If you can’t figure out Tulsi Gabbard’s politics when she spells out her Zionism, Islamophobia, Assadism, militarism, & Hindutva nationalism over & over again on Twitter & has a web site with her voting record, perhaps political thinking is not up your alley & fairy tales are.
Monthly Archives: August 2019
CNN has published a clear explanation for US, Jordanian, & Syrian joint responsibility for the humanitarian crisis facing 25,000 displaced Syrians in the Rukban refugee camp near the Jordanian border. The camp is in a US-protected zone only ten miles from a US military base, Jordan refuses to allow cross border deliveries, & Syria refuses to allow aid delivery in order to force residents to evacuate to regime-controlled areas where they will likely be arrested.
One of the major problems in building a Syrian Arab Spring solidarity movement was the misrepresentation of the role played by US-coalition forces in Syria. Assadists denounced a “US regime-change operation” while many leading anti-Assadists called for a humanitarian US intervention to defend the Syrian Arab Spring. There have recently been a few articles by anti-Assad supporters of the Syrian Arab Spring backing off their nonsense about a US humanitarian bombing campaign & giving a rational analysis of the role of the US-coalition in Syria. It was a major, almost unforgivable blunder to campaign for US military intervention as a means to save a revolution against dictatorship. In the case of Syria, it is proving fatal because it undermined the possibility of building a solidarity movement. Proponents of US humanitarian bombing claimed Syrians were demanding it so who were we to oppose it. Who are we? We are those who can connect the dots between the US wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, the US bankrolling of Israeli occupation & then make the connections with all the other US wars of the past many decades.
Demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Russian, Iranian, US-coalition, Israeli, & Hezbollah forces & mercenaries out of Syria.
CNN article: https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/01/middleeast/syria-rukban-us-intl/index.html?
(Photo from Rukban refugee camp by Khalil Mazraawi/AFP/Getty Images, March 2019)
This is another personal account by one of the Kashmiri men recently acquitted after 23 years in an Indian prison. The criminal disregard for justice is as much a part of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonialism as it is Kashmiris against Indian colonialism–& not coincidentally, as it is Black & Latino youth in the US against systemic racism.
https://thekashmirwalla.com/2019/07/23-years-of-injustice-im-a-stranger-in-my-own-house/?
Stephen Kinzer, a former writer for the NY Times, is as embedded with the White House as Bartlett & Beeley are with the Assad regime. Yesterday, he tweeted: “White Helmets are an arm of the terror movement in Syria. They are heroes to ISIS but not to any humanitarian.” The convergence between MSM & Assad propagandists is only apparent since MSM has always been the main venue peddling the Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ which is the heart of Assadist propaganda.
There is probably no more cynical & contemptible figure from the Assad regime than Fares Shehabi, a handler for Bartlett & Beeley, who posts photos of children killed by Syrian & Russian bombing & claims they were killed by rockets fired at cities by al-Qaeda terrorists.
Going through my old research projects, I came across one I did on the African origins of science & mathematics. There is considerable scholarship on this but it is isolated & has generated acrimonious opposition since the predominant history of science taught in universities has remained Eurocentric up to its white supremacist eyeballs since the Renaissance in Europe.
It serves colonialism & neoliberal plunder to depict African history as solely tribal. Most African tribal art, a magnificent aesthetic much drawn on by European artists, is displayed in museums of natural history as some form of primitive art rather than in fine art museums which are promoted as showcasing the art of ‘advanced societies’. The also magnificent art & architecture of the Nubian & other urban African societies is rarely shown. The Boston Fine Arts Museum has a gallery of Nubian art & several galleries of Egyptian art which they showcase. The Nubian gallery is just off an old entrance & the lights are seldom turned on. The intent, whether conscious or not, is clearly racist since Nubian art is easily mistaken for Egyptian & is also unmistakably Black African. When scholars speak of the origins of human civilization in Africa, they are not just talking about Egypt but all of Africa.
The huge numbers of African refugees fleeing neoliberal plunder & wars require us to seriously study African history, which believe me, is not easy unless you have a substantial book-buying budget. But there are many on-line resources where you can find scholarship on the immense contributions African societies have made to human knowledge. If you google African origins of science & math, you should find many resources & will find the study absolutely fascinating if not also politically crucial.
(Photo is facsimile painting from original depicting Nubians with a giraffe & a monkey in the Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
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)
This is just one Palestinian family out of tens of thousands thrown out of their homes while free-loading Zionist settlers move in & take over.
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)