Dublin, Ireland #StandWithKashmir rally, September 7th, 2019.
Daily Archives: September 11, 2019
When the UN or some politician refers to Kashmir as a territorial dispute between Pakistan & India, refer them to this photo of a Kashmiri pellet gun victim from September 2016. If it’s a territorial dispute between Pakistan & India, why are Kashmiris being murdered, maimed, disappeared, raped, arrested, tortured by Indian troops?
(Photo from Kashmir News Observer, September 9th, 2016)
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres appealed today to India & Pakistan to ‘resolve the Kashmir issue through dialogue’ to avoid any “potential escalation.” Every time the UN pulls this stunt, it is as an evasion of the real issue. Kashmir is not primarily a territorial dispute between India & Pakistan. It is the struggle of Kashmiris for self-determination against India’s colonial occupation by nearly one-million troops. It is the struggle of Kashmiris against mass rapes, forcible disappearances, pellet munitions & live ammo, curfews, lockdowns, telecommunication blockades, wholesale arrests of young men, mass graves. There is no possible resolution of this dispute without putting Kashmiris at the very heart of it. No one has made that clearer than Kashmiri activists, poets, writers, commentators, artists, stone pelters, protesters.
At the height of the uprising in Kashmir In September 2016, there were tens of thousands of unarmed protesters which the Indian Army brutally & mercilessly assaulted with pellet guns, live ammo, tear gas & mass arrests of young men. Kashmiri independence leader & icon Syed Ali Geelani, now 90-years-old, who was/is under house arrest was prevented from holding a press conference when Indian forces put up a cordon around his house. So instead, he emailed a statement to media which is a powerful manifesto of #azaadi worth reading in full. These two passages are particularly forceful & resonant today:
“…between us & our freedom stand half a million Indian guns only. Never before have we been so close to freedom with such clarity as we are now. We have reached this stage because the people of Jammu & Kashmir have not only resisted the brute military occupation of India with exemplary courage & sacrifices but also repeatedly shown that the people would not be defeated.”
“The greatest sign of our victory is that the mighty army of our occupier has to shoot dead middle-aged women, a 21-year-old girl & beat to death a teacher. If after 70 years of military control, a soldier has to kill an unarmed woman & a schoolboy with a stone in his hand to forcibly keep Kashmir under Indian control, what bigger proof do we need of who has been defeated & who is victorious? The bullets of Indian soldiers are merely the symbols of their cowardice.”
An excellent video about Germany’s censorship of & attempts to deport a Palestinian BDS activist as part of its campaign to outlaw BDS & associate opposition to Israeli colonialism, occupation, & apartheid with anti-Semitism.
Germany censors Palestinian BDS activist
Censored by Germany, attacked for supporting BDS and now facing deportation, listen to what this Palestinian man has to say.
Posted by Redfish on Tuesday, 20 August 2019
Political journals learned long ago that lurid or detailed descriptions of torture inflicted on individuals by repressive regimes do not motivate people to activism but overwhelm & demoralize them in the face of such bestial amorality. We faced the dimensions of that problem most recently in Assad’s gulag where 25,000 photos by a military photographer who defected show Auschwitz treatment of thousands of Syrian dissidents. The same barbarism prevails in India’s gulag where thousands of Kashmiris are held as political prisoners, tortured, disappeared, dumped in mass graves.
This article doesn’t describe so much how Indian forces brutalized & executed a 24-year-old working class man named Riyaz Ahmad Thickrey while in custody on spurious charges so much as it describes how little it took for them to arrest him in the first place & the unbearable impact it had on his mother & family. May he Rest In Peace.
Demand the immediate release of all political prisoners, the immediate end to the use of pellet guns, & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Indian troops.
#StandWithKashmir
The US is turning away hundreds of Bahamian climate refugees trying to evacuate islands rendered uninhabitable by Hurricane Dorian. Normally Bahamians can travel to the US with a passport & a police certificate issued within the past six months that shows no criminal record. Now, the US is also requiring visas when it is likely that many lost all their papers when the hurricane flooded & destroyed their homes, making them homeless. The prime minister of the Bahamas called it a “historic tragedy” but the US is demanding their paperwork be in order for them to get asylum.
Among passengers who had boarded a ferry last Sunday at Freeport for the two-hour trip to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 103 were forced to disembark before departure because they did not have a visa. The ferry company was informed that to travel to the US, passengers would need a pre-clearance authorization obtained in person at immigration offices in Nassau. Freeport is on an island 213 km (132 miles) from Nassau which can only be reached by air or ferry.
During a press conference yesterday, Trump said caution is required in allowing Bahamians to enter as refugees because they could be “very bad gang members” or “drug dealers.” Just like he claims all Mexicans are rapists & criminals. We live in the United States of racism & white supremacy.
The photo is Aliana Alexis of Haiti standing on the concrete slab that is left of her home after Hurricane Dorian hit Marsh Harbour in Great Abaco Island, Bahamas on September 5, 2019.
(Photo by Al Diaz/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Rollie Mukherjee has announced publication of “Boys of the Cave,” an anthology of short stories by Zulekha Dinath (Zulekha Adam) of stories from Palestine, Kashmir, Burma, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Central African Republic. Rollie has illustrated fourteen of the stories told in this book. It will soon be available from Amazon.
(Photo is cover of “Boys of the Cave” with one of Rollie’s illustrations.)
In a mountain of detestable Indian propaganda, this piece by Indian journalist/propagandist Barkha Dutt has to be among the most pernicious & malicious. She stoops as low as Zionists who justify the targeting of Palestinian children by claiming Palestinians use their own children as human shields. But Dutt puts an original Hindutva spin on it by saying Kashmiri terrorists use children as human shields & stoops even lower than Zionists when she blames the children themselves, saying, “school-age children have joined violent protests in support of slain militants.”
It’s being reported that Omar Abdullah, who is being detained at the swank Hari Niwas Palace in Srinagar, is complaining of depression & will be receiving psychiatric consultation with a doctor from Government Medical Hospital Srinagar. File that under ‘cry me a river’. During his tenure as J&K chief minister between 2009 & 2015, hundreds of Kashmiri youth were arrested, tortured, forcibly disappeared, murdered. He introduced the use of pellet guns in 2010 which have blinded, disabled, disfigured, killed, demoralized thousands of Kashmiri youth. None of that caused him a moment of lost sleep or depression. Being held against his will in luxury accommodations so India can morph him into a ‘moderate leader’ of Kashmir while it systematically destroys the movement for #azaadi is not punishment. It’s a dog & pony show.