Three million Syrian civilians, mostly women & children, are trapped by Syrian & Russian bombing of Idlib province & the adjacent areas. In the past 8 months, over a million have been displaced, including 320,000 in the past two months. While Assadists & Stalinists support this slaughter as the war against ‘Wahhabi/Salafi terrorism’, they are blubbering & eulogizing the Iranian general who orchestrated much of the actual terrorism against Syrians. We have a political crisis when resistance to tyranny is maligned as terrorism & when erstwhile progressive forces have lost their minds in support of tyranny.
Demand the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces & mercenaries from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya.
(Photo of child refugee from Idlib via Anadolu Ajansi)
The courageous young Indian woman holding up the “Free Kashmir” placard at the protest yesterday in support of students attacked by Hindutva mobs at Jawaharlal Nehru University is really riling the Hindutva crowd on Twitter. The specter of Indian Muslims allying with Kashmiris makes them tremble with rage & fear. There should be contingents of such placards.
“Everyone needs to remember: This is not a BJP induced problem. This torture and atmosphere has existed in Kashmir for the last 72 years, regardless of who was in power. Even Indians don’t consider us part of their country–not afforded the same protections and liberties.”
You don’t have to be up on diplomatic protocol to understand that Putin was intentionally humiliating Assad by paying a visit to Damascus & summoning Assad to Russian military headquarters rather than be hosted at Assad’s palace. It’s not the matter of venue but of who is calling the shots politically & militarily. The room is full of Russian military officers except for the guy at Assad’s left elbow who is the Syrian defense minister sitting in a child’s seat.
The diplomatic slights in this are not that interesting but what it signifies is the subordinate position of Assad/Syria to Putin/Russia. Assad mortgaged his regime to Russian oligarchs, the Iranian theocracy, Hezbollah, & US-NATO in order to defeat the Syrian Arab Spring. Chickens will come home to roost for the Assad regime in the so-called reconstruction of Syria. The Syrian people have already paid an immense price for this unholy alliance.
Politics are stressful & part of protecting yourself from burnout is avoiding people who bring you down. I have a lot of friends active on Facebook who in years of association haven’t given me the time of day, maybe because I’m too brash, maybe because I’m too radical, maybe because I’m not of their class. It feels like passive-aggression & it’s not comfortable to me. So to protect myself from indignity & the bum’s rush, I will be unfriending them. A woman has to do what a woman has to do to not get burned out.
Wonder when Assadists & Stalinists will stop their unseemly blubbering over Suleimani. They’re carrying on worse than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did at Suleimani’s funeral & he knew the guy. It’s kind of like the blubbering over Stalin’s death. Russians were afraid not to cry so they used spit as fake tears so they wouldn’t be sent to the gulag. Iranians protested by tens of thousands but it was probably less over Suleimani than over fear of US war against Iran.
Hopefully no one actually believes that a vote by the Iraqi Parliament will force the withdrawal of US troops. We should not forget that Madeleine Albright said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were ‘worth it’ to accomplish US policy goals in Iraq. We should not forget what US-NATO forces did to Mosul under the guise of taking out ISIS. Tens of thousands of civilians were displaced, arrested, buried in rubble from US bombing. The US occupation is a monstrous, merciless one which will only be ended by Iraqi political power. The only political power that can force a US-NATO & Iranian withdrawal is the Iraqis who are protesting in the streets in concert with principled antiwar opposition around the world.
