“Time and time again, I have come across a photograph of my mother carrying a dagger (a knife) in her hand. Whenever there is any news report about her, every media house in India, including the so-called progressive outlets, frequently makes use of such a picture. They do so in order to depict mother as a ‘deranged and distraught religious extremist’. Sadly, some of our own people assent to it as well. But what they do not tell their readers is that mother had encouraged the use of knives by Kashmiri women to resist attempts of sexual abuse by men, especially Indian Armed Forces.
On account of their Islamophobia, frantic violence and irrationality are highlighted as the dominant themes in the portrayal of a politically conscious Muslim woman who opposes India’s colonial regime in her homeland.”

-Ahmed Bin Qasim whose mother & father are both political prisoners

“When This Pandemic Is Over”

When this pandemic is over
We will send you the bullets
You fired into our homes
We will pluck and send you the pellets
You shot into our eyes and bodies
We will send you the broken glasses
Teargas canisters
And our smoke-filled lungs.

When this pandemic is over
We will collect the broken pieces
And burned memories of our homes
We will sing them to the world
So loud, so loud!
Till it wakes you to your senses.

When this pandemic is over
We will haunt you in the middle of night
To show you the soaked handkerchief
On which a grandmother wept all her night
When her child was trapped inside a barn
Fighting you till his last breath and bullet
And then in the morning they both died.

When this pandemic is over
We will throng your courts
With these yet-to-be-born orphans
And those you orphaned
We will keep writing their names
On the walls of your court halls
Till one day their blood waters
Your conscience into life.

When this pandemic is over
We will go out and find our disappeared ones
We will dig mountains and search rivers
Till their bones or bodies are back with us
The children will meet their parents
And speak to their decayed bones
The mothers to their lost sons
Our tears will find existence
When this pandemic is over

–Kashmiri Jibraan Javid

The Trudeau government’s intervention against Palestinians on behalf of Israel should finally lay to rest any claims Trudeau has to respect. He’s a smarmy, cry on demand kind of guy who panders to Canadian capitalism & to state power & is decidedly not a man of political principles who stands with the oppressed.

This article is about Trudeau’s intervention with the ICC against Palestinians: http://www.palestinechronicle.com/on-the-icc-and-canadian-government-hypocrisy/?

(Photo is Trudeau pandering during a February 2018 trip to India)

It should be said that whilst politicians look like criminally insane misogynists & Islamophobes now for imposing & enforcing laws against the Muslim veil, after we emerge from this coronavirus pandemic they will look like complete asses. For the flunkeys who support them, do you still insist on seeing a woman’s face when you talk to her? And does a woman who doesn’t want you looking at her have the right to spit in your eye?

(Photos of improvised coronavirus protection from The Hook)

An Amnesty International petition demanding India release Kashmiri political prisoners because they are imperiled by coronavirus. Please take a moment to sign & share as part of the campaign on behalf of political prisoners.
While recent steps taken by Indian authorities to decongest prisons in an effort to contain the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak are welcome, the Government should release all unjustly detained prisoners as a matter of priority.

https://amnesty.org.in/news-update/india-arbitrarily-detained-kashmiri-prisoners-must-be-freed/?

Rollie Mukherjee “did this drawing for the book “Kala Ghoda poems” by Arun Kolatkar(2004) which is translated into Gujarati by Hemang Desai (2020)This work is for the poem “Meera” It brings in the people who built the city and their labour is never acknowledged.(Those who can read Gujarati can refer Hemang Desai ‘s post for the complete poem in Gujarati)”

For many years, I reported about constant, almost daily slum fires in India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, Nigeria, Brazil. They were usually blamed on pirated electricity, faulty cooking facilities, tinderbox building materials & on the surface that makes sense. But residents challenged those determinations often claiming it was arson for purposes of slum clearance & gentrification. It was difficult to do long-distance forensics on very flimsy reporting by local fire officials. But my conclusion, based on studying dozens of fires as well as I could, was that residents were almost certainly right to call it arson to prevent the spread of slums on prime urban real estate. If you think it farfetched, arson was also used in US cities in the 1970s to clear slums for gentrification. In all of these fires, many men, women, & children were burned to death. Fire & government officials cover for developers & there have been almost no cases of prosecution, even when people burned to death.

Along with ubiquitous fires, there are hundreds of pitched street battles, particularly in the Philippines, between slum residents & police using bull dozers, tear gas, truncheons to forcibly evict them to homelessness.

Now, there is concern that over one-billion slum residents in the world will be neglected in healthcare programs during the coronavirus pandemic. Of course they will be neglected because using a triage ‘culling the herd’ mentality, governments now have another strategy for killing off slum residents. With the removal of slums, developers can move in to build upscale shopping malls, tourist five-star hotels, golf courses. This is not a dystopian or cynical vision but the actual strategy employed by developers & governments around the world.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/opinion/coronavirus-slums.html?

“Tale of a fallen paradise:
A wretched wizard from a distant land had his lecherous eyes on a land called paradise and invaded it…
Had few under his spell and let loose the creatures of dark on the rest ..
Exhibited black powers of arson and plunder…
But could never beat rivers and winds into submission..
Dwellers now await and yearn for a blessed being to vanquish the wizard and his spell.”

–Kashmiri Tahir Khan Hamidi

Judging from the resources used in this analysis, this organization is not a crank libertarian conspiracy group like Global Research. They don’t claim but suggest based on their research that the origins of Covid-19 may not be in the wet markets of China so much as China’s industrial farming of wildlife. It matters that scientists get to the bottom of this since industrial farming rooted in neoliberal agriculture policies is more & more a blight to the food supply around the world.

https://grain.org/e/6437?

Not that it stops glib commentators, but it’s quite challenging to draw political conclusions from election returns. The most significant part of any analysis is that a majority of Americans have not voted for decades because of disaffection with the two parties. Other than that, the demographics can be quite confusing since the data is unreliable. Thus it is curious that postmortems on the Sanders’ campaign by his supporters all assert that he “made mass working-class politics possible again in America.” Apparently, the majority of those in the working class who actually vote chose Biden over Sanders & those who habitually do not vote did not get off their asses to change that. So it would be useful if Sanders supporters could elaborate for the skeptical how he advanced working class politics in the US.