Hopefully all who denounce identity politics for whatever idiotic reason will take note that identity politics is bringing powerful sleaze-balls down one after another. Maybe there is something to fighting back for women, Blacks, Latinos, LGBT, & others oppressed for who they are. Can the denouncers concede the obvious?

Yet another miscarriage of justice in the July 5th, 2016 fatal shooting of 37-year-old Alton Sterling. He was first stun gunned & then shot several times at close range while being held down by two Baton Rouge, Louisiana police officers. In May 2017, the US Department of Justice chose not to file criminal charges against the officers for excessive force & misuse of authority. Today the Louisiana attorney general announced the state will not file charges because the officers acted in a “reasonable & justifiable manner.” There are several cellphone videos of the violent encounter documenting violations of police procedure & excessive force. The state refuses to release most of those videos.

Apparently Sterling has a criminal record from a similar encounter with police in 2009. That may be so but the Department of Justice & Louisiana attorney general were not asked to adjudicate that case for which he was tried & served a few years in jail. They were asked to judge the 2016 fatal shooting of a man pinned to the ground. As the Sterling family attorney said in 2016, “You can judge a man by his past, or in this case you can judge him by what we saw in the videotape. All that matters is that videotape.”

The devastated family say they have no more tears left to cry but they have plenty of fight left & have initiated civil litigation against the officers & hopefully city & state officials.

Photo is Alton Sterling. May he Rest In Peace. Sincere condolences to his family & friends.

#BlackLivesMatter

This is a useful article about an investigation, more a sting operation, about a “cash for coverage” deal bribing Indian media sources to promote the Hindutva nationalist political agenda. Reminiscent of the CIA planting false stories to promote their nefarious agenda & create false realities. One can’t go all paranoid about reading mainstream media or you’ll end up a cynic or nihilist. Any researcher worth reading reads plenty & learns plenty from reading mainstream media, especially when so-called alternative media is filled with just as much rubbish, plus paranoidal nihilism. Reality is concrete & can be understood. Conspiracy theories are mostly unverifiable & filled with evil monsters. No one speaks ex cathedra. So it’s useful to learn how to use media, how to study a complex issue, how to sort the wheat from the chaff from information sources which have a bias & point of view even if they are not promoting planted stories or Hindutva, Zionist, Islamophobic, Anti-Semitic, or white supremacist ideas.

https://thewire.in/media/large-media-houses-seen-striking-deals-for-paid-news-to-promote-hindutva-agenda

If anyone from Canada is interested in sponsoring a refugee, can you please let me know? I’ve tried to sponsor immigrants from Mexico but my income is now too low & I’ve been refused. You can help an immigrant or refugee get residence & work papers by sponsoring. You don’t have to be rich & you can use a two income family to sponsor. Before I retired, I sponsored & never had issues of any kind.

The inevitable collapse in relations has begun between the fascist wing of Assad supporters, led by Eva Bartlett & Vanessa Beeley, & their fellow travelers who claim to be “anti-imperialist.” It isn’t their associations with fascism, Islamophobia, & anti-Semitism that disturb these fellow travelers but that Bartlett & Beeley have been repeatedly exposed as lying propagandists who go over-the-top in defending torture, vilifying civilians being bombed as terrorists (including children & doctors serving in bombing zones), in censorship of articles & reports about Syria, & in bullying & vituperating against all who disagree with them. Such excesses discredit the whole rotten lot of Assad supporters. Some of the more prominent Assadists who have jumped the Bartlett-Beeley fan wagon include Barbara McKenzie from New Zealand, Paul Larudee on the steering committee of the Assadist Syrian Solidarity Movement, Sibel Edmonds, who runs the pro-Assad NewsBud video operation. These people breaking ranks are no prize packages. Edmonds holds up the smarmy, social climbing Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, & Rania Khalek as examples of reputable journalists though they stoop just as low as Bartlett & Beeley.

What these “anti-imperialist” Assadists want is Assad’s Beavis & Butthead duo to stop harping on the White Helmets & denouncing little kids as terrorists or dolls & to find a less obvious & detestable way of defending the bombing of civilians–like the national sovereignty thing. What these fellow travelers don’t understand is that the Bartlett, Beeley, & Tim Anderson types are associated with the Assad regime at the highest levels & function as ventriloquist dummies to the regime–from Bashar Al-Assad himself, to Syrian politician Fares Shehabi, Syrian representative to the UN Bashar Al-Jaafari, hangman & chief executioner Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassoun, & political & media advisor to Assad Bouthaina Shaaban. Bartlett & Beeley are repeating what they are told & remunerated well to say by Assad regime officials.

This breakdown in the Assadist movement presents some major problems for Assad, even though the level of sycophancy among fellow travelers cannot be underestimated. The greater likelihood is that ways will be found to vilify & isolate the likes of McKenzie, Larudee, & Edmonds in order for the Assad regime to continue using Bartlett & Beeley to promote lowlife & detestable slanders against the Syrian revolution. If Bartlett & Beeley are discredited, the entire propaganda edifice goes with them.

Photo is Vanessa Beeley fawning as Assad political & media advisor Bouthaina Shaaban receives a scarf as a gift from a Norwegian Assad supporter. Shaaban is probably Bartlett & Beeley’s handler within the Assad regime.

Video showing breakdown among Assadists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=446&v=aOio1baDxd4

(Photo by Assadist Eva Thomassen posted by Beeley)

Protests today in Sana’a, Yemen, went on for miles to protest three years of Saudi-US-UK coalition bombing. The coalition includes France, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, & Senegal. The official narratives for the cause of the bombing involve ‘geopolitical” conflict between Saudi Arabia & Iran, the Houthi rebel takeover of the government in January 2015, Al Qaeda & ISIS, the Sunni-Shia conflict. Whatever role those different factors play, the primary intent of carpet bombing Yemen is to destroy every vestige of the Yemen Arab Spring uprising in 2011-2012.

There is very little media coverage of these protests except by RT, Russia’s propaganda news agency, & Press TV, Iran’s propaganda news agency. Russia & Iran of course do not cover the war out of solidarity & most certainly did not support the Yemen uprising. Their purpose is partially to take the attention off their counterrevolutionary savagery in Syria. As far as one can tell from the RT video of the protests today, the marches were organized by the Houthis who undemocratically run Yemen. The Yemeni uprising was politically profound & not all of the participants agree with the program & methods of the Houthis. But on the issue of opposing the Saudi-US-UK coalition bombing, they speak with one voice: Stop the Bombing! Out Now!

RT video of rally:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTm4FXHF5-0

(Photo is screen shot from video of the march today)

On March 23rd, the UN Human Rights Council passed a cowardly, half-assed resolution shaking the naughty finger at Burma for genocide against the Rohingya people. That Burundi, China, & Philippines vetoed the resolution makes sense. They’re stone-cold reactionary regimes. But don’t you just cringe at the jive talk Cuba & Venezuela would use to explain why their veto of the resolution was the revolutionary thing to do, the Bolivarian thing to do?

Yesterday, fascist propagandist Eva Bartlett posted this photo of herself with Syrian Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassoun commenting that it “brought out the illuminati-ists” & that she looked forward to her next meeting with “this wonderful spiritual leader.”

Bartlett once edited Sott, a journal directly associated with David Icke who believes that extraterrestrial reptiles in the form of Illuminati/Jewish bankers run the world–a theory, minus the crazy-assed reptile thing, that they hold in common with Adolph Hitler. Icke & Bartlett likely descended on Syria along with other fascists because the Assad dynasty had purged all Jews from the country, making it suitable political terrain for anti-Semites. They are just as antipathetic to Muslims which is why their propaganda entangles threads of both hateful ideologies. Bartlett is so emboldened by the near-defeat of the Syrian uprising against Assad that she no longer feels a need to disguise her motivations & hatred for Jews.

As for the “wonderful spiritual” leadership of Grand Mufti Hassoun, according to the Amnesty report on torture in Saydnaya prison, Hassoun is the chief hangman who signed off on the torture & hanging of at least 13,000 political prisoners in a five-year period. In October 2017, he came out on Indian TV supporting the Burmese junta’s genocide against the Rohingya people & in support of India’s plans to deport 40,000 Rohingya refugees who the Modi regime characterize as terrorists. On his visit to Kashmir, he supported the occupation in order to “weed out the cult of violence” from Muslim society.

Hassoun’s support for fascism & genocide in Burma, the occupation of Kashmir, & the persecution of Muslims & Rohingya refugees in India is of a piece with his support for the Assad dictatorship. It ought to give pause to those taken in by Assadist propaganda that they are marching with fascists, Islamophobes, anti-Semites, white supremacists, rabid nationalists. It’s not too late to jump ship from this crowd but it is perilously close to being so.

Bartlett is a professional propagandist, not an independent journalist. She sucks off the Palestinian struggle for credibility & like Alice Walker, another Icke fangirl, should be held at arm’s length by those who believe in the justice of Palestinian self-determination which is inextricably bound to the fate of the Syrian revolution against Assad.

(Photo from FB wall of Eva Bartlett)

The Syrian revolution is being destroyed by bombers & special forces from nearly 70 countries. If you’re talking about that imaginary plan for a greater Israel posited by fascists & anti-Semites, don’t be surprised when I kick your ass to the curb.