A vigil in NYC this coming Sunday to protest the Kulgam massacre last Sunday & to oppose the occupation of Kashmir. Please like & publicize this event.

A truly iconic photo:

The photograph of a young, shirtless protester in Gaza holding a Palestinian flag in one hand and swinging a slingshot over his head with the other was shot on October 22 by Mustafa Hassouna of Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. The young boy is 20-year-old Palestinian A’ed Abu Amro, who lives in al-Zaytoun neighbourhood in Gaza City. ‘I was surprised this picture of me went viral,’ he said. ‘I participate in protests on a weekly basis, sometimes more. I didn’t even know there was a photographer near me.’

CIA director Gina Haspel was unimpressed when she heard the audio of the torture & beheading of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials. The CIA extracted much more suffering when she oversaw the torture of prisoners in US rendition prisons.

Concluding that Nikki Haley resigned to protest a US cover-up of the gruesome Khashoggi murder would be to suggest that she has a conscience when her enthusiasm for genocide against Palestinians shows her to be amoral & bereft of human solidarity.

Eid ul Fitr in Kashmir by Aaliya Mushtaq

The sacrificial Eid is yet months away
Yet Ishmael is dangled on the cross
The angels keep
their censored silences
and pour them into our hearts.

It isn’t even Muharram
But sisters wrap mourning
over their torn cloaks, and wipe off
sweat from the cold bullets
settled in the brows of their brothers.

Yesternight the guilty moon
wouldn’t show up.
All night it asked of me:
What joy could I shine upon
On all those slaughtered Eids?
I supplied no answers
the dread in my eyes furnished them.

Artwork details: Kashmir: The Metaphor of Pain by Rollie Mukherjee

In Koshur – the Kashmiri language – the metaphors of pain invoke sky, earth, mountains, fire, sounds, textures, smells, colours, erasure, departure, and objects like knife, axe, saw, nails. Artist Rollie Mukherjee’s work is a home to these metaphors.
Via Rubeena Choudhary

Since when did steadfast opposition to war & militarism (which is primarily the bombing of civilians) become dogma rather than political principle? How did it happen that the right & left are now defined by which army they’re rooting for, as if war was a football game & not the destruction of human civilization?

Call me an outdated feminist, call me a prude, but I consider the term “slut shaming” to be a repugnant, anti-woman term. My genre of feminists don’t re-purpose hate language & don’t legitimize or popularize its use by others. We do not ever refer to women as sluts or their behaviors as slutty. It’s an insult to women & to our sexual dignity.

“Kashmir lives between funerals.

At funerals we rekindle hope.

To participate in the final funeral of your occupation.

We don’t call your occupation a democracy.

Your democracy’s funeral was performed the day a Kashmiri demanding right to self-determination was put down with guns.

Guns will have funerals too, we promise.”

–Irfan Mehraj

In just the past few hours the kooky notion of the deep state has come up more than once in political discussions. One would think the Assadist “progressives” (led by Glenn Greenwald) had discredited it & them enough by accusing those who oppose Trump of being in league with the deep state to incite a “soft coup” against him. Now today, one erstwhile FB friend suggested that the Honduran/Guatemalan caravan was organized by the deep state to effect the US elections to the advantage of the Republicans & the rightwing crowd is claiming the deep state is sending explosives to leading Democrats to thwart the Republicans in the elections. It cuts nuts both ways.

The notion of the deep state originated, as far as I have been able to determine, in conservative analyses of the Turkish government. During the mass protests in 2013 against the Erdogan regime, I spent many hours hunting down the meaning of the deep state in Turkey & concluded that it was basically an Islamophobic & orientalist explanation for the workings of the Turkish capitalist class within the Turkish government. Not fundamentally different than how the capitalist class operates within every government that it controls except under autocratic conditions in Turkey.

Because of lazy intellectual habits, both right & left-wing libertarians see everything in terms of intrigue & conspiracy & are incapable of rigorous analysis of social or political phenomena. In the case of this deep state rubbish, it’s just a paranoidal or Islamophobic end-run around addressing the question of capitalist control of governments & has no relevance whatsoever in the context of the 2018 US elections.