An African mother grieves after the drowning of her baby in the Mediterranean when an overpacked refugee boat suddenly listed sending 200 occupants into the sea. At least 34 people drowned, most of them toddlers according to rescuers.

It’s not certain from reports where the drownings happened but it appears to be in Italian waters because the Italian coast guard commented to media about it although it does not participate in rescue operations. The survivors were rescued by the group Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), a private rescue group.

This bereft mother is in a rescue boat off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy, an island refugees are trying to reach & which has always welcomed refugees as fellow humans, even at times denouncing the Italian government for its criminal misconduct toward refugees.

Our deepest condolences to the families of those who drowned. There are no words sufficient but only action to defend the right of refugees & immigrants to asylum with full rights.

(Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Duterte’s imposition of martial law in a region of the Philippines & his threat to impose it on all of the country is quite alarming–especially coming days after threatening to “decapitate” human rights activists who oppose his death squad war on the poor.

Our fullest solidarity with our brothers & sisters in the Philippines.

A couple caveats I picked up along the way:

My little Daisy’s new caretaker (where she is very loved & happy) told me she is recovering from her 17th surgery after complications from gastric bypass surgery & that she has learned that destruction of health is common for all such operations other than the sleeve. No one warned her about this.

My car had a serious chugging thing on acceleration. The auto repair told me I needed a transmission overhaul for $1,500. I took it to another less upscale repair (run by a Mexican immigrant) who said it needed maintenance, not an overhaul, & fixed it for $100. It now runs smooth as a top. So the advice is, do maintenance on your transmission. And support immigrant rights.

This is about Kashmiri Pandits from “Kashmir and the Intifada of the Mind: An interview with Sanjay Kak” by David Barsamian, in January 2014:

David Barsamian: “One of the themes reiterated by those who support continued “occupation” of Kashmir by Indian security forces is the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits, the Kashmiri Hindu Brahmins. These people say they were forced out, brutalized, and they lost everything. You are a Kashmiri Pandit and your family is from Kashmir originally. What credence do you give to those kinds of reports?”

Sanjay Kak: “That’s a fact. The years 1989, 1990, and 1991 were very chaotic in Kashmir. There was a sudden and almost unplanned armed insurrection. There was an immediate and brutal crackdown and conditions were terrible. There was chaos in the air. In that situation, the Kashmiri Pandits, who were only 2 percent of the population, found themselves extremely vulnerable, despite the fact that there was a long history, if not of great cordiality, but certainly of mutual respect between the Muslim majority and the Hindu Brahmin minority.

But I think what we don’t recognize is that in that chaos there were all kinds of forces who would use that community in order to achieve other ends. We’re talking about, say, a population of probably not more than 150,000 people. And it is true that in 1990 and 1991, about 200 people from this small community were killed. Of course, it’s also true that in that same period probably 8,000 Kashmiri Muslims were killed. But we’re not doing math here, we’re not doing an equation of how many more people died because it’s true that even in a minority of 150,000, if 200 get killed, it is going to panic those people.

But the question is, who did those killings? It’s not Kashmiri Muslims who killed them. It’s important to identify and bring to book people responsible for the killings, whether they were Hindus or Muslims is not relevant. But in a time like that, in this completely chaotic, turbulent early 1990s, it’s very difficult to say who wanted to precipitate a crisis. Because if I were an extremist fringe militant organization, I might want to attack Kashmiri Pandits in order to precipitate a certain polarization between the communities. It could be argued that from the Indian state’s point of view also, the targeting of the Kashmiri Pandits served a useful purpose because it allowed the Indian state to paint the movement there, which saw itself as a movement for the liberation of Kashmir, as a fundamentalist Islamic movement. And as we discussed, there is also criminality. So if there were three families in a remote village and somebody had an eye on their land, in those prevailing chaotic circumstances, it would be possible to target those people and benefit from it.

Where I stand, apart from the general discourse on the position of the Kashmiri Pandits, is that I do not believe that this makes Kashmiri Muslims as a community or as a people culpable for those few crimes. That’s something in my work I’ve always tried to avoid. The troubles in Kashmir have not been communal in nature. That’s the word that we in India use for the tension between Hindus and Muslims. We use a polite term for it. “Communal tensions” they are called. There is no denying the fact that Kashmiri Pandits were in severe danger in Kashmir in the early 1990s. There is no doubt they were targeted and killed. And in the resultant chaos there was an exodus of this minority over the space of a few years left Kashmir.
It must also be at the same time that however tragic this was, the state made no attempt to stop that exodus. In the early 1990s, India was being riven with this new right-wing Hindu mobilization. And so the Kashmiri Pandit minority who left Kashmir at a time like that fell straight into the hands of the Hindutva right wing. That was the real tragedy, that what was a chaotic situation, which was local to Kashmir and could perhaps have been resolved in other ways. Suddenly, it became an issue around which Hindu mobilization in India was being constructed and Kashmir became an integral part of that.

Were Kashmiri Pandits forced to leave Kashmir? Yes, circumstances did force them. Were they victims? Of course they were. But they were victims in the same way that Kashmiri Muslims were victims. If we were to take a count of the migration during the 1990s from the Kashmir Valley, I can tell you more Kashmiri Muslims left for various reasons. But because they are Muslims, it’s not seen in the same way. One of the great tragedies of what has happened in Kashmir in the 1990s is that the distinctions between Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Hindus suddenly were cast in concrete. As I said before, it’s not exactly as if the two communities were absorbed in each other. They were separate and distinct, but they had found a way of surviving for centuries. It could have retained that quality, but it didn’t.”

Wonder how the ashram business is doing under Modi. Hard to sell that inner peace thing in such a political climate.

Kashmiri friends, is it true that stone pelting is a leisure activity “in lieu of gossip & loitering around the markets,” kind of like playing cricket with the occupying army, as the sociologist says?

Where do these political nimrods come from?

Let others hate on Coldplay. Not all of us are music snobs.

This is Paradise African-style. Stunning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cgovv8jWETM

Suicide is the leading cause of death, surpassing combat deaths, in the US & Indian armies which are of comparable size (1.1 million India; 1.3 million US). The US has 22 veteran suicides every day. That’s roughly 8,000 a year which is considered underreported. There are also about 200 to 250 suicides a year among active duty soldiers.

The Indian army has an average of 100 suicides every year among soldiers deployed in Kashmir with no report about suicides after discharge from duty.

You can’t draw any conclusions with insufficient data but it’s likely that suicide rates among Indian army veterans are substantial, given the human rights crimes they commit in Kashmir. Maybe they aren’t 8,000 a year but it’s almost certain they are sky high.

One Indian military publication suggested the liberal leave benefits, high standards of discipline, esprit-de-corps,”good & caring officers” were the secret of low suicide rates in the Indian army. But if they actually bothered to do the math, they would find that committing human rights atrocities is just as hard on Indian soldiers as it is on Americans.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the suffering those soldiers leave behind.

This meme was on an abandoned blog by a Kashmiri student named Ziyaan Bin Ashraf from 2012. It was part of Kashmiri activists using social media to explain their struggle against occupation.

Anyone know Ziyaan? He doesn’t appear to be on Facebook or Twitter. His blog was http://hardorestonepeltig.blogspot.com/.

An Indian nationalist named Vijeta Sharma came out of nowhere to support her fellow who suggested I be tied to the front of an Indian jeep as a human shield.

Using the cogent debating style nationalists around the world are known for, our Vijeta called me old & stupid. Omer Mehraj Raja gallantly came to my defense packing a stronger arsenal intellectually & epithetically.

I just want our Vijeta to know before I kick her ass to the curb that I’ve been called much worse than old & stupid; I’ve been called ISIS & Al Qaeda for heaven’s sake. But after a young hunky Kashmiri called me hot, I just take it all in stride. I’ve been riding that flattery for several months & anticipate riding it quite a while longer.