Life under quarantine: a love story.

Syrian health officials continue to deny that coronavirus has trespassed the Syrian border. But with over a million refugees living in compromised conditions without sufficient food or medical care, it is unlikely that situation will prevail, if in fact they are not lying. Given that Syria & Russia are bombing the refugee camps & medical facilities, it’s unlikely health officials know what’s going on health-wise with the refugees. Just the threat of coronavirus gives Turkey another justification for maintaining the lockdown on the border against safe passage of Syrians into Turkey.

The EU & European fascist & nationalist forces are already making the case against refugees from Turkey into Greece by claiming they might be carrying the virus. It would be surprising, given their health, housing, nutritional conditions & high levels of stress, that some of the refugees were not vulnerable or carrying the virus. There may or may not be coronavirus cases in Syria but there certainly are in refugees coming from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan. That is no good reason to prevent them from entering Greece but speaks to the urgent need for medical, housing, & food programs to assist them in seeking asylum in Europe. Instead, what refugees are faced with in Greece is squalid overcrowded concentration camp conditions that breed not just disease but demoralization. Just because the EU, fascists, & nationalists vilify refugees for suffering health problems, that is no reason for human rights activists to back off demanding open borders. No human being is alien to us.

The photo is a refugee & his little girl arriving in Lesbos, Greece on February 29, 2020.

(Photo by Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty)

They haven’t yet written postmortems on the Sanders campaign & already his supporters are inching their way toward supporting Biden who will clearly be the ‘lesser evil’ candidate against Trump. His cognitive decline should not be a problem–after Trump, even dementia looks good–because Ronald Reagan was in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s during his second term. If you end up feeling compelled to vote for Biden, could you at least show some dignity & integrity & not try to whitewash his racism & misogyny or claim he’s the choice of the working class? A good section of the working class hasn’t voted in decades because they don’t see a modicum of difference between the candidates of the two parties.

In response to the images & reports of over a million Syrians, a majority women & children, fleeing Syria & Russia’s scorched earth bombing of Idlib & living in canvas tents in sub-zero temperatures, Australian Assadist Tim Anderson posted this photo on Twitter & FB with the caption, “Shave the children of Idlib”. What kind of political mentality mocks the suffering of children or attempts to identify them with terrorists? To show the fascistic mentality of his cult followers, many of them called for beheading or bathing these men in acid.

What should not be missed in Anderson’s attempt to vilify Syrian children as terrorists is the arrant racism & Islamophobia. A brown-skinned man with a beard in a war zone is not necessarily an ISIS, al-Qaeda, or Islamist militiaman. But this portrayal of the opposition to Assad is the bread & butter of Assadist propagandists & cultists & is straight out of the US Pentagon manual for the so-called ‘war on terror’. Where did Anderson get these photos? From Assad’s propagandist-in-chief Bouthaina Shaaban or Fares Shehabi, the creep who called for assassinating a 7-year-old girl?

Stand with the Syrian Arab Spring & demand the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces & mercenaries from Syria.

(Collage from Assad’s propaganda office via Tim Anderson)

Louis Armstrong answers those who from grief & lack of vision call for ‘culling the human herd’, as though that cynical idea was a solution to human suffering. He sang this in 1967 at a time of high hopes for humanity with the US Civil Rights Movement, the international anti-Vietnam War movement, & international women’s movement taking center stage in politics. It is our united actions that give humanity hope, not the opportunist rhetoric of politicians seeking office. Somewhere, somehow in the past fifty-plus years many lost their faith in other human beings & we need to rebuild that. Muslims, from the Arab Spring uprisings to the protests for the Rohingya & Kashmiris, show the way.

“Kapil Gujjar, the fascist Hindutva extremist who opened fire in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh area on February 1 was greeted with hugs and music from his sympathisers after he was released on bail by a Delhi court on Saturday.

Gujjar had fired bullets in Shaheen Bagh, which has emerged as a centre of protests against the divisive Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC).”

–Boycott NRC

https://thecognate.com/naked-dance-of-injustice-shaheen-bagh-shooter-greeted-with-hugs-music-after-getting-released-on-bail/?

Never has narcissism combined with idiocy to greater disadvantage.

Mir Suhail Qadiri will be speaking on resistance & art in Kashmir at Brown University sponsored by the Kashmiri solidarity group. The event will be held March 19th at 1:00 pm.

They say there’s a run on toilet paper & sterile hand wipes since the coronavirus broke out. Just wondering how toilet paper provides protection against the virus. Or is it unseemly to ask?

Modi’s state visit with Sheikh Hasina has been cancelled. Nice work, Bangladeshi brothers & sisters!