New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern hasn’t used Twitter for months but she does use Facebook & showed a video of herself out & about in NYC today. The Gates Foundation award ceremony for Modi is tomorrow or Wednesday so we have time to besiege her with demands she cancel participation to honor Modi.
In March 2019, after the Christchurch massacre of Muslims, the NY Times published a piece titled “Why Jacinda Ardern Matters: New Zealand’s prime minister is emerging as the progressive antithesis to right-wing strongmen like Trump, Orban & Modi, whose careers thrive on illiberal, anti-Muslim & anti-immigrant rhetoric.” Even though in May, she congratulated Modi on his election win, remind her of that NY Times piece on her wall.
An article describing the broad coalition that organized & participated in the Adios Modi protest in Houston, including Hindu-American, Jewish Voice for Peace, & Black Lives Matter activists. It includes some wonderful photos from the protest.
“History is repeating itself in Houston. A group of German Americans organised a pro-Nazi rally on February 20, 1939 at Madison Square Garden, lauding the Fuhrer. In another six years, Nazism and its omnipotent leader were decimated forever. Let them celebrate. Fascism, however impregnable it might seem, has to perish. And the telltale signs have started to appear.”
Despite considerable political pressure & the damage to its undeserved reputation as humanitarian, the Gates Foundation is doubling down on its decision to award Modi for building public toilets in India. No one who’s ever had to use an outhouse or had to poop outside in the bushes will ever dismiss the importance of public toilets, which in Modi’s Swachh Bharat program appear to be mainly porta-potties. But if India didn’t have an entrenched oligarchic & capitalist system rooted in massive inequalities, they’d have built public toilets a long time ago & would have prioritized sanitation over militarism & the colonial occupation of Kashmir.
Most honorifics are worthless things. People shouldn’t receive awards for doing the right thing nor certainly for being a fascist & genocidaire. The upside to the Gates Foundation persisting in giving Modi this award is now their reputation as engaged in humanitarian work will come under more scrutiny when previously they operated an undercover operation engaged in eugenics & environmental ruin, including in India. The Gates Foundation knows what’s going on in Assam state & in Kashmir. They know what went on in Gujarat. It isn’t that they don’t care about all that but that Modi’s politics reflect their own politics. There’s nothing humanitarian about an organization that engages in racist programs to forcibly sterilize millions of black, brown, poor & marginalized women.
India, like Israel, has a strategy of targeting children for violence & arrest. It is intended to destroy the commitment to freedom that burns as strongly among the young as among their parents. The brutalization of children was honed in Israel against Palestinians & in the Black community in the US.
It’s going to take some work to get #BoycottIndia up & running but in the meanwhile nothing stops us from proceeding to build & organize it. The Irish band U2 will be ending its Joshua Tree tour in Mumbai on December 15th. Tickets go on sale starting October 1st. Now they’ve done some serious damage to their reputations, politically & personally, over the past few years. But that’s beside the point right now. We can set up Facebook & Twitter pages appealing to them to boycott India & giving them a chance to regain some dignity by refusing to play in India whilst Kashmir is under siege & two-million Muslims in Assam are being disenfranchised. Would anyone like to take responsibility for that or work with others on it?
This young Kashmiri man lost his eye from being beaten & assaulted by Indian forces in their fascist way of ‘winning the hearts & minds ‘ of Kashmiris over to colonialism. Modi calls this ‘hugging’ the Kashmiris with all his might.
#StandWithKashmir
Kashmiri boy who was ruthlessly beaten by Indian forces during restrictions in Srinagar outskirts and lost his eye, now he is Hospitalized in Srinagar
