This week I had to spend time at Texas motor vehicles to replace my lost drivers license, get six dogs their rabies shot (an ordeal since 70 pound Bianca has to be dragged), get the car repaired from my accident, find a new Medicare plan with better benefits, take my employer on a spending spree, so I haven’t had time for FB. I will catch up with your posts & begin posting later today. Keep the political fires burning in my absence.
Daily Archives: December 11, 2019
In July 2018, a high-ranking Indian Army official reported there were 200 armed guerrillas in Kashmir. That’s close to the 150 estimated in July 2016 by Kashmiri human rights leader Khurram Parvez. Since from the 2016 uprising until August 5th, 2019 the army ran several daily take-no-prisoners hunt to kill operations throughout Kashmir–a murderous military campaign they called ‘Operation All-Out’–often citing the numbers of militants killed (though neglecting to cite the number of civilians injured & killed), we’re wondering why Indian officials claim terrorism is the reason for the siege & lockdown of Kashmir necessitating not just draconian repression but genocide? By the Indian Army’s own statistics there are very few armed guerrillas still alive in Kashmir & any who miraculously survived are on the run. They can lay that terrorism rubbish to rest. Will they continue to invent terrorists or will they begin like other regimes to import them?
Bangladeshi officials are still ‘optimistic’ about deporting at least 100,000 Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char, the uninhabitable, monsoon-prone island in the middle of nowhere where they’ve built army barracks for housing. They don’t even know if the 15 sq mi/40 sq km island is stable since it only emerged in the Bay of Bengal in 2006, is under water four months out of the year, has no roads or flood fences, & is nearly 40 mi/60 km from the nearest coast. It’s a dumping ground not unlike the notorious, now abandoned French penal colony on Devil’s Island. The only thing holding back the plans is that Bangladesh announced the deportations will be voluntary but they can’t find any Rohingya willing to relocate to no-mans-land.
India debates the ‘Israeli model’ of religious tolerance for citizenship: Muslims excluded. To create a Hindu-only state, politicians would allow Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, & Parsis & only exclude Muslims. Then that ‘first they came for the Muslims & I did not protest because I am not a Muslim’ trope comes into play.
The Oslo Accords for Kashmir, called the Israeli-model of colonialism, have begun: in the past four months since India announced plans to plunder/’develop’ Kashmir, an Indian official announced that at least 39 outside companies have shown interest in ‘development’ on expropriated land & investing in different industrial sectors, including the apple industry, cold storages, dry fruit, saffron, & tourism & accommodations.
https://thewire.in/business/jammu-and-kashmir-land-investment?
“The intersection of misogyny with poverty is a particularly painful one.”
–Thamina Eff
“My son threw me out of the house after my husband died! People believe that even the shadow of a widow can wreak havoc in their lives and bring bad luck!
Because of that, the owner threw me out of the house when they found out that I am a widow, where I used to wash dishes and clothes while hiding my real identity for earning money!
Now, I try to earn money by singing devotional songs in temples and manage to get enough for one meal a day. I could start begging but throughout my life, I have longed for some respect and some dignity!
I have been living in this temple now for more than 20 years, and every day I am just waiting for death to come so that I can be out of this life of misery and get some relief.
The only thought that bothers me badly is that nobody will mourn for me when I die! I will die unwanted and unloved.
My son knows where I live! But he never came to see me once all these years!
I feel hungry for the love of my son and my family; it is this hunger that gives me more pain than the hunger for the food I always search for.
–Alpona Rani”
Photo by Bangladeshi photographer GMB Akash
You get a good sense of the rightwing politics of Max Blumenthal & the other grifters he associates with (including the ‘retired’ FBI, CIA, & FBI operatives who lead the US Assadist antiwar cult) when he spends more time vilifying the White Helmet rescue workers than he does exposing US-coalition intervention in Syria; when he defends Assad & Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians; when he denies China’s genocide of Uyghur Muslims & vilifies the Hong Kong protesters; when he reduces the complexity of international politics to ‘US regime-change operations’; when he promotes Tulsi Gabbard & turns a deaf ear to her Zionism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, support for Modi, Hindutva politics, & India’s siege in Kashmir; by his political affinities with the detestable Tucker Carlson on Fox News. It’s only a matter of time before he comes out in the same orbit as fascists Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, & Kevork Almassian. He never claimed to be a leftist but was always just an elitist rich kid on the make who has made a mockery & burlesque of journalism. Those who find his simple-minded mockeries persuasive need to face up to their own affinities with the far right. In the political polarization that is taking place, they have chosen the wrong side.
THE CONFLUENCE BETWEEN THE PALESTINIAN & KASHMIRI STRUGGLES FOR SELF-DETERMINATION
In May 2018, I was asked by a Kashmiri journal to write an article about the affinities between the Kashmiri & Palestinian struggles. Recognizing those affinities did not originate with my observations but with those of Kashmiri writers & activists. The article was not published because the journal wanted more of an emphasis on the affinities between Kashmiri & Palestinian Intifada; on the targeting of children, the role of stone pelters in both struggles, the role of women, the scale of political prisoners, & resistance to the primary features of occupation. Today, I would write it differently but I think its observations are quite relevant to the discussion of the importance of forging unity in action between the two movements which are both rooted in the struggle against colonialism & occupation:
THE CONFLUENCE BETWEEN THE PALESTINIAN & KASHMIRI STRUGGLES FOR SELF-DETERMINATION
There is a confluence happening right before our eyes in real time–a confluence between the Palestinian & Kashmiri freedom struggles that is of the greatest importance for those movements &, it is not too pompous to say, for the future of humanity. For over seventy years, Palestinians & Kashmiris have been fighting colonial oppression & decades of military occupation but because of systematic news blackouts & false narratives turning freedom fighters into terrorists they were unaware of their profound political affinities. Both struggles were isolated from each other & from the rest of the world. They are very distinct struggles with very distinct social & political histories but they are yoked by resistance to colonialism & military occupation. They are also brought together by a similar political trajectory & of course by the growing political, economic, & military relationship between Israel & India.
Their movements have similar trajectories in that both in the later years of the 20th century explored the strategy of guerrillaism against occupation. Guerrillaism is a necessary tactic as part of a full program of resistance involving protests, strikes, shutdowns, boycotts, but when it is elevated to a strategy preempting all other tactics, it leads to passivity on the part of the many in deference to the heroic actions of a few. Irregular forces in & of themselves prove insufficient against the power of high-tech modern armies. What is required is massive participation to close a society down if necessary & bring the occupying nation to its knees regardless of the number of troops they deploy. It was inevitable that guerrillaism would exhaust its possibilities as a strategy for both Palestinians & Kashmiris as it did for the Irish struggle against British colonialism & occupation. It is serendipitous & unquestionably related to the advent of social media that it was about the same time in the early 21st century that both Palestinians & Kashmiris turned to Intifada, to a mass-based social movement strategy integrating all the tactics of social revolution. Nothing represents Palestinian & Kashmiri Intifada more than the stone pelters who are the iconic representation of Intifada. They are not a continuation of guerrillaism by other means but function as civilian defense guards for unarmed civilian protesters confronted by soldiers armed to the teeth.
It is primarily the relationship between Israel & India that dictates & compels Palestinians & Kashmiris to create formal structures of collaboration. Integrating Kashmiri solidarity & Palestinian solidarity will not weaken either but strengthen both as well as the Rohingya struggle which plays such an important role in Indian politics & is also yoked by Israeli weapons sales to Burma. An apparent irony is that Israel is a colonial construct rooted in British colonialism in the Middle East allied with Zionist terrorism while India is a postcolonial state forged out of the post-World War II independence movement against British colonialism. Israel is still fundamentally a colonial garrison state whose existence is based on militarism & genocide. The new state of India used the fractured divisions of the British Partition & the institutional matrix of British colonialism to construct a European model nation-state over a heterogeneous & vast political & social reality. In many ways, Israel & India remain artificial constructs with a manufactured, carefully honed image as democracies when both countries are based in religious nationalism–a Jewish-only state & a Hindu dominated state–one based on the dispossession, expulsion, & genocide of millions of Palestinians & the other on an ironclad & violent caste system & a colonial relationship to Kashmir. Israel has reproduced the violence of Jewish pogroms & persecution in its treatment of Palestinians just as India, using the instruments of the British Raj, has reproduced the violent excesses of the British in the occupation of Kashmir.
The political, economic, & military nexus between India & Israel inextricably link the struggles for self-determination of Palestinians & Kashmiris. We should not take seriously India’s formal diplomatic stance supporting the Palestinians since in the 70 years of its existence Palestinians have nothing concrete to show for it. Modi told Mahmoud Abbas that Indian support for a Palestinian state is unwavering & that “the relationship between India & Palestine is built on the foundation of longstanding solidarity & friendship since the days of our own freedom struggle.” But arms deals with Israel speak louder than words. Military links between India & Israel have grown exponentially since Modi took power in May 2014. The current 41 billion rupees (US $659 million) of Israeli arms sales to India is more than Israel’s total military exports to India for the three years before Modi took power. But in fact, for the past 25 years India & Israel have maintained extensive economic & military ties worth billions of dollars. Those military ties include Israeli weapons & a contract for Israel to train paramilitary forces in Kashmir. India has billions of dollars in deals with Israel for counterinsurgency training services going back over a decade. It has trained thousands of Indian commandos in the brutal methods used against Kashmiris & others in India because Israel was founded by death squad battalions & has perfected its brutalities on the bodies of Palestinians.
Since the 1980s Israel has been one of the world’s top arms producers & exporters with an estimated $7.47 billion a year in sales. India is the largest customer of Israeli military equipment which include assault & sniper rifles with ammunition; night vision devices; laser location & targeting equipment; drones; laser-guided bombs; high-tech surveillance equipment; anti-tank guided missiles & launchers; aircraft, cruise, & sea-to-sea missiles; border monitoring equipment; artillery radars; fast attack naval craft. You name it, Israel sells it to India which uses most of it against Kashmiris to maintain its force of 700,000 soldiers, paramilitary forces, & counterinsurgency thugs. Israel & India have a compelling need to collaborate about controlling occupied populations & breaking the political will for self-determination shared by Palestinians & Kashmiris. Both India and Israel are central to US political, military & strategic designs in the Middle East & South Asia so the nexus between them includes the Pentagon which has brokered military contracts worth billions with both countries.
The Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement launched by Palestinians in 2005 is having a profound destabilizing impact & undermining the legitimacy of Israel so that deepening political & economic connections to countries like India, China, & Russia are critical to its survival. Bilateral trade between Israel & India, excluding military sales, is almost US $7 billion annually, including $45 million in blood diamonds from Israel. There are also numerous joint projects involving Israeli companies in several Indian states engaged in wasteland development, irrigation, chemicals and paints, telecommunications, plastics, floriculture, agro-technology, electronics, knitwear & textiles, medical diagnostics, not to mention tourist promotion & cultural exchanges.
The growing confluence between the Palestinian & Kashmiri movements, which will also impact the Rohingya movement, is one of the most exciting political developments of the past several years & everything should be done to advance it. They are among the most important political struggles of our times & their outcomes will determine the future of humanity–hopefully in creating a world suitable for human beings to live & love in.
This photo of a child construction worker in the Patiala district, Rajpura, India by Kashmiri Saqib Majeed was a Guardian photo of the day on November 25th, 2019. Under sweatshop economics, child labor is ubiquitous across the globe, including in the US where small children work legally as immigrant farmworkers & were denied protective legislation under the Obama regime against working with livestock, chemicals, dangerous tools, or in grain silos which shift & can bury them. Because human trafficking is involved, estimates vary worldwide from 150 million child workers to 217 million under the age of 14. In India, it is estimated there are 35 million child workers. Their lives are directly affected by Indian militarism which wolfs down money better spent on building schools.
Child labor is integral to neoliberal economics, primarily as a form of cheap, exploitable labor & to undercut labor organizing by adult workers. It might be pointed out that while many are pointing to Bolivia as a worker’s paradise, child labor, including as underground miners, was massive enough that attempts were made to legalize it & to portray the legalization of child labor as progressive. Children belong in schools & playgrounds, not in mines, construction sites, or sweatshops.
(Photo by Saqib Majeed/Guardian)