The real question in this campaign, which has gone unaddressed, is: are we ready for an orange president who bleaches his hair yellow?
Category Archives: News
Judging from the size of crowds, Sanders is the clear winner over Clinton by tens of thousands. Yet she is foreordained as the candidate. How does that work? Could it be a rigged system?
For that matter, the same is true of Drumpf & Cruz & but it would take a miracle for Drumpf to become nominated. He doesn’t seem to know how government works–as administrators for bank & corporate policies–& you can’t have a schnook that stupid in office.
Arundhati Roy in Kashmir
Arundhati Roy is in Srinagar, Kashmir today with the authors of “Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?”, the book about the 1991 case of mass rape
by the Indian army.
A salute to the authors for their investigation & exposé & to Roy for standing with justice.
(The book can be ordered online)
(Photo by Khurram Parvez)
Clinton’s politics are rotten to the core but that is no license for misogyny
There is a caricature of Hillary Clinton circulating on FB called “Hillary has big “hands” by artist Anthony Freda. It portrays her lasciviously & naked as a macho man & is a take-off of one done about Trump called “Trump has small hands.”
Despite the progressive critique probably intended by the caricaturist, it is profoundly misogynist & offensive. Regrettably, it is done in the satiric genre of Charlie Hebdo–which is hateful & takes inappropriate license–in this case, not with Clinton’s politics but with her gender.
That shouldn’t have to be spelled out. But to be clear, power politics have to do with capitalism, not gender–not even if you drag in epithets against the patriarchy. After Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Hillary Clinton, & so many other treacherous political women, how can anyone regard corrupt power as just machismo & male? In a subtle way, the caricature disempowers women more than it skewers Clinton.
Wielding social hatred in the form of caricature is not a new phenomenon & didn’t just emerge with Charlie Hebdo. There is probably no more democratic art form than political cartooning which emerged in the 17th century after the democratic revolutions that overthrew feudalism & brought in capitalist nation-states. Cartooning signals the shift in power relations between church, monarchies, & plebeians by the ability to lampoon power. The obsequious posture of serfs is replaced with defiance & ridicule.
But because colonialism was a political feature of those states, racist caricature has always been part of cartooning–particularly in depictions of the Irish, Jews, Blacks, Arabs. George Cruikshank, the great English cartoonist of the 19th century, originated the simian comparison with the Irish.
Thomas Nast, in the 19th century, considered the pioneer of US cartooning, also portrayed the Irish as simian. Nast was an ardent supporter of the Civil War & Black Reconstruction but his depictions of Blacks are outrageously simian. Although he championed Chinese immigration at a time when they were under attack, his caricatures of them are racist & he attributed the violence to Irish immigrants.
The simian portrayal of Blacks has long been used to incite violence & social hatred & plagues caricature to this day–including of Obama & elite athletes. Degrading portrayals of women are no less pernicious.
Caricaturing is not the same as writing a book. It’s a visceral art & shouldn’t require long political tracts of explanation. Granted that racism & misogyny make satire more difficult because whites & men cannot take the easy way out in lampooning. If you can’t tell the distinction between political critique & social hatred, that’s a problem. It should be considered a creative challenge by satirists & caricaturists, not an impediment of their free speech.
Which lesser evil candidate is this? Bet you can’t tell.
Does Tony Blair evoke homicidal impulses in anyone else? Every time I see his photo I just want to punch the living daylights out of him.
From Northern Ireland to Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine, he’s played a monstrous role. His latest dropping is that “many millions” of Muslims hold a viewpoint that is “fundamentally incompatible with the modern world.” That from one of the biggest war criminals of our generation.
My mother always quoted the Bible to me in vengeful moments, saying, “Revenge is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Why should God have all the fun? The guy needs to be prosecuted this side of hell.
Gaza Children’s Choir make fundraising album
Project Peace On Earth (PPoE), a US humanitarian group that uses music to promote human rights, released the song Haumea (We Are The Ones) on Sunday to commemorate Easter & their hopes for peace in Palestine.
PPoE partnered with the National Centre for Community Rehabilitation (NCCR) in Gaza who assembled a Children’s Choir to perform. NCCR assists people with disabilities–a growing problem in Gaza because of Israeli bombing. The team from PPoE worked for three months to train the children who had no singing experience & then record the song & film them for the album.
Haumea was released on YouTube & Vimeo on Easter day but is part of a two volume album called “2 Unite All” to be released April 19th. Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters, & several other musicians will be singing 30 songs.
Proceeds go to Palestinian relief agencies for surgical teams, medical supplies, & PTSD therapies.
This is Haumea (We Are The Ones)–dedicated to Palestinian as well as Kashmiri, refugee, & other children suffering assaults on their lives & very humanity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzCSyILliZ0
(Photo is NCCR Children’s Choir)
Amal Clooney: human rights lawyer, my ass!
Can we put to rest the notion that Amal Clooney is a human rights lawyer? We’ll put aside her former defense of Enron; we’ll acknowledge she has a couple high-profile cases like Assange & the Irish republicans alleging torture by the British army in 1971. Good for her. It could mean she’s not completely corrupt. It could also mean she’s scratching for credentials.
If you’re a human rights lawyer, you can’t play both sides of the street. But she defended the king of Bahrain against charges of monstrous human rights crimes against activists in the Bahraini uprising of 2011, including using excessive force, jailing thousands, torturing many to death, excessive use of tear gas & pellet guns. Her defense was to clean up his image internationally when he’s a lowbrow murderous thug. For those who witnessed that glorious uprising, it is absolutely unspeakable she would defend the guy.
After Israel’s 2014 carpet bombing of Gaza, she was asked to be on a three-person UN commission investigating Israeli war crimes but declined citing schedule conflicts. It would be damn uncomfortable to cite Israel for war crimes & human rights violations if you support Hillary Clinton whose groveling speech to AIPAC vilifying Palestinians will go down in infamy. What do you bet that political relationship was more a consideration than her schedule?
As for George, he’s a worthless bum; war-mongering is the only time he emerges from red carpeting through life.
(Photo is the two of them taken somewhere by someone)
CBS news is reporting the panic about ISIS targeting nuclear facilities. Whether it’s true or not, who knows? If they have that kind of intelligence on ISIS war plans, why don’t they know who’s arming them & cut them off? How did it happen that ISIS became more of a peril than the US Pentagon with 1,000 military bases all over the planet? What smells about that story?
Refugees at Idomeni, Greece protest closing of border to Macedonia
Refugees (who the Guardian-UK now refers to as “refugees & migrants” to sanctify the EU distinction between refugees from war & those fleeing sweatshop economics) are sleeping on train tracks to block train traffic & protesting in other ways at Idomeni, Greece near the border with Macedonia.
They’ve also held several rallies laying with their children on the tracks demanding Macedonia reopen its border which is now completely sealed. Banners read: “Open the borders”; “I’m child & might not know much, but I believe treating people disrespectful for being born on the other side of the planet is called: ‘RACISM”; & “We are humans, not animals”.
Estimates of how many are stranded at the border vary from one source to the next, ranging from 6,500 to 20,000. But of course, tens of thousands more are stranded on the Greek islands, mostly in detention camps. Two weeks ago, Greek officials estimated the number of refugees trapped in Greece at 44,000 & said by next month it could increase to between 50,000 & 70,000. Of course, they expect NATO operations in the Aegean Sea to reduce the flow of refugees by 70 percent. (Will they start torpedoing the plastic dinghies? Or just picking them up & deporting them back to Turkey?)
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) & Frontex estimates don’t jibe but about one million refugees have entered Greece since January 2015 through today. According to the EU statistics agency (Eurostat), in 2015 alone, the EU accepted about 700,000 asylum applications from Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, & others from the Middle East. Many of these were declined, many were or will be deported.
UNHCR also reported that between January 1st & March 1st, about 120,000 had entered Greece from Turkey; that’s 60,000 a month. Since March 1st, only 20,000 had entered on that route, testifying to the malicious efficacy of the NATO operation.
No one expects demented trolls like run the EU to be good at math, but if you factor in 2015 asylum applications; assume falsely that 96,000 refugees who entered Greece in January & February 2016 got past the Macedonian border & 24,000 got left behind; & that the 20,000 who entered this month could not proceed because the border was closed in early March, then you have 44,000 refugees trapped in Greece. That leaves about 180,000 refugees unaccounted for.
Dimitris Vitsas is the Greek official coordinating this whole fiasco-cum-atrocity for the EU. He’s been quite blunt that the border to Macedonia will remain on lockdown, that most refugees will be living in detention centers-cum-concentration camps for at least two years while being processed for deportation. But of course he hopes this can be accomplished speedily “without recourse to force.”
Italian officials are now fortifying their coast on the Adriatic Sea across from Albania in case any refugees try to take that route out of Greece.
Immigration & human rights activists need to chart an international course of action to demand: Immigration is a human right. Open the borders.
(Top photo by Darko Vojinovic/AP; bottom photo by Stoyan Nenov/Reuters)