Our blood
On the renamed street of ours
Our blood
to erase the constitution of ours
Our blood
On the sacred brick of yours
Our blood
To cover the naked crime of yours
Our blood
In your eyes, on your hands
Our blood
In that valley, on this land
Our blood
Your majority, your mandate
Our blood
where we all prostrate
–Indian poet & writer Musab Iqbal
– 15/16 December 2019
Anti-Jewish legislation under German fascism began in 1933 excluding them as civil servants or as employees of the government. Under those laws, doctors, notaries, accountants, actors, civilian workers with the army, & others had restrictions imposed, including the loss of licenses. Access to public education & universities was cut to 1.5% & Jewish dietary practices were denied.
In 1935, the Nazi Party leadership announced the Nuremberg Laws enacted by the Reichstag which excluded German Jews from citizenship & prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of “German or German-related blood.” Among the many other laws making Jews personae non gratae to German fascism, the names of Jewish soldiers killed in World War I could not be placed on war memorials.
It got worse from there over the next few years under ‘Aryanization’ where they were more forcibly segregated from other Germans & excluded from public schools & universities, cinemas, theaters, & sports facilities. By 1939, they were forced to carry identity cards indicating they were Jews & their passports were stamped with ‘J’ to identify them as Jews.
German Nazism is the political model India, Israel, Burma are all using in their implementation of citizenship laws. It may seem the easiest way to ethnically cleanse the population & when that fails, they have all resorted to outright genocide involving crimes of unimaginable savagery. China has another model which involves concentration camps & forcible conversion of Uyghur to bots of the Chinese Communist system.
Not only have these genocides not spared the children, but they have targeted them. This is 14-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, a Polish Catholic girl in her Auschwitz identity photo (it is not clear why her & her mother were picked up; they may have had Jewish ancestry). Within three months, both her & her mother were executed. She didn’t understand what was happening when this mug shot was taken & in her terror began to cry. The woman concentration camp guard beat her on the face with a stick.
(Photo by Wilhelm Brasse, photographer at Auschwitz)
Twitter storm today & tomorrow for Kashmir using hastags & themes below:
#KashmirReferendum
#SanctionsForIndia
#StandWithKashmir
#CABProtests
#CABBill2019
Themes for tweets
• Referendum in Kashmir.
• Action from the world community against Indian occupation of Kashmir
• Boycott,Disinvestment &Sanctions as part of political negotiations.
• Stop attacking the culture and identity of Kashmiris & Muslims
• Stop religious discrimination & Respect democratic norms
Would the Indian liberal & socialist who took umbrage at my comparison between German fascism & Hindutva fascism regarding Kashmir dare step forward to defend their view now that jackboots are all over India & the internet is being turned off?
“They failed to bring Indian situation to Kashmir; now they decided to bring Kashmir-like situation to India. The north-east is just a start. Army in and internet out.”
–Rajiv Kumar
More on Facebook’s ‘community standards’. Muslim-hating meets its community standards. Kashmiri & Palestinian solidarity are in violation.
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.