In an interview on Moderate Rebels, the podcast of the disreputable Ben Norton, Max Blumenthal, & Rania Khalek, she complained that Arab & Palestinian groups no longer ask her to speak because of her Islamophobic war on terror rhetoric. In her defense, she said all Arab groups in the US receive money from foreign governments. This is an invitation to & justification for FBI surveillance of Arab & Palestinian groups. For that allegation alone she should be considered treacherous. She may just be an idiot but she is a dangerous one. Does it surprise anyone that she promotes Tulsi Gabbard?
Daily Archives: March 16, 2019
To my mind holocaust denial should not be prosecuted because of free speech rights although it is outlawed in several countries. But the horrors & barbarities of the holocaust are so unimaginable that anyone who does deny it should be regarded as the political dirt balls they are. In almost every case, they are aligned with white supremacy, nationalism, & fascism.
The US Peace Council, a Stalinist & Assadist organization, has organized a delegation to Venezuela to meet with Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza in a replay of the delegation they took to Syria to meet with Assad in July 2016. The Venezuelan delegation included some of the same people as went to Syria but broadened to include Assadist Ajamu Baraka & other activists from the corrupted US antiwar movement who also support the Assad regime. Fascist Eva Bartlett, described as a progressive journalist rather than an Assad propagandist, was part of the delegation. In Syria, Stalinism found its natural habitat in fascism.
Even if political people have made colossal mistakes in the past, it’s possible to work with them when they’re doing the right thing. This is not an instance of that. They went to Syria to drum up support for the Assad dictatorship & to undermine support for the Syrian Arab Spring uprising. They successfully disoriented the international antiwar movement so that it did not mobilize against Syrian & Russian bombing, Iranian military intervention, or even US military intervention in Syria. They persuaded thousands of activists around the world that the Syrian Arab Spring was ‘Wahhabi jihadi terrorism’ & not a popular uprising against dictatorship. Their intervention into Venezuelan politics is not as a peace delegation but under the tiresome rubric of “regime change operation” to drum up support for the Maduro regime & demonize the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans protesting his austerity policies. They will present eye-witness accounts from their government-sponsored tour of the barrios as proof there is no popular resistance to Maduro & that which exists is US-sponsored. Venezuela may become the final nail in the coffin for the antiwar movement which cannot distinguish between repressive, capitalist regimes & the just demands of exploited working people. Or if can distinguish, chooses to side with the regime against working people.
Venezuela remained a capitalist country even after the so-called Bolivarian Revolution. Its programs to advance the working poor, though important, were more analogous to the poverty programs for Black workers coming out of the US Civil Rights Movement than to a social revolution against systemic inequality. The leaders of Venezuela have created a distorted economy based in oil & have shifted their axis from the US-IMF orbit to Russian & Chinese aid. That is a fundamental aspect of the austerity Venezuelans are protesting even though all of the economic misery is being placed on US sanctions by pro-regime apologists.
They will not be able to rebuild the corrupted antiwar movement on a basis of support for the Maduro regime but only on principled opposition to US military intervention which places political emphasis on the Venezuelan people & not on support for a corrupt capitalist regime.
(Photo of US delegation meeting yesterday with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza)
Meghan McCain, rightwing talk show host & daughter of war criminal John McCain, broke into crocodile tears saying she has no Jewish family but takes Ilhan Omar’s criticism of Israel very personally. I have no Palestinian family but I take Israeli genocide very personally. I have no Jewish family & I take anti-Semitism very personally. I have no Vietnamese, Iraqi, Afghan, Libyan, Somali, Syrian, or Yemeni family either & I take her & her father’s support for all US wars very personally. What I don’t take personally is McCain’s crocodile tears or hypocrisy.
Whether the Palestinians win their freedom struggle against colonialism & genocide or not has the greatest consequence for the future of all suffering humanity. To my mind, there should be no compromises with those who waffle on the issue of Palestinian solidarity & no tolerance for those in Palestinian solidarity who compromise with anti-Semitism. Not when genocide is at stake.
An Al Jazeera video on cow vigilantes (Hindutva nationalists) in India attacking & killing Muslims. The video is not straightforward enough in pointing out that the motivation is not the welfare of cows but the persecution of Muslims. In the US under Jim Crow (the US form of apartheid), lynchings of Black men were widespread ostensibly to protect white women from allegedly sexually rapacious Black men but there was no noticeable improvement in the violent & misogynist treatment of white women by the lynchers. It wasn’t about the women & it isn’t about the cows. It’s about justifying persecution.
If it weren’t for Kashmiri activists on social media, this halfwitted article in the Guardian would be what the rest of us are being fed on the Kashmiri freedom struggle against occupation & colonialism: “Standoff in Kashmir: ‘Our last hope is that a war will sort this once & for all’.” The two writers, one a Kashmiri & the other the South Asia correspondent for the Guardian based in Delhi, found the only two guys in Kashmir who think in their despair that war between India & Pakistan will resolve the Kashmiri conflict with India.
This photo from the article was captioned: “A Kashmiri Muslim woman looks on as Indian government forces stand guard after clashes with separatist protesters.” Now doesn’t that just clear things up about what the war mongering in India is all about? A more coherent & honest caption would say “Some of the 700,000 Indian occupying soldiers in Kashmir are hassling pedestrians while they wait for the next hunt to kill operation where they will terrorize civilians, shoot up their neighborhoods with pellet guns, & raze homes under the guise of hunting down terrorists.” This is a shameful article & outside of a brief synopsis of Kashmiri history & a few sentences about the repression in Kashmir after the Pulwama incident, it is worthless.
Article from Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/02/kashmir-india-pakistan-stand-off-war-border?
(Photo by Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)
This is the stuff of military occupation: in occupied Palestine, ambulances, women in labor, extremely sick Palestinians are frequently held up at Israeli military checkpoints, often leading to their deaths. It’s one form of the genocide. Here in this video of occupied Kashmir, military convoys block roads & force a man to carry a patient to hospital. Ambulances are also often detained by Indian occupying forces so that injured civilians die. It is part of the genocide.
The Bangladeshi government is proceeding with its deranged plan to deport up to 103,000 Rohingya refugees to the island of Bhasan Char. The island only emerged from the sea about 20 years ago & is one of many shifting, unstable islands called floating islands in the Bay of Bengal. British & Chinese engineers are working with the Bangladeshi navy to turn the remote island (30 km/21 mi from the mainland) into a concentration camp even though it is uninhabitable. It is frequently flooded by cyclones & during a normal high tide is under three to four feet of water. During the full moon & new moon some areas are under four to eight feet of water.
The Sheikh Hasina government says Rohingya refugees will not be forcibly deported to Bhasan Char but odds are infinitesimal that they will find anyone to volunteer being sent to certain death. One of Hasina’s advisers told Reuters that once on Bhasan Char they will not be able to leave unless it is back to the killing fields of Burma or for asylum to a third country.
All pressure must be put on the Bangladeshi government to abandon this insane plan & to instead send the politicians & engineers who devised this plan to spend all eternity on Bhasan Char. Or at least until the first monsoon takes them out.
(Map of Bhasan Char from Human Rights Watch)