A word to the Indian government: do you really want to keep looking like jackasses before the entire world by pitting your IT skills against tech savvy Kashmiri kids?

Even if you close down every VPN, they will find another way. Even if you succeed in closing down the internet, you will never silence the voices of Kashmiri resistance nor make the emerging international solidarity forces go away. Eat it India!

Once again, a Kashmiri friend notified me that India is making inroads in their VPN war against Kashmir. He tried all the suggestions from yesterday & thinks he’s losing ground. Is there some super-impenetrable VPN or other modality he can use?

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/3/full_interview_anand_gopal_on_syria

An important interview with journalist Anand Gopal on Syria, Iraq, Yemen & on US, Iranian, Saudi strategy in the Middle East. It’s political analysis, not Islamophobic & war-mongering rubbish like Hands Off Syria Coalition & Assadist propagandists pawn off.

There is one strong exception I take to his analysis which is most evident in his comments on Yemen. He emphasizes the ports & economic interests in Yemen. To my mind, the unifying political intent of US, Russian, Saudi, Iranian intervention & collaboration (albeit temporary & unstable collaboration) in the Middle East is to decisively reverse the Arab Spring uprisings against dictators, monarchs, military juntas.

The method of reversal employed in Syria & Yemen is to bomb the revolutions into smithereens; in Bahrain & Egypt, it is to reinforce repression & military control; in Palestine, it is to use Israel as an armed fortress against Palestinians & as a political force in all of the Middle East.

Principled activists demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces in every one of those countries & let revolution proceed unrestrained to take down autocracy & build democratic societies.

Reposting this from May 3, 2014 about US Pentagon war mongering in Afghanistan combining misogyny with Islamophobia–a toxic combination still used today by Assadists.
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US-Nato forces are on a righteous crusade to rout Islamic misogyny out of Afghanistan by using one fleet to bomb the hell out of the country & another fleet to fly the opium out for processing & distribution. If you see no reason why women’s rights requires drug peddling or mass murder, or how the marines got all mixed up in feminism, you’re not alone & have put your finger on the despicable irrationalities of war propaganda.

Reports coming out of the Pentagon itself expose horrific statistics on rape & sexual assault in the US military beginning in basic training & military academies. Estimates vary between 26,000 to 45,000 on the number of men & women assaulted every year. According to a 2011 Newsweek magazine report (admittedly not the most reliable source), women are more likely to be assaulted by a fellow soldier or officer than killed in combat.

Now the US Department of Education has released a report that one in five women college students will be sexually assaulted on campus, including at the most prestigious universities in the country.

Will US-NATO forces start bombing universities then or even turn their drones on the Pentagon? Will we hear denunciations of Christian theology which likely dominates most of those schools & certainly the Pentagon? Will they send in the marines to free women from the clutches of such ignominy? Or have we had just enough of this crap?

It’s time for a regeneration of feminism–not one that sucks up to politicians but that is independent & political & hopefully shows up fully clothed so that racism & grandstanding for media do not replace political message. (And yes, I’m taking a jab at FEMEN & Slut Walks!)

US out of Afghanistan! US out of Iraq!

(Photo of Afghan women from Al Jazeera)

There is a distinct change in photojournalist coverage of the military siege of Mosul, Iraq. There are photos of buildings reduced to rubble, images of military equipment, a few photos from refugee camps, & this grotesque thing of a guy at a Mosul sulphur spa. There’s an apocalypse in Mosul & this is what media thought worth covering. It’s not just deranged; it is war propaganda.

The only matter of interest in the siege of Mosul is what has happened to the millions of residents being shelled & bombed so the US coalition & Iraqi forces can get to a small number of ISIS urban guerrilla fighters.

The total number of US & Iraqi forces, including special forces, aligned against ISIS in Mosul exceeds 100,000 while Iraqi forces estimate the number of ISIS fighters remaining in west Mosul at 200 to 300, down from an estimated 5,000 when the offensive began in October 2016.

The UN estimates that at least half a million people remain in west Mosul still controlled by ISIS with little food & without water or electricity since US airstrikes took out the power & water plants. They have no access to medical care for the injured & sick because airstrikes & rockets have made it impossible to leave their homes & have destroyed the roads leading out of the area.

ISIS fighters–all 200 to 300 of them–are using civilians as human shields against the airstrikes & rockets. Of course they are because they’re psycho killers. But that should be a deterrent to US & Iraqi forces bombing & shelling. It is barbarism to indiscriminately bomb hundreds of thousands of men, women, & children in the hopes that some of those bombs will take out an ISIS fighter.

But of course, the US Pentagon, Iraqi forces, & coalition allies know damn well that their military strategy against urban guerrilla fighters is barbaric. ISIS is not the primary target or they would have long ago closed down the weapons pipeline to ISIS forces in Mosul & everywhere else. The primary target is the military subordination of the civilian Iraqi population.

The only principled demand is for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all US coalition forces from Iraq & because the siege of Mosul is directly tied to the fate of the Syrian revolution to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.

(Photo by Bram Janssen/AP)

http://www.firstpost.com/long-reads/muslim-women-do-not-need-saving-3392516.html

To show how inflammatory it is for Muslims, especially Muslim women, to refute the braying jackasses of Islamophobia, it’s educational to read the comments on this article.

This high-level educational polemic laying out why “Muslim women do not need to be saved” by western feminists, the US Marines, or US or Russian bombers brought out the haters whose Muslim-hating rhetoric is not on a higher intellectual level than the US Pentagon, the EU, or Assadists.

This is a marvelous piece & it would be an act of solidarity to go to the link here & defend it as such. We don’t take guff from the scuzzballs who defend war, colonialism, genocide, carpet bombing on the basis of hatred for Muslims.

Yesterday, at a press conference in Brussels, Aung San Suu Kyi rejected the UN human rights council fact-finding investigation into allegations of mass rapes, summary executions, torture, genocide by the Myanmar military against Rohingya in Arakan state. “We do not agree with it,” she said.

For anyone with the stomach to examine criminal psychology, Suu Kyi would make an interesting case study. How did a woman who spent almost her entire life living an apolitical, domestic life outside Myanmar morph into the public face of the military junta & of ethnic cleansing Rohingya Muslims? Why has she compromised her, albeit entirely false, reputation as a human rights champion to become the voice of genocide? It isn’t reductionist to point to Suu Kyi’s familial roots in Burmese politics & her place in the class system which runs the military & the country as a place to begin such a stomach-turning analysis.

Whatever Suu Kyi’s psychological & political disorders, Myanmar’s refusal to allow UN monitors into Arakan state should be no deterrent to an investigation of ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. Since October 2016, over 75,000 Rohingya fled Arakan state for Bangladesh in fear for their lives. They were direct witnesses to the crimes; they are the survivors who watched family & neighbors be beaten, terrorized, executed, disappeared, tortured, raped, & their villages torched. They are a more reliable source of information than Rohingya who remain in Arakan state who would be terrified of reprisals by the military if they even spoke to UN monitors.

Suu Kyi’s phony reputation as a human rights champion is shot to hell. The UN Human Rights council isn’t doing so well either. But we should demand the UN proceed with its investigation by interviewing refugees in Bangladesh.

We should also demand full democratic, human, citizen rights for Rohingya in Myanmar & for Rohingya forced into exile.
Their struggle is our struggle.

(Photo is Aung San Suu Kyi & EU diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini at a press conference in Brussels by Olivier Hoslet/EPA)

A lot of erstwhile socialists writing “Marxist-Leninist” defenses of Assad’s dictatorship & bombing of civilians are now writing retrospectives on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution–Tariq Ali among them.

They’re probably no better on the Russian revolution before the internet than they are on the Syrian revolution but who wants to plow through their crap to find out? After reading their essays explaining that Syria is a nation oppressed by US imperialism which they demonstrate with quotes from Lenin & not a peep about Syrian politics, the better part of judgement is to use their essays for toilet paper.

https://www.facebook.com/caseforfreedom/videos/1000597293408859/?pnref=story

Kashmiri women protesting: solid documentation of the article titled “Muslim women do not need saving” by authors Afrin Firdaus Idris & Heba Ahmad.

Political solidarity is a very different thing than a supremacist, usually racist savior complex. Solidarity is extended to those on the front lines of struggle because social transformation everywhere depends on their victory against oppression. But mostly because no human being is alien to us.

“This is not a “VPN war”. This is Free Speech versus blanket censorship. This is Socrates versus the state. This is plain, unadulterated Truth versus narratives of abusive power.”

–Umar Lateef Misgar