We should take a moment to honor these two leading human rights figures in the Kashmiri freedom struggle: Parveena Ahangar & Parvez Imroz. It takes extreme commitment & toughness to consistently play the roles they both do. There are many, many others also but these two are among the giants not just to Kashmiris but for all humanity struggling against oppression.
What’s really frying Trump about the four congresswomen is that he’s getting his ass kicked by two Black women, a Latina, & a Palestinian–those ethnicities & that gender he holds most in contempt. Almost everyone else in the US Congress, male & female, is kissing his ass. Hats off to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib & Ayanna Pressley. Get him in the nuts where it really hurts for the rest of us.
(Photo of the congressional gang of four)
“Hey Trump, Rep. Rashida Tlaib would love to go back to the country she came from Palestine but the Zionists who stole & occupy it will not allow that with your support for their illegal occupation!”
–Ramez Hage
Trump issued an order today that effectively denies asylum to refugees from 52 countries attempting to cross at the southern US border. Even with legal challenges, this will only get worse until there are massive national protests & a movement for refugee rights. For so long, there were no protests, especially on the Texas border where the immigration rights groups are politically compromised up to their eyeballs. Now, protests are reported in several cities in California, Chicago, NYC, & elsewhere. What is needed is a national call for a massive protest in Washington, DC that will begin a sustained fight against the Trump regime for refugee rights.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/07/15/us/politics/ap-us-immigration-asylum.html?
Facebook is messing with Kashmiris right & left, repeatedly suspending their accounts or deleting them outright. Rizwan Raheem is one of them & now cannot send friend requests though he can accept them. Please consider sending a friend request to him. He’s a no-nonsense political commentator.
It’s now become apparent that what once appeared a major blunder & betrayal of antiwar & socialist activists in supporting Assad & Russian & Iranian military intervention in Syria is actually part of a pattern in their politics. A new current is forming, an alliance, a meeting of the minds between Assadists, fascists, Stalinists, & a guppy league of confusionists. The bête noire, more the guiding ethos, is opposition to ‘US regime-change operations’ which they see behind every popular movement against dictatorship & repression.
This phenomenon has to be taken seriously but in countering it, we can never underestimate the power of those popular movements especially in Kashmir, Palestine, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Algeria, & Sudan.
Michael Parenti is a retired academic & well-known political writer. He has ridiculed the idea that Stalinism remains a political current in world politics & claims it died with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This blind spot of his might reflect that he’s never been an activist & has never had to confront Stalinists in political activity to understand that as an ideology & political methodology it is alive & strong & is now morphing toward fascism. Or it might reflect that he himself shares some of the orientation of Stalinism.
In 2007, he published a persuasive & influential article titled “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth” which is a defense of China’s 1950 military occupation of Tibet. It is a masterpiece of Stalinist political methodology which justifies occupation as a way for Chinese communism to free Tibetans from feudalism. You will never get me to defend feudal economic, social, or political relations but it’s not up to me & it wasn’t up to the Chinese government to change Tibetan society by force. Marching in an army, violently taking over a country, repressing the population, & forcing people to flee has been proven completely disastrous over & over again in improving humane & democratic relations, just as it has proven in Tibet.
In their defense of China by denying the Uyghur genocide, maligning the Hong Kong protesters as stooges of nefarious western forces, & denying the massacre at Tiananmen Square, Assadists are now including defense of China’s occupation of Tibet. Just because some of the ‘free Tibet’ movement are half-baked celebrities or that the Dalai Lama plays ball with reactionary governments does not negate the demands of Tibetan resistance that wants China to get the hell out of Tibet. The issue is self-determination & that’s a right the oppressed have whether Stalinists & their apologists like it or not.
It isn’t that Parenti does not accurately describe the problems of feudal society but that he believes military force is the way to change things. Tibetans are completely removed as an agency acting on their own behalf & having the right to control their own lives.
A study in Stalinist methodology: http://michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
Photo is Tibetans living in exile in India take part in a protest against China in March 2019 on the annual Tibetan Uprising Day commemorating the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.
(Photo from EPA-EFE)
Assad propagandists & their guppy cultists will ridicule the photos of White Helmet rescue workers dealing with abandoned cats, dogs, birds, chickens, livestock, & other wild animals. They’ll mock them as staged & the animals as “crisis actors” like they do the photos of children & adults injured & killed by Syrian & Russian bombers. But since they don’t deny that Syria & Russia are bombing Idlib, in fact applaud it as the apocalypse for ‘Salafi-jihadi terrorism’ in Syria, it’s hard to deny that animals are suffering unimaginably. Any animal lover can tell you that dogs, cats, & other animals freak during thunder storms, firecracker displays, planes flying overhead. They’re as traumatized as small children by the noise & so much more traumatized by bombs, explosives, shrapnel, incendiary weapons, being buried in rubble, being abandoned by dead or fleeing caretakers.
So let the Assadists mock these photos so they can continue to makes asses of themselves & expose themselves as apologists for dictatorship, even at the expense of animals & small children.
(Photo of White Helmet rescuing an abandoned dog at Hama from White Helmets)
A little boy in hospital after being injured in the murderous Syrian & Russian bombing attack last Saturday on Kafriya town, Idlib province: we’re waiting to hear which faction of ‘Salafi-jihadi terrorists’ Assad authorities will claim the little guy belonged to or maybe even commanded.
For so long, many of us held out hope that corrupted activists in the antiwar movement, now become a pro-war cult, would be roused to their senses by the overwhelming proof presented in the savage carpet bombing of Idlib. But in fact, they’ve dug in their heels & ignore or deny the war crimes so evident. There is no hope nor a future for them though the ‘dogs will go on with their doggy lives’ pretending they have the same political stature as before. When you lay down with flea-bitten dogs, you get up with fleas. When you march lockstep with fascists in support of dictatorship against democracy, you march yourself straight into oblivion.
(Photo of child from July 13, 2019 at Kafriya town, Idlib from AFP)
A little boy in Idlib is overwhelmed with grief & trauma after weeks of Syrian & Russian carpet bombing. The Assad dictatorship, its paid propagandists, & guppy cultists insist that all civilians left Idlib months, even years, ago & those being bombed are only “al-Qaeda affiliated Salafi-jihadi terrorists.” You could only write such an Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ script for a science fiction film because it makes not an iota of sense in political reality & contradicts overwhelming documentation.
That Bartlett & Beeley peddle this crap makes sense since they’re paid well by Syria & Russia to do so. That Chomsky, Pilger, Fisk, Tariq Ali, Cockburn, Prashad, & others peddle this crap is a symptom of their political corruption & irrelevancy. That the Assadists & Stalinists who’ve run the antiwar movement into the ground & made it a deranged cult peddle this crap is a declaration of their betrayal of principles.
The only principled stand is to demand the cessation of bombing in Idlib & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces & mercenaries from Syria.
Stop the bombing of Idlib.
(Photo from May 2019 by Smart News Agency)