“From torture to rape & from fake encounters to mass graves #India’s occupation in Kashmir committing every war crime.”

–from Kashmir Freedom

In the Now, which is part of RT, is circulating a video of Omran Daqneesh & his family whose older child was killed & apartment in east Aleppo hit by a Russian airstrike in August 2016. The image of traumatized 5-year-old Omran was iconic & condemned Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians more powerfully than a thousand polemics. Thus it enflamed Assadists, particularly Beeley & Bartlett who created an energy base producing rancid & unhinged tracts against the child, denouncing it as staged. They remained as obsessed with Omran as with the White Helmet rescue workers & actually attempted to associate his image with head-chopping.

The RT video is clearly the Daqneesh family living in quite comfortable accommodations as the father explains that Omran was used by the opposition to Assad for propaganda purposes & thanking the Syrian army for liberating Aleppo.

Maybe the father always was an Assad supporter; maybe, though not likely after the bombing death of his child, he is now. It doesn’t matter what his politics are & we are grateful Omran & the rest of the family are safe. But if anyone actually thinks Mr. Daqneesh was not muscled or coerced in some way to be part of this effort to undo the impact of the Omran image, then there is no hope for your sense of judgement or your understanding of the Assad regime. God save your sorry ass.

I’m struggling with this article I’m writing about the Middle East. But it’s required me to think again about the meaning & the scope of the monumental Arab uprisings against tyranny called the Arab Spring, especially in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, with reverberations in Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco. Mostly, it’s made me realize the place of the Palestinian struggle against the legacy & stranglehold of colonialism in the Middle East.

There’s so much hate & racism directed toward Arabs & Muslims but in this historic period it’s Palestinians, Kashmiris, & the indigenous tribes in the Americas who are leading the most intransigent battles against oppression, plunder, & inequality. Seemingly against all odds. Or at least without the big battalions of international solidarity.

The human race owes so much to them for the price they have paid & the leadership they show.

It’s quite telling that Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, & John Pilger, who all support the Assad dictatorship, chose this moment following incidents of terrorism in Europe to spew their rancid crap about the connections between Islam & terrorism. Just in case there might be some confusion on that score after nearly 17 years of war & hate mongering using Islamophobia & in case the denial of asylum to refugees because they might be ISIS didn’t make that accusation clear.

It’s one thing to speak uncomfortable truths. It’s quite another to compromise with war mongering not because harsh realities must be faced but because you want to stuff hatred down other people’s throats. The three of them are gaseous windbags but they aren’t stupid & know exactly what they are doing. So let us ourselves speak uncomfortable truths. Let us say openly that Fisk, Cockburn, & Pilger are leading the chorus of war mongers & haters associated with the counter-revolutionary Hands Off Syria Coalition & anyone who takes their word on things is a fool.

Did I mention that I don’t know anything about Wahhabism? Not any more than those who denounce it as the basis of terrorism. What I know about is war-mongering & people who blow smoke from their nether regions to cover their ignorance. If I were so inclined, I could write a political profile of them & if I go to heaven it will be because I have had to tolerate so of many of them in my political life.

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.