https://www.facebook.com/nytimes/videos/vb.5281959998/533036773831907/?type=2&theater

Since The NY Times is so ardently pro-Israel & has some of the most detestable reporting about it, it’s unclear why it would do such a forensic analysis of the execution of Palestinian medic Rouzan al-Najjar at the Great Return March last June. The likely explanation is that it’s playing the loyal opposition, signaling to Israel to tone down the excesses of genocide so as not to undercut the narrative of Israeli victimhood against Palestinian terrorism. Note how the video subtlety justifies Israeli aggression against Palestinians. Perhaps not so much subtlety as detestably.

The video ends with the Israeli general saying “accidents happen” about the sniper execution of Rouzan al-Najjar. But what about the hundreds of other unarmed Palestinians killed & thousands injured & disabled by Israeli snipers & bombers? Genocide is not an accident. It is Israeli policy & the political logic of Zionism

A 104-year-old Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh talking about his flight from genocide in Burma:

https://www.facebook.com/UNHCR/videos/1551806288252377/?

Facebook archives reminds me that on January 8th, 2018, a Bangladeshi court upheld a ruling by the Sheikh Hasina government banning Bangladeshi citizens from marrying Rohingya refugees–a ruling intended to prevent refugees from acquiring citizenship through marriage, as if love didn’t happen between Bangladeshis & Rohingyas.

On December 13, 2018, the NY Times published an interview with author Alice Walker where she said one of the books on her nightstand was “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” by David Icke, a notorious British anti-Semite politically associated with fascists & Assad propagandists Eva Bartlett & Vanessa Beeley. The core of Icke’s ideas, which Walker explicitly & repeatedly defends, is that the world is run by the Jewish Illuminati, a corporate & banking elite of blood-sucking, flesh-eating, shape-shifting extraterrestrial reptiles trying to create a new world order of global fascism. There was an immediate furor of criticism against Walker even though she has long publicly promoted Icke’s deranged views on her website. Walker is not just a famous American author but is also well-known as a Palestinian supporter–as are fascists David Duke, Bartlett, & Beeley, most likely as a way to hate on Jews rather than from respect for Palestinian self-determination.

Unfortunately, Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa has answered the criticism of Walker–some from Zionists, some from anti-Zionists like myself–with a piece in Al Jazeera titled “In defence of Alice Walker” where she incredibly admits she has never read Icke but claims Walker is being indicted for guilt by association & is only being criticized for supporting Palestinians. Abulhawa would be advised to do her homework before making such an embarrassing defense. Some Palestinian organizations & activists, including myself, believe Walker should not be invited to speak or represent Palestinian solidarity until she publicly severs & denounces her association with David Icke. Her shameless association with Icke should absolutely exclude her from participation in Palestinian solidarity events of any kind, including as a forum, rally, or honored keynote speaker, or in any formal capacity whatsoever.

Palestinians are fighting a life & death struggle against genocide & Palestinian supporters cannot allow their struggle to be tainted with the stinking odor of hatred for Jews.

NY Times article about Walker: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/books/review/alice-walker-by-the-book.html?

Susan Abulhawa’s defense of Walker in Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/defence-alice-walker-190104043720518.html?

A critique of Abulhawa’s article by British anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein: https://medium.com/@tonygreenstein_84728/from-alice-walkers-color-purple-to-david-icke-s-shape-shifting-lizards-5de9459437ad?

(Photo of Icke & Walker was tweeted by Icke on September 27th, 2016)

Anyone else not surprised that Assadists like Tim Anderson are claiming the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China are “fake human rights stories”? Islamophobia & anti-Semitism are central to support for the Assad regime.

Local media reports that on Thursday Trump will be coming to the southern border, possibly McAllen, to rant about the wall. His arrival details are completely secret so that his grandstanding is not interrupted by protesters calling him naughty names.

From Gaza: does anything say human freedom better than hip hop, break dancing, & the exuberance of the young?

https://www.facebook.com/waleed.alghalban.35/posts/1595884070501048

It’s a loathsome reality that in 2019 we are still debating the issue of race. But racism, once a powerful, & an invented, tool of colonialism & capitalism, is now integral to the very survival of the system. Among white writers on racism, the most cogent are now deceased or in retirement. But their writings are timeless, especially “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race” by Ashley Montagu (1905-1999), “The Mismeasure of Man” by Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), “The Politics of Women’s Biology” by Ruth Hubbard (1924-2016), “Not In Our Genes” co-authored by Leon Kamin (1927-2017) with Richard Lewontin & Steven Rose who are both in their eighties & retired. All of these authors wrote many other invaluable books & essays but those mentioned are among their most important. They all played a key role in debating & refuting the resurgence of biological determinism–especially the racist & misogynist essence of that doctrine–first termed sociobiology & then evolutionary psychology (more accurately called evo-psycho) but which also hides behind the terms biological or physical anthropology.
With their deaths & retirement, biological determinism–most prominently represented by Richard Dawkins from Oxford & Steven Pinker from Harvard–has gained preeminence in universities & is promoted in media, most vigorously in the NY Times by now retired Nicholas Wade who published “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race & Human History” in 2014. Where Montagu & Gould hammered against the validity of even the concept of race as biologically meaningful, Wade & all the rest of evo psychos in university anthropology departments promote it to establish a hierarchy of inferiority & superiority–that is, white & male supremacy. Their writings are a cornucopia of banalities & deceits that read like parody or farce more than science.
Stephen Jay Gould was a merciless & masterful polemicist against racism in science who held no scientist sacred or beyond criticism if they promoted racism, misogyny, or the denigration of those with disabilities. Now that he’s deceased, intellectual lowlifes like Nicholas Wade are coming out of the woodwork, including in the NY Times, to discredit his scholarship. You have to be a boneheaded racist to find Gould or Montagu’s scholarship wanting in comparison to that of evo psychos. Evo psychos write about why women wear high heels, why rape is a biological imperative (especially for homely men), why Blacks are intellectually inferior, why infants prefer pretty people. That only scrapes the surface of their idiocies. In this day & age, after the anti-colonial struggles, after the civil rights & women’s movements, after the ongoing struggles against war, occupation, & genocide, you have to be sucking from a poison cesspool to posit biology, our genetic makeup, for alleged differences between men & women or the multitude of ethnic groups rather than the monstrous inequalities of modern capitalism that lead to war, occupation, genocide.
There is only one human race with a multitude of physical characteristics & cultures. Vive la difference! No human being is alien to any other. Most of all, no human being is superior to any other.
(Cover of latest edition of Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man”)