A dear Facebook friend sent me a copy of “A Letter From Manus Island” by Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish Iranian writer denied asylum & locked up by the Australian government on Manus Island in Papua, New Guinea for almost six years. He is the recent winner of the Australian Victorian literary award for his book “No Friend But the Mountains” which was written one text message at a time.He was unable to be present to receive the award because he is not allowed into Australia & remains incarcerated for being a refugee.
Boochani calls it a “resistance manifesto.” It’s only ten pages long but it is a powerful, magnificent assertion of the humanity of immigrants & refugees. This is just one excerpt: “The refugees have been able to refashion the image of themselves as the “Other.” We have reshaped the understanding of us as politically inept & have been successful in projecting an image of who we are. We now present the real face of refugees for Australia to discern.” After Christchurch & after the hateful manifesto by the white supremacist politician, Boochani’s letter is a breath of fresh air which affirms the humanity of refugees & appeals to the humanity of all of us to fight with them for asylum rights as human rights. Anyone who has read his resistance manifesto for refugees awaits with anticipation getting our hands on “No Friend But the Mountains.”
(Photo of Behrouz Boochani by Jonas Gratzer for the Guardian)
This handsome young man is 28-year-old Rizwan Pandit from Awantipora in Kashmir. He was a school teacher at a private school who was arrested three days ago for questioning about a ‘militancy case.’ He died in police custody last night. People, especially the young, don’t just die from questioning. Unless there is torture involved. Such criminality is the very nature of military occupation for Kashmiris & Palestinians. His murder is a threat to all civilians & a clarion call to all human rights supporters to stand with Kashmiris against the occupation.
May this young man Rest In Peace. Keep his kind face in mind in building international opposition to the Indian occupation of Kashmir.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
The big girl is Bianca who has a bum leg from when she broke it while abandoned. It’s not repairable & bothers her some days worse than others. The little ones love her because she roughhouses with them & swats them with the bum leg but never hurts them. She has a big heart except for feral cats since she would be a lion killer in Africa where Rhodesian Ridgebacks originate.
The black & white boy is Maxi who is about 12 years old & did not ever go indoors for eight years. The little black furball is Rocky who just learned to bark & the little beige furball is Bellissima who does the mean girl routine at the dog park but is a mama’s girl at home.
I have the ‘regime change operation’ blues after going through that rubbish over Syria, North Korea, Iran, the Philippines, & now Venezuela. We need a political satirist up to the challenges of such low-level political foolishness spouted by so many from fascists & libertarians to half-baked socialists. Not that’s there’s anything to laugh about in such betrayals of working people but there’s no dignity either.
According to investigations by the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 13 journalists were killed in relation to their work in Afghanistan in 2018, making it the deadliest country for journalists worldwide. When I said in a post yesterday that there was no war reporting by journalists in Afghanistan, I was talking through my hat in a most deplorable way. Whatever these reporters were recording was not being reported, at least in US & European media. They were not murdered for writing propaganda for the Afghan government or to cover for the US war, as embedded reporters do.
This is a list of the journalist’s names, media associations, & data on their deaths, mostly by murder. We should take a moment to honor their lives lost in trying to inform us about the 18-year US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan. May they Rest In Peace.
After a whirlwind government-led tour of Caracas, a small delegation of Assadists & ‘regime change operation’ specialists announced ‘they had been to Venezuela & everything media reports is a lie’. According to their government tour guides, Venezuela is in fact a worker’s paradise with no social conflict & just a little bit of social inequality. This delegation would be farce were they not attempting to buttress a capitalist regime rooted in inequality while undermining the just demands of working people.
Of course, we oppose US military intervention in Venezuela, as do most Venezuelan working people. That doesn’t mean talking rubbish about the regime or Venezuelan politics.
Twitter has suspended the account of Will Connolly, aka EggBoy, but not the account of Fraser Anning, the Australian politician who wrote a hateful screed against refugees & Muslims saying Islam is a fascist religion. The community standards they enforce are not those of human rights supporters. So whose community standards are they imposing?
Ilhan Omar is under attack & receiving death threats from Zionists & the most malignant forces in world politics for supporting BDS & protesting laws criminalizing criticism of Israel & Assadists & fascists are jumping all over her like rabid monkeys for supporting the Syrian Arab Spring & calling Assad a dictator. By their rabid methods shall ye know them.
One of the many parallels between the Palestinian & Kashmiri struggles against colonialism & occupation is how Israel & India lay siege to Muslim places of worship. The Jamia Masjid in Srinagar sustains the same kinds of aggression as the al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem: lockouts of worshippers, long months of bans on Friday prayers along with harassment, confrontations & provocations by Indian troops near the premises. I once investigated the issue & despite inadequate information found that other mosques in Kashmir have been vandalized & torched by Indian occupying forces. These assaults on Muslim religious institutions are part of occupation & fighting for freedom of religion is part of the struggle against it.
Photo is lockdown of Jamia Masjid in September 2018.
This is an important article about the struggle of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh to get an education beyond the first few grades. It doesn’t just speak to the oppressive treatment of refugees by the Bangladeshi government but to the role that the education has always played in the struggles of the oppressed. In his monumental work “Black Reconstruction in America,” W.E.B. Du Bois discusses how the first public schools for whites & Blacks in the US were built by former slaves under Black Reconstruction in the South. In the US struggles for civil rights, education still plays a central role for the Black, Latino, & Native American communities & there have been massive urban struggles over the issue. Denying education to the oppressed is fundamental to keeping them subordinated. These struggles by Rohingya refugees & in the US are extremely important politically to their liberation.
