This is an interesting contribution by Umar Lateef Misgar on the important role China plays in neoliberal economics & politics on almost every continent. This article covers only one aspect, but an important aspect, of the role China is playing in Kashmir. China’s economic & political involvement in Africa, Latin America, South Asia, & elsewhere needs to be exposed & elaborated to fully understand the competitive forces driving capitalism into a vortex of crisis.

(PS: Only because of the importance of this issue, I put aside my objections to AlAraby journal for publishing the scurrilous rubbish by Sam Hamad attacking BDS & the designation of Israel as apartheid. Apparently not all of its editors are reactionary.)

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2017/7/31/is-china-the-next-big-player-in-kashmir

Was looking down the Facebook wall of someone who requested me as a friend. It all went south when I came across a post about the incident of the Indian officer who used a Kashmiri man as a human shield on the front of his jeep. The post regretted that the video of the event went viral, delivering “a humiliating blow” to the public image of the Indian army, wrongly discrediting it “as an army of occupation that cowered behind human shields.” It went on to say most Kashmiris respect the Indian army “as an impartial & restrained force” & then suggested that opening fire to “disperse the mob” might have been a better course of action for the officer to safeguard the army’s honor.

First we laugh, then we cry, then we block. Amen.

Apparently, some find my style of polemic overly-aggressive, obnoxious, even abusive. Such high praise & flattery isn’t necessary, but thank you anyway. This is something I wrote during the height of Israel’s 2014 carpet bombing siege of Gaza which directly targeted children & then brought out a deluge of apologists, including Elie Wiesel, who accused Palestinians of using their children as human shields. Would a kinder, gentler approach to such scurrilous crap have been more suitable?

This must be what Zionist apologists for ethnic cleansing mean when they claim Palestinians use their children as human shields. This man has no where to go with his small child since Israel is taking out homes, markets, mosques, hospitals, & UN refugee centers. There’s no place to go, no place to keep your children safe & where you aren’t a sitting duck. But hasbara is clinging to that human shield story because it is frantic to undo the damage of hundreds of photos of mangled & dismembered Palestinian children. Those wee martyrs have become Israel’s undoing. May they RIP.

Some witnessing this carnage are bereft that massive protests haven’t stopped Israel but if you think Israel & it’s allies aren’t sweating bullets about those protests, take a look at some of the war propaganda Zionist apologists are frantically barfing out. Some of it is completely indistinguishable from burlesque. Brigitte Gabriel, a shady, half-baked character, is the queen of farce in this regard. Gabriel, who has a couple names (probably from running from the law), is a hateful Islamophobe who claims she was used as a human shield by Palestinians in Lebanon. According to her, Palestinian fighters (in 1975-76) would park rocket launchers in front of each house, shoot off a cannon, & move on to the next house to make the evening news. You don’t have to be an artillery expert to recognize folly.

She’s a nasty piece of work too, claiming Palestinians “cannot win militarily against Israel so what they do is they use their own children as disposable collateral in order to win the war of public opinion against Israel.” She’s described by book venders as “fiercely articulate & passionately committed” when the pithy “unhinged” would be much more suitable. But when it comes to finding people to peddle this crap, beggars can’t be choosers. Hasbara takes what it can get.

This is the hay day of the Islamophobe who usually live isolated lives since even feral cats & mad dogs want nothing to do with them. A case in point would be witless, right-wing comedian Pat Condell, the UK’s own version of the contemptible Bill Maher. He posted a several-minute rant hating on Arabs who he calls “a bloody nuisance to human civilization.” Our man has no respect for anything except the sound of his own croaking. In denouncing Palestinians for using their kids as human shields he claims Hamas used child labor to build the tunnels between Gaza & Israel. Where did he get that information since Israel claims it didn’t know about those tunnels? Does our man have metaphysical sources of intelligence? Or like the rest of hasbara, does he simply make stuff up? It’s clear now why the mad dogs want no part of him, not even a ragged bone.

Hasbara thinks it really snagged a live one when they interveiwed retired Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British troops in Afghanistan. To enlightened minds, not the best authority to address justice but again, beggars can’t be choosers. This interview is where you confirm crackpot Zionism has taken over the hasbara factory. He claims–contrary to IDF press releases–that Israel did not bomb a hospital & refugee center in Gaza; they were in fact bombed by misfired Hamas rockets. The rare (& entirely questionable) images of Hamas rocket damage in Israel are the size of potholes. Is our man actually claiming that one of those took out an entire hospital & a refugee center?

The only thing of value this military servant of neoliberal colonialism says is that the people of Britain have been deeply affected by the photographs of Palestinian children. To counter that, he claims Hamas falsifies these photos & includes images of Israeli children as dead Palestinian kids. His lies are even topping the state of Israel which has not claimed any deaths from Hamas except among the occupying soldiers.

This human shield story is obvious crap but it’s all Israel has got left. So this sorry-assed fool claims the high number of children killed in Gaza are because Hamas used them as human shields as a “key element of their strategy.” Listen to the jackass in his own words: “They want to lure & force Israel to kill civilians. And so you see images of dead babies, dead boys on the beach, women screaming about their children, & no reality can overcome those images. It’s understandable in a way, because it is heart-wrenching, I’ve seen firsthand what shrapnel can do to a baby, & it’s horrifying, & the problem is that there’s no reference, no open-mindedness to the fact that the only reason these children have been killed is because of Hamas’ aggression towards Israel.” The devil made them do it!

It isn’t that Hamas uses kids as a key element in their military strategy but that hasbara uses that racist accusation drawn from the rancid well of 19th century colonialism as a key element in their war propaganda.

The most powerful way to answer this racist rubbish is to continue public protests denouncing Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The official lies aren’t stacking up, millions of people have seen the photos of small Palestinian children & know that something stinks in the state of Israel. It’s up to us to hammer home the truth & stand for justice.

Stand publicly for Palestinian justice! Honor the economic boycott of Israel (barcode beginning 729).

(Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP)

“Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

This iconic line from the Dylan Thomas poem is written on the wall opposite the abandoned Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India that in December 1984 released 27 tons of a toxic, deadly gas because of reckless safety procedures.

Over 500,000 people were exposed to the gas, over 25,000 have died from exposure to date, & over 150,000 survivors are chronically ill & in need of medical care, many with debilitating neurological disorders. The Indian & US courts have allowed Dow Corporation which now owns Union Carbide to walk away from this monstrous crime with complete impunity. Whilst Bhopal activists work out a strategy to force Dow to clean up the environmental damage & compensate victims, including with lifetime medical & other assistance, there is ongoing need to provide medical care.

You can learn more about the Bhopal gas incident & respond to the medical appeal at: http://www.bhopal.org.

How old do you think this Palestinian boy is? No more than his early teens & being manhandled by two Israeli soldiers armed like they were in a war zone. That’s not because the boy was particularly disruptive but because he was part of massive protests against the siege & occupation of the Al Aqsa compound.

Youth, in particular young men but also young women, are specifically targeted for abuse & arrest wherever there is social unrest–whether in the US Black & Latino communities, Palestine, Kashmir, & elsewhere. They are seen as the most threatening to social order because they are most fearless in standing against injustice. Some say it’s because they’re heedless of mortality; others say it’s the ardor of their hatred for injustice. Whatever inspires them is a powerful, almost wondrous, thing.

It is a violation of entire volumes of human rights crimes to victimize unarmed youth, no matter how threatening you think them, but it is done with impunity by the US, Israel, & India. Standing with the oppressed means standing against the abuse, torture, disappearance, execution, incarceration of youth.

Long live Palestinian & Kashmir Intifada.

(Photo from Palestine Information Center)

Who was it said Palestinians have no traditions of peaceful protest? Who is it that maligns them as terrorists like the Israeli government does when they protest apartheid, ethnic cleansing, carpet bombing, colonial expropriation?

These are Palestinians from Gaza at a checkpoint on the apartheid barrier with Israel protesting Israel’s ban against family members visiting their kin imprisoned in Israeli jails. Very peaceful indeed even though Israel cages them in like animals in Gaza, arrests & shoots at them for resistance, vilifies them as terrorists, carpet bombs them to the point of collapse.

It isn’t that Palestinians do not have traditions of peaceful protest but that they have 69 years of unrelenting opposition of every kind to colonial barbarism.

Long live Palestinian Intifada. End the occupation. Self-determination for Palestine.

(Photo from Palestine Information Center)

There are so many funerals for young people murdered by the occupying armies in Kashmir & Palestine that one cannot report all of them, let alone keep up with all of them. Mostly those targeted are young men, as if destroying the lives of young freedom fighters will magically end the struggle when in fact the death of every martyr inspires deeper resistance & commitment to freedom.

This is the mother of 16-year-old Palestinian Abdulrahman Abu Hmaisa preparing him for burial. He was executed by Israeli troops while protesting from Gaza along the apartheid barrier against the blockade & against the violence at the Al Aqsa compound & in the West Bank.

Our sincere condolences to young Abdulrahman’s family & friends, May he Rest In Peace.

Long live Palestinian Intifada. End the occupation. End the blockade. Self-determination for Palestine & Kashmir.

(Photo from Palestine Information Center)

There is probably nothing more theoretically banal & politically reactionary than the rubbish about “identity politics.” It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense in the real world where human beings work out their destinies. How does one apply the theoretics of identity politics in the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar? After all, it is Rohingya who are targeted so mercilessly; not anyone else with another identity. In fact, they are even required to deny & renounce their own identity & call themselves Bengali. How is their identity not relevant?

How does a woman deny her identity so she can avoid violence? Or a Black or Latino or Native American deny their identity so they won’t be brutalized or discriminated against in the US? How will a Muslim get past US immigration authorities or avoid pogroms in India? How will Dalits & other oppressed castes avoid persecution & violence from Brahmins? How will African, Iraqi, Bangladeshi, Afghan, Haitian, Mexican refugees pass as white people so they can clear the borders of Europe, Australia, & the US?

What is the identity that the oppressed are supposed to renounce? Their ethnicity, skin color, clothing, language, culture, poetry, music, history? Or just anything that makes them different from white people or men? Those who get on their high horse against identity politics are privileged, mostly obtuse white people who have no idea what price people are willing to pay to demand respect for who they are & will not bend the knee to a false unity based on denying who they are & who refuse to abandon the struggle against persecution.

Nobody can write a jeremiad quite like John Pilger, the journalist-turned-propagandist for Assad. The end of the world is always just on the horizon for our man if we don’t see things his way. His latest titled “How the World May End” for Consortium News, a media source for Assad apologetics, will have you torn been weeping & rolling on the floor laughing. Pilger has a real flare for melodrama that works well in propaganda, not so well in serious journalism.

According to Pilger, Trump & Putin are the maligned saviors of human civilization & to prove his case he pulls one of his non sequiturs & quotes unreconstructed Stalinist Luciana Bohne who thinks opposition to our two saviors is because of “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics.” Like the fights against Islamophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, women’s oppression, dictatorship?

Pilger is about as cogent in this piece of rubbish as he was in his excoriation of feminism. But to be fair to him, this is a much more cogent piece of rubbish than his writings on Syria have ever been.

Detainees crammed into a jail cell near Caracas, Venezuela (December 2016): whatever these young people were arrested for, whatever the charges against them, is subjecting them to subhuman conditions acceptable just because the regime calls itself socialist? Does that Bolivarian Revolution stuff exempt a government from human rights in the treatment of youthful offenders or those at least alleged to have committed a crime?

Because if this is what Bolivarian socialism looks like, if this is how it treats young people, if you can’t tell the difference between Bolivarian socialism & barbarism, then no wonder there are massive protests in the streets against it.

(Photo by Meridith Kohut for New York Times)