This is a very important article on the mass rape of women & torture of men at Kunan Poshpora, Kashmir in February 1991–for which there is still no justice. Kashmiri feminists along with Mayan women in Guatemala have played a leading role in educating about & campaigning against the use of rape as a weapon of war, occupation, & genocide.
https://thepolisproject.com/it-was-not-rape-it-was-war-that-night-in-kunan-poshpora/?
Jacobin magazine, which positions itself as the thinking socialist’s journal, has published several useful articles explaining & promoting open borders. It is also campaigning for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 elections. Since they’re such smarty-pants, they should elaborate how they can advocate for open borders while going gaga for a candidate vociferously against them because, according to him, it would allow too many ‘poor, unskilled workers’ into the US, undercut the wages of American-born workers, & undermine the nation-state? Classic xenophobia stuff, classic white supremacy, classic pandering to rightwing voters. Also detestable elitism & upper-class snobbery. The only way Sanders doesn’t sound like Trump is that he doesn’t claim those hordes of ‘poor, unskilled workers’ are criminals & terrorists from the Middle East.
Indistinguishable from Trump, Sanders has been railing against open borders since the 2016 election campaign calling them a “right wing, Koch brothers proposal.” He repeated this rubbish while campaigning in Iowa this weekend. Insistent in saying he is “absolutely opposed” to open borders–what some of us call immigrant & refugee rights–Sanders pulled a Hail Mary pass by calling for ‘comprehensive immigration reform’. Good for him. Has he ever defined what that means? Has he ever proposed a program for such reform in the US Congress? Would such comprehensive reform include stopping US corporations from developing the sweatshop economy at the expense of those ‘poor, unskilled workers’ in other countries? Or is Sanders, like a true xenophobe, only concerned about the wages of native-born workers?
It is US corporations that are undermining the wages of working people in other countries through the sweatshop economy. It is US, European, Chinese, Japanese, Indian corporations imposing neoliberal policies in other countries that force millions to move elsewhere. The problem is not ‘poor, unskilled workers’ from other countries & the solution is not pandering to xenophobia among American voters. If Sanders wants to protect the wages of workers, he needs to engage in union-building & organizing so that immigrants cannot be used in a divide & conquer chokehold. He needs to propose legislation stopping corporations from using sweatshops against workers in other countries. But mostly he needs to help break the hold of the Democratic Party over the US labor movement because that party has consistently sold workers down the drain for the past 150 years. You’d think a so-called socialist magazine would understand that. Or are they getting caught in their own contradictions? It’s a hard lesson to learn, but you can’t have it both ways in politics. You can’t play both sides of the street. The dialectic doesn’t work that way: to justify betrayal. Either you stand with working people, regardless of their immigration status, or you stand with the corporations.
(Photo of Sanders by Seth Wenig/AP)
Please take a moment to join this campaign as part of BDS.
Before you enlist me in one of those groups you better make damn sure it’s not filled with anti-Semitic memes about the Rothschild bankers.
Maybe it’s a generational thing, since my generation is so close to WWII, maybe it’s disguised anti-Semitism, but too many minimize the Nazi holocaust of Jews, Roma, Sinti, disabled, gays, socialists, communists. There were concentration camps, mass starvation, mass graves, gas chambers. It was the savageries of colonialism brought back to the metropolitan centers. It is not invidious to compare Israel & India in their actions toward Palestinians & Kashmiris but this does not mean what Jews & others suffered was not absolutely monstrous.
Assad propagandists are so detestably dishonest. Mint Press had the headline “Utter silence: that was the sound of Western corporate media following a UN panel on the White Helmets in December.” RT (wholly owned by the Russian government) published an article by fascist Eva Bartlett titled “Organ theft, staged attacks: UN panel details White Helmets’ criminal activities, media yawns.” That so-called “UN panel” which is available to view on YouTube was a group of Russian diplomats & their flunkeys with ‘experts’ like fascist Vanessa Beeley testifying in a rented room at the UN that the White Helmet rescue workers are a terrorist front engaged in organ trafficking. Of course media was silent about it. It was arrant propaganda & bullshit.
“We are not the zoo animals and you are not our ring masters.
Stand against this injustice (Convoy Terror).”
–Tahir Khan Hamidi on the Indian military shutdown of a main highway in Kashmir.
An article about Rohingya refugee Ziaur Rahman who was a victim of human traffickers:
This is another story about the Spanish fireman Miguel Roldán who faces 20 years in prison because Italian authorities have accused him of aiding human traffickers after he helped save thousands of African refugees from drowning in the Mediterranean.
Most African refugees try to make it to the island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean (part of Sicily) where there is an immigrant intake shelter. There have been several protests by refugees at the shelter since the management company that runs it for the Italian government engages in abusive practices, including squalid, dangerous, overcrowded living conditions. Over the past 20 years, an estimated 400,000 people have crossed the sea from Libya to Lampedusa. Some estimate that 15,00 have died trying. Other estimates are well over 25,000 but no one knows for sure because African lives don’t matter; there is no monitoring agency that counts the number who board ships & the number who land safely.
In 2013 there was a notorious incident where the Italian Coast Guard allowed 366 refugees to drown just off the coast of the island while fishermen attempted to save them. The woman mayor of Lampedusa & most of the 6,000 residents vociferously disagree with Italian government policy & volunteer food, blankets, medical care, sleeping space to refugees. In a 2012 open letter to the EU protesting its refugee policies, Lampedusa mayor Giusi Nicolini said, “If these dead are only ours, then I want to receive telegrams of condolences after every drowned person I receive. As if he had white skin, as if he were our son drowned during a holiday.”
Many search & rescue operations port in Lampedusa & local fishermen continue to rescue refugees off the coast. Under current Italian government & EU policy, they could be charged, like Miguel Roldán, with human trafficking.
https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/03/27/inenglish/1553678880_692129.html?
(Photo is Miguel Roldán by Paco Puentes)
Another article elaborating how the Indian military closing of a main highway in Kashmir on Sundays & Wednesdays is an instrument of oppression & occupation.