Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is calling for an accounting of the disappearances & deaths in Assad’s gulag of Ali Mahmoud Othman & other journalists. Syria ranks as one of the most dangerous countries on RSF’s annual World Press Freedom Index: 174 out of 180. Meanwhile Assad propagandists like Bartlett & Beeley & pro-Assad journalists like Robert Fisk travel freely in Syria embedded up the ass of the Syrian Army.
Among world leaders condemning the attacks in Sri Lanka are Trump (commander-in-chief of several wars), Modi (genocidaire of Muslims & commander-in-chief of occupation in Kashmir), Netanyahu (presiding over the genocide of Palestinians), Zarif of Iran (with militias on the ground fighting the Syrian Arab Spring), Erdogan (who violently represses Kurds, journalists, & democratic rights), May & Merkel (both opposing refugee rights). Those condemnations mean nothing. Nor do ours unless we stand in active solidarity against war, occupation, genocide.
“We may have different religions, different language, different coloured skin. But we all belong to one HUMAN race thus we have to fight against terrorism together.
#SriLanka 💔”
Somebody in Canada invited Slavoj Zizek to represent socialists in a debate with a rightwing blowhard named Jordan Peterson. It was billed like a Rolling Stone concert. Now there you have it in a nutshell! Zizek has been completely discredited as a xenophobic windbag after so much hateful & racist flatulence against refugees & immigrants. That anyone would consider him a representative of the highest ideals of socialism speaks only to the abject corruption of a movement that now promotes Assad, Putin, & Maduro as champions of democracy.
Had a brief bout of the blues so I spent a couple days scrubbing my house clean to work those blues away. Self-pity doesn’t work well with my DNA so I snapped out of them fighting dust bunnies. But it really helped to return to Facebook with so many messages of good will. The massacre in Sri Lanka put my blues in perspective in a heartbeat. The majority of the human race wants to live in peace & harmony with each other. We have to out-mobilize the haters, supremacists, & psychopaths who want to destroy human solidarity & embrace the differences requiring identity politics because it is possible to create societies suitable for human beings to live & love in.
Mehbooba Mufti, India’s former Chief Minister for Jammu & Kashmir, dropping crocodile tears: what can she expect but mockery after allowing the arrest of hundreds of activists, the repression of journalists, & the disfigurement, disability, blindness, & deaths of thousands of young people from pellet guns? Cry us a river since you shed no tears for them.
The ‘war on terror’ has made everybody an expert on denominations within Islam. Exegetists of the Quran (they’ve never read) abound. All this reached its highest level of farce with Assad apologists like the hapless Ben Norton, Max Blumenthal, & Rania Khalek. Beware lest in following their lead you end up like them: spawning podcasts because no reputable news venues will touch your work with a ten-foot pole.
There needs to be a thorough investigation of the murder of 29-year-old Irish journalist Lyra McKee. She was gunned down in Derry, Northern Ireland during a protest & police immediately blamed the attack on dissident Republicans. McKee was going to be speaking in a few weeks at a public World Press Freedom Day event about the murder of journalist Marie Colvin in Syria & the dangers of reporting violent conflicts. The Assad regime had directly ordered Colvin’s assassination. Assad propagandist Eva Bartlett spoke as an honored guest at an event in Derry about a year ago because Assad has strong support among a current of Republicans. There may be no connection between those who murdered McKee & Assad supporters in Derry but it is absolutely a link that must be investigated.
(Photo of Lyra McKee from Jess Lowe Photography/Agence France-Presse–Getty Images)
Before posting articles from Mint Press, it would be wise to vet the information. It has questionable funding sources which appear to be associated with the Iranian government, is rabidly Assadist, including leading the campaign to deny Syrian chemical weapons attacks on civilians, & it is anti-Semitic under the guise of anti-Zionism in the same way all Assadists are. It has a veneer of being progressive but that is the schtick of many fascist currents. It’s how so many get sucked into their vortex.
