An unsparing article by Gideon Levy on how Israeli occupying forces shoot to maim or kill Palestinian children.
Daily Archives: February 12, 2020
Stand With Kashmir’s tribute to Maqbool Bhat on the anniversary of his hanging as a political prisoner of India on February 11th, 1984.
Today, Kashmiris commemorate the 1984 hanging of Maqbool Bhat, founder of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front and one of the most beloved leaders in Kashmir’s freedom struggle. To this day, India has still not returned his remains to Kashmir.
For a detailed account of Maqbool Bhat’s Life and Legacy please read this important two-part piece in Wande Magazine:
http://www.wandemag.com/the-life-and-times-of-maqbool-bhat-part-one/?
http://www.wandemag.com/the-life-and-times-maqbool-bhat-part-two/?
Today, along with Kashmiris around the world, we commemorate the hanging of Kashmiri Maqbool Bhat (also spelled Butt) on February 11th, 1984 in Tihar prison, New Delhi at the age of 46. He is of the same political stature as Malcolm X among the giants of the human struggle against oppression.
https://kashmiriat.com/maqbool-butt-from-birth-to-death-a-brief-biography/?
An article about the redoubtable Israeli lawyer & socialist Lea Tsemel & the documentary titled “Advocate” about her work defending Palestinians.
Graffiti political art played a prominent role in all of the Arab Spring uprisings, including Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Tunisia, as it still does in Syria & now in Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan. Most of the graffiti has been vandalized, demolished or painted over in the counterrevolutions against the uprisings & only some has been preserved in photographs. Graffiti is a distinct feature of popular resistance to tyranny, as we also see in Kashmir & on the apartheid wall in Palestine. There have been may thoughtful & insightful articles about what the phenomenon represents. This article is about graffiti done by women artists in Lebanon, Sudan, & Iraq whilst it has generally been seen as a male genre. The rise of women graffiti artists probably reflects the leading role of women in political resistance.
Female artists are not only leaving a mark on the historically male-dominated graffiti scene in the region, but are pioneering their own digital form of revolutionary art.
A Winter Night
Inside my 10/12 feet mudroom
Four things vie for space─
My poplar body, mother’s spinning wheel,
Heirloom from her disappeared brother,
Old books bartered out of plastic shoes,
Blank posters pilfered from deodar poles
And a ragged mattress, an old quilt rolled
Borrowed from grandpa’s deathbed;
As the night stretches its big black arms
Like an eagle perching atop a chinar tree;
I trust my body to its vast darkness
Unfolding the mattress, over it quilt cold.
My both eyes close, only half scene follows─
The cosmic force wakes up angry in haste
Inside the room of a yawning universe
And falls down as snow on our cowshed’s
Shaky rooftop; ‘I shall break icicles’, I smile
Rubbing my eyes; the wheel stares at me
Like a dying day slipping into darkness
While two lines from an opened book read─
“Memory hangs like a wart on my face
It is visible, there cannot be an escape!”
©Ashaq Hussain Parray
This India Conference at Harvard is likely part of an orchestrated & systematic propaganda campaign to win support for colonialism & occupation in Kashmir.
An article about the February 9, 2013 hanging of Kashmiri Afzal Guru for conspiracy to blow up the Indian parliament, a crime for which he was almost certainly framed.
In standard American English, proper nouns are capitalized. Thus, unlike media, I capitalize Black as the name of an ethnic group–like French, Kashmiri, Chinese, or Native American. I don’t use the term African-American since coming out of the Civil Rights & Black power movement most Blacks I know proudly call themselves Black & because I believe it is an attempt to disassociate from ‘Black power’ & ‘Black is beautiful’.
In my lifetime, Blacks have been called Negroes, Blacks, African-Americans & countless hateful terms. Such conflict over what to call someone & the level of abuse proper names are subjected to is only an issue with the oppressed, including ethnicities, oppressed castes, women, LGBTs. A Black coworker of mine once said about being called African-American, ‘They keep changing our names to make us think something has changed about the way they treat us.’
The only time I don’t capitalize black is when it is used as an adjective, like ‘black & brown-skinned’. I never use the terms ‘race’ or ‘racial’ since I believe different human races do not exist. That would be white supremacist junk science. There is only one human race with truly beautiful physical differences.
“Assad or We Burn the Country” by journalist Sam Dagher is one of the most comprehensive books written about the Syrian Arab Spring & the counterrevolution against it. Dagher begins with Hafez Al-Assad’s rise to power in 1963 & consolidation of a police state. His psychological profile of Bashar Al-Assad, including the arranged marriage to Asma, is relevant mostly because it shows how the regime uses their westernized personas to support Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ propaganda.
One of the strengths of the book is Dagher’s discussion of the role of Iran & Hezbollah in the counterrevolution. His focus is on the power politics involved so he isn’t as cogent in discussing the causes & rise of the Arab Spring though his descriptions of police state terrorism employed by the regime under both Assads is overwhelming. For a closer look at the emergence & character of the Arab Spring, it is necessary to read “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution & War” by Leila Al-Shami & Robin Yassin-Kassab.
What’s important about understanding the role of Iran & its proxy Hezbollah in Syria is that it discredits an ‘orientalist’ attitude toward Middle East regimes & acknowledges their agency in counterrevolution within their own countries & in other Middle Eastern countries. Rohini Hensman’s book “Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, & the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism” has a very cogent analysis of the role of Russia, Iran & Hezbollah but her book is deeply problematic because of her peculiar understanding of the relationship of militarism to capitalism & her belief that the US-coalition can employ a humanitarian militarism to support the Arab Spring. In that regard, Hensman, Dagher, Al-Shami, & Yassin-Kassab all fail to see that behind the seemingly contradictory role of the US-coalition is collaboration with the regime, Russia, Iran, & Hezbollah in crushing the Arab Spring.
Dagher has a coherent description of how the Arab Spring became militarized in defense against regime massacres & slaughter but also because of meddling & intervention by Qatar & Saudi Arabia. He doesn’t elaborate sufficiently how Qatar & Saudi intervention along with regime machinations introduced ‘Islamist’ (for want of a less loaded term) elements into the counterrevolution, including al-Qaeda & ISIS, & even into defense of the Arab Spring uprising. Al-Shami, Yassin-Kassab, & Hensman address the militarization primarily as a matter of self-defense but it is important to understand how Qatar & the Saudis compromised the Arab Spring by their intervention, leading to the ‘head-choppers’ narrative employed by Assadists & Stalinists.
If one wants to understand the counterrevolution in Syria, “Assad or We Burn the Country” is a brilliant & comprehensive place to start.