Does the Indian soldier think the little Kashmiri boy is hiding an AK-47 under his coat? This is called the brutalization of children under occupation.

A quite disturbing but important article on India’s ‘development’ plans for deforestation of Kashmir.

https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/13/17896/The-Direct-Attack-on-Forests-?

Assaults by nationalist thugs on Kashmiri students studying in India have gone on for many years but appear to have increased since the brutal military crackdown on the 2016 uprising in Kashmir & since the current lockdown. There have been repeated attacks on Kashmiri students in Bengaluru, Haryana, Jodhpur & Chittorgarh in Rajasthan state. All of the incident reports show the attacks are unprovoked, that the thugs use weapons, operate in groups, & call the Kashmiris terrorists & stone pelters whilst they beat them to a pulp. The attacks are a direct consequence of government attempts to associate Kashmiris with terrorism.

The reports show the refusal of police & university authorities to take the violence seriously or to take legal or punitive action against the perpetrators, essentially using a ‘boys will be boys’ kind of defense & even using drunkenness to excuse the assaults. Media report the assaults as ‘little scuffles’ following ‘altercations’. In one instance, the two Kashmiris were standing at a bus stop. In another, they were cooking beef in their school hostel. In the latest of three incidents at Mewar University in Rajasthan, four Kashmiri students were assaulted by a mob wielding weapons over a gate pass denied a nationalist student. Those are not exactly what are meant by altercations or scuffles. They are unprovoked assaults in a national pattern of assaults on Kashmiri students & other Muslims.

Rajasthan is the same state where last August an Indian court acquitted six nationalist thugs of lynching a 55-year-old Muslim dairy farmer after they stopped his truck with cows in the back even though there was video documentation showing him begging the cow vigilantes for mercy. In coverage of the 2016 & 2017 assaults at Mewar University, it was reported that 500 Kashmiri students attended the university. Coverage of this last assault report there are only 30 Kashmiris attending Mewar. Is the coverage inaccurate or have Kashmiris fled from the school & Rajasthan state in fear for their lives?

The photo is Kashmiri students at Mewar University in April 2017 protesting attacks on six Kashmiri students for being ‘stone-pelters’.

(Photo from HT)

111 days by Rollie Mukherjee.

The very political forces who support Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians are outraged by the alleged violence of protesters in Hong Kong. According to these apologists for tyranny, the violence of police toward protesters is justified because the protesters are aggressive & anti-communist. Perhaps the politicos have never heard of agents provocateurs. Perhaps they believe that if you oppose repression by a so-called communist regime, you have no right to protest it. Perhaps they believe Maoism has created ‘the best of all possible worlds’. Perhaps they have rocks in their heads. Or more likely, they are corrupt from their pea brains all the way down to the rotten marrow of their bones. They don’t protest barrel bombs dropped by Syrian & Russian war planes on civilians but go all indignation when a Chinese protester throws a stink bomb back at police using tear gas & truncheons.

The Hong Kong protests have gone on a very long time. Facing extreme repression, they may temporarily face a crisis of leadership & perspectives. But the Hong Kong movement is very experienced & has long been an inspiration to human rights supporters around the world. They have a right to protest without being assaulted by police even if they are demanding the overthrow of Chinese-style communism. That’s what democracy is all about. But what they are demanding is democracy & the end of tyranny.

Jammu & Kashmir police: “We are very much concerned about what is happening in the virtual world. We monitor social media, particularly Twitter, on a regular basis and the tweets with posts critical of the state are collected.” Such posts are often reported to the social media websites.

https://www.news18.com/news/india/jk-police-reveal-twitter-handles-posting-about-valley-situation-are-being-monitored-2397417.html?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/israel-arab-dialog.html?auth=login-email&login=email&

The NY Times posted this article about the opposition of a handful of Arab “thinkers” to demonizing & punishing Israel with BDS. The reporter met with a new group calling itself the Arab Council for Regional Integration. The rest of us would call them professional flunkeys & collaborators with Israeli genocide. The article is just a masterpiece of idiocy & deceit. With the Oslo Accords going into full effect taking over the West Bank & East Jerusalem & Israeli bombers & snipers in full genocide mode in Gaza, the only weapon Palestinians have is BDS. If it wasn’t effective, there would not be so many countries trying to make it illegal.

Collaborators are not a new phenomenon. Every social & political struggle has them. Every Arab is not a supporter of Palestinians. Since a major concern of this little group of flunkeys is trade, we can assume that class plays a major role in their politics, that they represent capitalist interests in their different countries. Such matters as Palestinian self-determination, or even genocide for that matter, are of little interest.

A young Kashmiri pellet victim of Indian-style ‘democracy’: the pellets are being extracted by an amateur medic because if he goes to hospital he stands a good chance of being arrested. He will suffer disfigurement & lifelong health problems because these lead pellets enter internal organs & cannot be extracted even with professional medical care.

Demand the Indian Army stop using pellet munitions. Demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Indian troops from Kashmir.

(Photographer not identified, probably for security reasons)

Cleaning the yard this morning I messed with the wrong ants & ended up with fire ant bites all over my butt, thighs & arms. They hurt like hell even with calamine lotion so it’s too hard to sit at the computer. There’s a metaphor there for the mighty against the weak but my butt hurts too much to belabor it. Talk with you tomorrow.

(Posted on November 22nd)