Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström tweeted today that in a phone call with Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, she stressed that “the EU, including Sweden, supports, a bilateral political solution between India & Pakistan over Kashmir, dialogue through diplomatic channels.” What’s wrong with that hare-brained, completely worthless proposal? It completely disempowers Kashmiris & ignores their struggle for self-determination. They are not even invited to participate in negotiations over their fate. It ignores Indian colonialism & the presence of nearly one-million Indian troops using pellet guns & live ammo against unarmed civilians. It makes no demands on India whatsoever when it should, at least, be denouncing the occupation & the hermetic blockade. Let’s call this proposal what it is: a sham, an evasion, an obfuscation for the fact that the EU, including Sweden, intend to do nothing to pressure India to withdraw its troops & stop its murderous siege of Kashmir. There’s too much trade & commerce money at stake.

Any serious negotiations with India over Kashmir would begin with demands for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Indian troops & the immediate release of all Kashmiri political prisoners & only then would proceed to negotiations requiring the presence of democratically chosen Kashmiri representatives so that Kashmiris can damn well speak for themselves.

“Kashmir’s a very complicated place. You have the Hindus & you have the Muslims & I wouldn’t say they get along so great,” Trump told reporters.

Trump boasts repeatedly of his “very good brain,” of “being, like, really smart.” When running for president, he said, “I went to the best schools. I’m, like, a very smart person. I’m going to represent our country with dignity & very well.” The guy is an amoral halfwit & nothing makes that more evident than this jejune misrepresentation of the Indian occupation of Kashmir. It would be farcical if it weren’t so truly insulting & tragic for Kashmiris.

My neighbor, a kind & loving woman, recently purchased two parakeets & a cockatiel. She asked me to keep the birds with mine because her home was being fumigated & the fumes would kill the birds. My rescue birds are not caged because I believe captivity & cages violate their nature. They have cages but they just perch on them to canoodle, socialize, & poop. Most birds are social animals & grieve solidarity. Cockatiels especially demand companionship & develop severe psychological disorders without it. Her little guy sits alone in a cage all day but I couldn’t responsibly let him fly free while caring for him. My little flock are hovering around his cage & he seems overwhelmed to again meet some of his own kind. It’ll break my heart to send him home alone but I will suggest to her that getting him a companion is a must.

Just stating again for the record: solidarity with those on the front lines of oppression is not a matter of noblesse oblige. It isn’t even just a matter of ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ in any sentimental sense. It’s a matter of the survival of the whole human race before war, occupation, genocide take down all of us together. Militarism doesn’t just slaughter millions of people in the besieged countries; it rots the very souls of the aggressing countries, produces psycho-killers, & necessitates greater repression, impoverishment, misery. That’s why no human being is alien to us.

Most of us are not in the mood to tolerate Hindutva trolling on our posts. My policy is to delete & block after their few seconds of shame. But sometimes I think it would be educational to compile their droppings & contrast them to those of Zionists, anti-Semites, white supremacists, xenophobes, Islamophobes, Assadists, fascists, Stalinists to document that all their ideologies are based on nothing but deranged hatred for the oppressed. When you see how intellectually impoverished they are, you marvel at their delusions of supremacy.

Arundhati Roy elaborates the fascist political character & genocidal history of Indian prime minister Modi, now orchestrating the genocidal siege of Kashmir.

A quite moving account by Irfan Rashid living in Delhi about communicating with his mother & family in Kashmir:

https://www.thequint.com/my-report/letters-to-kashmir-article-370-abrogation?fbclid=IwAR1dl1gqwctAOsUaAvmxt-zxUJrWm2LYFQSm8nuTGNwcvPsjYQdr4wV6aiE

A Kashmiri father talks about his two teenage boys who were arrested during this siege by Indian occupying forces as stone pelters–though their dad says they were not. He is unable to get information on their whereabouts, safety, conditions of confinement.

It’s not a coincidence that those children on the front lines of oppression–war, occupation, pogroms, persecution, genocide–are Muslim. This collage doesn’t even include all of them. Syrians are not specifically identified (Shaam includes them), Bahrainis, Muslims in the Central African Republic, Somalis, Libyans, Muslims in India, the Moro in the Philippines, Muslims in Sri Lanka, Kurds, & several other countries of the former Soviet Union. That’s what the excessive vilification of Islam, Muslim-hating & ‘jihadi’ propaganda is all about in media, movies, popular culture.

The reason is not that Islam teaches hate but that hate is taught against Islam because Muslims are not taking war, occupation, genocide lying down, beginning with the magnificent, even if eventually set back, Arab Spring uprisings. We say ‘set back’ rather than defeated because they will rise again after presenting some of the most advanced political ideas of our times & they will win if we can forge an uncompromising, consistent movement to stand with them. In the process, we will learn how to fight the same malignant forces in our own countries where nationalism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, xenophobia, racism, misogyny are gaining the upper hand.