“The pogrom begins. Muslims are killed and butchered and burnt alive. Their homes, shops are looted. The entire police force of the state ensures that those killing are provided with all sorts of ammunitions and armours and safety. This goes on for days.

Liberals find a Muslim scapegoat and paint him as someone who was involved in violence. The whole anti Muslim pogrom becomes a clash. Then isolated stories of Hindus helping Muslims are strategically used.

The whole incident now becomes a clash started by bad people of both the communities while the good people of both the communities are in total love with each other.

The state sponsored, state led, well crafted anti Muslim pogrom is reduced to a clash between two communities. Liberals are the part of the problem. Rajdeeps and Barkhas are no better than Kapils and Amits. NDTVs and Republics come on same page.”

–Sharjeel Usmani

“Kashmiris are giving their lives for the idea of Kashmir. The idea of Kashmir. The freedom of Kashmir. The Kashmir. Cashmere. cashmir. Kaschmere. Kasheer. Cushmeer. Its Kashmir. Only Cashmere. Only a fool will think, after all that happened in Kashmir, we will forget Kashmir. We are Kashmiris and forcing any identity on us will turn that identity into a joke. Repeat it. K as in Kashmir. Cashmere. Only Kashmir. Remember. living in a delusion doesn’t change ground realities. People know it well what Kashmiris want, they simply support forcing Kashmiris to accept what they’re not.”

–Zachriah Sulayman

“This work I did…on Syrian torture victims in a refugee camp…it shows the children who are thrown out of their own lands as the witness of the cruelties.”

–Rollie Mukherjee

#Socialmedia #drama
#india #kashmirseige

By Mir Suhail Qadiri

An account by a partisan of the Syrian Arab Spring.

Hi Everyone ,

I am M… I am from Syria ,Idlib, Marat Alnouman. I was an English teacher in one of Idlib’s school.

In 2011 the revolution started in Syria. At that time, I was studying in Albaath University in Homs. I was there in the first demonstration of Homs in 2011. The demonstration was peaceful one, we just walked in the street with empty hands. In that demonstration, on the first day, Assad’s regime shot us and killed civilians. There were demonstrations in most cities in Syria, and Assad’s regime killed civilians everywhere. I was arrested in Homs, and I was detained for 14 days. It was so awful for me, there was all kinds of torture imaginable.

My father paid a bribe, and I was released from the jail. At that time my city Marat Alnouman was bombed a demonstration was in progress. I came back there to join the peaceful demonstrations against Assad.

FSA was created at that time to protect the civilians and a lot of parts of Syria was released from Assad. And later on ISIS and HTS appeared. They started fighting against FSA, but they didn’t fight against the Assad regime. HTS and ISIS were one part of Assad regime. They withdrew from a lot of “free” areas to allow Assad to retake control. Assad recaptured most territory with their help.

Right now, HTS are still in the city of Idlib. HTS has withdrawn from Marat Alnouman for the Assad regime. The people here in Idlib hate HTS the same way as they hate Assad. We have many demonstrations against HTS the same way as we did against Assad. Because of the so much bombing by Assad, and so many arrests, a lot of people have left Syria towards different countries. This is especially the case with Turkey who received about 3.5million refugees. Through the last four months more than one million were displaced from Northern Hamma , Southern and Eastern Idlib and Western Aleppo. This was because of the Assad regime’s and Russian warplanes which attacked and killled only the civilian population. Those one million moved near the Turkish border. Most of us live in tents inside the camps with very bad situation.

We will go back to our homes when Assad regime leaves them.

To my mind, there have been no satisfactory analyses of Turkey’s game plan in Syria. What I do know is that Erdogan cannot simultaneously play a counterrevolutionary role bombing Kurds in Rojava & a revolutionary one in Idlib, no matter how many Syrian bombers Turkey takes out. With Turkish bombers challenging Syrian & Russian warplanes & 7,000 troops on the ground, the word quagmire comes to mind. It is not ‘knee-jerk opposition to militarism’, as many claim, but the dominance of militarism & power politics over the integrity & survival of the Syrian Arab Spring. Turning Idlib into a war zone confrontation between Turkey, Syria, Russia, Iran, & US-coalition forces does not defend the Syrian revolution, but negates & preempts it & creates tens of thousands more refugees.

According to the NY Times, Turkey is negotiating to get the US-coalition more directly involved against Syrian & Russian air power. The US-coalition & Turkey have long been involved in Syria in the air & on the ground, not to challenge the Assad regime but to defeat the Syrian revolution. Erdogan, who is meeting with Putin tomorrow, has an agreement with Russia to maintain Idlib as a safe zone where civilians fleeing bombing can evacuate. His motivation in challenging Syria may be primarily to maintain the region as a safe zone so that Turkey will not be flooded with more refugees.

In short-term thinking, every time a Syrian bomber is shot down by Turkey we may feel elation. But in long-term thinking, that credulity will destroy the Syrian Arab Spring & kill thousands of civilians in the process.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/world/middleeast/turkey-syria-assault.html?

China forces Uyghur Muslims to relocate & work in factories that produce Nike sneakers. Nike has been previously cited for using child labor. A public boycott of Nike would bring attention to forced labor, child labor, & the persecution of Uyghur in China. Other brands which use forced Uyghur labor: Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen.

The mother of the young man beaten by Indian police & forced to sing the national anthem claims he died in police custody. Was it from the injuries he sustained in the beating, from lack of treatment for those injuries, or from additional beatings by police behind closed doors?

The flight of nearly a million civilians from Idlib to escape Syrian & Russian bombing is the largest exodus since the flight of nearly as many Rohingya fleeing genocide in Burma in 2017. Assadists & Stalinists deny the Rohingya genocide & blame the exodus on Saudi-backed terrorists in the same way they vilify Syrian refugees as terrorists. Today they’re circulating a video of Tulsi Gabbard appealing to her hate-filled constituency by calling Idlib “the biggest & most powerful Al-Qaeda enclave in the world today.” It’s her way of supporting Syrian & Russian scorched earth bombing. Yet Tulsi, who is one of Modi’s biggest fangirls, has not uttered one peep of protest against Hindutva mobs carrying out a pogrom against Muslims in northeast Delhi & has consistently refused to denounce the occupation & lockdown of Kashmir. There is a consistency in the politics of oppression, including not just the hatred of Muslims which motivates the ‘war on terror’ but the glorification of militarism to destroy the struggles of the oppressed.

As the Syrian Arab Spring approaches the final battles against the counterrevolution, Assadist & Stalinist ideologues are boasting that they will write the history of the Syrian revolution against the Assad regime. Their version will likely not include the necessary postmortems on the international left which abandoned all principles to support counterrevolution. Their triumphalism about military defeat in Syria will be short-lived since Syrians, Iraqis, Egyptians, Bahrainis, Yemenis, Afghans will rise again to finally dispose of dictatorships, inequality, & colonialism in the Middle East.

(Photo from Idlib via Syrian Network for Human Rights)

A video of Trump praising Modi not in spite of his persecution of Indian Muslims & lockdown of Kashmir, but because of them.