Kashmiri Mubashir Naik writes about the oppressive conditions of Rohingya refugees in Jammu.
Monthly Archives: June 2019
There hasn’t been a single antiwar protest against the murderous Syrian & Russian bombing siege in Idlib & Hama. Not a peep of organized opposition nor any sense of humanity toward the hundreds of thousands of civilians subjected to carpet bombing. Meanwhile, Tariq Ali is posting rubbish from right-wing media calling Trump an antiwar president when he is the commander-in-chief of six US wars. Doesn’t Ali believe his own rhetoric about that “US regime-change operation” in Syria?
“Conviction (Inspired from a photograph of a Kashimiri man shared on internet)” by artist Dhrupadi Noor.
It’s understandable that most Assad supporters are all rah-rah for Tulsi Gabbard because her politics reflect the ignorance & disorientation of many of them & the political corruption of most of them. These Sikhs protesting yesterday in San Francisco don’t fall for her demagoguery but identify her as “Trump 2.0” & as “the mascot of India’s KKK.”
Like Assadists, Gabbard talks antiwar while she supports the Assad dictatorship & Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians in Syria; supports Modi & Hindutva nationalism, which includes the military occupation of Kashmir; supports the repressive military regime of General Sisi in Egypt; supports the military state of Israel; is rabidly Islamophobic, which is the ideology of the ‘war on terror’ to justify several wars, genocide against the Rohingya & Uyghur, & countless pogroms; & she is anti-Semitic toward Jews. That glaring contradiction between her antiwar rhetoric & her support for militarism in all its manifestations is not just demagoguery but a feature of extreme right-wing, even fascist politics.
It doesn’t take an exegesist pouring through her speeches to get to the bottom of her nationalism & white supremacy. It’s written all over everything she says, every political association she seeks (including with Trump), every opportunist rewriting she does of her own political history. It isn’t that Assadists don’t see her hateful politics but that they agree with them.
(Photo by Anne Silver whose little dog is shown in the rear view mirror of the car)
Two UN agencies just extended a 2018 memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Burmese government to develop a plan to return Rohingya refugees to Arakan state. The text was not made public nor was it shared with the Bangladesh government. Most importantly, Rohingya representatives were not a party to the document. Ro Nay San Lwin, a representative of Free Rohingya Coalition, said: “Rohingyas were not consulted, who are a primary party. The UN agencies have just agreed to what genocidal Myanmar government & military wanted….They didn’t inform anyone about the signing of the MoU. It was our organization that made it public. The MoU is unacceptable for us. We have shown our concerns to the UN agencies, but it seems they do not respect the victims.”
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/un-bodies-sign-mou-with-myanmar-for-rohingya-return/1495025?
Given their explanation for the war in Syria as a “US regime-change operation,” you would think Assadists would be all over the Amnesty & Airwars report on US savageries in Raqqa titled “Rhetoric versus Reality: How the ‘most precise air campaign in history’ left Raqqa the most destroyed city in modern times.” But they’re so busy vilifying civilians in Idlib & Hama as ‘jihadi terrorists’, denouncing the White Helmets as organ traffickers, & glorifying the murderous feats of the Syrian Army that they haven’t said a peep about the report. Fact is, they haven’t said a peep about how that US regime-change thing is working out in Syria for the entire duration of the counterrevolution against the Syrian Arab Spring uprising. That’s because, under scrutiny, it doesn’t make any sense at all.
Maybe Assadists haven’t mentioned the Amnesty report because they don’t want to legitimize an organization that Bartlett & Beeley placed on their enemy list long ago for criticizing Syrian & Russian government savagery against civilians in Syria. Amnesty does have problems, serious political problems, as we know from its reports on Gaza & ARSA, among others. But that doesn’t make all their work fraudulent or dishonest & much of it remains invaluable. One has to know how to vet media reports or investigations like this. But since Assadists denounce everything & everyone who criticizes their favorite dictator, they won’t touch this Amnesty report with a ten-foot pole even though it is about the US military role in Syria.
Amnesty report: https://raqqa.amnesty.org
(Photo from Syrian & Russian bombing siege of Idlib, Hama, & Aleppo, May 2019, from the White Helmets)