Is Trump mutating before our eyes into one of those reptiles David Ickes talks about? Assad supporters, are you following that? Will you still support him when the mutation is complete to Illuminati?

Social revolutions against powerful social forces like in Syria, Palestine, Kashmir include contending political perspectives for how to end unbearable oppression. Some political currents are conservative in their ideas about how to throw off tyranny; some more hot-headed. Some are dead wrong & play into the hands of the oppressor.

India is taking advantage of the murder of an Indian army officer from Kashmir (probably by Indian agents provocateurs) & the reckless statement of a guerrilla fighter named Zakir Moosa who threatened to behead more conservative political leaders if they impeded association with al-Qaeda & ISIS & thwarted attempts to set up a caliphate in Kashmir like in Syria & Iraq. After making his public statement, Moosa resigned from the guerrilla group & that group issued a statement disassociating from the politics he expressed.

The strategy of guerrilla warfare against sophisticated military might is a long-disputed question. The Vietnamese used it effectively as an adjunct of the North Vietnamese army which had 40 years of experience fighting the French before the US invasion.
But guerrilla warfare strategy as in Northern Ireland against the British army & against military dictatorships in Latin America during the 1970s proved to be a disaster which led to greater repression & the torture, disappearance, murders of thousands of young militants.

Ardent hatred for repression was no match for high-tech militaries armed to the teeth with allies like the US. That failure led to rancorous disputes & debates among activists around the world. The majority of activists in Kashmir rejected guerrilla warfare as a strategy in the 1980s & turned to the strategy of Intifada or movement building. This is not to condemn the remaining guerrilla fighters in Kashmir who are committed to ending tyranny but to disagree with that strategy as the most powerful & inclusive.

In an era of such sophisticated, automated military arsenals, small groups are no substitute for broad-based social mobilizations which include every constituent of society with grievances against autocracy. The spread of ISIS in the Middle East does not refute that reality. The sui generis character of ISIS & al-Qaeda is precisely what makes their existence suspicious. If ISIS did not exist, the forces of repression would have to invent them. Or at least arm them.

Kashmiri activists on social media were educating & building opposition to the occupation & had broken through the decades long news blackout. India’s use of pellet munitions, its barbarous hunt & kill operations, its use of mass rape, torture, administrative detention, forcible disappearance were internationally exposed. There were protests in cities around the world in solidarity with Kashmiris & the nascence of a solidarity movement.

India will now use the reckless statement of Zakir Moosa to discredit & vilify the Kashmiri struggle against occupation & for self-determination as another front for ISIS. That comes as no surprise since Aung San Suu Kyi is using the same allegations against Rohingya resistance in Myanmar & for Assadists it is their stock-in-trade.

Too late India! Kashmiri activists have exposed your brutal occupation. If they had not, India would not be attempting to block the internet & access to social media in Kashmir. Truth is the enemy of oppression. Solidarity will not be deterred by attempts to smear Kashmiris whose struggle has been fearless & intransigent against all odds. Their struggle is our struggle.

Je suis Kashmiri.

What goes on in the heads of the extreme rightwing who promote family values but ardently support Trump who boasted publicly of being a serial sexual molester?

Mosul Apocalypse, emancipation US-style:

A man pushing two little kids in a wheelchair trying to get out of the crossfire between ISIS fighters & Iraqi special forces.

Is this outrageous or what? If the intention were really to “liberate” Mosul from ISIS, Iraqi forces & the US coalition would not consider the hundreds of thousands of civilians to be “collateral damage.” They are not being liberated but destroyed.

If they want to take out ISIS, stop the weapons supply trail.

(Photo by Maya Alleruzzo/AP)

Just got called an idiot & “Mozzie sharia scumball” for “propagating Islamist stuff.” You gotta be packing more than that to bring me to my knees.

Wikipedia is complete rubbish in entries on Palestinians (& of course Israel), Kashmiris, & the Rohingya. The owner of Wikipedia is a Zionist who was given a big money award from the state of Israel for services rendered.

The way to use Wikipedia on those issues & many others is to take advantage of the links which are sometimes a gold mine of useful info. Not necessarily honest info but useful.

Article by Umar Lateef Misgar on the political meaning of the student protests in Kashmir:

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/blog/2017/5/12/the-worlds-biggest-democracy-kashmiris-seek-justice-from-india

Kashmiri friends: what’s going on with the internet/social media ban? I’m getting very little on Twitter from Kashmir but still see Kashmiri friends on Facebook.

https://sputniknews.com/asia/201612221048889444-refugees-india-border-pakistan/

Sputnik News, wholly owned by the Russian government, is one of the most frequently cited & shared media sources by Assad & Putin supporters. Its articles are a constant on the Hands Off Syria Coalition social media circuits. Professional Assad propagandists like Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Tim Anderson write regularly for it as does fellow traveler Pepe Escobar who sings for his supper for most Russian media.

You don’t have to be the most perspicacious person in the world to spot Islamophobia as fundamental to Assadist ideology. It reeks of that hate mongering which comes straight out of the US Pentagon war propaganda office & is the heart of rightwing libertarian politics. Why so many don’t recognize that has to do with internalizing US war mongering until people who consider themselves progressive now spout Wahhabi/Salafi & head-chopper rubbish against the Syrian revolution like it was the gospel truth.

In researching the persecution of Rohingya Muslim refugees in Jammu, I came across this article in Sputnik News titled “Resentment Grows Against Rohingya Refugees in Jammu.” It was written in late December 2016 as the xenophobic, rightwing Hindu nationalist campaign was looking like the prelude to pogroms against Rohingya refugees.

The article cited Bhim Singh, founder & leader of the rightwing nationalist Jammu & Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPP) “in an exclusive interview” where he called refugee asylum for Rohingya in Jammu “a big conspiracy” of the state government & expressed alarm about the presence of Rohingya. Sputnik also pointed out that Indian security agencies consider Rohingya a security threat since Jammu is close to the Pakistan border.

There is no expression of concern for the safety or human rights of Rohingya refugees. Only a repetition of Indian rightwing nationalist propaganda against them. It has been noted in discussions about Rohingya refugees among Assad supporters, including at the height of the last genocidal siege in Arakan state, Myanmar, that many attempt to associate Rohingya with “jihadi head-choppers in the Middle East.”

The article is posted here despite the toxic miasma it emits in the hopes that ignorant or reluctant Assadists will pull their heads out of their asses to confront the Islamophobia of Assadist ideology & decisively reject it to stand with Rohingya Muslims, with the Syrian revolution, & with Muslims wherever they are persecuted for their religious beliefs.

Mohammed Imran, a Rohingya friend, has been urging me for a while to write about the persecution faced by Rohingya refugees in Jammu. India considers Jammu & Kashmir to be a state of India.

Kashmir Valley, occupied by 700,000 Indian soldiers, is Muslim in its majority; the Jammu district is two-thirds Hindu. In themselves, religious differences are not an issue between Rohingya Muslims & Jammu Hindus but rightwing Hindu nationalism in Jammu is a problem as it is in Kashmir & in India.

According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), there are 14,300 Rohingya refugees registered with them in India, 7,000 of those living in refugee camps in Jammu. There are thousands of unregistered Rohingya in India & Jammu, which means they are ineligible for UN humanitarian aid. According to one source, there are about 13,000 Rohingya living in refugee camps & makeshift shelters on the outskirts of Jammu.

There is growing terror among Rohingya refugees & Bangladeshi immigrants living in Jammu because of a crescendoing xenophobic hysteria demanding they leave or be deported. The campaign which began last year is orchestrated by the BJP, India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, & the Jammu & Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPP), a local rightwing nationalist group.

The hysteria is moving beyond rhetoric into calls for pogroms against Rohingya with a systematic & threatening xenophobic campaign of billboards like this sponsored by the JKNPP saying: “Wake up, Jammu, Rohingya, Bangladeshis quit Jammu. Let us all Jammuites unite to save history, culture & identity of Dogras.” In April, a prominent official in the Jammu Chamber of Commerce called for Rohingya to be “identified & killed.”

This is an entirely racist, nationalist, & xenophobic campaign since Mehbooba Mufti, Jammu & Kashmir’s chief minister for India, reported a lilliputian crime rate among Rohingya of 17 criminal cases against 38 Rohingya for various offenses, including illegal border crossing. She also reported that military surveillance found no evidence of “radicalization” among Rohingya refugees.

Since the Indian army is surveilling the Rohingya community & finds them to be exemplary in politics & conduct, it should be possible for the army, which has thousands of troops garrisoned in the Jammu district, to extend protection to them against the rightwing nationalists threatening violence.

Full refugee rights to Rohingya in Jammu, in India, & elsewhere. Asylum from genocide is mandated in international law & by every precept of human civilization.

(Photo is billboard put up all over Jammu by the JKNPP)