You could write a hundred treatises about refugee rights & against forced repatriation to the killing fields of Arakan state, Burma but you could never speak as eloquently as these Rohingya children in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. Who would ever harm a hair on their heads should be charged, arrested, & prosecuted before an international human rights tribunal & then sent up the river with no possibility of parole.

(Photo from Anayet Ullah Arman’s FB wall)

A tear gas shell explodes near this Kashmiri protester during a protest today in Srinagar against the surge in killings & other human rights crimes by Indian occupying troops. You can really see the full flowering of “the world’s largest democracy” in its assaults on unarmed protesters.

Stand with Kashmiris to demand an end to the occupation & self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo by Saqib Majeed)

George Lakoff, the prestigious linguist at UC Berkeley, thinks Trump’s hate language is strategic manipulation. Maybe his career depends on such analysis but the rest of us recognize a demented, moronic hater when we hear one. He just opens his big fat trap & farts hate.

#ThrowTheBumOut

Reposted from January 13, 2017 because understanding Syria, the last Arab Spring uprising not yet defeated, matters for a resurgence of the Arab uprisings, Palestinian self-determination, & democracy in the entire Middle East:
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It must seem the epitome of arrogance for Syrian revolutionists & their supporters to disagree with almost the entire pantheon of western gurus: Noam Chomsky, Patrick Cockburn, Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, Chris Hedges, Vijay Prashad, John Pilger, Glenn Greenwald, Glen Ford, Seamus Milne, Seymour Hersh, Ajamu Baraka. After all, these guys–& it is noticeable that they are all men–are the left intellectual avant-garde of the past 40 years, even outside the west. The problem with gurus is that they are not infallible & they don’t speak ex cathedra for “the left.” Sometimes when you scratch below the surface of their analyses, you learn they’re not that left at all. For every one of those celebrity journalists & authors there is an entire catalog of serious misjudgments long before they fell apart over Syria.

It’s no surprise they can’t distinguish between revolution & counter-revolution in Syria since not a one of them has any real credentials in that regard. They operate in elite circles, are accustomed to deference, & likely have no understanding at all of working people nor any respect for our capacities to enter history & change it. Like the lilliputian socialist groups who support Assad & carpet bombing of civilians, their writings reflect theoretical torpor & political inertia where they can no longer tell the difference between a political analysis of Syria & the conspiracy mongering of Global Research, complete with “reptilian Rothschild banksters.”

If the Islamophobia & anti-Semitism of Assadist apologia, including that of these gurus, doesn’t hit you in the face, if the demonizing of rescue workers & small children doesn’t sicken you, if marching for Assad & Russia with fascists & libertarians who believe “jihadists” & Jewish people are the problems in this world doesn’t horrify you, then maybe it’s time to accept that you were only on the left by a misunderstanding. The bandwagon is not a reliable guide in politics.

Photo is White Helmet rescue workers in Douma under aerial bombardment by Syrian & Russian bombers on January 8th, 2018.

(Photo by Al-Ajweh/AFP/Getty Images)

They’re zoning in on Trump with every intention to eventually get him out of the White House. They don’t need him anymore since he got the tax bill for corporations & millionaires but he’s screwing up every other thing they wanted from him & discrediting every agency of the US government. There’s no dignity left in DC & the US needs that to throw its weight around. The sucker had to cancel his state visit to England because of popular opposition. But the way they’re executing the ouster of Trump is unsavory & pollutes political discourse, making everything about his boundless amorality & not about the US electoral system that gave him an election he lost. Russiagate wasn’t the main problem in the election. It was the entirely undemocratic & stage-managed US electoral system that handed him an office he was obviously unfit to hold–& I’m not one to hold the US presidency in high regard nor did I see Clinton’s realpolitik as an alternative.

If media can’t keep their noses out of sordid gossip as part of discrediting his ugly ass, we should at least keep our attention on issues of substance. For heaven’s sakes, put that damn book away & stop the salacious gossip about his sexual habits. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t render it any more dignity than The National Inquirer would. If that’s all you can talk about instead of refugee rights, the Muslim ban, the several US wars, US support for Israeli apartheid, its alliance with Indian militarism, its de facto support for the Rohingya genocide & for Duterte’s death squads, maybe you’re not as political as you think. You certainly aren’t very useful to understanding what the hell is going on.

Maybe Rachel Maddow thinks Trump paying a porn star hush money for sex is an important political story but it’s just salacious gossip. It’s more documentation that he’s a sleazy dirtball but the political story they haven’t followed up on is the countless women who’ve accused him of sexual assault. Don’t we all love getting the dirt on this lowlife slimeball but we need to keep our eyes on what matters.

#ThrowTheBumOut

So if African countries are shitholes, that should mean the US can close down AFRICOM & pull out the thousands of US soldiers deployed there, the IMF & World Bank can shut down their predatory projects, & the thousands of US corporations operating there can shut down their operations.

January 12th is the 8th anniversary of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. They don’t know how many people were killed but estimates are as high as 315,000. The consequences of that earthquake were a UN troop occupation which brought a cholera epidemic; the invasion of over 10,000 NGOs milking humanitarian aid to enrich themselves, including the Clinton Foundation; the creation of a sweatshop economy orchestrated by then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Millions were pledged in humanitarian aid but they didn’t clear the rubble, provide port-au-potties, or build housing. The US has militarily & diplomatically intervened in Haiti, including under Obama, not because it is an unmanageable shithole but because of the history of rebellion by the Haitian people.

Haitians are forced to immigrate & until this year had special immigration status to the US which Trump just annulled. This post from last year is about immigrants/refugees from Haiti & African countries now on the US southern border unable to enter, despite the special immigration status many of them have.

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According to local news, just across the US border in Reynosa, Mexico, immigrant shelters are increasingly serving African & Asian undocumented immigrants. That is true along the entire southern US border from California to Texas & has been since 2011.

Africans from several countries & Asians (mostly Bangladeshis & Indians) have chosen to travel to Brazil because their destination is the US. They each pay thousands of dollars to an organized network of human smugglers for false papers to cross them through 10 countries on foot, boat, & bus to the border of Mexico. That involves traveling in overcrowded fishing boats, trekking through mosquito-infested jungles, dodging armed bandits & immigration authorities, temporary encampments.

Because Mexico has no deportation agreements with some of the African countries of origin, Mexican authorities will issue Africans transit permits to get to the US border. Most, probably those with false papers, do not register for permits & must navigate the treacheries of the 1,450-mile trek on their own.

Mexico is hardly a model of enlightened immigration policy. It functions as the southern flank of US immigration & in 2015 deported more than 165,000 Central Americans. It also has one of the highest immigration detention rates in the world, including of children, & in 2015, detained 190,000 from around the world.

African refugees want to get to the US border because individuals from Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan are given US Temporary Protection Status against deportation for periods from 6 to 18 months, subject to renewal. It doesn’t mean US Homeland Security always honors that amnesty because it is also supposed to be provided to refugees from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria, & Yemen & as of September 2016, it began detaining & then deporting Haitians.

There are now thousands of Africans encamped along the US-Mexico border because the US grants asylum to only 50 Africans a day. That’s why the US Border Patrol reported that it apprehended 6,126 African & Asian refugees trying to cross illegally in 2015. In the first seven months of 2016, nearly 8,000 Africans & Asians had registered with Mexican immigration in Chiapas. Just to process the registered would take US officials over six months when the International Organization for Migration estimated that 20,000 more African refugees were already en route from Brazil to the US.

The US is trying to involve Latin American countries in policing & containing refugee transit to the US & has deployed immigration agents to Mexican immigration facilities on the southern border to impede the traffic from Africa, Asia, & the Middle East.

This photo is African, Asian, Haitian & refugees from other countries waiting to register with Mexican immigration in Tapachula, Chiapas on the southern Mexican border.

Immigration is a human right. Open the borders.

(Photo by Encarni Pindado for the Guardian)

Assad propagandists Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett, & Tim Anderson are up in arms that the Guardian will not allow them to take over the paper to rebut the exposé of their connections to Putin & Assad titled “How Syria’s White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine” by Olivia Solon. Maybe they can work out a reciprocal agreement between the Guardian & RT allowing the White Helmets to take over RT & rebut all the lies told there about them & the Syrian revolution, especially the head-chopper stuff.

Beeley is in Syria right now, embedded like always up the ass of the Syrian army & trying to deny the carnage of Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians in Idlib & eastern Ghouta. How does she explain this? This is 6-year-old Oyis Al-Taki at Dar Al Shifa Hospital. The little guy suffered massive head injuries & extensive damage to both eyes from Russian bombing in Ghouta. He was likely pulled out of rubble by a White Helmet rescue worker. A White Helmet rescue worker going about the business of the CIA? Get real.

(Photo from Dar Al-Shifa Hospital SDI)