Just so we’re clear where the American gigolo stands on the issue of human rights & apartheid:

This is the obligatory photo op with Shimon Peres all committed Zionists do in homage to Israel. This trip in 2004 is one of numerous trips Gere has made to Israel. He’s probably been courted by Zionist organizations to render a human rights face to ethnic cleansing. The caption said the gigolo was “in Israel on a good will visit, visiting both Israelis & Palestinians.” It isn’t reported which Palestinians but if he actually did meet with any, it was probably a less than cordial encounter.

One could say that perhaps our man the gigolo has learned a thing or two since 2004 & that’s why he made his objection to the settlements & occupation. Once could also say that as a human rights advocate he isn’t much on top of things since there is no evidence that he ever spoke out against the several carpet bombing offensives over Gaza.

It’s nice he spoke out against the settlements. So does the US State Department which funds them. The Zionist media is all over Gere for his statement but they never did get the art of equivocation in politics. If you’re going to give a human rights face to apartheid you have to learn to talk out of both sides of your ass. And the gigolo is the master of that.

Honor the cultural & economic boycott of Israel: buy nothing with barcode beginning 729.

(Photo from Getty Images)

It’s been nearly a week since the fire in the Virgen de la Asuncion detention center for youth near Guatemala City but the smoke still hasn’t cleared on what really happened. Media is calling the place a home & a youth shelter, even a safe house, but it was an overcrowded hellhole, a penitentiary where they warehoused troubled & delinquent kids with those who had been abused. In the context of Guatemalan justice for working class kids, even those designations need to be interrogated. Everything about this story has to be interrogated & we need to hear from Guatemalan parents, survivors, & human rights organizations.

The fire was in the girl’s wing after they had tried to break out en masse to protest conditions & abuse at the prison, including charges of rape. Apparently the fire was caused by mattresses set on fire after the girls were locked in. So who set the fires? Did the inmates even have access to matches? Who locked them in? And why did they move in riot police rather than grief counselors when parents thronged to find out what happened to their daughters?

So far 39 young girls have died & at least 19 are being treated for burn injuries so severe & grisly that a doctor treating them described it as a scene from Dante’s Inferno.
The state-run penitentiary behind a 30-foot wall has long been criticized for housing 800 in a facility built for 500; for unsanitary conditions & rotting food; for physical abuse of the inmates & for rape. Guatemalan officials will now have to cook up a story to cover their own asses & it is already beginning to emerge from the ashes of their crimes against children.

They will talk about those delinquent boys, allege they were gang members to set off a Pavlovian response akin to claiming they were “jihadi terrorists.” But the girls were warehoused in a separate wing from the boys. So how will they pawn off the story that the boys were responsible? Responsible for what? The overcrowding? The filthy conditions? The decaying food? The rapes & beatings? For sticking kids with problems in an institution rather than providing humane social services for them?

It’s a damn good thing Guatemala has strong human rights organizations & combative activists schooled in the struggles against dictatorship & genocide. We extend our fullest solidarity to them, the parents, & survivors in getting to the bottom of this monstrous crime against children.

Our condolences to the families of those who died. May their daughters Rest In Peace.

Photo is Guatemala’s concept of grief counselors outside the “safe house” where children were raped by prison authorities.

(Photo from Reuters)

Don’t know where the western left led by retired CIA & FBI agents is going but do know Ann Coulter & Michelle Malkin got there first.

Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report lost his way over Syria with a US regime change scenario & rants about the “throat-cutting jihadis.” Now he’s chanting “Death to the Fascist Pigs” against the imaginary deep state for plotting regime change against Trump.

We are witnessing a profound break with reality. Maybe the fragmentation of a personality.

So glad Richard Gere felt angst walking the red carpet in Israel after rejecting the appeals of BDS activists to honor the cultural boycott. Swell of him to make a statement against settlements & the military occupation–only to negate it by denouncing “violent extremist factions on either side.”

He’s been to Israel several times & after Yasser Arafat died made an embarrassing intervention into the 2005 Palestinian presidential election with a video urging Palestinians to vote in an election designed to make fools of them.

Somebody’s gotta tell Israel’s very own American gigolo that the jig is up, that you can’t make like you’re a human rights advocate if you can’t tell right from wrong or are shilling for apartheid behind a stink bomb

This is the body of an unknown African refugee on the beach at Sabratha, Libya where he was buried or maybe washed ashore from drowning. He will be buried in a “specially designated cemetery” without funereal ministrations or the grieving of those who loved him.

The US-Mexican border is also lined with such graves or mass graves where their bodies were dumped like trash. Beyond doubt, thousands of refugees’ bodies are buried, drowned, or lie exposed around the world as they set out from unbearable conditions to find a human life–the life that is their due.

Their deaths represent the epic failure of humanity to forge human solidarity against the strictures & rabidity of the nation-state. It is our historic mission yet to accomplish. Millions have already stood against the Muslim ban to say “an injury to one is an injury to all”–which is the iron law of social transformation.

We should take a moment to pay tribute to these unknown refugees who were not strangers but in fact our own. When our protests are scorned & mocked because we haven’t protested every war for the last 100 years, we only need think of this young man & countless others. We will be part of changing history in their honor for the life & dignity they were denied & that no other sustain death without mourning. May they Rest In Peace.

Open the borders, No human being is illegal. No human being is alien to us.

(Photo from Reuters)

Many people apparently don’t realize that if you support the moribund two-state solution in Palestine, i.e., the bantustate solution of the Oslo Accords, you thereby legitimize the racist, colonial ideology of Zionism & existence of a Jewish-only state. There’s no way that doesn’t make you a Zionist according to the definition even if you abhor the racism. It puts one in a politically untenable position because racism is the essence of Zionism. It’s another situation where you just can’t have it both ways.

Many take that contradictory position because they’re concerned about the fate of Jewish Israelis. The proposal for a democratic secular state where Jews live in harmony with Palestinians more than accounts for that concern. Israeli youth were born in Israel & it would be barbaric to simply deport them elsewhere. (Although deportation back home doesn’t seem unreasonable for recent settlers who are violent & psychotic supremacists & would be unable to live in harmony & equality with anyone.)

The proposal for a democratic secular state shows the political spirit & willingness of Palestinians to solve the problems created by Zionist colonialism rather than extract revenge for now 69 years of apartheid & barbaric violence.

Many also support the bantustate solution because they are reactionary & fundamentally racist, even those who think they’re socialists. The way you tell the difference between the misguided & the racist is the latter’s refusal to analyze or criticize Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing & their reduction of Palestinian resistance to terrorism. They fixate on Hamas–although they couldn’t tell you one damn thing about the politics or history of Hamas or any other group in the Palestinian struggle.

Too many people are convinced Jews & Palestinians could never live together. Those skeptics need to study Black Reconstruction in the US after the end of slavery along with the history following the US Civil Rights Movement to see the transformative power of justice. Things didn’t regress politically for Blacks because those struggles didn’t work but because of massive repression & violence used against them. A revolution will be required to sustain justice.

No one says a democratic secular state will be easy to achieve–it will take a revolution against Zionism & neoliberalism–but the alternative is continued apartheid & ethnic cleansing. That’s only acceptable to Zionists whose ideology has proven a scourge to the human race.

This photo of Israeli occupying forces arresting a Palestinian protester in Bethlehem a few weeks ago shows the political character of Zionism. The Palestinian proposal for a democratic secular state would put all this behind in the interests of justice.

For a democratic secular state in Palestine, build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel & demand no aid of any kind to Israel.

(Photo by Mussa Qawasma/Reuters)

PS: This is reposted from March 12, 2015 but it remains relevant.

Facebook is alerting people I’m online. I’m not. It’s fake news.

News is making quite a deal of the guy who got over the White House fence last night. Secret Service is so concerned they’re going to raise the fence from 6 feet to 11 feet high. If they make it even higher, of steel-enforced cement, cut off communications, & seal up the exits, we should be all set for the rest of Trump’s term.

My Kashmiri friends are telling me my sarcasm is not always understood by those whose second language is English. I’m really sorry if that has led some to think they’ve found another western leftist who hates on Muslims. You face enough of that crap in the world.

In fact, as an antiwar activist, socialist, & feminist, I have been campaigning against Muslim-hating for several years. One of the polemical devices I use is ridicule. Sarcasm might even be built into my DNA since my father was notorious for it too.

If you think I am ridiculing Muslims or any working person, please read my post again in the spirit of a smart-aleck. It would be unthinkable of me to vilify Muslims. When my sarcasm is dead earnest is when it’s directed at politicians, war, Muslim-hating, Assadists, nationalists, propagandists.