So I’m wondering about doing a podcast. I love chatting up & interviewing people & think it might be a strong way to get out news about war, persecution, occupation, genocide from those engaged in struggle against them. You have to have a suitable voice & can’t sound monotone, whiny, or falsetto so if I lower my voice an octave & talk like a toughie I may be able to pull if off. Unlike many podcasters, my guests would actually have things substantial to say. What thinkest thou?

Israeli snipers attack unarmed Palestinian Great Return March

Great Return March (Shehab News) Mar 30 2018

There’s a discussion on Twitter asking if the US should recognize Palestine as a sovereign independent state? Like the US has any rights at all over Palestine!? You have to be completely stupid to believe there can be a bantustate solution to Israeli colonialism, apartheid, genocide. Palestinians long ago proposed the only workable & democratic solution: a democratic, secular state where Palestinians & Jews can live as brothers & sisters. Zionism is no part of that equation & must be defeated because it is terrorist in ideology & practice.

This photo is the Great Return March today where 20,000 Palestinians marched peacefully for the right of return for Palestinian refugees. The unarmed marchers were fired on by Israeli snipers using drones, tear gas, & live ammo. So far, they have killed fifteen Palestinians & injured 1,500 others.

Stand with Palestinians in demanding the end of occupation & their right to self-determination. Honor the cultural & economic boycott of Israel.

(Photo from Shehab News Agency)

According to officials in the UK, anonymous hate groups or individuals are circulating a call for April 3rd to be “Punish a Muslim Day.” The fliers being sent around call for specific acts of violence against Muslims with points for each vile action taken:

1. 10 points to verbally abuse a Muslim
2. 25 points to pull the head scarf off a Muslim woman
3. 50 points to throw acid in face of a Muslim
4. 100 points to beat up a Muslim
5. 250 points to torture a Muslim using electrocution, skinning, use of a rack
6. 500 points to butcher a Muslim using gun, knife, vehicle or other weapon
7. 1,000 points to burn or bomb a mosque
8. 2,500 points to nuke Mecca”

In response to these threats, many who refuse to be guppies to fascists call for April 3rd to be designated “Love a Muslim Day,” including protests for religious freedom & against the hating of Muslims in order to justify war, occupation, persecution, genocide.

A poetic tribute to torture victims by Kashmiri poet Ather Zia

A poetic tribute to torture victims by Kashmiri poet Ather Zia:

Artist Statement
As a people living under an occupation which is camouflaged within a patina of democratic set-up & draconian laws, there is a constant erasure of our bodies, memories & identities. We are inflicted with active forgetting in order to survive. At the border where the direct gaze of prose is constricted with barbed wires of multiple coercions, poetry spurts forth. Poetry makes one a witness, rather than just an archivist. One’s life-blood, all that is political & emotional; lived, remaining, & forgotten coagulates into a poem.

Abode of the God?

This poem is for those who were tortured to death & those who survived one of the known & notorious interrogation centers in Kashmir called Hari Niwas (Abode of God). Hari Niwas was a royal palace before it was turned into an interrogation center in the late 80’s & 90’s.

a phantasm above,

I am the bones under this earth

where you plan to plant

tulips, daffodils (so dear to my soil)

trying to cover

wide-mouthed pits,

filled with

shoes, limbs, amulets for protection

unblinking eyes,

a first love’s charm bracelet

husbands, sons,

lovers,

fathers

your rooms are clinging to their walls –

the abode of God, looks less so –

no diviner dare carry a broom

to erase my trace,

in this dank darkness, tinged red

I am not yet done etching tremulous lines on walls

I am not done memorizing faces that are gone,

I am not done counting and keeping time which passed,

there are still dead – dying in certain rooms

(Reposted from March 30th, 2016)

Indian forces bully kids in Kashmir

Kashmir bullying kid (Kadshmir Observer) Mar 29 2017

“At Habba Kadal, Srinagar today {March 2017} a child being humiliated by soldiers. This is a devastating sight for any parent.”

Why do soldiers humiliate & bully small children in Kashmir, Palestine, Burma, & in other war & conflict zones? Because children must be ruthlessly socialized to accept occupation & oppression as their natural, unalterable state in life. Children of the oppressed terrify the oppressors because they are a new generation who will demand freedom. They are never accidental victims of humiliation & violence but among the intended victims. They are the “terrorists” so feared & maligned.

(Photo by Abid Bhat from March 29, 2017)

Assad’s Beavis & Butthead propaganda duo: Bartlett & Beeley

Assad's Beavis & Butthead duo Mar 30 2018

Assad’s own Ann Coulter & Leni Reifenstahl or his Beavis & Butthead duo: Bartlett & Beeley:

By their own admission, they have only been “experts” & “independent journalists” on Syrian politics since 2014. The Syrian revolution has been going on since 2011. That’s like calling yourself a doctor after taking a four-hour course in first aid & learning how to administer CPR. Bartlett (omitting her tutelage by David Icke) actually admits her education came mostly from Global Research, the Canadian conspiracy rag based on anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, & fascist fear-mongering. It lost its cachet for anyone with all their political marbles when in 2011 it tried to discredit all the Arab Spring uprisings involving millions of Arabs in several countries as street theater orchestrated by the CIA & Mossad. That’s when their contempt for Arabs & Muslims was lit up in technicolor & they began to attract the haters & deranged lost souls in politics. Beeley admits to no education of any kind except in horse back riding. Both are clearly paid propagandists for Putin & Assad. Their primary talent is willingness to say anything to justify counterrevolution & the bombing of civilians. Sycophants are a dime a dozen but Islamophobia prefers to use women to peddle the detestable notion that Arab & Muslim women need white western Christians backed by bombers to teach them how to be free. Color them fascists & white supremacists.

(Photos are Beeley/Riefenstahl on the left & Bartlett/Coulter on the right)

Syrian war refugees found ‘resilient’ enough to be homeless by London housing authorities

UK Solidarity with refugees rally Mar 30 2018

Muhamed & Rouzeh Shouesh, a Syrian refugee couple in the UK living on state benefits with two college-age kids, were evicted & made homeless after they were told by London council housing authorities that they are “resilient” enough to deal with homelessness. Can the housing authorities tell us how they quantify resilience, especially the kind needed for war refugees who move to a foreign country where they’re unable to earn a living & then learn their lives have no value & they are forced to live outside in the rainy, cold climate of England? This is when you kinda wish that ‘eye for an eye’ revenge thing were a fully operative legal option which would take its revenge on the housing officials.

Article: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/syrian-refugee-family-homeless-uk-local-council-emergency-accommodation-rouzeh-muhamed-shouesh-syria-a8278406.html#gallery

(Photo is from refugee rights protest in London last Saturday)

Photographic evidence of March 30th, 1996 massacre by Indian occupying forces in Kashmir

Bodies of 22 Kashmiris Mar 30 1996 (Inside Kashmir) Mar 30 2018

A photographer with the bodies of 22 Kashmiris laying in a police station yard in Srinagar on March 30th, 1996:

It seems unlikely Indian security forces would allow media photographers to document their treatment of the bodies of Kashmiris executed under occupation looking like livestock in a cattle yard, some of them in a state of undress. The desecration & mistreatment of a corpse violates several international laws–albeit laws that are routinely flouted. The photographers here may be part of a forensics operation such as Assad used in his gulag. It’s not certain if he still does since one defected with 28,000 photos of political prisoners tortured, mutilated, hung & killed & laid out naked in this same manner. In discussing torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Smita Chakraburtty reminded us of the several torture centers that exist in Kashmir because torture is part of war, occupation, repression, & genocide as much in Kashmir as in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Burma, Somalia, Libya, Israel.

Stand with Kashmiris in demanding the end of the occupation & self-determination for Kashmir. Our respects to those who died in such a monstrous way. May they Rest In Peace. Any indignity belongs entirely to the Indian army.

#FreeKashmir
#Azadi

(Photo from Inside Kashmir)

When the surreal state of the world gets you down, keep in mind that the ‘race’ is not to the swift & the few with the bombers & big artillery but to the majority who can bring this world to a halt by just sitting on our asses since we’re the ones who make the world go round. Victory goes to those like Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingya, Mayans, indigenous peoples on every continent, who never bend the knee to oppression. Freedom from occupation, war, genocide is immediately tied to our power as working people. They think they have us where they want us so the element of surprise will catch them off-guard when we show the stuff we’re really made of: united political power. The mighty should tremble because as brutalized Black prisoners said at the 1971 Attica prison uprising in NY: “We are (hu)men. We are not beasts & do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison population has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization & disregard for the lives of the prisoners here & throughout the United State. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.”