“I am simply amazed by the adults sitting in safe spaces branding students as violent creatures when every photograph and video shows who’s holding the firearms, the lathis and the tear gas. What perfumed incense are you inhaling that’s making you take leave of your basic senses, let alone your rational thinking? Or do girls wearing head scarves pointing a finger at the cop mercilessly beating up their friend scare you? Can you be any more of a coward in this lifetime?”

–Vinutha Mallya via Rollie Mukherjee

Let’s hope the strong, prominent, & fearless role women are playing in social struggles around the world is being documented & that those struggles will produce women historians. Women have always played a prominent role, sometimes the primary role, in social struggles. If we don’t have documentation & women historians to record our present role, we’ll be written right out of history like women were before the rise of feminism in the 1960s. The historic method of exclusion is a way of undermining women’s respect for each other. This is not an anti-man statement. It’s an assertion of the right of women to be respected for the role we play in making this world suitable for human beings to live in. For heaven’s sake, we started by developing agriculture & now we’re fighting to keep our kids from being jailed, tortured, murdered or our friends from being beaten with truncheons. Respect is long overdue.

A well-known Assad propagandist named Sarah Abed posted an article from Russia Insider, a publication of American ex-patriates living in Russia which is openly anti-Semitic, racist, Assadist. They might not aptly be called Stalinist since they are also openly pro-czarist but the distinctions between Stalinist & czarist rule were often indistinguishable. It would not be too much to characterize them as fascist. It’s hard to distinguish between those ideologies these days since they are massively converging. In the discussion, Alexander Reid Ross (who has written important exposés about Assad propagandists) dared to enter & point out that “Russia-Insider is a fascist publication that traffics in pro-Assad propaganda & antisemitism.” One of Abed’s followers responded, “Sometimes this is the only effective resistance people have against Zionist occupation.”

Consider the political vision that would posit fascism as an effective counter against the rightwing colonial ideology of Zionism. What you will find in unraveling such derangement is that Islamophobia & anti-Semitism are the central ideological pillars of Assadism. With such a political vision, any ‘support’ for Palestinians is simply an expedience to attack Jews. When they oppose Zionism, it is not its rightwing character they oppose but that it provides an opportunity to vent their irrational hatred for Jews.

“Hope more people in India get to understand from their growing experience of protests that “stone-pelter” is a term used by the Indian State and media to demonise the unarmed protester in Kashmir. We saw how stones are being thrown either by “riot-control” cops at people, or by protesters prevented from protesting by the overwhelming force of armed police, as a civil form of defending their inalienable right to protest against tyranny.”

–Satyadeep Satya

Making Kashmir a territorial dispute between Pakistan & India is one of the most pernicious evasions & denials of Kashmiri self-determination ever invented.

It’s worth noting that the student protesters at Islamia College in Srinagar when the Indian journalist was attacked by police were protesting against India’s Citizenship Act. The spirit of azaadi is imbued with the spirit of solidarity.

If all you know about India is the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” & the IT revolution, you’ve been in for a rude awakening.

“The Fate of Murderers and Killers:

Jalil Andrabi—was a prominent Kashmiri human rights lawyer and pro independence political activist.

On March 8, 1996, Andrabi was detained in Srinagar by Major Avtar Singh, of the 35th Rashtriya Rifles unit of the Indian army. Three weeks later, Andrabi’s body was found floating in the Jhelum River; an autopsy showed that he had been killed days after his arrest. A case is pending adjudication in a Budgam court against Major Avtar Singh.

On June 9, 2012, Avtar Singh, 47, then living in Selma, California, killed his wife, 3-year-old Jay Singh, and 15-year-old Kinwaljeet “Aryan” Singh, and seriously wounded his 17-year-old son Kanwarpal “Chris” Singh with a handgun. He called police to admit the killings and then shot and killed himself. The surviving son had severe head injuries. He was taken off life support in Community Regional Medical Center at Selma and died on June 14.”

–Kashmiri Ashraf Bhat

This article is interesting for a whole lot of reasons: first, it’s one of the only accounts directly from Kashmir in the past month. It reports a current student protest in Srinagar, suggesting that nearly a million Indian jackboots have not cowed the spirit of azaadi & resistance. The journalist Azaan Javaid was assaulted by Kashmiri police in trying to cover that protest, an assault which took place in the presence of 30 to 40 other journalists & photographers. Since Kashmiri journalists are unable to work, those must be from international media.

Since Javaid was assaulted, we can be certain that other foreign journalists in Kashmir fear for their lives under the lockdown & may be unwilling to go into the streets to report any protests. India may not yet have adopted the US & Syrian model of embedding journalists with the military to train them as propagandists. But the presence of journalists in Kashmir suggests that India may be making it impossible for them to file stories (although they could fly to India to do so) or that international media is not publishing their reports in order to reimpose a news blackout.

https://theprint.in/india/abused-hit-phone-snatched-theprint-journalist-azaan-javaid-beaten-up-by-jk-police/336760/?