Recently, Phyllis Chesler has been cited in several articles & in a TV documentary as an authority on Second Wave feminism–probably because she just published a gossipy autobiography. She is indeed a well-known feminist thanks to her talent for self-promotion & social climbing. She once wrote unreadable books about women’s psychology, always exaggerates her place in feminist history, & now writes volume after volume of hateful scurrilous screeds against Palestinians & Islam–in one piece calling Palestinian supporters & BDS activists “brownshirts.” In hatred & deceit & to align feminists with Israeli apartheid, she has proven indefatigable. What most distinguishes our girl is her preoccupation with her own superiority–a superiority highlighted by contrast to her contempt for the rest of women, her admiration for lowlifes like Brett Kavanaugh & her close association with Alan Dershowitz.

Those who would like to test their adrenalin levels can google her for articles on Islam but be advised you do so at your own peril. When it comes to lies, insults, abuse, malice, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has her beat hands down. From unreadable she has progressed to rabid Zionist, petulant & mean & has become one of us whom she calls “mean girls.”

(Screensho of Chesler on video where she explains how superior & politically incorrect she is–by which she means willing to spew hatred toward Muslims without the slightest bow to human decency.)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has resigned at Trump’s request. We are losing a great public servant with an unfortunate resemblance & intellectual affinity to a troll doll. He once said “I thought the KKK was ok until I learned that they smoked pot.” What distinguished this giant figure among his peers like Mitch McConnell & Lindsey Graham was that he didn’t have an ounce of self-respect before others he deemed superior. His sniveling & groveling for approval from Trump even whilst Trump was publicly berating & humiliating him bear unfortunate comparison to a whipped puppy. We would suggest assertive training classes but the troll-man seems to have no problems humiliating those he deems inferior to himself. May he now proceed to the oblivion that he so richly deserves. Amen.

Zulkarnain Bandey, the editor of Lost Kashmiri History (LKH), on FB’s deletion of that account:

Article on censorship of LKH:

https://freepresskashmir.com/2018/11/05/facebook-censors-lost-kashmiri-history-page-from-its-portal-founder-calls-it-war-on-dissent/?fbclid=

Dear friends and allies,

Yesterday at around 6:30 PM, after Lost Kashmiri History (LKH) posted a document detailing the deaths in Kashmir for the month of October, I got a few texts informing me that the Facebook page of LKH has been banned in India and Kashmir, some people outside India can’t see it too. Although the page is intact and I can post stuff the accessibility to the audience has been curtailed. The page has more than 70k+ followers.

This is not for the first time Facebook in collusion with Indian state and has removed content related to Kashmir. I have lost count of how many times my facebook profile has been either blocked temporarily or content removed because apparently, it doesn’t suit their community standards.

LKH acts as a digital archive of curated content about the blood-soaked history of Kashmir. It features over a hundred books and presents historical events in chronological order through various multimedia tools, using newspaper articles and research papers as its primary sources.

The content we share on LKH, both website as well as social media, go through cross-checks and verifications and I take full responsibility for that. Nothing on our website or social media is without reference and source citation. What we write or post is nothing but India’s brutal history in Kashmir.

I fail to understand why Facebook chooses to censor pages and accounts that are critical to India in Kashmir or are simply writing the facts, regardless of how old they are. LKH has never had nor will ever have a political affliction. This is not only Facebook’s attack on freedom of speech but also a war on dissent.

We will soon publish a mirror page for Lost Kashmiri History. Support us in growing.

P:S This is the original page that has been censored in India, all other pages with our name are fake. https://www.facebook.com/LostKashmiriHistory/

Regards
Z

Since my dogs go in & out all day to pee, the door is constantly open & the house swarms with flies. They aren’t the smartest or swiftest little creatures on the planet so it’s easy to swat them where they gather in the windows. But they were beginning to engulf my head in herds, not unlike the villainous character Flyface in the old Dick Tracy comic strip. So against my sense of fair play in the fight against insects, I bought a box of fly ribbons, those sticky things you suspend near a window to attract & kill them. Seemed almost cruel even though I hate the damn pests.

Karma is a bitch. In two days, only one fly has gone near the ribbons. But I have glued my head to the window twice, been wrapped in that damn ribbon repeatedly, & am covered in gummy crap. The flies have won.

(Picture of Flyface from Dick Tracy comic strip)

Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF) held its annual fundraising event in Los Angeles ostensibly to raise money for the Israeli army (IOF) which is already bankrolled up the yin yang by the US Pentagon to the tune of $38 billion over the next ten years. All of it to be used against the Palestinians who are an unarmed people. All of it to be used for genocide, for the snipers shooting unarmed protesters & bombing civilians. The IOF has no need to cry poor-mouth for its veterans when it also has a multi-billion defense industry selling weapons to Burma & India for use against the Rohingyas & Kashmiris.

This FIDF gala put on by billionaire Zionists Sheldon Adelson & Haim Saban is really a public relations political event to involve celebrities in supporting Israel. All sorts of singers & movie stars attend including Arnold Schwarzenegger, singers Gene Simmons & Seal, Helen Mirren & this year Fran Drescher, Pharrell Williams, Ashton Kutcher, Katherine McPhee, David Foster, Andy Garcia, Gerard Butler, & a couple retired athletes. Is there a single one among those who anyone looks to for political guidance? The last time anyone heard a peep out of Andy Garcia was in 2000 when he tried to get 6-year-old Elián González kidnapped by rightwing relatives in Florida from his father in Cuba.

This year Pharrell Williams was the featured performer. Mr. “Happy” taps is particularly detestable since in 2015 he was scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv & South Africa. The BDS movement informed him about the cultural boycott & prevailed on him to honor it. He performed first in Cape Town where hundreds of Palestinian supporters greeted him with protests. He then cancelled Tel Aviv & many hoped he was taking a step back to assess the situation. He has had three years to smarten up about the character of Israeli genocide but instead he performed at this years FIDF gala which celebrates soldiers who shoot at, bomb, & forcibly dispossess Palestinians.

Before he sang, Williams offered condolences to the Pittsburgh synagogue but remained silent on the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians by the IOF. He closed the program with a performance of “Happy” but earlier in the week had sent a cease & desist letter to Trump demanding he not play “Happy” at any of his rallies after it was played at a Trump rally in Indiana on the day of the synagogue massacre. There will never be an occasion when Williams will have to send such a letter to Palestinian solidarity events since we include him & that damn song in the cultural boycott of Israel for genocide against the Palestinian people. He can shove that Happy crap where the sun don’t shine.

(Photo of 2018 FIDF event by Shahar Azran)

There is considerably more jubilation over US election results internationally–especially the election of 100 women, including Muslim, Native American, & a Palestinian women–than there is among the estimated 40-60% of US eligible voters who don’t bother to vote because they haven’t discerned a modicum of difference between the two parties in several decades. Rhetorical differences between the two parties certainly exist but no meaningful policy differences. Regardless of their intentions, those women will not change the character of the Democratic Party (DP). On the contrary, that party will change them, especially on the issues of war, occupation, genocide, immigration, Palestine. If they do not toe the line, DP officials will make it impossible for them to function.

The DP is a capitalist party in a two-party system with an electoral system rigged top to bottom against third party opposition. It is not really a membership organization so much as it is an electoral apparatus. If you want to see how little democratic control its members have, one only has to attend a precinct caucus which are stage-managed events without any political power or say-so over the program of the DP. But it isn’t just its electoral fraudulence as the party of the underdog that is of concern. More important is how the DP functions outside the electoral arena where it plays a central role in managing & controlling progressive forces, primarily by undercutting independent action & massive popular social movements. Most shamefully, it functioned to neutralize & demobilize the US civil rights movement. Similarly in the women’s movement of the 1970s, there was a wrenching political conflict between those who wanted an independent movement & those like Gloria Steinem who wanted it subordinated to the Democratic Party. That subordination is central to why there is so little consistent opposition to the attacks on the Black, Latino, & Native American communities or to the attacks on women’s reproductive rights. The DP also functions to neutralize immigration rights groups by providing them millions in foundation grant hush money so that they actively prevent a mass movement from developing.

If some want to vote for the DP in what they see a do or die election, that’s their right. We should all actively oppose the mass disenfranchisement & gerrymandering of Black, Latino, & Native American voters who traditionally vote for the DP. But to chide the 40-60% of American non-voters for white privilege or indifference is misanthropy & misunderstanding. If they thought voting made a difference in their lives, they would be chock-a-block at the polls.

(Photo is voting line November 6th in Ponte Vedra, Florida by Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

Indian scholar Jairus Banaji on the affinities between India’s extermination of Muslims & the Spanish Inquisition’s extermination of Muslims & Jews:

Faizabad becomes Ayodhya. The drive to obliterate the Muslim heritage from the fabric of India’s society and history by, for example, renaming places is tantamount to progressively stripping away the cosmopolitan element from India’s culture and transforming this into something hideously artificial, lifeless and drab, and of course irreducibly caste-ridden. The surge of hatred which drives it is like a series of amputations. The BJP loves to talk about ‘surgical strikes’, but their bonehead in UP is wielding a mechanical saw on his battered patient. He reminds me of nothing so much as the Spanish Church in the middle ages and its own drive to eliminate the last traces of Spanish Islam in the sixteenth century.

It was in Spain that fascism first appeared in its strictly medieval avatar, in sucessive expulsions of Jews and Moriscos for a whole period from the end of the fifteenth century down to the early seventeenth. The process was brutal, violent and protracted. Spain was the only European country that actually had the chance to evolve a unique civilization because it both inherited its Catholicism from late Rome and saw large parts of the country ruled by (mostly Syrian) Arabs. What it chose instead was the extermination of cultures which its bigoted leaders decided were antithetical to Christianity. Spain “became” Catholic the way India will “become” Hindu, unless the modernist strand in India’s politics, culture and society is able to put a stop to this appalling catastrophe. 2019 may be a good chance to do so.

Someone sent me a video of “Don’t Lie to Me,” the lead single from Barbra Streisand’s newly released album titled “Walls.” The entire album is apparently a criticism of the political climate in the US & of Trump’s presidency since she is a longtime Democrat. The title track “Walls” refers to her opposition to a wall on the southern border with Mexico. Call me unforgiving, call me sectarian, but I just cannot get past Streisand’s almost evangelical Zionism, her unconditional support for Israel & for its apartheid wall. She has been a troubadour of my generation since we were in our twenties but in respect to the Palestinian freedom struggle, I boycott her work. If she doesn’t include Palestinians in her vision of a humane society, there are other singers that speak more to my heart. Don’t lie to us, Barbra.

(Photo is melodramatic cover of “Walls” album)

The World Bank & Canada will provide a $25 million education grant for 350,000 Rohingya children ($71 per child) living in the Cox’s Bazar area of Bangladesh. Sounds like largesse but it’s chump change when you consider what the World Bank is pulling out of Burma from its joint investments with the military & what Canada is pulling out from its joint mining projects with the Burmese genocidaires. Burma is a military form of capitalism where the military, its families & cronies control the economy. But to overcome economic stagnation & sanctions imposed after its suppression of the 1988 uprising, the military is introducing neoliberal economic policies in joint enterprises with foreign investors. With the massive profits & plunder involved, the World Bank & Canada are doing little more than handing over their petty cash drawers to Rohingya kids who deserve so much more–like the withdrawal of investments in protest against the genocide.

What’s happening in the US with all the hate mongering is absolutely terrifying. But it is demonstrated over & over again that the haters are a minority emboldened by Trump. The only reason they sound so clamorous is because there are insufficient mobilizations to counter them with political power. But there have been & there will be again when the elections show that Democrats are not the vanguard for social change. It is mass political power alone that can defend democracy.