The BBC had a headline “World shrugging as Syria death toll mounts.” Maybe if the BBC, Associated Press, & other media stopped saying Idlib is a stronghold of terrorists there would be less shrugging about the massive slaughter of civilians. It isn’t that Assad propagandists have won over MSM so much as MSM has always promoted the Islamophobic ‘war on terror’.

According to the Kashmir Media Service, during the month of July 2019, Indian occupying forces killed eleven Kashmiris, including a woman & a young girl, injured 80 civilians with pellet guns, live ammo, & teargas shells, & arrested at least 46 activists. There isn’t much about that in Indian media but there is plenty of coverage about the several improvised explosive device (IED) blasts in the Pulwama district of Kashmir (October 2018, February, March, June, July 2019). The February 2019 car bomb IED was a suicide mission against a 78 bus convoy of CRPF paramilitary troops. Forty-two Indian troops were killed. India blamed the Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad. To enforce the idea that Kashmir is a territorial dispute between India & Pakistan rather than a Kashmiri struggle for self-determination against Indian colonialism & occupation, India then conducted airstrikes in Pakistan against what it called terrorist camps but which turned out to be forest land.

Since IEDs are a weapon used by irregular forces, it’s possible, maybe even likely, that they were set off by guerrilla operatives, though according to an unnamed Indian official cited by Al Jazeera, car bombs are rare in Kashmir. It’s also possible that some of the blasts were set off by Indian paramilitary operatives as a tactic to justify almost daily hunt to kill operations & to impose harsher conditions & restrictions on civilian life.

After the October 2018 IED attack in Trichal village, Pulwama, eleven civilians were injured when retaliating Indian troops went berserk, barged into family homes and beat the residents “ruthlessly”. In the March 2019 early morning IED blast in Tral, Pulwama, a civilian but no soldiers were killed & in June 2019 in Arihal, Pulwama, two civilians & nine soldiers were injured. Again, the Indian army retaliated in Arihal with a hunt to kill cordon. On July 27th, there was another early morning IED blast on the Arihal-Pulwama road with no reported deaths or injuries. In response, the Indian army again went on a rampage. Soldiers blocked the main road, started searching family homes, vandalizing homes, cow sheds, vehicles, assaulting young people, & harassing residents. It’s called ‘collective punishment’ which, as we also know from Palestine, is the nature of military occupation.

Since the Indian army has such a pervasive security & surveillance presence in Kashmir, especially in Pulwama, there are questions raised about the IED bombs. This March 2019 article by Basharat Shameem titled “10 Questions on IED Blasts in Kashmir” addresses some of them: https://countercurrents.org/2019/03/10-questions-on-ied-blasts-in-kashmir?

(Photo of a civilian young man assaulted by Indian soldiers after October 2018 IED attack in Trichal village, Pulwama from Greater Kashmir)

Serving as envoy for Pope Francis, Cardinal Peter Turkson accompanied by Cardinal Mario Zenari (the pope’s ambassador to Syria), delivered a letter to Assad which expressed the pope’s “deep concern” about the “humanitarian situation in Syria,” referring to the slaughter by Syrian & Russian forces in Idlib. The Vatican Secretary of State said, “The Pope is following the dramatic fate of the civilian population with apprehension & great pain, above all for the children caught up in these bloody bombings.”

The pope’s concern about Syria is nothing new. He’s been sending letters back & forth to Assad since he became pope in 2013. After six years of temperate diplomacy where he takes no sides & makes no condemnations, Pope Francis might want to speak more boldly now–at least as boldly as the children of Idlib who cry “Stop the bombing. We are civilians, not terrorists.”

It’s problematic that Pope Francis would send a guy like Cardinal Zenari along on this mission of peace since Zenari had made his associations with Assadism quite clear, including by attending a regime bash in Aleppo in January 2017 to celebrate the ‘defeat of terrorism in Aleppo.’ He also posed for photos with Syrian journalist Kinana Allouche who posted selfies & videos of herself gloating over the bodies of opposition soldiers & laughing over the bodies of children killed in Aleppo. Any court of law would call that strong evidence that Zenari isn’t squeamish about slaughter or at least goes along with the Assad regime charade about fighting terrorism rather than the Syrian Arab Spring.

Hardcore Assadists of the fascist kind like Bartlett, Beeley, Kevork Almassian were outraged by the pope’s letter. In a rant on Syriana Analysis, Almassian (who belongs to the German extreme right) said he was ‘speechless’ that the pope was not “thanking Assad for the fight against Wahhabi terrorism” that is ‘butchering tens of thousands of Christians in Syria.” He was aghast at the “audacity” of the pope ‘asking Assad to end the suffering in Idlib instead of heading to Brussels, Washington, & Ankara to ask the leaders to stop supporting terrorism.’

It’s long since time for Pope Francis to drop the diplomatic niceties & publicly denounce Assad for indiscriminate bombing of towns, markets, fields, mosques, hospitals, schools. But Pope Francis traveled to Burma at the height of the Rohingya genocide & remained silent; in visiting Israel, he played equivocal about the Palestinian struggle, thinking a few prayers at the apartheid wall would substitute for solidarity; & regrettably he is trying to outsmart the laity on the crisis of rapists among the clergy. We should not expect from him the same courage as we see from the little kids in Idlib.

(Photo of Turkson, Zenari, & Assad from AFP)

This is a very cogent article about the strategy of Suu Kyi & the generals regarding the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. This is one of the more notable passages:

The most striking findings of a recently published analysis of satellite imagery from Rakhine State by the International Cyber Policy Centre at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute are that the government of Myanmar is still engaged in an active process of razing abandoned and/or burnt Rohingya villages (almost 400 villages in the past six months or so), while so-called preparations for accepting Rohingya returnees from Bangladesh are “minimal.”

“This is not the behavior of a state that understands it has committed genocide against one of its indigenous peoples and is looking to make amends. This is the behavior of a state that is putting the finishing touches on erasing every last physical trace that the Rohingya were ever in Rakhine State.”

http://www.arabnews.com/node/1533616?fbclid=IwAR1cvBIIy43TvH0kXZmcqRP6oZNFVEnvZtK606cS1U2rSyNEflCQVKISSb0

Despite months of repeated appeals by BDS activists, Jennifer Lopez & her boyfriend A-Rod arrived in Israel early to tour before her performance tomorrow in Tel Aviv. In an Instagram post embellished with a heart & an Israeli flag she wrote, “The mother land Israel. First time I’m here. I’m in love! Energy off the charts!”
Lopez has just written herself & A-Hole into the BDS hall of shame by putting big bucks from Israel over the humanity of Palestinians. A big Bronx cheer to ‘Jenny from the Block’.

Putting aside the apologetics of sycophants like Ben Norton & Max Blumenthal who deny the Uyghur genocide & suck up to dictators everywhere, why does anyone disbelieve that China would incarcerate one million Muslims in concentration camps? It’s a bastion of sweatshops including child labor. It’s engaged in massive neoliberal plunder in Africa & elsewhere making it indistinguishable from colonialism. Why would the regime have any more respect for Muslims than it does for children, workers, Africans? Because it calls itself socialist?

When former J&K chief minister Mehbooba Mufti pretended to morph into a champion of azadi by tweeting an objection to India’s deployment of 10,000 more troops, Ahmed Bin Qasim, a Kashmiri whose parents are both political prisoners, responded on Twitter:

“What are you made of? If it is a political problem for you, then why did you send my mother to jail for dissent? Why did you provide impunity to bloodthirsty occupational forces? They provide security to quislings like you. Not us. For God’s sake, stop this drama.”

Ahmed Bin Qasim, a Kashmiri whose parents are both political prisoners, responded to former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah pretending to morph into a champion of azadi by tweeting distress about the wrongful imprisonment of the Kashmiri men recently acquitted after 23 years in prison:

“You, abetted by your father, illegally detained my father. He has been behind bars for TWENTY-SIX years now. Will your family apologize for tearing apart my family? You won’t. But at least don’t stoop so low and use the ordeal of our prisoners for your pitiful politics.”