Trump’s approval ratings are dropping & are now at 38%. This does not reflect the exponential increase in those who’d like to slap the crap out of him (metaphorically, of course) or wash his foul mouth with soap.

Okay, I get that Syria & Venezuela have been so badly mangled & misrepresented by libertarians & Stalinists that people think the right thing to do is support dictatorship. But if Duterte’s death squads against poor people confuse you, the problem isn’t confusion so much as pathological. You’re out of here.

This is the 50th commemoration of the June 5th to 10th, 1967 Six-Day War when the Israeli military routed the armies of Jordan, Egypt, & Syria. It is a watershed & deeply tragic moment in Palestinian history ushering in now 50 years of occupation, apartheid, & repeated sieges of carpet bombing over Gaza.

Israel’s victory demonstrated its value to the US as a fortress for US hegemony in the Middle East & US military aid has been increasing ever since. The war altered the relationship between the US & Arab countries to the disadvantage of the Arab peoples & altered the relationship between Arab regimes & the Palestinian people.

In violation of international law, Israel militarily occupied more of Palestine, including the Golon Heights, Gaza, the West Bank, & East Jerusalem & launched an aggressive settlement program moving Zionist settlers from all over the world to claim Palestinian land in the occupied territories.

Many politicians & liberal Zionists call for Israel to remove its troops & go back to the 1967 borders. That’s essentially the unworkable, unacceptable bantustate solution. The only possible resolution is a democratic secular state for Jews & Palestinians with the 1948 borders, including all of Palestine before Zionist paramilitary terrorists dispossessed them.

Commemorate the 50th anniversary by honoring & building the cultural & economic boycott of Israel (BDS); buy nothing with barcode beginning 729.

(Photo by AFP)

(Updated post from 2015)

So many naifs ask “Why don’t Arab countries accept more refugees?” as if being Arab constitutes an identity in & of itself & creates bonds of solidarity.

In a more sophisticated, comprehensive version, that was the basis of pan-Arabism or Arab nationalism which long ago proved itself insufficient as ideology or strategy. There is no identity of interests between the Saudi & other Arab monarchies, the Egyptian military junta, & the working people & small farmers in those countries. If there is one thing the Arab Spring made clear, it is that distinction between oppressor & oppressed.

There are several explanations offered for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, & the UAE severing diplomatic ties & expelling Qatar from the coalition bombing Yemen to smithereens. None of the reasons are persuasive & in all of them someone is lying because the story doesn’t add up. The one about ransoming the kidnapped royal hunting party in Iraq takes the cake.

The most compelling one might be Qatar support for Palestinians if it can be proven that the country has actually given substantial aid or any aid at all other than asylum to a Hamas official.

This is another case where experts emerge from the woodwork even though they had to look up the location of Qatar before they began speculating. Facts have to emerge before there can be any understanding of what this is all about. But any breakdown in that Yemen war coalition has to be a good thing.

In the wake of the Manchester attack, journalists Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, & John Pilger published another round of their tattered theme that ISIS is rooted in Islam, specifically the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia. Cockburn, writing in the Independent said the US & UK “will look in any direction except Saudi Arabia when seeking the causes of terrorism.”

Cockburn, Fisk, & Pilger represent what happens when you try to write political analysis with your head stuck up your ass. The US & European powers have been linking terrorism to Islam since before 9/11 & since 9/11 have been whipping up a frenzy of Islamophobia as the primary ideology of war, genocide, occupation. It is Zionists & the so-called left (erstwhile socialists & anti-Semitic libertarians) who have linked it specifically to Wahhabism without having a clue what Wahhabism is theologically or politically.

It’s true ISIS identifies itself as jihadi fighters but as numerous Muslim scholars & theologians have so cogently argued, ISIS has no affinity with Islam but is a warped political response to the terrorism & destruction of US-European forces in the Middle East. ISIS is a counter-revolutionary force, a rightwing response morphing from defeat & demoralization going back nearly 30 years to the first Gulf War & kept in operation by weapons from the US Pentagon & other countries. These scholars point to the killing fields of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, & to the massive repression in Egypt & Bahrain because they root their analyses in political reality, not in Islamophobia.

ISIS has affinity to Islam in the same way Cockburn, Fisk, Pilger, Tariq Ali, & the whole Hands Off Syria Coalition crowd have affinity to leftism & progressive thought. They wave their hammer & sickle banners but they’ve grown old before their time, decrepit, warped, hateful & stupid, & more than anything lazy in their scholarship. They know nothing & get away with it because those who share their antipathies for Muslims & Arabs know even less, are content with tropes about Wahhabism & don’t require understanding.

There’s a polarization taking place, a sifting of the wheat from the chaff. Those who will make this world a better place to live have nothing in common with social hatred toward anyone. Let the haters go straight to hell.

Assadist political analyses fall squarely within the perimeters & traditions of demonizing Islam & Arabs so characteristic of western historiography. So I’m learning. Reading all the rubbish is exhausting.

There is an urgent need for Muslim & Arab historians to render political reality without the social hatred & with insight. Maybe it’s mostly a matter of translating what has already been written. But I hope translation will be done & made available & that among them are historians & political thinkers with a razor-sharp polemical style that will take no prisoners nor compromise with US-European militarism.

Before communism took over the job in the 20th century, Wahhabism was the greatest threat to human civilization for hundreds of years. British colonialists trembled before its power. Only the Ottoman Empire could stop the spread. Thank God we didn’t have the internet to let us know what Zionist historians are now revealing.

Now Wahhabism is back imperiling the future of humanity. Turn off social media & you’ll never know. Or hide under the bed.

Zionist writers on Wahhabism post 9/11 went much further than the US State Department in associating it with terrorism. If you want to know where Assadists get their version of Wahhabism, it’s from Zionists with the addition of the head-chopping stuff.

In one sweeping smear, they malign Islam & add nothing to an understanding of terrorism, extremism, war, occupation. The obfuscation lends itself to supporting Assad’s dictatorship.
In reality, Islam has as little to do with ISIS as Judaism has to the state of Israel.

It’s oddly comforting to know the US doesn’t rank alone in idiocy. We have our Bowling Green Massacre & covfefe. India has the judge who thinks peacocks get pregnant from crying & the TV guy who wants to know why Kashmiris have red cheeks.