Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who flagged my criminal record in 2001 for using a weapon of mass destruction (making me unemployable) is a keynote speaker at a May Day conference in Minneapolis titled “What Would You Do?: Mass Surveillance & the Citizen.”
She became famous for opposing the Iraq War after her pension was secured. She’s now an Assadist, Trump supporter, libertarian wing-nut, & leader of pro-Assad dementos in the US.
If you ask me, she may still be on someone’s payroll.
Say what you like about the burqa (don’t say it here; enough already) but it’s an attire made for revolution & the women of Yemen & Bahrain have maximized the possibilities.
In this photo from 2013, Bahraini women are burning tires as barriers against the riot police who’ve been trained by supercops from the UK & US in the use of pellet munitions & other barbaric crowd control methods. The women are protesting in a village near Manama against the imprisonment of thousands of political activists.
There are many photos of Bahraini women engaged in political activities indistinguishable from their kids. When they run from police, catch ’em if you can. Try to identify which one is the arsonist who set the tires aflame.
No disrespect intended, but the burqa should be adapted by protesters across the globe.
Something else might be mentioned: Assadists always support Assad’s regime by referring to its secular character, by which they mean he’s too western, too haute couture, too repressive of the Muslim veil to be a monstrous dictator. That exposes their counter-revolutionary loyalties since in both Bahrain & Yemen veiled women led those revolutions & in Egypt they played a significant role. Let it be said again: revolution is a come-as-you-are affair.
The women of Bahrain are the standard bearers of women’s liberation & revolution against dictatorship & we stand with them no matter what the hell they wear.
(Photo by Mohammed Al-shaikh/AFP/Getty Images)
The caption to this photo in the Guardian-UK identified the location as “Srinagar, India.” Such a concession to Indian colonialism in a British newspaper isn’t surprising since when Britain ended colonial rule over India in 1947, its partition scheme maximized potential conflicts between regions, religions, ethnic groups & cultures.
Britain pulled the same malicious political stunts in Africa & the Middle East so that today the stinking legacy of British & European colonialism as a whole has not yet been decisively uprooted & defeated. Self-determination for Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingya, & so many others has not yet been realized because their freedom struggles challenge the political (dis)order engineered by colonialism to leave inequality & exploitation intact. Syria is every bit a part of that struggle.
This particular photo is of concern in a more specific way. Indian occupying forces shown here are standing in a flow of “purple rain,” a colored water shot from high-velocity water cannons which they used to disperse unarmed student protesters. The soldier in the foreground is dragging away a metal sheet used as a shield by student protesters.
High velocity water cannons are assaultive & extremely dangerous in several ways: by knocking people down, internal organs are damaged & bones broken, eye injuries & blindness, skin reactions & allergies, respiratory problems, panic, & death. They were first used to disperse protesters in 1930s Germany under Hitler. The US used them against the civil rights movement in the 1960s & England used them with dye added in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
India has used water cannons with purple dye for years in occupied Kashmir against striking public service workers, teachers, health workers demanding payment of wages in arrears, regularizing their temporary jobs, & raising the retirement age by two years since India provides no social security.
England was the first to experiment with adding dyes to water cannons but it was made notorious by the apartheid regime in South Africa. At the now-named Purple Rain Protest in Cape Town in 1989, police turned purple water cannons on thousands of peaceful protesters who stood their ground politically by getting on their knees rather than back down against the assault. One of the protesters leapt on to the water cannon vehicle, seized the nozzle, turned it away from protesters, & sprayed the facades of nearby buildings. After that, purple rain became a symbol of protest against apartheid & graffiti proclaiming “The Purple Shall Govern” appeared everywhere.
Many repressive regimes use high-velocity water cannons against protesters, including in subzero temperatures. Many add the colored dyes; Indonesia once added ammonia (in 1996); Turkey added liquid tear gas (in 2013); Israel routinely adds Skunk additive which one journalist said smells like “you mixed dirty diapers with with not-so-fresh road kill & left them all in the sun for a few days.” Like skunk spray, it is an ordeal to eliminate the odor from those hit with the spray.
It’s alarming that Indian military forces are expanding the use of purple rain from unarmed striking workers to unarmed protesting students. Water cannons cause serious injuries & deaths & that is exactly why the Indian military is employing them. This must be denounced & actively opposed as vigorously as their use of pellet munitions, tear gas grenades, live ammo, & human shields.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
(Photo by Mukhtar Khan/AP)
So I’m standing in line at the post office for quite a while when a postal clerk ordered me in the rudest way to leave with little Lukey, the tiny dog I’d be taking to the vet after the post office. “The sign clearly says no dogs,” she growled.
I’m usually riding a crest of human kindness so I answered her, “But the little guy is sick, on his way to a vet, & it’s 100 degrees in the car. We’ll only be a moment.” No matter she said, “The sign clearly says no dogs.”
An elegant woman a few places behind me in line stepped up to me & said “Give me the dog; I’ll hold him outside till you’re finished.” But he’s sick, I told her, & he smells like hell. “No problem,” she said & off they went.
Wouldn’t you know when it was my turn, I got the surly postal clerk. “No thank you,” I told her. “I’ll wait.” The man who waited on me graciously asked about the dog, probably less from interest than an expression of kindness–a man who knows some rules are made to be broken. But the best part was another woman postal clerk leaned over to me & said “When the woman holding your dog comes back in, tell her not to wait in line. Tell her to come right to me & I’ll take care of her without delay.”
The kindness of strangers & many friends too.
The hallmark of the libertarian is hating on liberals more than one condemns US wars. It’s a genre of misanthropy & elitism & holds working people in contempt.
Kashmiris have enough to worry about without anxiety that India closing down the internet will create again the long international news blackout of the past decades. The brutalities & barbarity of the Indian occupation stand exposed before the world. Pellet munitions against children & unarmed protesters was a titanic shift India should never have made.
Aung San Suu Kyi & the military junta of Myanmar, Bashar Assad of Syria, the Australian, European, Turkish, US, & other governments have attempted to blackout all news of their monstrous human rights & war crimes, including against refugees by allowing thousands to drown or live rough in subzero temperatures. Reporters from around the world have been murdered by the thousands to silence the voices of the oppressed.
You have allies now around the world to stand with you. Believe me, we will beat the bushes to report what is going on in Kashmir. Your struggle is our struggle. It’s no longer possible to silence your voices.
Je suis Kashmir.
(Photo thanks to Satyadeep Satya)
This is 17-year-old Iqra, a student lying in the neurosurgery ward of a Kashmiri hospital with a fractured skull & brain hemorrhage after occupying forces attacking peaceful protesters catapulted a rock at her head.
Other students were also seriously injured & their lives endangered when the occupying army attacked them with pellet munitions, tear gas, & truncheons. Mind you, tens of thousands of students were rightfully protesting Kashmiris being used as human shields, being executed just walking down the road, being beaten to a pulp by gangs of soldiers, being denied their democratic & civil rights to protest occupation & violence against them.
Now Indian media reports government plans to shut down FB & WhatsApp in Kashmir to “clamp down on rumour-mongering” & “stop videos & pictures of alleged atrocities by security forces from going viral.” You can’t say the Modi regime hasn’t learned anything from the Assad regime.
If the Indian army of 700,000 soldiers (one to every 17 Kashmiris) is not committing human rights crimes in Kashmir, it would have nothing to fear from those videos & photos or from Kashmiri activists on social media. It’s threatening to close down the internet for the exact same reason Aung San Suu Kyi will not allow human rights monitors & journalists into Arakan state & that Assad denies access to journalists who aren’t embedded up the ass of his military like Bartlett, Beeley, & Fisk.
It must be overwhelming for Kashmiris to sustain such relentless violence, to see beloved classmates, neighbors, friends, family disfigured, disabled, executed before their very eyes.
International solidarity has never been more urgent or compelling & should begin to take organizational form with solidarity committees that can coordinate educational forums, call rallies, mobilize human rights activists to stand with Kashmiris.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
(Photo of Iqra is from Kashmir Today)
Chris Hedges is always using his years of experience as a war correspondent to render authority to his long-winded jeremiads & to his defense of the Assad regime.
This is my 51st year as an antiwar activist so I could claim some authority of my own. But one thing you know from activism is that longevity is no measure of good sense in politics. There’s no sectarian fool quite so deplorable as an old sectarian fool. New York City socialist politics is filled with them.
When a young activist in NYC, I was attending an antiwar meeting with a friend where an octogenarian socialist was ranting on & denouncing everyone in that hammer & sickle language that is their style. My friend leaned over & whispered “If I turn out that way at 80, just shoot me.” I won’t shoot him but he did turn out that way & is now a vociferous defender of Assad.
What doesn’t kill you in politics makes you loony instead.
Despite profligacy with the block button, I hate like hell giving up on people, especially if they’re involved in immigration rights or Palestinian solidarity work. But when they won’t be persuaded to look at other sources than Global Research, Mint Press, RT, Pravda, Sputnik News, & the Beavis & Butthead propagandists for Assad, there isn’t much point in wasting your breath.
You know they’ve gone full monty deranged when they talk about the Arab Spring uprisings of millions against dictatorships as orchestrated by the CIA & Mossad; how the world is run by reptilian Jewish bankers; how Assad is the lesser evil to jihadist head-choppers; how the gassing of Khan Shiekhoun was really the White Helmets making a “snuff movie of dead kids”; or when they switch the subject from Khan Sheikhoun 2017 to Fallujah 2004 to deflect from Syrian war crimes to US war crimes rather than denounce Assad, Russia, & the US.
Syria isn’t easy to understand & is intentionally obfuscated to mask the character of US, Russian, & other military intervention. The primary facts are that Syria has formed an unstable & volatile alliance with Russia, the US, Iran, et al, as a counter-revolutionary force to destroy every vestige of revolution against Assad’s dictatorship–just as they are bombing Yemen to destroy the revolution & operating through military dictatorship in Egypt & the Saudis, US, UK in Bahrain to destroy the Arab Spring uprisings–& through Israel to destroy Palestinian self-determination.
It is a Faustian bargain for Assad who needs US & Russian bombers to destroy the revolution but who knows full well that if the revolution is defeated, the US & Russia will turn on him to impose a partition of Syria & he will not end up where he was before the revolution began but will become a minor satrap in a fractious colony starved out by sanctions & besieged by US special forces.
If Assadists think the US is engaged in a proxy head-chopping war against Assad now, they ain’t seen nothing yet. If the revolution is defeated, their days of being embedded up the ass of the Syrian army will be over & they’ll be riding sidecar at a demolition derby.
We cannot allow the Syrian revolution to be defeated without putting up a fight to defend it. The fate of millions hangs in the balance: the fate of Syrians, of democracy in the Middle East & Africa, of Palestinian self-determination, of the Arab uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, South Sudan, of beleaguered & persecuted Muslims & of the oppressed around the world. That’s how important the Syrian revolution is to all of humanity.
Those confused by a complicated situation can begin by reading
“Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution & War” by Robin Yassin-Kassab & Leila Al-Shami (an eminently readable primer of the revolution), & the blogs of Syrian revolutionist Yassin Al Haj Saleh & Leila Al-Shami.
One needn’t agree with those writers on everything; I take issue with Robin Yassin-Kassab on US intervention & disagree with imposing a No Fly Zone, which I consider an act of war. But his & Al-Shami’s analysis of the Syrian revolution is brilliant & makes Assadist apologetics look like horse manure in comparison.
My friend who rescues cats called this evening to ask if I would take in a Cocker Spaniel she found & asked me to meet her at a supermarket to get the dog. When I arrived, my friend & another woman–a stranger & also a dog lover–were trying to calm the very frightened little girl. My beloved mutts were in the car & their jealous barking sent the little Cocker running. We chased on foot across the parking lot, dodging cars along the way, but our flip flops were no match & she left us in the dust.
Stalking dogs by car is an art form for me now so I set off looking for her, driving in the middle lane with the emergency lights flashing. Looking like a fool, I might add. Soon I saw her skulking down a side street & set off in pursuit. She dodged me for about a mile but by now it was getting dark & she was walking down a road with oncoming traffic & no shoulder. She was a sitting duck to get hit so I was flailing my arms to traffic so they wouldn’t hit her.
Now here’s the beginning of the miracle part: a young man & woman driving by saw my predicament, pulled their car off the road ahead of us, & the man set back on foot to capture the dog. Another man joined in & the wife & I were a caravan of cars following them follow the dog. It was completely dark when they caught her & handed her triumphantly to me. There was no way to thank them. People who are so kind don’t require more than gratitude.
Now part two of the miracle: I phoned my cat rescue friend & my new rescue friend to tell them the dog was found. Becky, my new friend, told me she looked on FB lost & found dogs & found this photo of a dog named Lady that looked just like our Cocker. The family was looking for her & offering a $500 reward. She connected us & it turns out the family lives about three blocks from me though they lost her quite a distance away & I found her about three miles from here.
They left here moments ago. It was their Lady, no mistaking that. The older fellow was crying as he cuddled her & his family said he’d been crying all day. He’s a double amputee & spends most of his day with Lady by his side. They’re working people. There are no rich people in my neighborhood, believe me. I would have felt the fool taking $500 offered me by the man for chasing down his dog. There was more miracle here than anything & more kindness from strangers of the kind that makes your heart sing. I’ve been the recipient of far too much kindness in my life to not be grateful for a chance to pay it forward.
I’m thinking such miracles come from all the blessings I receive from Kashmir. 