People keep telling me to make my wall private because it gets “infested by a lot of nasty critters” or “attracts worms.” On the contrary, it has introduced many of us to those fighting the most important political struggles in the world today. If Kashmiris looking for solidarity & allies had not read my posts about other struggles, they would not have introduced us to theirs. What’s a worm or two compared to that? Get past the nasty critters to the solidarity.
Daily Archives: March 20, 2018
A very succinct portrayal of the Indian occupation of Kashmir:
https://www.facebook.com/soankashmir/videos/198041004125415/
15th anniversary of US invasion of Iraq
This is a poem Rafiq Kathwari wrote in 2003 in response to the US invasion of Iraq. Today is the 15th anniversary of that monstrous event.
ASSIGNMENT
Only Muslim in the workshop
I went on a bit about
Shock & Awe
Weapons of mass destruction
Axis of evil
Mobile chemical labs
Slam dunks
Curveball
Smoking guns
Mushroom clouds
Cakewalks
Liberators
Regime change
& Mission Accomplished.
Civilization’s Cradle,
I said, is broken.
I am a witness
I must howl.
In every well in Baghdad
A rafiq is weeping
While long black coats
(With gas masks)
Huddle at the Wailing Wall
As if prayers could halt
Smart bombs.
“Rhetoric, not lyric,”
My peers echoed Yeats
“Argue with yourself not others.”
An adjunct admonished,
“A warhead soaring
From the earth’s womb
Was over the top. Navy Seals
Stockpiling kneepads was sick.
Not ars poetica.”
(Photo is poster Rafiq bought at Sinn Fein shop in Dublin)
On the question of Kurds in Syria
Syria is extremely complicated militarily because of the nearly 70 militaries involved plus an estimated thousand-plus paramilitary groups, including ISIS & al-Qaeda. You don’t have to be a military strategist to take a position but you do need to be scholarly if you want to understand it. Scholarly does not mean rounding up all the media articles about the conflict & going with the preponderance of opinion. That is becoming way too evident in commentary on the role of Kurdish forces in the conflict & on Turkish military intervention in Afrin against the Kurds.
Turkey has the second largest military within NATO & is no ally of the revolution against Assad. It may appear to operate at cross-purposes to the US, but it is part of the US counterrevolutionary coalition, including allowing the US to use its airbases for sorties into Syria. Turkey has been bombing Afrin, a Kurdish stronghold in northern Syria, for over two months & announced yesterday that the city is now under Turkish control. The Kurds, or at least a section of them, have been collaborating with the US coalition, both in Mosul & Raqqa in the ostensible fight against ISIS which involves carpet bombing of civilians. The Guardian newspaper has been publishing articles portraying the Kurds in Afrin as democratic, even socialist, with ethnic & female equality, ecologically advanced, & as LGBT-friendly. Drawing from other media sources, there are commentators who portray the Kurds as Stalinists & as American stooges.
The complexity & duration of the Kurdish struggle for self-determination deserves more respect than such ‘analyses’ are serving up. There are up to 45 million Kurds who live in Kurdistan in the border regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Armenia. To understand their struggle, one would have to do a scholarly study of who they are, when their marginalization & persecution arose, what their demands as a people are, their relationship to regimes in Turkey, Iraq, et al, the character of their political leadership, why they got involved with the US in the war against ISIS, why they called on Assad to protect them against Turkey. Collaborating with the US in Syria & Iraq out of political expedience speaks to the character of their political leadership & in no way invalidates Kurdish grievances or their just demands for self-determination.
Most people don’t have the time for the scholarship required to understand the Kurdish struggle. Since every scholar comes with a point of view, one has to weed through volumes of tendentious rubbish to understand any complex political issue. But that doesn’t mean we can go lazy & just accept what the Guardian or NY Times say as if it were the gospel truth. Or that we accept what influential commentators say based on media reports combined with their prejudices & impressions.
Without doing that scholarship, we need to hold the glorifications & vilifications. We stand on solid ground by supporting the Kurdish struggle for self-determination without compromise or equivocation; by opposing the collaboration of some Kurds with the US coalition & now with the Assad regime in Afrin; & by steadfastly opposing the bombing of Afrin by the Turkish military. Self-determination for the Kurdish people is linked inextricably with the Syrian revolution against Assad.
Photo is Kurdish civilians fleeing Turkish bombing of Afrin.
(Photo by Nazeer Al-Khatib/AFP/Getty Images)
This is a very cogent article on India’s arrest of Kashmiri photojournalist Kamran Yousef. We need to understand these frame-ups of journalists in Kashmir & elsewhere & significantly step up our defense. The arrests, forcible disappearances, extermination of journalists is a human rights issue of concern to all of us. That is highlighted by Kamran’s case, by Burma’s extermination of almost the entire network of Rohingya citizen journalists in Arakan/Rakhine state, & by the role of citizen journalists in Syria.
(Photo is Kamran Yousef)