More on Facebook’s ‘community standards’. Muslim-hating meets its community standards. Kashmiri & Palestinian solidarity are in violation.
Daily Archives: December 16, 2019
Mirza Saaib Bég speaks about the Indian intelligence agency RAW spying on Kashmiris & Sikhs living outside Kashmir.
In the backdrop of what is happening in #Kashmir this is an additional assault, on privacy and freedom of speech, that seeks to enforce oblivion on the legacy of genocide in India, to inhibit non-violent, democratic discourse on freedom from any kind of political space. Yesterday, an Indian-origin couple in Germany was convicted on charges of spying on Kashmiri and Sikh diaspora for a sum of around ~7000 Euros. This is the 3rd case from Germany since 2014. In the past also, due to similar instances of spying on diaspora communities, Canada had to ask the Indian General Counsul, Surinder Malik, to leave the country. Subsequently, diplomats and two vice consuls were also asked to be transferred. For anyone interested- Maloy Krishna Dhar, a former joint director of the Indian Intelligence bureau has written about this period in his book “Open Secrets”. The three cases since 2014 indicate a clear pattern of well-coordinated efforts to spy on diaspora communities, in contravention of local law. India is turning into a surveillance police state. Just last month, we came to know of how lawyers, journalists and activists in India were being spied on by Israeli surveillance technology that is only leased to governments. In this conversation, we discuss the tightening of OCI rules, the use of #NRC and #CAB to depoliticise and disenfranchise Muslims and the increasing lack of space for any kind of dissent in India. India must be cautioned about the dangers of secret surveillance regimes, the inevitable abuse of this power which necessarily must be exercised in secret, and the inhibition of ideas caused by the existence of such surveillance. You can not be the world’s largest democracy and at the same time repress dissent on a political question.
Posted by Mirza Saaib Bég on Sunday, December 15, 2019
Maybe some think I should write more about the impeachment of Trump. Sorry, but anything short of prosecution, lining him up against the wall & throwing horse manure at him, then incarcerating him for life falls short of my sense of justice.
It was so shocking a few years ago to see photos of police in Kenya wielding truncheons as they chased down protesting students into classrooms & beat the hell out of them. Now we see Indian police invading a New Delhi university with tear gas & truncheons & Hong Kong police chasing down protesters in shopping malls. This has been daily life for Kashmiris, Uyghur, Palestinians, Rohingya, & so many others for decades. India & Hong Kong are important precisely because we have a chance to reverse the thunderous global march toward fascism & the Muslim-hating which is a central part of the strategy.
#StandWithTheStudentsAgainstCAA #StandWithKashmir #StandWithHongKong #StandWithPalestine #StandWithUyghur
How can leading figures of Palestinian solidarity, especially those around Electronic Intifada, so ardently campaign for Bernie Sanders when he has more than once declared himself “100% pro-Israel”? Visionary Palestinians have proposed a democratic, secular state where Palestinians & Jews can live together as brothers & sisters. They should be our standard, not opportunist electoral rhetoric. Lesser evil politics are the bane of social transformation because they compromise so egregiously with oppression.
133 days of Kashmir caged: the poster directly links the struggle against occupation of Kashmir with the struggle in India against the Citizenship Act which legalizes the marginalization & persecution of Muslims.
There is lots of news on Twitter about the protests in India against the Citizenship Act. As there should be since they are so monumentally important in pushing back the thrust toward fascism. But there is no news at all from occupied Kashmir. It is impossible for Kashmiri journalists to work & hard for international journalists to operate in Kashmir under the conditions imposed by India but does that mean the few that went there packed up & went home? Are they afraid of getting caught up in a hunt to kill operation in Kashmir, afraid of the Indian Army, or have they just decided Kashmir’s news cycle time has elapsed? Is that also why they no longer report from the several US-NATO wars zones, even embedded with the troops?
Nationalist Indian media & Russian propaganda sites like RT are reporting that violent protesters are torching buses & engaged in other acts of violence in New Delhi. In fact, the unarmed protesters are peaceful. The violence is all coming from police attacks with tear gas & truncheons on protesters. If the protesters attempt to defend themselves, that is not violence but self-defense.
Do you think Tulsi Gabbard’s associations with Indian fascism will tank her candidacy? Many Assad supporters, including the hapless Rania Khalek, are still promoting her, thus exposing their political affinities with fascist ideology. (Just for the record Khalek & her associates Ben Norton & Max Blumenthal just came out publicly to oppose the democracy protests in Iran & Lebanon.)
A list from Forbes of countries who shut down the internet the most to silence dissent:
India (154 times, with Kashmir accounting for much of that)
Pakistan (19 times)
Iraq (8 times, Iraq is under US occupation)
Syria (8 times, where not shut down, bombed into silence)
Turkey (7 times)
D.R. Congo (5 times)
Ethiopia (5 times)
Iran (4 times)
Chad (3 times)
Egypt (3 times)