UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has the regrettable habit of talking through clenched teeth, not unlike a Pit Bull, but with ferocity derived from the orange gorilla in the White House who talks through his ass. In other words, outside that position she’s just another two-bit opportunist social climber, very like Hillary Clinton. Speaking to an AIPAC event where she knew they’d eat her grandstanding up, Haley called herself a new sheriff in town & talked about wearing high heels not as a fashion statement but to better ‘boot’ Palestinian representatives out at the UN because “the days of Israel bashing” & condemning its apartheid policies are over.
We got news for the new US sheriff at the UN who thinks of herself as a goon squad in high heels & lipstick. Palestinian solidarity is under serious legal attack, especially the boycott movement & especially on campuses. Zionist ideologues have made Palestinian solidarity & BDS central issues of civil liberties in this & many other countries. The struggle in defense of free speech & free association–that is, the fight to defend the Bill of Rights (the only salvageable part of the US Constitution)–has now broadened to incorporate millions of others who will be marching for the first time with Palestinians & their supporters. We cannot be intimidated by her & Trump throwing down the gauntlet against the Palestinians–just as Clinton pledged in her campaign. We will stand with them, build support for them, & fight like hell with them regardless of Haley’s jackboot diplomacy at the UN or Trump’s provocations. And the movement will grow & be strengthened. That’s just the way it is because there’s a new posse in town who won’t stand for the bullying. So kiss off with the threats, not kick off, sister Haley. We’re on your case.
(Picture is screen shot from Haley at AIPAC feeling within her element pandering to Israel.)
A child scavenging landfill for recyclables: see how well capitalism works out for little kids under sweatshop economics? Just so there’s no confusion: child labor is also legal in the US for agribusiness where the kids endangered by pesticides, tools, & livestock are usually brown. Obama made it illegal for the Labor Department to ever again raise the issue of protective laws for children farm workers.
Don’t you just love the vaunted creativity of capitalism? Five-hundred kinds of toothpaste & every other product on the market but still no solution to inequality.
The photographer who is from Bangladesh doesn’t say which city this is & the tragedy is that it could be anywhere.
Kashmiri friends, I often get confused by the names of those killed in encounters. From one report to another, the spellings of the names change. Can someone tell me the formal name of the 10-year-old boy killed by the live shell?
The story of the 10-year-old boy who just died in the Shopian district of Kashmir was reported differently last week. He was not just standing in front of his family home but had picked up a live shell from the site of a hunt to kill operation & brought it home to play with when it blew up in his face. Can you imagine the reckless disregard of an occupying army bombarding a neighborhood with such ammunition & then leaving the area without de-mining? It resonates with the former Soviet Union & the US coalition in Afghanistan who have left millions of undetonated explosives all over Afghanistan, creating a crisis among children who think they are toys & get killed or lose limbs.
There are protests in Shopian & Srinagar, Kashmir against the Indian army killing of civilians. Some may look at this photo of a young man taunting soldiers to shoot him & see provocation; others may see bravado. Some claim the stone pelters are paid provocateurs or self-destructive. Let it be noted that just in January 2018, the Indian occupying army killed 18 civilians, including a 10-year-old boy & others who were not protesting, injured 147 others, arrested 137, widowed two women & orphaned ten kids by the use of brute force, pellet guns, tear gas shells.
If this is bravado, it is to mask fear & express resistance to occupation. Stand with Kashmiris against occupation so youth can use their vital life energy to create a free society rather than resist brute force.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
Loved the stone-faced thing Democrats played out at Trump’s State of the Union talk. Loved that he gave himself about a hundred standing ovations. They all looked like trained seals.
Notice how the US labor officialdom hasn’t made a peep of protest against Trump policies? And that’s only the least of their treacheries. They’ve never made a peep against US wars, in support of immigrants & undocumented workers, for women’s rights, for Black & Latino rights, against sweatshop economics. (Trumka’s grandstanding doesn’t count.) They wouldn’t want to incite any rebellion among the ranks that in the long run would jeopardize their own positions.
This is Thengar Char, an isolated Bangladeshi island two hours by speedboat from the mainland. It only emerged from the sea about 8 years ago & is still not on some maps. It is completely submerged under several feet of water at high tide every day (which lasts about six hours), has no roads, no flood defenses. It is in an area frequently hit by cyclones which in the past have killed thousands on the nearby island of Hatiya & on Bangladesh’s southern coast. The island is uninhabitable.
A team of Bangladeshi government surveyors selected Thengar Char as a place to relocate thousands of Rohingya refugees if they are not deported back to Burma. There was no consideration given to permanent housing nor apparently to temporary housing which would be washed away every high tide, along with many refugees.
Prime minister Sheikh Hasina just told the Swedish ambassador to Bangladesh that this deranged deportation plan is still in the works. Stand with Rohingya refugees & demand no forced deportation & for asylum in any country they choose with visas & full refugee rights to work, education, healthcare.
Yesterday, when a former Facebook friend was calling feminists “the scum of the earth” & saying feminists are just ‘pissed off because they can’t get laid after 40’, Kashmiri Sheikh Imran rebutted him with a strong, no-nonsense defense of women. Today he messaged me saying he’d also bounced the fellow for being a hater. Part of his message was to say that “there will always be men who stand with women” & that “justice demands equality among all sexes & sections of our society.”
Women alway respect men who stand with them without bending a whit to political pressures. We’ve marched with them for women rights for decades now. But I think all of us will agree that it makes your heart sing when someone stands by your side duking it out with you. <3
