An Israeli terrorism expert is calling the wildfires a “fire intifada.” This comes a year after the “knifing intifada” last November.

The knives were of course mostly planted on Palestinians executed by Israeli settlers or soldiers. But when it comes to arson as a weapon of ethnic cleansing, Israeli settlers in the West Bank wrote the book. Israel better start hauling in Israeli settlers to see if any of them tried to torch Palestinian property & ended up torching Israel.

The defense of Palestinians against false charges & imprisonment for arson is certain to come.

Social media is awash in accusations that 800,000 Arabs have tweeted jubilation about the fires in Israel. Their elation is going viral according to the reports. Others are retweeting this unsubstantiated charge with disgust, like it was the gospel truth. The source of the story is Vocativ, a media company founded & run by an Israeli who once published an article about ISIS links to Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli media is reporting that Israeli government officials & Shin Bet are already accusing Palestinians of arson for political purposes. They will use that charge without investigation to victimize Palestinians & they will do so despite the countless Palestinians who rushed to help Israel put out the fires.

One jamoke from California who claims to be a supporter of Palestinians said about the fires: “Hey karma is karma.” He can take that kind of solidarity & stuff it where the sun don’t shine because it discredits Palestinian solidarity as hateful. His pathology of social hatred for Jews & the arrant disregard for the tens of thousands of Israelis fleeing for their lives is not an expression of solidarity but of political derangement.

Palestinians intend to defeat Israel politically, not by torching thousands of people to death.

Noam Chomsky thinks Trump is the greater evil; Slavoj Žižek thinks Clinton was more dangerous & they’re both right-wing on other important questions like Israel & refugees. Now do you see why the left is in the final stages of decay?

Khurram Parvez’s legal counsel announced that the administrative detention order against him has been quashed by a High Court & authorities have been ordered to release him from jail in Jammu. When he was originally arrested without charge in September, a magistrate ordered his release but Indian authorities then held him under the Public Safety Act allowing indefinite detention.

The Jammu & Kashmir government submitted an affidavit to the court opposing his release saying Parvez was “an anti-social element known for his anti-national activities,” uses his human rights work as a cover for his “secessionist ideology & inclination towards secessionism,” & most damning of all, wears “foreign clothes” which he carried in a suitcase with him to jail.

He is in jail only for his human rights activities in Kashmir investigating & exposing the forcible disappearance of thousands, their murders & mass graves & for his work strengthening bonds of collaboration with organizations of the disappeared around the world.

#FreeKhurramParvez

Emancipation Russian-style: this is an unexploded Russian missile in an east Aleppo neighborhood. When Russia bombs schools, hospitals, & municipal housing in cities of 250,000 civilians it isn’t war crimes because they’re doing it for a higher purpose: a secular & democratic dictatorship.

We are assured by many writers who support Syrian & Russian bombing that getting bombed to death by Syria’s barrel bombs filled with chlorine are not a more painful way to die than by one of these Russian missiles or by US missiles. We wonder where Craig Murray, Paul Larudee, Margaret Kimberley, & others get that information because to many it seems utterly callous, if not deranged. Since when do those who claim they’re antiwar make that kind of determination instead of vociferously opposing the use of any weapons against unarmed civilians?

The only principled antiwar demands: the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians; the immediate cessation of US bombing; the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military operatives from Syria.

If it didn’t foretell a crackdown on freedom of speech, this campaign about fake news would take the cake for sarcasm. Yesterday, the Washington Post had an article about how sophisticated Russian propaganda machinery flooded social media with fake news & may have effected the outcome of the election.

That’s probably the source of all the nonsense about growing Russophobia in the US & a lot of the war-mongering for Russia in Syria.

In response to the fake news from Russia panic, only three words are required: Radio Free Europe. It’s a US broadcasting network & CIA front that blasted propaganda into Eastern Europe & the former USSR since the heart of the Cold War in 1953 & is still operating in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, & the Middle East.

Reading a long article calling for self-determination for Syria as an oppressed nation withstanding a “US imperialist onslaught” & defending Russian intervention as Assad’s right to invite other countries to defend his dictatorship–which the writer does not deny.

To the writer’s mind, the war in Syria is all about US-backed Islamist militias threatening a legitimate dictatorship & he dismisses the popular movement against Assad with the flick of a wrist.

The article included this August 2016 photo of a wounded child being rescued in east Aleppo which Syrian & Russian bombers have been carpet bombing, including with chlorine-filled barrel bombs. It never dawns on the writer to question the military strategy of bombing a city with 250,000 civilians to get at those US-backed militias?

He calls this a socialist analysis. In a pig’s eye! We could find similar apologia in the archives of Stalinism.

Young girl is wounded in August 2016 bombing attack on eastern Aleppo by Syrian government planes.

(Photo by Ameer al-Halbi / AFP / Getty Images)

Now friend requests are coming from US military in Syria. Will they still want to be friends when I call for them to face a war crimes tribunal?

It wasn’t until the civil rights movement of the 1960s that US history began to acknowledge this country was built on the ruthless extermination of Native Americans though till today that history is excluded from school text books & what we are fed is maudlin & racist mythology.

Genocide is not one of those things that passes through history without leaving profound discordancies & social wreckage–not just on those who were the victims but on the perpetrators. Societies of the latter develop psychological mechanisms to distort & deny genocide. One peculiar manifestation of that in the US is “playing Indian”–from the attire at the Boston Tea Party, rituals of the Boy Scouts & fraternal organizations, the names & mascots of sports teams, the names given military operations & fighter planes.

After the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln commissioned former Yankee generals to lead the wars of extermination on Indian tribes of the Plains regions. By that time, the wars of extermination had mostly ended east of the Mississippi. By the early 20th century, most of the Plains tribes from the Canadian to the Mexican borders had been massacred, defeated militarily, driven on to reservations as defeated peoples.

Anthropology museums were being developed then to house the artifacts of defeated tribes throughout the Americas. The elites who bankrolled the museums, like J.P. Morgan, commissioned photographers to go west & document Native American tribes for the historic record before they went extinct–which they were expected to do on the reservations.

Those photographers confronted the reality of traumatized survivors of genocide living in squalor on reservations. The photos they took, though magnificent, were staged, glorified images of Indians & integral to the process of denying genocide–so that generations would be deceived by what had really happened, by what our ancestors had participated in, by what this country was built on.

The top photos here of Sioux chieftains were taken in the era of anthropological images. Until the civil rights movement, Indians who lived on reservations near state parks in Minnesota & probably elsewhere would attire in the same way to work in the parks “playing Indian” & selling American flags on a stick.

The bottom photos are Standing Rock Sioux activists in North Dakota opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. All over the Americas, indigenous tribes are leading struggles against neoliberal economics & the destruction of the environment leading to climate change.

Who could have imagined such a historic irony when the US army deployed to exterminate Native Americans from the face of the earth?

(Photos of Sioux chiefs from The Vintage News.)

(Photo from Facebook wall of Women at Standing Rock)

(Photo of protester at Standing Rock by Stephanie Keith/Reuters)

“It’s so ironic that people are gearing up for Thanksgiving when Native Americans are being tear gassed & shot with rubber bullets & water hoses as we speak.”

(From undocumedia on Instagram)