How long are those who really run this country going to allow the Trump travesty to continue? As a socialist who ran for president against him, I have no interest in how or if he & his family compromise the US government.

But the longer this sideshow goes on with a president who is clearly demented, corrupt, treasonous, financially compromised, vulgar, & blackmail worthy, the more the entire US government is exposed as all of that & incompetent too.

Capitalism itself isn’t looking so good after his finances allow us a front row seat, through his family, to how corrupt it is.

Jonathan Cook, respected for his writing about Palestinians & Israel, recently entered the debates about Syria on the side of Assad. His latest essay titled “Syria is the dam against more bloody anarchy” elaborates his theory that the “proxy war” in Syria is about Israel’s plan to Balkanize the Middle East.

He shares the political malignancies of Global Research, promoting the theory of a “Greater Israel” plan, a US-Israel collaboration to break up states in the Middle East, to Balkanize & make them part of an expanded Israel. Other than a nearly 30-year-old document written by Israeli extremists (the Yinon plan), there is no evidence for this scenario. The evidence is that Israel is a military fortress serving US plans for the Middle East at the expense of Jews. But in Cook’s imaginary universe, Israel controls the US government–not unlike how Global Research claims the world is controlled by reptilian Jewish bankers & media magnates.

Then we come to Cook’s defense of dictatorship. We will put aside that he cannot distinguish the differences between foreign intervention in Syria, Iraq, Libya. Assad, Hussain, Gaddafi were “ruthless & brutal” he admits but they “also oversaw societies in which there were high levels of education & literacy, well-established welfare states, & low levels of sectarianism.” Well if there’s anything that justifies gulags, forcible disappearance, carpet bombing of civilians, it’s high levels of literacy & social security. But how did Syria with such low levels of sectarianism become a hotbed of ISIS, conflict between Sunnis, Shia, & of course what alarms Cook most, Wahhabism?

Cook lowers himself to the contemptible in what is a cliche of Assad apologetics. He wants to distinguish himself from those head-choppers & doesn’t want to excuse human rights crimes by the Assad regime. He just wants to focus on the more important issue of Balkanization. He’s not getting anything past anybody when he says it’s “tempting” to use human rights as the measure for which side to support but this conflict isn’t about human rights. He’s reduced himself to a greasy apologist willing to overlook gulags & bombing of civilians because in his mind Israel is scheming against Assad.

Human rights do matter; they are the primary measure for revolutions. A notable omission in this essay is any mention of the Syrian revolution or other Arab uprisings. It’s another denial Cook shares with all other Assad apologists who are racist at heart & don’t see Arabs or Muslims as having aspirations higher than literacy & social security & willing to tolerate tyranny for them.

Cook has disgraced himself with this apologetic based on an anti-Semitic theory identical to the defense of Assad by David Duke & other fascists. The fate of a democratic state where Palestinians & Jews live in harmony is dependent on the success of the Syrian revolution & all the Arab revolutions. Pity Cook doesn’t get that.

(Photo is Palestinians in Assad’s gulag.)

Tweeted regarding Syria: “We’d like to be like the French. We asked for a new president. We got one million dead.”

(via Anealla)

This baby refugee rescued from a sinking boat off the coast of Libya could be one of those “jihadi” terrorists we’re always warned about. But this rescue worker whose humanity makes mockery of paranoia & racism rescued the baby & everybody else on the boat. That’s what being human is all about.

The rescuer is part of the Phoenix rescue ship operated by Malta-based MOAS. SOS Mediterranee & Doctors Without Borders operate the Aquarius rescue ship & these are the only rescue operations for hundreds of thousands of refugees on the Mediterranean route from Libya. The EU & NATO navy ships are too busy thwarting refugees to rescue the drowning.

Anyone looking for a place to contribute help for refugees might consider one or both of those marine rescue operations so they can expand fleets & services.

Accepting refugees is international law & an imperative of human civilization.

Open the borders. Immigration is a human right. No human being is alien to us.

(Photo by Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters)

Not making this up, not exaggerating, not patronizing to make a point: when I go through my Facebook memories which pop up automatically every day, a huge share of the images are of women involved in struggles, usually leading them. Their are lots of images of grieving women, but some like the women of Kashmir or the Mayan women of Guatemala, are grieving as they protest mass rape, the disappearance or execution of their kids & spouses, ethnic cleansing.

A huge percentage of the images are of veiled Muslim women & my photos only go back to April 2012 when Facebook deleted my entire album, including my hundreds of posts about the Arab uprisings.

Draw your own conclusions from my observation. But mine are that women are leading revolution & that Muslim women are chief among them.

Palestinian woman: where the kids learn Intifada.
Sling shots are the first line of defense against one of the most sophisticated military forces in the world.

Organizing revolution to wrest power & create a democratic, secular state where Palestinians & Jews can live as brothers & sisters is the goal.

Honoring & building the economic & cultural boycott of Israel (BDS) is the international line of defense. Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729.

(This photo is reposted from April 2013)

Anayet Ullah Arman, a schoolteacher & Rohingya refugee in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, has introduced me to another valuable source of information about the Rohingya struggle. It is called The Stateless & is run out Ireland, presumably by Rohingya refugees.

This is the FB wall: https://www.facebook.com/thestateless/

This is the blog: https://thestateless.blogspot.com/

This is the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Statelessrhg1

This is Twitter: https://twitter.com/Thestateless1

(Photo is Rohingya children in refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh by Saiful Huq Omi/UNHCR)

A new work by Rollie Mukherjee: a tribute to the youth & children of Kashmir blinded, disabled, terrorized, disappeared, tortured, murdered by the Indian occupying army. Yet still defiant against occupation & determined to achieve freedom, self-determination, azadi.

Our fullest respect & solidarity with this historic, monumental struggle for freedom. A victory for Kashmiris would change the balance of power to the advantage of the oppressed around the world.

Their struggle is our struggle. Je suis Kashmiri.

The hacking of Satyadeep Satya’s Facebook account either by amateur or professional hackers is becoming more of a problem among many of my friends. It threatens the work people do to advance justice, interferes with our friendships, creates distrust among us.

Usually the recommendation is to change one’s password & make it complicated & strong. But that isn’t proving to be enough against the malignant & against pros. As we know from how India messes with internet & social media access in Kashmir, our democratic access to reliable news is under siege.

One of the most dangerous professions is journalism with astronomical murder, kidnapping, forcible disappearance incarceration rates. (We’re talking real journalists, not the embedded kind who sing for their supper.)

Social media is a democratic source of information, giving us a vast range of sources & the means to vet those sources so it’s in our interests to protect it.

We know from the “VPN war” India is running against Kashmiri activists that many of the latter are tech savvy & know their way around lockouts so maybe they know their way around ambushes like hacking. We know that many others are also up to speed on this stuff. No questions asked of the latter, we’d be interested if anyone has ideas of how we can protect our social media accounts from being hacked & attacked.

Satyadeep Satya is back.

He says his account was hacked & Facebook locked him out as precaution against further misuse. And here we jumped to the conclusion FB was censoring for Modi! What brought us to that conclusion so quickly? Its history of doing so?

We’re delighted Satyadeep is back; Facebook wasn’t the same without him. The upshot of this is that many who didn’t know his contributions to building the movement to oppose occupation of Kashmir now know about his work.

Thank you to Facebook for doing the right thing. We like when you do that. Now stop censoring altogether.