Students clash with Indian police in Srinagar today.

How ever will Assadists & other Islamophobes explain this? How can they save women who will kick their asses?

(Photo by Faisal Khan)

For several years, the purple rain strikes of government workers in Kashmir received regular photojournalist coverage but little media elaboration of the issues at dispute–which remain unresolved. Workers were demanding payment of wages in arrears, that contract employees be made permanent, & that retirement age be raised by two years (because India has no social security).

What was striking about them was not just that none of the issues were resolved after years of protests & work stoppages but the extremes of violence against the strikers, especially the use of water cannons with purple dye. The dramatic imagery may be what attracted media coverage although there were also many photos of physical assaults on strikers.

During the recent horrific military siege in Kashmir, there was another round of this strike involving contractual medical staff in the national health service who are not part of permanent medical staff–creating a two-tier system of employment & conflict. The issues were important not just because of their labor ramifications but because of how they intersected with the occupation & emergency medical treatment for injured protesters especially in the more rural areas.

Because the military siege was so pressing, a post discussing the labor dispute became a low priority even though it related to emergency care for protesters. The strike issues have not been resolved so a later post will address them. There is also considerably more information available now about those issues.

I only bring this up because in that memory thing Facebook does, a post popped up about that strike on May 9th 2012. It was after Kashmiri activists were on my case to study their struggle & write about it but before I had actually done so & knew nothing about the occupation. So in that post & in others, I refer to “Srinagar, India” & reveal other similar ignorance. In the interest of veracity & not just to hide my ignorance I am correcting the posts.

This is one of the purple rain photos from that May 2012 strike where we can see how really aggressive the water cannon is as a weapon.

(Photo by Mukhtar Khan/AP)

This is an article by me titled “The Unpeople Rohingya: Expose The Duplicity Of Aung San Suu Kyi” which was published May 9th, 2016 in Countercurrents. The editor Binu Mathew told me it reached over 50,000 people.

Because of Suu Kyi’s many international awards as a human rights champion, her role was confused as silence rather than outright collusion & as a human rights facade for ethnic cleansing. Her human rights record is actually wholly fictitious, a construct serving the military junta. She has never had a damn thing to do with human rights.

Even she once made light of her 15 years of house arrest in her mansion on a lake in the swankiest section of Yangon attended by servants. Not quite a gulag like other Burmese dissidents, no torture, persecution, or ethnic cleansing.

At the time I wrote this article, it was becoming clearer internationally who Suu Kyi was politically: an image & no martyr for human rights. Though it was already entirely evident in 2012 when she traveled to pick up her Nobel Peace Prize & other honorifics whilst the military was on siege against Rohingya & she never uttered a peep about it, neither to acknowledge nor condemn.

Her public role denying & mocking the recent siege against Rohingya in Arakan state involving mass rapes, executions & massacres, forced disappearances, torture & beatings, torching of villages, & the flight of 75,000 as refugees to Bangladesh has removed the battered halo & made her an object of scorn. Hopefully, someday she will one day be the subject of prosecution for crimes against humanity.

This iconic photo is a man pleading with Bangladeshi border guards for asylum from the 2012 military siege against Rohingya. Tens of thousands were fleeing for their lives but being refused entry by Bangladesh. The same was happening to Rohingya refugees on boats. The Thai government was not just turning away boats of refugees but tugging them out to sea & abandoning them to certain death.

Rohingya refugees are organizing solidarity groups & networks, using social media to educate & build solidarity, rallying & picketing in countries where they have found asylum. The response to genocide by most governments has been to play dead or rant a little indignation but many governments & their agencies are baiting Rohingya resistance as associated with Middle East “jihadi terrorists.” To this we respond with an international hoot of derision. International solidarity is growing & it won’t be stopped by vilifying.

Je suis Rohingya. Their struggle is our struggle. No human being is alien to us.

Article: http://www.countercurrents.org/scully090516.htm

This is the cover of a new book by Freny Manecksha about the Indian occupying army’s use of rape & sexual violence in Kashmir as a form of social control. It is not a matter of troops releasing sexual frustration but an orchestrated political & military tactic to subordinate & demoralize resistance.

Because of the nature of the violation involved in rape & sexual assault, how women, children, & often male (especially in torture) victims are interrogated for their legal defense or interviewed for political campaigns requires sensitivity, respect, & a profound grasp that any shame adheres only to the perpetrators.

Freny worked many years as a journalist for Indian publications, including the Times of India, but now is a freelance journalist focusing in the past few years on Kashmir, particularly women’s experiences under occupation.

It is of course more than apt that the cover art on her book would be by Rollie Mukherjee whose art has also highlighted the narratives of Kashmiri women & honored them for their role & leadership against occupation & as freedom fighters.

This article by Freny is an excerpt from the book titled “How does a Kashmiri woman tell the world her story of rape & sexual violence by security forces?”

http://www.dailyo.in/politics/kashmir-women-in-conflict-sexual-assault/story/1/16948.html

Could Michael Flynn be a Manchurian candidate? Or is he just a corrupt ass?

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.