These little boys named Batoul & Ahmad are the only members of their family who survived Syrian & Russian bombing of Idlib yesterday. The bodies of their mother, father, & newborn baby brother were recovered from the rubble late last night by White Helmet rescue workers.

The Assad dictatorship, its propagandists & guppies continue to denounce these little guys, their family, neighbors, & the White Helmets as “Salafi-jihadi terrorists.” But they are civilians, just two little boys, not terrorists.

May the deceased Rest In Peace. Stop the bombing of Idlib. Stop the slaughter.

(Photo from journalist Asaad Hanna on Twitter)

Funeral preparations from a detail in the embroidery work of Rollie Mukherjee & her mother Sumita Mukherjee.

(Photo of work by Sanna Irshad Mattoo)

I’ve been an active political dissident for over 53 years. I don’t do armchair dissidence. My commitment is that if you see something wrong, you should try to do something to change it. I am hardly what one could call a patriot but I don’t hate my country. I love & respect my fellow Americans as much as I do every other people on the face of the earth. We are not special nor certainly more civilized. As someone who cares about human life more than anything else, I do detest US capitalism & what it has done & is doing to Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, refugees, Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Somalis, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Salvadorans, & so many others.

The distinction between the US government & US citizens is an important one because it is the latter who have the will & capacity to end the violence of US foreign & domestic policies. Those who continue to harbor delusions about the capacity of the US government to end wars, occupations, genocides cannot be faulted for ignorance so much as credulity–a credulity that the oppressed in the US cannot afford & that those in other countries being bombed cannot tolerate.

India has a population of nearly 1.4 billion people. Jammu & Kashmir has a population of 12.5 million. Since Trump speaks for US capitalism, where do you think US political & economic interests lie? With Indian dominance & exploitation of Kashmiri resources or with Kashmiri self-determination?

Trump says that he could win the 18-year-long war in Afghanistan in 10 days because he has plans that could wipe Afghanistan off the face of the earth & kill 10 million people, but “I don’t want to go that route.” Anybody really think his mediations would ‘resolve the Kashmir issue’ with any more sanity?

Those who had high hopes in Pakistan PM Imran Khan might want to reconsider his political sanity in asking Trump & the US to intervene between India & Pakistan to settle the ‘issue of Kashmir’. Trump’s response was that two weeks ago Modi had already asked him to mediate between India & Pakistan to resolve the conflict & that he “would love to be a mediator.”

What’s glaringly wrong with that scenario? How about the absence of Kashmiris? Where would the citizens of Kashmir who have been fighting for 70 years for self-determination have a say in the ‘resolution of this conflict’? Their voices are the only ones that matter in how this issue is mediated & resolved since they have seen their leaders, activists, citizens disappeared, jailed, tortured, raped, hung, beaten, their homes razed to the ground in hunt to kill operations, thousands of their young people disfigured, disabled, blinded, demoralized by pellet guns.

After the screwing the US has given Palestinians in the Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, & the ‘deal of the century’, is any Kashmiri willing to put their fate in the hands of Trump & the US? Who would play the role of Jared Kushner? Indian Army chief Bipin Rawat who is heading up hunt to kill operations in Kashmir? Or possibly Major Leetul Gogoi, the guy who tied a young Kashmiri man to the hood of a jeep & paraded him around as a human shield? Or maybe one of those saffron Hindutva monks who belongs to the BJP? How could anyone imagine that the US would deal more equitably or reasonably with Kashmiris fighting colonialism & occupation than it does with Palestinians? How could anyone imagine that Trump & the US care any more about the human & democratic rights of Kashmiris than it does about Rohingya, African, Central American, Syrian, Afghan refugees?

How exactly would Trump & the US resolve the issue of Kashmir? The same way they do Israeli colonialism & occupation? By sending in more CIA operatives than they already have in Kashmir? By training paramilitaries to counter Kashmiri militants when Israel already has that covered? By building barrier walls between Pakistan & Kashmir & India & Kashmir? By introducing or bankrolling carpet bombing like the Pentagon does in Gaza, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen? By moving in Hindutva settlers to take over Kashmiri lands like they do Zionist settlers in the West Bank?

Kashmiri popular resistance is central to their struggle for self-determination & any proposal that leaves them out, that compromises on their full demands, or tries to make an end run around self-determination doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of resolving the conflict. These young protesters are resting after the funeral procession of a teenage boy killed by Indian occupying forces. If, after fighting for self-determination, they are left out of the resolution process, it isn’t worth a rat’s ass.

(Photo by Dar Yasin/AP is undated but is from between 2016 & 2019)

It boggles the sane mind how criminally governments are dealing with the refugee crises they are creating with war, occupation, genocide, sweatshop economics, neoliberal plunder. The US with its concentration camps for refugees & criminal misconduct toward children & Bangladesh with its surreal plan to deport thousands of Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char, a monsoon & cyclone prone island in the middle of nowhere. The housing is army barracks, there is no economy & no way to survive, & there is no way to get away from the place. It would essentially become a dumping ground or a penal colony like Devil’s Island.

The deranged plan to deport thousands of Rohingya to Bhasan Char is supposed to be on a volunteer basis but in the few years they’ve been promoting it Bangladesh hasn’t found a single Rohingya volunteer. Except the UN which has offered to help implement the deportations. Since the island only emerged from the sea about eight years ago, they don’t even know if the damn thing is stable enough for human life.

Here’s a counterproposal: why don’t the UN officials offering to assist deportations & the Bangladesh officials who devised the plan move to Bhasan Char for a couple years & test out the possibilities before they force Rohingya to move there? If the bureaucratic halfwits think it’s good enough for refugees, why isn’t it good enough for them? Or don’t Rohingya lives matter?

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jul/19/bangladesh-prepares-to-move-rohingya-to-island-at-risk-of-floods-and-cyclones?

Syrian rescuers are here helping a man they pulled out from the rubble of a building destroyed today by Syrian & Russian bombers on Maarat al-Numan, Idlib. Syria & Russia have been engaged in nearly three months of indiscriminate & intense bombing along with a fierce ground offensive on popular markets & residential neighborhoods, not in attacking nests of terrorist militias. Hundreds of civilians have been killed, critically injured, or massively displaced with no place to go since the border to Turkey is sealed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors injuries & fatalities reports that 2,443 people have been killed since April 30th: 629 civilians, including 159 children; 869 pro-government fighters & troops as well as 945 insurgents; countless others have been wounded, some critically; many towns have been destroyed. At least 330,000 have been displaced & since the borders are sealed, they now live in squalid overcrowded tents near the border.

In the airstrikes today on Maarat al-Numan, a White Helmet rescuer searching for bodies under the rubble told Reuters, “Bodies are lying in the streets. May God take revenge on Putin & Assad for their crimes.” Tariq Ali, Fisk, Cockburn, Pilger, & the corrupted antiwar movement remain silent on the slaughter.

Stop the bombing of Idlib. Stop the slaughter. All foreign military forces & mercenaries out of Syria.

(Photo by Abdulaziz Ketaz / AFP)

Idlib: in the densely populated town of Maarat al-Numan, at least 25 civilians were killed & many critically injured today by Russian airstrikes. The silence, actually complicity of the corrupted antiwar movement in supporting this slaughter as a fight against ‘Salafi-jihadi terrorism’ damns it to complete irrelevancy. Once they fell into the trap of the Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ & the anti-Semitism that accompanies it, they made a Mephistophelean deal that does not separate them from the military-industrial complex they pretend to denounce.

When the Stalinists & Assadists who have run the antiwar movement into the ground say Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians is not a concern to anyone but Syrians & that only US ‘regime-change operations’ should concern us, they betray every principle of human decency, let alone political solidarity.

Stop the bombing of Idlib. Stop the slaughter.

(Photo by Abdulaziz Ketaz/AFP/Getty Images)

The genocide in Idlib: will Assad propagandists & their corrupt guppies continue to call this scene from Syrian & Russian bombing ‘staged’ & this woman a ‘crisis actor’? Will most of the so-called left continue to ignore this savagery because the election of two-bit hustler Bernie Sanders matters more to them?

https://www.facebook.com/100006207079113/videos/2346179998932213/UzpfSTE2MjUyMjkwNjE6MTAyMTcwNDExMjM3MzMzNDM/