British Labour Party MP Jeremy Corbyn is really getting the business by media commentators & political cartoonists for refusing to blame or condemn Putin & the Kremlin for the nerve gas attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal living in the UK & his daughter Yulia. Fair enough. Every knows the Kremlin did it but due process & an investigation are required before we go all condemnatory.

What Corbyn should be excoriated for is years of equivocations & double-talk about Russian & Syrian bombing of civilians in Syria. He can’t be faulted for unequivocal denunciations of US coalition bombing in Syria & elsewhere. But when it comes to Russian intervention, mum’s the word for Corbyn. A little peep over Aleppo, some moral outrage here & there is not the same as denouncing what Syria, Russia, Iran, & other military forces are doing in Eastern Ghouta.

Cartoon by Gerald Scarfe on Corbyn’s response to the nerve gas attack.

Trump just called for the death penalty for drug traffickers. By which he does not mean US, Mexican, Afghan, & other government officials organizing & facilitating trafficking, or agencies like the CIA which organize production, transport, processing, or bankers laundering drug money who he needs for his real estate bungles. He means small time operators, including kids selling to finance their own addiction habits. Specifically, he means Black & Latino kids. Addiction is a social issue, a health issue–& often a private choice–but it is not a criminal matter–except for the governments, agencies, bankers involved in creating mass addiction & the black market for private profit.

The merciless British political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe on Trump policies & on Putin: “We’re going to make America hate again!!”

This is an extremely disturbing account of sexual harassment endured by Kashmiri women & girls under the Indian army occupation–in their own homes. As the author describes, degrading & humiliating harassment has often led to rape, sexual torture, murder. The photo on this article of a women stone pelter & the hundreds of Kashmiri women protesters represent the active role they play in resistance against occupation.

The struggle against occupation in Kashmir is an international women’s rights issue.

http://lostkashmirihistory.com/army-men-hanged-panties-bras-wall-hooks-littered-sanitary-pads/

March 15th is the 7th anniversary of the onset of the Syrian revolution as part of the Arab Spring uprisings which began in the early months of 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain with reverberations in Morocco, Jordan, Iraq. Millions of people, with women playing a leading role, rose up fearlessly against brutal dictatorships. They were among the most momentous uprisings in human history & it has taken massive repression, massacres, carpet bombing, vilification, mockery, & international treachery & military intervention to reverse them.

We should take a moment to honor those millions who dared all & are paying such a heavy price for trying to make this a more democratic & humane world. The problem is not that they tried & failed because they have not yet conceded defeat. Things are always harder to do than they appear & that is nowhere more reality than in creating social transformation from a world of sorrow, brutality, & inequality. That mistakes were made is obvious. The problem is more that they stood alone without the giant phalanxes of international solidarity. Who among us has not tried to change the world as they did have no right to sneer at the monumental struggle they dared & continue against all odds.

When I went to high school in northern Minnesota, there were very bad relations between protestants & Catholics & my family of 19 kids was decidedly Catholic. Protestant boys were not allowed to date Catholics & social relations in general were strained even among school kids. Now high school classmates claim they’re hunting me down to reunite. Too late bucko! Some grudges last a lifetime.

Jacqueline Daley’s daughter Kim Daley-Mascoll notified me that her mom passed away yesterday in Toronto where she lived. She would have been 83 this coming July. Jacqueline & I have been friends since 2013 when we met because of our common commitment to justice & human rights. But our affinities were personal as well as political. We were both working class girls from the Catholic tradition with all that represents emotionally & psychologically. Jacqueline told me she was shy about entering discussions on my wall because she wasn’t as well-schooled as others. Well-schooled isn’t something that necessarily helps one understand oppression. She had a keen eye for injustice & an intolerance for it & was particularly outraged by the conditions of sweatshop workers. Over the years, she commented on many issues, including war, persecution, inequality, immigrant & refugee rights.

In the past few years she suffered health problems, including the loss of her vision, so that she couldn’t be active in discussions. Some may recall we were going to get her a special computer for the sight-impaired but she declined it, knowing her vision & health were failing.

I loved Jacqueline for her kindness, her modesty & lack of pretension, her uncompromising ability to see even the most oppressed as equals, her unwillingness & inability to put herself above others. She was a glorious soul, a marvelous person. My deepest condolences to Kim & to the rest of her family. May dear Jacqueline Rest In Peace.

The most debilitating weakness of international political opposition to Assad’s dictatorship, to the Syrian, Russian, Iranian coalition & US coalition intervention in Syria is misunderstanding what the US coalition is doing there. Militarily, it’s a very complicated war that most trained military strategists cannot unravel because there are several aerial & ground forces, including over a thousand paramilitary groups. Militarily, it’s an extremely dangerous & reckless operation with the unified purpose of destroying a popular revolution. It is the very essence of folly to believe the US is simply blundering in its Syria policies or playing high-stakes diplomatic maneuvers by not taking on Syria, Russia, & Iran to defend the Syrian revolution. That kind of naiveté about the character of US militarism & about its mission in Syria boggles the rational mind–especially after what they just did to Mosul & Raqqa & after dropping the Mother of All Bombs in Afghanistan.

There is no such thing as a humanitarian intervention coming from the US Pentagon. Those who promote such a delusion are not treading new military or theoretical ground but turning over old manure in the hopes they’ll find a pot of gold. To demand such a thing after the US has dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs & missiles on civilians is not just magical thinking but treachery toward the people of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya.

Photo of US bombers is not what a freedom struggle looks like.