The American actor/comedian Chris Rock has landed in Israel & will be performing in Tel Aviv tonight despite appeals asking him to honor the cultural boycott of Israel because of apartheid & ethnic cleansing. We’ll avoid any cheap shots about the decomposition of his excoriating wit because his career fortunes depended on reining it in. But shame on Chris Rock. Another one bites the dust.

Trump wants 5,000 more US Border Patrol agents for the southern border but the Border Patrol has a morale & detention problem–& not because the pay is low or their lives are endangered by refugees. Last year, the head of the Border Patrol told Congress there were 7,542 assaults on agents since 2006 & 30 agents killed in the line of duty since 2003. No offense, but our man is going to have to justify those figures which are anyway dwarfed by the number of refugees who die trying to cross the militarized border. By the US government’s own accounting, between 300 & 500 refugees die every year at the US-Mexico border from exposure, including heat stroke, dehydration, & hyperthermia. It’s a gruesome & bereft way to die. It’s entirely possible that young recruits to the Border Patrol can’t stomach being foot soldiers against desperate & poor refugees looking for work & a better life.

Bangladesh says it is unlikely that forcible repatriation of Rohingya refugees to Burma will start on January 22nd as scheduled because the logistics are not in place. What logistics would those be? Hasn’t the Suu Kyi government finished building the concentration camps in Arakan state to warehouse the refugees? Is Bangladesh having trouble recruiting goon squads to roust refugees from their camps & drive them back across the border with their sick & hungry kids? Let’s get real. There is no procedure that makes forcible repatriation back to the killing fields of Arakan anything other than barbaric.

There can be no decisions made about the lives of Rohingya refugees without their direct participation. They are human beings, not livestock, & where they can live safely is for them to decide.

“Ethnic Politics and Myanmar’s Anti-Democratic Transition

“We need to organise a big 2-days-gathering of engaged scholars, intellectuals & activists concerned about Myanmar genocide & racist wars to build an international political force to challenge the lies of policy-makers about Myanmar ‘democratic transition’.”

–Burmese dissident in exile Maung Zarni

Oprah gave a rousing speech & I agreed with everything she said about sexual assault on women. But she still has conservative, elitist Democratic Party politics. If she does decide to run for president I just want her to know she’ll have me on her tail since I’ll be running again. We have to end the control of US politics by the bankrupt duopoly of Republicrats & we have to change the character of the US government as an oppressor.

Insha Mushtaq stands for all Kashmiri children blinded & disabled by pellet guns

There have been several reports about this Kashmiri girl named Insha Mushtaq who was 15-years-old when she was blinded & disfigured by pellet munitions in July 2016 while in her family home. She represents the 1,562 mostly children & youth who were partially or fully blinded by pellet guns just in the last 6 months of 2016. Another 7,330 were injured by pellet guns &, though not blinded, suffered disfigurement & permanent disability, pain, & health problems because the pellets cannot all be removed from vital organs.

We know Insha’s story because Kashmiri media, Al Jazeera, & a documentary video reported on the many surgeries she endured to extract pellets & repair tissue. They also reported about the emotional turmoil Insha & her family went through in accepting her disability, learning how to deal with it, & helping her build a fruitful life. She was a girl who loved to read & that would surely become much harder. That Insha lives in a society dealing with thousands of young people blinded & disabled by occupying forces does not make those adjustments less traumatizing for any of those affected.

There is no inspirational silver-lining in disability. Being disabled makes things harder. But the disability rights movement has hammered home the understanding that disability does not render a person useless, immobile, inferior, nor is it a death sentence. It requires emotional transitions, major adjustments, physical accommodations & learning new ways of doing things. No one not disabled would be so cavalier as to dismiss how hard it it, especially for young people, to come to terms with the grief & loss of disability. That’s why disability rights have been so important in forging respect which does not include pity but also demands social services necessary for a good life.

Blinding & disabling Kashmiri young people is not accidental but an intentional military stratagem to exact maximum suffering & demoralize resistance to occupation. But we know the leading part played in social struggle by those with disability, including the Kashmiri struggle, the Arab Spring uprisings, the anti-austerity protests in Europe, the Palestinian struggle (where Ibrahim Abu Thuraya was a prominent activist despite the loss of both legs in an Israeli airstrike until an Israeli sniper fatally shot him), & the US fight against austerity cutbacks. They have been on the front lines, not sitting out the struggles for a better world.

http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/kashmir/kashmir-pellet-victim-insha-mushtaq-qualified-10th-class-exam/271678.html

The solidarity against sexual assault at the Golden Globe awards does not mean feminism has been hijacked by “neoliberal feminists.” Violence against women includes every class in society as the #MeToo movement has made quite clear. How that affects working class women or women in war, occupation, & genocide may be the most compelling concerns but feminism is an all-inclusive movement. No one owns it. It is an ideology that incorporates the liberation demands of all women, excluding any demands to demean, oppress, exploit others.

Oprah made a damn good speech & other actresses made strong & eloquent statements against sexual assault. They spoke for all of us. Even if we’ll never be invited to their parties except as cleaning ladies.

That mantra about not reading MSM because it lies does not grow less imbecilic with repetition. Media is by its nature tendentious & always has been. But everything they report is not a lie. It’s their interpretation where things fall apart. One reads it to get basic information & to understand the viewpoints promoted by those who run the world. One cannot hope to understand social & political reality without reading MSM from around the world along with other commentators. Reading it does not cause brain rot or exposure to infectious diseases. One has to learn how to read it critically, not as if it’s gospel truth.

People who repeat the banalities about MSM just don’t want others to know the important things that can be gleaned from reading it. Fascists & Assadist propagandists come to mind since MSM & fake news are their bĂȘte noire. As they want us to see it, everything wrong with the world is all about US regime-change & Israel. With that bias, they can support repressive regimes up the wazoo. And they do. The racism & anti-Semitism of that view should be evident: everything is the fault of Jews & nations other than the US & Israel have no agency but are mere puppets & victims. It doesn’t concede an inch to US & Israeli aggression to say the regimes in other countries, especially those with big militaries, play a role in history. More importantly, so do the peoples of those countries. Witness the Arab Spring.

Homeless in Iran

Homeless kids in Iran

Homeless in Iran: the metrics to determine a society’s freedom are the number of homeless, the numbers unemployed, the quality of public education & healthcare, the quality of prisons. Apologists for the Iranian theocracy can blither about a US regime-change scenario but the roots of popular protest in Iran are inequality, not US-Israel subversion.

Without direction & leadership, the protests are unlikely to make substantial changes. But in the course of struggle, people learn what was wanting. Some draw the wrong conclusions. Social transformation involving contending forces, some of them armed to the teeth, is a monumental effort. But the irrepressible forces demanding freedom are the hope for all humanity.

(Photo tweeted by the Baghdad Post)