A tribute to Syed Ali Geelani by Michigan artist Lori Dee Desgranges.
Daily Archives: August 29, 2019
A disturbing video on the impact the Indian occupation has on wildlife in Kashmir. The barrier wall on the US southern border, the Israeli apartheid wall, & nearly 200 barrier walls on the planet to prevent immigration all have the same destructive impact on wildlife.
Kashmir is running out of medicines, including life-saving drugs, with no end of the occupation in sight. Some think genocide is an overstatement but what else can one call this?
Zionists, Hindutva nationalists, Islamophobes, anti-Semites, Assadists, Stalinists, white supremacists all draw from the same cesspool for their repertoire of political arguments: The eff-word is prominent; lots of epithets, especially whore & the c-word; lots of hating going on. But I’ve yet to see anything even approximating a cogent political defense for their hatred of the oppressed.
Join the campaign, starting today for ten days, to share a post every day about the Kashmiri struggle. It’s a simple act of solidarity but you never know who you might reach who someday will also play a role in building a massive, public, consistent, uncompromising movement to reinforce Kashmiri political power against Indian colonialism & occupation.
Take the pledge at this site to #StandWithKashmir by at least one post every day.
There are hundreds of devastating photos from the Rohingya flight from genocide in 2017. It’s a nightmare just to revisit those images. But some of the most wrenching are of unaccompanied children running for asylum carrying a baby sister or brother probably after losing their parents to the Burmese Army hunting them down. Consider their terror & misery. But mostly stand in awe of their humanity.
Stand with the Rohingya in their struggle for full human, democratic, & civil rights in Burma.
(Photo by unidentified photographer)
A Rohingya child speaks out on Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day.
Stand with the Rohingya struggle for full human, democratic, & civil rights in Burma.
To honor the Native Hawaiian struggle for independence from US colonial occupation & to honor Israel Kamakawiwoʻole (1959-1997), the troubadour of Native Hawaiian independence.
This is a repost from 2012 & belated a few days since August 21, 1959 is the date the US rendered colonial occupation of Hawaii ‘legal’ by declaring it a state.
August 21, 1959 is the date the US tried to render the theft of Hawaii legitimate by declaring it a state. There is no media coverage of the Native Hawaiian independence movement & no honest history taught in US schools of the forcible acquisition of Hawaii by the US military in league with plantation owners & agribusiness companies. Following the overthrow of Hawaiian rulers in 1893, the entire archipelago was annexed by the US. In 1959, statehood was fraudulently created in a popular vote on the question, “Shall Hawaii immediately be admitted into the Union as a State?” Those qualified to vote were US citizens who had resided in Hawaii for at least one year.
Since the US occupation & annexation in 1893, thousands from the US mainland had migrated to Hawaii, many stationed with the US occupying army. Any Hawaiians who took up US citizenship while under occupation were eligible to vote but those who refused to adopt US citizenship & instead declared themselves Hawaiian citizens were ineligible. That’s how Hawaii became the 50th state of the US–through fraud, chicanery, & theft.
Though Hawaiians continue to fight for self-determination & against the unlawful occupation, they are now less than 10% of the population, with many forced into diaspora on the mainland & replaced by affluent interlopers. Since the Hawaiian language is one of the cultural devastations of the occupation & diaspora, there is no way to say in Hawaiian, “the struggle continues”, la lucha continúa!
(Photo of Hawaiian independence protest from Zinn Education Project)
(This was originally posted in 2012 but has been slightly edited)
First they came for Black children
And I did not speak out
Because I believed the rubbish about them being narco-terrorists.
Then they came for Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian, Kashmiri, Rohingya, Uyghur, Yemeni, Somali, Venezuelan, Hong Kong, Central African children
And I did not speak out
Because they live too far away from me to care & were probably “US regime-change operations” anyway.
Then they came for refugee children
And I did not speak out
Because I was waiting for someone else to organize a protest movement.
Then they came for me.
And there was no one left to speak out for me
Because not even God gave a damn about someone indifferent & passive about oppression, but especially about those who justify it.
–an update of Martin Niemöller’s iconic protest