Monthly Archives: September 2020
It was with trepidation that I began to watch the Netflix series ‘Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich’ because I feared it would be yellow journalism or the form of pornography that pretends to be repulsed by sexual exploitation but is in fact titillated by it. On the contrary, it is an intelligent documentary which exposes the corruption of political & legal officials who turn a blind eye to child prostitution & trafficking & who pander to power & wealth. One of the most salient things about the documentary is that it restores dignity to the hundreds of young girls, now grown women, who were victims of Epstein & other perverts of considerable wealth & political power. It is a documentary well worth watching.
Street graffiti & murals are being painted all over the world to honor George Floyd & protest racist violence against the Black community in the US. This mural done by Palestinians was painted on the apartheid wall. Zionists & Hindutva nationalists are having a lot of trouble with this new movement since so many activists make the links between racist violence in the US & the occupations of Palestine & Kashmir. One Zionist writer wrote “Jews share the pain of those who protest racism. But extremists who link this crime to Israel’s efforts to defend itself against Palestinian terror are spreading a big lie.” Given the long history of pogroms & the holocaust, it is absolutely true that Jews share the scourge of persecution. As a result, they have long played a progressive role in civil rights struggles. But Zionism is corruptive because as an ideology & political force it threw in its lot with colonialism & white supremacy in order to broker a better deal for Jews. They used terrorist death squads to forcibly evict Palestinians from their lands & then vilify Palestinian resistance to colonialism as terrorism.
You see the same political disconnect with liberal Indian nationalists who are all over social media with their ‘Black lives matter’ placards whilst defending India’s occupation of Kashmir as a fight against ‘Pakistani-sponsored terrorism’. Assadists have the same reaction to the George Floyd mural done in Idlib by participants in the Syrian Arab Spring because one of the artists said George Floyd’s death reminded him of the Syrian civilians who were “killed by suffocation after the Syrian regime hit them with chemical weapons.”
When it comes to liberation politics, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t play both sides of the street. You can’t be for ethnic, religious, nationalist supremacy in one place & against it in another. It isn’t just a matter of cognitive dissonance. Some Zionists, Hindutva nationalists, & Assadists only give lip service to the Black civil rights movement to dissemble, to make it seem as if there are affinities between hate-mongering, racism, genocide & the liberation struggles against them. Is it also because Zionists, Hindutva, & Assadists cannot so effectively use Islamophobia to impugn the Black community because of the dominance of Christianity?
(Photo of Palestinian mural on apartheid wall)
Probably because they’re terrified of the massive show of Black power, white supremacist males on social media are taking up the ‘George Floyd challenge’ where they pose in smiling photos of themselves with their knees on the neck of another ass to mock the death of George Floyd. It began in the UK & is now an internet trend in the US. Such mockery of the suffering of the oppressed is deranged but it is not original. Kashmiris well remember that a prominent BJP spokesperson & businessman put out tee-shirts with the inscription ‘Indian Army saving your ass whether you like it or not’ to honor Indian Army Major Gogoi who in 2017 tied Kashmiri Farooq Ahmad Dar to the hood of an army jeep & drove him around Badgam, Kashmir. The tee-shirt had a picture depicting Farooq tied to the jeep. The young man sustained a fracture on his shoulder & serious injuries to his back that caused him pain a year after the incident. His sister said the incident & humiliation shattered him physically & emotionally.
Mocking the suffering & deaths of the oppressed is a supremacist thing, a way for the blunt intellects of amoral racists & nationalists to establish equilibrium when they’re terrified of political resistance. It’s a way for them to feel they have the upper hand. The answer is not to arrest or ban these creeps from social media but to out-mobilize them & maximize their terror by organizing the political power of the Black community & of Kashmiris.
(Photo on left is some shameless dirtball taking the George Floyd challenge; photo on right in BJP tee-shirt mocking Farooq Ahmad Dar)
“Never ever thought this would happen in the US!! Especially growing up in Kashmir and reading newspapers and magazines from the US with articles and news reports lecturing the whole world about human rights. We got the impression that the US is this wonderland where all citizens regardless of differences have so many rights that Kashmiris could only dream of (“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”) Turns out the weak and minorities in US are no better off than we are in Kashmir under Indian oppression!”
–Bashir Ahmad
This is the Lincoln Monument in DC on June 2nd as Trump deployed the military to keep civil rights protesters away. This monument is the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic ‘I have a dream’ speech to 250,000 civil rights protesters in 1963. It’s where Marian Anderson sang in 1939 after being refused an indoor stage because she was Black. Those were remarkable moments in US civil rights history which the US government led by Trump is trying to erase so Blacks can be driven back to Jim Crow apartheid. This is a call to arms for all who are committed to ending racism & who are committed to the US Bill of Rights. It is long-since time to reclaim the Lincoln Monument for civil rights & civil liberties.
(Photo by Martha Raddatz, ABC News)
This is a very important development: first, that Trump threatens to send the US Army against civil rights protesters & secondly, that some of them along with National Guards will refuse to shoot at us for protesting.
Mahrukh Inayet, an Indian journalist who co-anchors with rabid nationalist Arnab Goswami, is calling on all Kashmiris to take a knee in front of Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) to ask for forgiveness as part of truth & reconciliation. She’s part of the nationalist campaign to falsify the history of the conflict with Pandits as if all Kashmiris, who were at the time sustaining occupation, are responsible for the exodus of Pandits. There can be no reconciliation if there is no damn truth. Kashmiris cannot be asked to prostrate before a lie.
But who will take a knee in front of Kashmiris to ask for truth & reconciliation for the tens of thousands killed, held as political prisoners, tortured, raped, forcibly disappeared, dumped in mass graves, killed, injured, disfigured by pellet guns? Mahrukh Inayet does not honor George Floyd but makes a mockery of everything he stands for.
This is a scene from the search & seizure operation last night in Kangan village in the Pulwama district of Kashmir: a woman standing in front of her half-destroyed home & dead cow. Apparently, cows in Kashmir are not as sacred as those in India. The joint operation was launched by the J&K police, & two kinds of Indian Army special forces (CRPF & RR).
Indian media headlines the operation for killing three ‘terrorists’ (Kashmiri media calls them militants) but Indian media has a formula for reporting these brutal, & almost daily, operations. This is the second search & seizure operation in Pulwama in the last couple days. One Indian source does report that the army & police were conducting house to house searches in Kangan not long after midnight when they came under heavy fire from the militants–though it’s not clear how heavy three militants with a rifle apiece can subject three entire units of soldiers. Indian media is so focused on portraying the Kashmiri freedom struggle as terrorist that they may not realize how damning it is that the army & police move hundreds of men into a district & drag people out of bed in the middle of the night to search, ransack, loot, vandalize their homes & kill their livestock. That would be defined as terrorism by most people in the world & it’s an outrage that Kashmiris are subjected to such predations.
Stand with Kashmiris & demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Indian forces from Kashmir.
(Photo by Kamran Yousuf)