It is deeply disturbing to read that anti-fascist protesters in India are asking Kashmiris not to raise the issue of the occupation but to go elsewhere. It is important to remember that the Indian government & its covert operatives are working tirelessly to prevent an alliance between Indian Muslims, anti-fascists, & Kashmiris, to prevent Indians from recognizing that Indians & Kashmiris face the common enemy of Indian fascism. Social movements are riddled with agents provocateurs, many of them in leading positions. Those who ask Kashmiris to be silent or leave should themselves be thrust unceremoniously out of the movement since their complicity with the Kashmiri occupation weakens the struggle against fascism.
Daily Archives: February 11, 2020
A Kashmiri mother talks about the arrest of her 22-year-old son who went out during curfew to get her medicine. Though he was not protesting, he was picked up & sent to a prison in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh which is about 1,287 km/800 miles from Kashmir.
“Solidarity with Kashmiri self-determination is the essential factor that makes any struggle against fascism in India a genuine one. Unless redefining India means building a country that does not colonise or occupy Kashmir and other lands of resistance against the nation-state, why waste time and face danger by challenging the Hindutva idea of India?”
–Satyadeep Satya
“After bipin rawat, dilbagh singh, head of police in Kashmir has supported the idea of setting up internment camps to detain Kashmiri children. This is not an idea but a preparation to execute such devious plans. The violence against Kashmiris is being mainstreamed and ideas put forth to test the waters before they actually execute it. You must understand how much hate there is being spread that they have the gall to justify violence over our kids in the open air. The only ones radicalized here are these two men who try to legalize violence over 10-year-old kids.
**small caps because they are not names of people but of furniture**”
–Kashmiri Zachriah Sulayman
For good reason, many are ridiculing the NY Times presidential endorsement of Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar who presents herself as a liberal. In 2000, ninety animal rights activists, including myself, were arrested for peacefully protesting experimentation on live animals outside a conference co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota which engages in considerable & lucrative experimentation on living animals. She was the county attorney in charge of prosecuting us. It turned out that nearly half of those 90 arrested were undercover agents used later to testify against us in court.
After being assaulted with tear gas, about 100 protesters wearing sandals & tee-shirts were surrounded by over 800 police in riot gear with truncheons. We sat down on the ground to put ourselves in a defensive position because it was clear they were going to charge us. I approached the police in charge to say we did not want a confrontation & would leave in whatever manner they required. When more than one police officer told me to sit down & shut up, I stood up & addressed the hundreds of spectators outside the police cordon telling them our right to protest was being denied, we wanted to avoid a confrontation, were willing to leave anyway the police determined. After a lengthy stand-off & faced with hundreds of witnesses, the police moved in to arrest us instead of beating us up.
Under the direction of Klobuchar, those arrested were told that to be released we had to sign an agreement not to go in certain parts of Minneapolis, including on the campus of the U of M. Most agreed to sign the form out of fear. I refused, saying we did not have martial law in Minneapolis & no one could tell us where we could or could not go. Those who refused to sign were charged by Klobuchar’s office & put on trial.
What’s important about this confrontation is that it was at a time when US police departments resumed using riot police & SWAT-style policing against peaceful protests. After the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, this confrontation was one of the first exercises to normalize police aggression against peaceful protesters. Such aggression was routine against the Civil Rights Movement but ended during the antiwar protests of the 1970s. The use of excessive force was not so much to protect the U of M profiteering off the suffering of animals but more to test the political environment for using police force against protests.
Several of us were put on trial in Minneapolis. My trial lasted a week with several police & undercover agents testifying against me. Videos showed my conduct to be entirely peaceful, including my speech explaining that we wanted to leave without confrontation. The judge dismissed all charges saying the county attorney (Klobuchar) should never have brought this to trial. Despite the court ruling, ‘retired’ FBI agent Coleen Rowley, who now leads the US antiwar cult, placed an alert on my criminal record for using a weapon of mass destruction which prevents me from getting jobs that require a security clearance.
There is something grotesque about Israel sponsoring the 5th World Holocaust Forum today in Jerusalem whilst conducting genocide against Palestinians. Forty heads of state attended, including Putin, Pence, Macron, a Catholic cardinal, Charles Windsor & a bunch of other European moochocrats. It is not just a gesture of contempt for Palestinians but an insult to those who suffered & died in the Nazi holocaust who would not want their lives to be commemorated with such treachery.
“Merely borrowing slogans from Kashmir is no sign of courage or solidarity.
Indians protesting against repression want democratic rights. Simultaneously, they ask Kashmiris to leave & protest elsewhere. They are afraid of being detained if Kashmiris protest with them….Without making space for directly addressing the harsh truth of Kashmir any democratic revolution in India is hollow. Don’t just adopt our words. Understand them.”
–tweeted by Kashmiri Mirza Saaib Bég @M_S_Beg
The city of Santa Fe, NM has ordered the owner of an adobe wall in the historic preservation district of the city to remove a series of pro-Palestinian murals created by Navajo artist Remy on January 4th. The reason city officials give is that the artist did the murals in digital images pasted on the wall in papier-mâché when city codes require they “must be built of brick, adobe, rock, masonry, wood, coyote fencing, wrought iron, slump block, or similar materials….These provisions do not provide for the application of artwork on paper with starch-paste glue”. The city officials didn’t explain how one creates murals on walls in brick, rock or any of the other specified materials without defying the laws of gravity.
The organization Santa Feans for Justice in Palestine (which includes Jewish activists) has previously used the walls for posters as far back as the 2014 Israeli bombing siege of Gaza. Most of those posters were vandalized or torn down. The local Jewish community is reportedly divided about the murals, with Zionists, led by Rabbi Berel Levertov, claiming they are anti-Semitic. The rabbi wants the genocide of Palestinians whitewashed into scenes depicting Israelis & Palestinians living in peace–a depiction which would necessarily omit those Israeli snipers at the Gaza border shooting down unarmed protesters. According to him, the intention of the murals is “not to promote peace, but to instigate & inspire hate” against Jews. He called the comparison with Native American struggles in the US “unfortunate propaganda” & “just not factually correct, because Jews are Indigenous to the land.”
Another Zionist resident of Santa Fee who claimed the murals played into “age-old dangerous & false anti-Jewish tropes” said “What we fear is that after the murals come the swastikas.” Speaking of age-old tropes, that’s called guilt-baiting, using the Jewish holocaust to justify genocide against Palestinians. What Palestinians fear is that after the snipers come the bombers. In response to the charges of anti-semitism, Remy simply said: “It’s not anti-Semitic to be sympathetic to a humanitarian crisis.”
There was an initial report that the homeowner would be appealing the order to destroy the murals but that doesn’t appear to be the case. He has only a couple days left before they must be removed. He held a meeting with Rabbi Levertov who suggested a presentation with a ‘more balanced’ view of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. That would require Israeli war planes bombing the adobe wall to smithereens. Santa Fe media reports Zionist objection to the murals as protestation against eyesores, politically inflammatory images, hate-mongering. Some have already been partially ruined by vandalism. Let’s call it what it is: cooperation of American Zionists with Israel to cover up its crimes against Palestinians.
(Photos of murals by Navajo artist Remy in solidarity with Palestinians, created January 4th, 2020 on Old Pecos Trail in Santa Fe, NM)
There is a video circulating on Twitter of a wailing Syrian mother helping a White Helmet team collect the scattered remains of her son Muhammad Eid Nour who was killed by Syrian bombers in their village near Aleppo.
Demand the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians.
On the Tulsi Gabbard front: she filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit against Hillary Clinton for calling her a “Russian asset’. Will she sue any of us who also call her a Syrian asset, a Hindutva asset, a Zionist asset, an anti-Semitic & Islamophobic asset? When she tweeted ‘I like Bernie’, over 80,000 socialists liked Gabbard in return. Corrupt politics made strange bedfellows.