tortured, & thousands ended up in mass graves.
Disappearing is a crime of incalculable measure, leaden with grief that can never be resolved nor forgotten. Photo montages of the disappeared are a feature of families protesting the disappeared going as far back as those disappeared under General Franco in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
Kashmiri activists, most notably Parveena Ahangar, a co-founder of APDP, & Khurram Parvez & Parvez Imroz from the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), have educated many around the world on the importance of this issue in nearly 50 countries who employ disappearing as a weapon of social control & repression.
This is a quite interesting article about a 2017 calendar put out by APDP which has a photo & story of one disappeared person every month. The article has photos of the regular APDP protests.
http://www.kashmirlife.net/apdp-calendar-disappeared-not-forgotten-129174/
(Photo is by Kashmiri Hilal Ahmad at Hillal Ahmad Fine Art Photography FB wall)
Russia Today (RT) is making the tendentious claim that more civilians have been killed by US airstrikes over Mosul than by Russian & Syrian airstrikes over Aleppo–& further that there is less media coverage of US bombing operations in Mosul than of Syrian & Russian operations in Aleppo.
It’s about time a Russian propaganda medium acknowledges that Syria & Russia bombed civilians in Aleppo but anyone who reiterates that shameful rubbish belies either political credulity or a complete lack of investigative integrity. There has never been an honest accounting in any war of troop deaths by the US Pentagon & certainly none of civilian deaths. To suggest Syria or Russia would be different makes a mockery even of propaganda. There isn’t even an official international monitor of civilian deaths in any of the many & constant wars.
There are independent sources like AirWars which estimate civilian deaths by culling from media, human rights groups, the UN, sources within the war zones, etc. but this is approximating at best. RT’s report drew on Air Wars which is one of the more credible & comprehensive sources. Interesting RT was not as disturbed as its fan base that AirWars receives funding from the George Soros foundation.
No one really knows how many people are buried in rubble in Aleppo–other than those who lost loved ones but were not interviewed by human rights monitors before being deported out of Aleppo on buses hours after the Syrian army took over. With US airstrikes over Mosul ongoing, who is monitoring civilian deaths whilst thousands flee for their lives?
This comparison schtick is pathetic because mainstream media (considered anathema to Assad & Putin supporters), has quite a lot of coverage about Mosul, as there was about Aleppo even though reporters were not allowed in the country. There is much more coverage of the sieges in Aleppo & Mosul than of Somalia, Yemen, Libya for which there is almost none.
What’s repugnant is viewing the two military offensives as a competition of some kind, a kind of one-up-man-ship game between Russia & the US rather than of a piece with foreign military intervention in the Middle East that must be opposed unconditionally. Where’s the outrage over war crimes in both Aleppo & Mosul? Why instead the sneering, small-minded comparisons that are not even real? There are human lives involved here.
Fighting ISIS or al-Qaeda begins with withdrawing all foreign military operations & cutting off the munitions network to ISIS fighters, including from Russia & the US. Bombing cities with millions of civilians is not the way to fight ISIS & isn’t intended as such so much as it is a justification for occupation. The only principled approach to foreign intervention is to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all military forces. Now.
(Photo of Iraqis, including one who is injured, fleeing Mosul, March 13th by Ari Jalal/Reuters)