The Indian government issued an order today to indefinitely ban all social media in Kashmir (a total of 22 platforms) “in the interest of maintenance of public order”. The ban includes FB, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, Skype. Internet services will also be suspended.

Indian officials have been mulling the ban for a while claiming it’s to avoid the spread of fake news that has led to violence & a volatile situation in Kashmir. Oblivious to how damn stupid it sounded, they claimed anti-national, anti-social, & subversive elements were misusing social media to incite hatred & violence against the Indian government & its 700,000 occupying troops.

The “fake news” that’s so inciteful is reports, photos, videos of the massive unarmed resistance to occupation being fired on by troops; using young men as human shields on military vehicles; goon squads of soldiers ganging up on protesters & beating them to a pulp; images of a young man just walking shot in the head.

Those images don’t engender hate or violence; they are creating political solidarity with Kashmiri self-determination. Kashmiri activists have used social media to overcome the international new blackout which forced them to stand alone for decades against one of the best armed & aggressive military forces in the world & the largest military occupation in the world (one Indian soldier to every 17 Kashmiris).

Kashmiris used social media to educate activists & create an international solidarity movement. That threatened India’s claims about Islamist terrorist & separatist troublemakers that allowed them to get away with murder & savagery in Kashmir. The full scope of criminality (with legal impunity) by the occupying army was exposed before the world: tens of thousands forcibly disappeared; extrajudicial executions; mass rapes; pellet munitions against unarmed protesters, small children, elderly bystanders causing thousands to be blinded, disfigured, disabled, in constant pain; mass graves; constant search & summary execution operations.

Most Kashmiris won’t be on social media for a while but they have taught us well so we cannot allow their voices to be silenced but must speak in their stead to overcome the news blackout Kashmiri activists worked so hard to challenge.

This photo is a student protester stopping to rescue another who has been injured by the occupying troops. Let the young man be a metaphor for solidarity during the period of the internet ban in Kashmir, however long it lasts. Whilst Kashmiris cannot speak for themselves & India increases its murderous crackdown on protesters, let us stop to rescue our not fallen but silenced sisters & brothers & to campaign against India to end the internet ban.

Je Suis Kashmiri.

(Photo by Faisal Khan)

Elise Hendrick took exception to my criticism of Max Blumenthal & said I consider anyone “having a Jewish surname to be discrediting in itself.” Elise of course is just stooping beneath her dignity to make a point, as is her wont. But is anyone else confused about my views on hatred of Jews?

So I’ve been asked on a Facebook timeline if I’ve ever been in love by someone who clearly has no idea how insulting or impertinent the question is. Not because it was asked publicly but because it was asked, even thought, at all.

No political man would ever be asked that question but only political women because the misogynist assumption is a politically committed woman has no emotions or personal life but is some sort of androidal creature without capacity for human love.

Am I going to answer the question? Of course. As soon as I’ve finished slapping the crap out of him to smarten him up. It’s the surest form of pedagogy.

Islamophobes look at this teenage stone pelter in Kashmir & see male & religious dominance, a young girl who needs to be liberated by western feminism backed up with US-NATO or Syrian-Russian bombers.

Others look at this young girl & see a freedom fighter, a teacher & leader of resistance to oppression, a revolutionary.

Sports scouts look at her with a powerful thrust like that & see a potential Vanessa or Serena Williams. That is one of the great tragedies of occupation: young people who should be creating music, art, poetry, making breakthroughs in athletics, science, teaching, human welfare, or just living peaceful, happy lives are forced to spend youth fighting for survival.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
Azadi!

(Photo shared by Shabir Baba)

The Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest English language newspapers, published an article titled “Barely out of teens, young girls are the new face of protests in Kashmir.”

In a tone of incredulity, they report that veiled teenage girls joined student protests not with polite chants of “azadi” but standing up against tear gas shelling & pellet guns along with teenage boys & chasing down armored vehicles with stones in their hands.

A police official in Kashmir described this development as “teenage aggression” but women have always been part of protest in Kashmir & have organized, led, participated in protests of their own, including as stone pelters. If we are to believe the police official, women in Kashmir never grow out of their teenage aggression. But where do they think the teens, male & female, learned how to throw?

These are teenage girl protesters in Lal Chowk who are part of student protests across Kashmir against the ever-escalating violence of the Indian occupying army.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
Azadi!

(Photo from PTI/Hindustan Times)

https://www.facebook.com/678717902233048/videos/1160087604096073/?pnref=story

You need not speak the language of these Brazilian Indigenous people to grasp their message of opposition to neoliberal predations & expropriations of their communal lands for multinational agribusiness & mining enterprises, & hydroelectric power projects, much of it carried out during the regime of Dilma Rousseff.

This is true of Indigenous tribes on every continent & archipelago, of which Standing Rock in the Dakotas USA is a part. They have been alone for decades facing extreme military violence & assassination of leaders & activists in defense of their rights & the environment. Urban slums are populated by those who have lost their battles. It is the people Philippine president Duterte is singling out with death squads.

This is a tribute to the political struggle of the Guarani and other tribes in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America who have paid in blood for human rights and the environment in the barbaric phase of capitalism.

Smarmy Max Blumenthal is the social climbing son of Clinton sycophant-in-chief Sidney Blumenthal & has been trying to build his journalistic career on the backs of Palestinians & Syrians. There’s that adage about apples not falling far from the tree but also that biblical thing about sins of the father not being visited on the son. So perhaps Max came to smarmy all by himself. A rule of thumb is ‘never trust a man with smug written all over his mug.’

Smarmy Max plagiarized the drivel of Vanessa Beeley, Assad propagandist & daughter of a British diplomat, & writes what he calls exposés about the White Helmet rescue workers, denouncing them for being partially funded by USAID. His platform is Alternet, an online journal he edits where all the dead people write, including Ben Norton, Rania Khalek, Vijay Prashad.

This is a repost of mine from November 2016 on Alternet funding sources:
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Max Blumenthal made quite a splash in October with his two-part hatchet job on White Helmet rescue workers in Syria. The articles were published in Alternet, considered a progressive alternative media source. His primary charge to discredit the White Helmets was their funding sources, including by USAID.

Blumenthal is a frequent writer for Alternet & since he’s so scrupulous about funding would be advised to check out its funding sources if he considers that the sole measure of corruption. Between 2001-2005 the top three financial backers of Alternet were the Ford Foundation (which the CIA operates through), the David & Lucille Packard Foundation (involved in population control/eugenics programs), & the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

As of 2014, Alternet kept many of its financial backers secret & there isn’t much information on other foundations listed except their connections to millionaire Democrats. One of them, The New World Foundation, was once chaired by Hillary Clinton. Still included among the publicly acknowledged financial backers is the Nathan Cummings Foundation which should be quite significant to Blumenthal since it has a public partnership with the New Israel Fund, a US-based Zionist organization very active in Israel.

Maybe our man Max should explain to us how the questionable funding of Alternet differs from the funding of the White Helmets?
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Photo is smarmy Max so we can get a snootful of his smug. He has the kind of face you want to slap the crap out of so he needed progressive politics to counteract those impulses. He has instead added to our burden by becoming a mendacious Islamophobe & enthusiastic propagandist for Assad’s dictatorship. Hoping thereby to rise to celebrity journalist stature, he now writes hack for Alternet & other propaganda sites & lives life on Twitter.

Received this message from Kashmir:

“Most of Kashmir has been blocked from FB. Internet is almost nowhere.”

Media blackouts cover a multitude of military aggressions against the Kashmiri freedom struggle which is why most of us never heard about it until Kashmiri activists used social media to educate & build solidarity. The struggle will continue in Kashmir, with or without social media exposure, but with more violence.

Now is the time to stand actively with Kashmiris against Indian colonialism: share articles, write statements of support, post photos of Kashmiri Intifada, so that India will know they can ban the internet but they will not silence the voices of Kashmiri freedom.

(Photo from Musa Kashmiri)

Common Dreams is considered a progressive news website & reflects mostly the views of liberal Democrats (Robert Reich, Arianna Huffington, Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders, Katrina vanden Heuvel, & Michael Moore), anarchists (Noam Chomsky), mavericks (Ralph Nader & Naomi Klein), liberal Zionists (Michael Lerner), Assadists (Robert Fisk), & sweatshop defenders (Paul Krugman).

The website just published an article titled “What’s Worse? Trump Dropping ‘Mother of All Bombs’ or That 70% of Americans Approve?” The article is based on one shabby, shallow little poll, no scholarship, speculation & a manure pile of cynicism. Truth is, that repeated polls going back decades repeatedly show the majority of Americans strongly oppose US wars. For several reasons, they do not mobilize in protests but that has much to do with the longtime factional character of the antiwar movement now gone rogue to support Assad & Putin carpet bombing civilians in Syria.

After the US was defeated in the Vietnam War & because of massive international opposition to that war, political resistance to US interventions called “the Vietnam Syndrome” caused the US Pentagon immense problems. They began to strategize new ways of dealing with the political fallout which included embedding reporters with the military, controlling journalist access to war zones & managing media coverage, conducting covert military operations as well as CIA operations, bankrolling guerrilla forces, a misnamed “low intensity warfare” which was really high intensity war with low media coverage.

Much of the Vietnam Syndrome, which the Pentagon considers a pathological condition, has been weakened but has not been decisively reversed. Recruitment of young kids to fight US wars is at crisis low levels with parents being the strongest opposition. That’s why women are allowed to fight combat, LGBT soldiers are not dishonorably discharged, soldiers do multiple tours of duty.

Rebuilding the international antiwar movement on a principled basis remains the historic imperative of our generation.

For a few weeks I’ve been struggling over the focus of an article about Kashmir. I’m neither glib nor facile as a writer & the readers would include Kashmiris who have more to teach than learn from me.

I’ve learned in politics that asking the elementary questions & trying to answer them can sometimes bring the greatest understanding. That “devil in the details” thing is often hidden within assumptions.

So I’m up at 2 in the morning because it dawned on me at an uncongenial time that the question worth exploring is what makes the Kashmiri struggle against occupation & for self-determination so important? What makes it historic & would make a victory monumentally so?

I’m working on it now cause my mind is cooking so if anyone has ideas I’d be glad to hear them.