Who is more opposed to “identity politics”? The extreme right or the academic left? What is it about the oppressed taking a stand against brutalities imposed specially upon them that so rankles & unites these counterposed political forces? Why should the oppressed subordinate their demands in the interests of some false harmony with the privileged? How do you separate being woman, Dalit, Black, Latino, Native American, Palestinian, Kashmiri, Rohingya, Uyghur, Muslim, LGBT, indigenous from the special forms of oppression imposed on us?

In truth, there was never a more banal objection to the struggles of the oppressed than the rubbish around “identity politics.” Perhaps it isn’t so banal as it is pernicious in making the oppressed defend their resistance to injustice.

“Ali is on the grill!’ Israeli settlers celebrate burning of Palestinian baby

Such profound personal & political corruption as taunting the burning alive of a baby seems inscrutable evil. But it has always been the very nature of colonialism & racism. Israeli Zionist settlers are part of that tradition. Zionism has never been an emancipatory ideology but since its inception was rooted in colonialism with all the savageries & butcheries of that history. That is what makes the Palestinian struggle so monumentally important for all humanity.

https://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/settlers-celebrate-palestinian/?fbclid=IwAR0zuzKOo-

Liam Neeson said he felt a “primal urge to lash out” & kill a random Black person after a Black man raped his friend. There’s a name for those kind of urges: racism. John Malkovich had a similar homicidal urge, threatening to shoot Fisk & Galloway for supporting Palestinians. Now his resemblance to Hannibal Lecter comes into full relief. They ought to learn to keep their big traps shut because now we know to boycott their films.

Initially after seeing this photo, I tried to write two posts about the refugee crises all over the world from Rohingya fleeing genocide in Burma to children being torn from their families & jailed in the US; from Syrian, Iraqi, & Afghan war refugees denied asylum to Sri Lankan, Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan refugees jailed in Australia. FB disappeared them both. That’s good because the photo of this young man from Sub-Saharan Africa speaks to those crises more powerfully than words ever could.

Open the damn borders. No human being is alien to us.
Haseeb Rahman’s original post on this photo:

“Colonialism raped Africa and this is just one result.”

A sub-Saharan Asylum seeker with bloodied feet cut from barbed wire dejectedly sits on a metallic fence that divides Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. After hours of waiting for Police dogs to disperse the man buried his head in his hands.

“All the borders in the world are man-made. There are no borders, we are all hooked together. Everything is connected. There is no line of demarcation. We are hooked together like the colors of a rainbow, our problem is ignorance, we don’t understand that.”

After 30-years in an Israeli military prison, Fares Mohammed Baroud from Gaza City died due to lack of medical treatment. May he Rest In Peace.

Build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel for colonialism, apartheid, genocide so that his life was not lived in vain.

The reason I’m not a lesser evil kind of girl is that 99.9-percent of Democrats support Zionism & the genocide of Palestinians. Their struggle against colonialism & apartheid is a touchstone in modern politics, not an issue that can tolerate compromise. I would rather jump off the 500-ft. Cliffs of Moher in Ireland than betray Palestinian justice. Don’t ever ask me to support a Democrat no matter how good their populist rhetoric on other issues.

Tariq Ali, the éminence grise of left politics who rah-rahs for Assad & Maduro, posted a video of Tulsi Gabbard (Zionist, anti-Semite, Islamophobe, Hindutva supporter, Assadist, General Sisi supporter) opposing US intervention in Venezuela. That’s not unlike holding up Hitler propagandist Joseph Goebbels as an authority on the Nazi holocausts. With gurus like this guy, young progressives don’t stand a chance unless they learn to think for themselves.

Sophisticated apologists for the repressive Maduro regime are circulating a five-year-old article by an uncritical apologist for Maduro (Mark Weisbrot) claiming that the unarmed protesters in Venezuela are all middle-class. That makes it okay to shoot them? It was demonstrably not true five years ago & it is indisputably not true of protesters today. To make that claim is beyond criminality. Why can’t these sophisticates oppose US military intervention without sucking up to dictators like Assad or repressive tyrants like Maduro?

Calling Maduro out for political repression, corruption, & anti-working class policies does not compromise with US military aggression or make concessions to the hypocrisy of European countries who remain silent about the Rohingya genocide & are guilty of war crimes in several countries. It is the only principled way to stand with the working people protesting Maduro while also opposing US intervention. To rah-rah for Maduro as they do for the murderous Assad is the very essence of betrayal of working people.

Let me tell you my Oscar Arias story: in 1986, he drew up a peace plan for Central America at a time when the US was heavily engaged there militarily, including through proxy armies like the Nicaraguan Contras. I don’t recall the details of the plan now but it legitimized & called for more US military involvement. He had already been nominated for the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for his nefarious plan when Harvard invited him to speak. He was readying himself for his Nobel acceptance speech.

At the time I lived in Boston, was of course active in the antiwar movement, & a delegation of us attended his public Harvard speech. He went on at length about the defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, promoting it as the restoration of democracy. The audience of mostly Harvard students & faculty frequently interrupted his speech with vigorous applause for democracy in Nicaragua. In the Q & A session, I stood up & respectfully but directly challenged him on the inclusion of US intervention in his plan asking him to explain it. During the entirety of my question the audience went wild with booing. They considered this a moment of sycophancy, not challenge. For those who have not experienced being booed, it’s like being fish getting shot in a barrel. I said to the audience “You can stop the booing because I intend to finish my question.” And I did. But after my adrenaline calmed down & to this day, I regret not saying “Is the same crowd that applauded the so-called restoration of democracy in war-torn Nicaragua not allowing me to ask a serious & important question at Harvard University?”
After his Nobel, Arias became known—like Suu Kyi after him—as a human rights icon. They belong to a false pantheon. It is fitting that Arias, the war criminal who did so much harm to the people of Central America, live his final years exposed as a pervert & sexual predator.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/world/americas/oscar-arias-sanchez-sexual-assault.html?