The pope’s visit to Burma is just bad business all the way around. General Min Aung Hlaing, head of the Burmese military & architect of the Rohingya genocide, met with Pope Francis at Cardinal Bo’s residence not long after the pope landed in Yangon. The general reported on FB that he told the pope that Burma “has no religious discrimination at all.” It isn’t reported what the pope responded to Hlaing–& therein lies the problem. What do you say to a guy who is orchestrating the torching of villages, rape, torture, executions including of small children, burning people alive? More importantly, what should a spiritual leader say to a genocidaire? Most people wouldn’t want to shake the general’s blood-drenched hand or show him any kind of respect but the the pope exchanged presents with the general. The pope should have headed straight from this unsavory meeting to an exorcist or at least to confession.

Tomorrow, the pope will move on to the capital city Nay Pyi Taw to meet with Suu Kyi, other political figures, & Buddhist officials. Thursday he’ll fly on to Bangladesh to meet with Bangladesh’s Catholic cardinal & politicians but he has not scheduled a visit to Cox’s Bazar to meet with Rohingya refugees. What’s wrong with that picture? Is this papal visit to show solidarity with the Rohingya people or solidarity with the fascist junta? It’s a reasonable question & not impertinent at all.

Kenneth Roth from Human Rights Watch tweeted “We’re all waiting for the Pope to say the R word.” Other media sources from the NY Times to Al Jazeera are asking “Will he say the incendiary name?” What kind of Mickey Mouse spiritual operation is the Vatican running when it plays coy & tiptoes around the issue of genocide? Has it no moral bearings that make it able to distinguish right from wrong or compels it to speak out against such monstrous crimes? Is it a religious institution or a political operation that talks morality & compassion but runs interference for genocidaires & pedophiles?

Pope Francis delivered a message to the people of Burma before his trip saying he was coming to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ & deliver a message of ‘reconciliation, forgiveness, & peace’. Who’s he talking to in Burma with that kind of nonsense? How can one speak of reconciliation & forgiveness while the military is engaged in a genocide? You can go through the New Testament with a fine tooth comb & won’t come up with justification for that kind of compromise. We should not hold Pope Francis to a lower standard than we hold anyone when it comes to human rights & we should be able to hold him to the gospel he purports to proclaim. If that seems too harsh a judgement, consider that 95-percent of the underground Rohingya reporting network in Arakan state have gone missing, that nearly a million Rohingya have been displaced to refugee camps, that the military is still engaged in unspeakable violence against the Rohingya, & that thousands may be forced back to apartheid, concentration camps, & continuing genocide in Arakan state.

Photo is 30-year-old Momtaz Begum at a refugee camp in Bangladesh. She is who Pope Francis should be talking to; not the genocidaires.

(Photo by Jorge Silva/Reuters)

This story is about the extraordinary underground of Rohingya reporters who have been sending videos, photos, & reports by cellphone from Arakan state since 2012. It is their reports which have informed us about the scale of oppression & violence & which Aung San Suu Kyi denounced as fake news. According to the Rohingya activists who receive & publish these reports, over 95-percent of the mobile reporters have gone missing since the genocidal offensive began on August 25th. This is a profound loss & we share the grief of their families & the Rohingya community. We should take a moment to honor these remarkable & courageous reporters for their contribution to the Rohingya struggle & their contribution to making this world suitable for all human beings to live in. They are among the very best of humanity.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/nov/27/starved-of-news-myanmar-derailing-coverage-rohingya-crisis-rakhine-state

A stone pelter with ammunition in his backpack, by Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain:

India & Israel have criminalized stone pelting & severely punish children & youth who engage in it, including with the the use of lethal force & lengthy jail sentences. Stone pelting is certainly not a strategy to end the occupation but we cannot accept criminalizing it or even moralizing about it as violence. It isn’t antisocial hooliganism but a method used to thwart & distract the occupying forces & to protect unarmed protesters–if not also to vent youthful anger at the extreme violence & humiliation of occupation. The very fact that Israel & India so harshly punish stone pelters speaks to the role they play in the struggle against occupation. A stone pelter armed with a political strategy is a force that can end occupation.

Long live Kashmiri & Palestinian Intifada. End the occupations. Self-determination for Kashmir & Palestine.

What’s to say about Nick Cave & his group the Bad Seed who defiantly rejected appeals to honor the cultural boycott of Israel? Not just defiantly but whining like a twit that he was being bullied by the BDS movement. You don’t make groupies playing Count Dracula to apartheid & ethnic cleansing but the money is better. You show what you’re made of if you choose to stand with human rights over cashing in on oppression. Or vice-versa. Nothing left to say about Cave except another dirt-ball bites the dust.

The Voice singing talent show is in its finals tonight. It might be noted that two of the judges–Miley Cyrus (this season) & Pharrell Williams (past seasons)–bowed to appeals to honor the cultural boycott of Israel & backed out of scheduled performances. Another former judge Alicia Keyes refused to honor the cultural boycott & played Israel. Or rather, Israel played her.

On that note, we should tap our feet & snap our fingers to “Happy” by Pharrell Williams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbZSe6N_BXs

Slavoj Zizek is simply must reading on the politics of toilets but when he finally made his racism & xenophobia coherent in his vituperations against refugees he was all washed up as the rock star of socialism. Or so we hoped. Those of us who always thought he was a two-bit huckster like him best as farce & not at all as a theoretician where he should be an embarrassment since he is a cornucopia of idiocies.

His latest contribution to thought published in the Independent is titled “Alt-right Trump supporters & left-wing Bernie Sanders fans should join together to defeat capitalism.” He may be tapping into something here since there is an affinity between some of these forces on Syria & the denial of the Bosniak & Rohingya genocides. But the article mostly elaborates Zizek’s own affinity with the extreme right. He’s not so much Elvis as a reject from The Gong Show.

Social media is full of photos & reports about assaults on Palestinian children by Israeli occupying forces. It may be escalating but it is hardly a new tactic for Israel to target children. That is a hallmark of war, occupation, persecution, & genocide. Israel was formally accused of it by the UN & human rights groups after the seven-week bombing siege of Gaza.

This young boy was a victim of assault in one of the more notorious cases of July 2014 leading up to the bombing siege of Gaza. Then 15-year-old Palestinian-American Tariq Abu Khdeir was beaten into unconsciousness & stomped on by an Israeli border policeman following the kidnapping & torching murder of his 16-year-old cousin, Mohammed Abu Khdeir in occupied East Jerusalem.

Despite video documentation of the assault on Tariq, the policeman, whose identity was kept anonymous by Israel, was only sentenced to 45 days of community service & a suspended sentence of four months in jail. At the time, Tariq’s mother mother Suha Abu Khdeir said if her son hadn’t been a US citizen he would have been “just pushed to the side like a dog…left to rot in jail.”

Defend Palestinian children by honoring & promoting the economic & cultural boycott of Israel. Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729 & check every label.

A Palestinian human rights group for prisoners reports that Israel has kidnapped & arrested 5,700 Palestinians, including 700 children, since the start of 2017. Most are manhandled, many are physically assaulted, some have been released, hundreds have been placed in administrative detention & held indefinitely without charge or trial.

The incident pictured here has become iconic of Israeli violence toward Palestinian kids. In August 2015, an Israeli soldier was assaulting 11-year-old Mohammed Tamimi from the Palestinian family noted for fearless activism in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. The incident became notorious internationally because Mohammed had a broken arm when he was assaulted & his sister, mother, & others jumped on the soldier to get him off the boy.

The most powerful way to stand with Palestinians is to honor & promote the economic & cultural boycott of Israel (BDS). Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729 & check every label.

(Photo by Abbas Momani/AFP)

The Kashmir Doctors’ Association (KDA) reports that under revised guidelines established by the American Heart Association & American College of Cardiology more than 3.5 million of the almost 7 million residents of occupied Kashmir suffer from high blood pressure, also called hypertension. The affects of hypertension on the human body include heart disease, aneurysms, stroke, dementia, kidney failure.

You can’t just jump to conclusions or make facile comparisons about the pathology of hypertension but it is noteworthy that under the old, unrevised guidelines, 40-percent of American Black men & women had hypertension, one of the highest rates in the world. They not only sustain higher rates of hypertension but it develops earlier in life & is more severe. It’s no surprise that researchers started looking for the cause of hypertension among Blacks in their genes. Influenced by the antisocial idiocies of evolutionary psychology (more aptly called evo-psycho) which now dominate the social sciences, researchers are also looking for the biological roots of racism, misogyny, inequality & supremacy in the genes. If they were going to be scientific about the pathology of hypertension, it would be more useful to compare hypertension rates around the world by class & caste, by gender, by measure of oppression including war, occupation, persecution, genocide.

War, occupation, persecution, genocide are not good for human health. That should be as obvious to researchers with an ounce of scientific integrity as it is to the oppressed.

Television news is so obsessed with Trump’s tweets that none of the networks have considered war, occupation, or the Rohingya genocide of any interest for months. But the arrival of Pope Francis in Burma this morning actually prompted some coverage–although the summit of European & Asian diplomats in Burma last week received none. All media reports focus on whether Pope Francis will play politic with genocide by avoiding the proper name Rohingya as Burmese Cardinal Charles Bo requested since Bo is a nationalist supporter of the genocide.

There’s no way in hell Pope Francis can visit Burma & go all euphemistic about the Rohingya people. Suu Kyi & the generals justify the denial of citizenship, human, & democratic rights to the Rohingya precisely by claiming they are Bengali immigrants living illegally in Burma & have made it an international issue by asking diplomats not to use the proper name Rohingya. Kofi Annan obliged genocide in his commission recommendations by refusing to use the name & personally advised Pope Francis to also become a sniveling accomplice to genocide. If the pope does not stand up to the political pressure, he won’t just compromise his own spiritual leadership & reduce the Vatican to a flunkey of fascism. Most importantly, he endangers the Rohingya people & justifies governments who deny genocide & refuse to impose economic & military sanctions on Burma. Genocide is what is at stake in his visit & Pope Francis knows that–which is what makes his state visit so inadvisable & possibly compromised with the fascist junta.

Pope Francis has a chance here to show political & spiritual leadership. For the Rohingya people, we sincerely hope he has the integrity & courage to do so.

(Photo of pope arriving in Burma from Business Standard)