A Ku Klux Klan chapter from North Carolina rallied their forces for a rally at the South Carolina capital in defense of the Confederate flag. All 35 of them showed up bearing their ugly-assed flag, white supremacist & Nazi insignias & shouting racist insults at the counter-rally of 2,000 activists gathered across the street.

The people who got the permit for the counter-rally were reportedly from the Florida group Black Educators for Justice, which media sources immediately linked to the New Black Panther Party (NBPP). Media reports claim participants at the rally included NBPP members as well as activists from Black Lawyers for Justice & the Nation of Islam (NOI). This identification is supposed to set off red alerts for us since both the NBPP & NOI have been identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

There are undeniable political & organizational associations between Black Educators for Justice, Black Lawyers for Justice, & the NBPP. Malik Zulu Shabazz, the head of Black Lawyers for Justice, is a well-known & very impressive Black activist regrettably notorious for antisemitic outbursts–often reprehensibly conflating anti-Zionism & opposition to Israeli apartheid with antisemitism. NBPP is unmistakably antisemitic in its views.

This is not a new problem in the Black nationalist movement. It has long been an issue in the Nation of Islam, including under Louis Farrakhan. It was an issue during Malcolm X’s tenure in the NOI & has led many to charge him with antisemitism.

As the BlackLivesMatter movement grows, there will be many young activists looking for a radical alternative to the old conservative civil rights groups. Many will be drawn to groups that espouse antisemitic views. That is no reason to declare them all haters or their groups as hate groups & try to shun them out of politics. That is a failed strategy of the SPLC–perhaps more related to their relationship to Israel than their commitment to Black justice. Would they have declared Malcolm X a hater? Likely.

Antisemitism is social hatred & it’s a problem wherever it rears its ugly ass. There’s no reason to be accommodating; there is no political merit to pretend there’s good reasons for it among Black activists. It weakens the Black movement & Palestinian solidarity in one fell swoop. But instead of declaring them political pariahs like SPLC does, it is necessary to take them on politically & forcefully to persuade young activists that social hatreds of any kind have no place in the civil rights & Black power movement. Historic movements for human freedom & justice have no place for prejudice.

We wish media were merely reporting the truth & not issuing a warning against support. Our fullest solidarity with the rally yesterday. When activists do what’s necessary, we stand with them.

(Photo of activist at counter-rally in Columbia, SC by Getty Images)

Nobel prize winning physicist Ivar Giaever says Obama is “dead wrong” on global warming. Which part is wrong? The one where he acknowledges it as an existential threat or the one where he doesn’t do anything about it because corporate profits would be affected?

Our man Giaever is no more qualified to speak on global warming than the local proctologist nor Obama to address world peace since he’s openly conducting at least two major wars & using proxies in others. Nobel might have problems with its selection process.

Protestors around the world are facing extreme violence from riot cops, particularly assaultive weapons like rubber bullets, water cannons, stun grenade cannisters, & in some places like Palestine & Kashmir, live ammunition. In 2010, the Indian army began using pellet guns in Kashmir. They claimed they were moving to “non-lethal weapons” to quell anti-India protests. Pellet guns use hydraulic force to pump out hundreds of pellets at a time which become embedded & can cause permanent blindness & disfigurement as well as fatal injuries by destroying vital organs. Because of the scattershot nature of buckshot, many children & passersby are also blinded & injured.

The buckshot is made of lead & the deleterious health effects of that metal are not mitigated in pellet form. There are actually restrictions in the US on the use of lead pellets in hunting because of its negative impact on birds & the environment.

Pellet guns were also used in the 2011 Bahrain uprising when the regime hired two supercops, one from the UK & one from the US, to organize security. Pellet guns were part of their arsenal & there are dozens of photos of protesters riddled with buckshot–many which cannot be removed. The lethality & barbarism of the weapon are beyond dispute.

The photo is an X-ray of Amir Kabir Beigh, a 22-year-old Kashmiri, showing dozens of lead pellets embedded in his skull. Looks like they were directing the pellet gun directly at this eyes & head. And it looks like documentation for human rights & war crimes against Kashmiris by the Indian army.

Today Kashmir is considered the most densely militarized zone in the world administered & occupied by over 700,000 Indian soldiers. Since the 1990s, the death toll from political conflict has risen to 70,000, with an estimated 100,000 tortured & 10,000 disappeared.

Things are not going to improve for Kashmiri justice under Modi, India’s new reactionary prime minister. His close political association with apartheid Israel bodes very badly. Colonial wars eat at the very soul of a society, engendering extreme violence at home & abroad unless they are actively opposed & international solidarity extended to the people of Kashmir.

Our fullest solidarity with the people of Kashmir.

(Photo by Abid Bhat)

Vilifying immigrants & refugees isn’t just a staple of right-wing talk radio in the US or boneheads like Donald Trump. The US government has used it for at least 130 years to justify discrimination against immigrant groups. Inflammatory accusations played a big role in drug policy & prohibition–first against Chinese immigrants & opium; then against Black Americans moving north from Jim Crow (US form of apartheid) & cocaine; & against Mexicans & marijuana. The problem was not their high rates of addiction; on the contrary, studies showed low rates. But associating them with excessive drug use allowed associating, especially Blacks & Mexicans, with orgies & rape of white women. As contemptible & stupid as Trump is, he is repeating ancient racist & xenophobic verities cooked up in the US Bureau of Narcotics, testified to in the US Congress, & promoted in the NY Times.

Those of us outside European countries & Australia can only imagine what their xenophobes are peddling against immigrants. But as anyone who has studied the development of legislation & proscription against immigration knows, all of these countries collaborate on policy, formulate them to suit national circumstances, & likely suck at the same trough for hateful propaganda. Social hatred is fundamental to divide & conquer & working people have been held in its stranglehold for too long. There is no way around the iron law of social transformation that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” That’s all she wrote!

The dislocation of entire families from their homelands is primarily a phenomenon of war & catastrophe & is now a central feature of immigration. Nothing puts the lie more quickly to the hateful rubbish immigrants are subjected to than the massive presence of small children in the millions of refugees around the world–& not just small children with parents, but unaccompanied minors.

These children are Syrian refugees queueing up at an immigration center in Serbia to apply for asylum & get documents allowing them to stay for 72 hours. Children are the face of modern immigration all over this world, including those crossing the US-Mexican border. Perhaps hardened misanthropes & right-wing psychos don’t give a damn what happens to kids, but most working people do. And we need evangelize for the rights of immigrants to cross borders unimpeded because the welfare of children is now central to the human right of immigration–& the Obama regime is not the only one to flout that.

Immigration is a human right. Open the borders!

(Photo by Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)

This little guy is 7-year-old Thek Kay Pyin working at a brick kiln in Rakhine state, Myanmar. Child labor doesn’t make Myanmar stand out; it exists in every country, including the US which has 800,000 mostly Latino child farmworkers working legally. Though the fact that it’s ubiquitous or legalized certainly doesn’t make it one iota less criminal or reprehensible.

But what’s distinctive about our little guy is that he lives in a concentration camp because his family is Rohingya Muslim, subjected to ethnic cleansing by the Myanmar regime. This is not a recent genocide; it’s gone on for decades. So we’d really like to know why in 2012, at the height of a murderous assault on Rohingya that sent tens of thousands fleeing (& got many killed), Obama called on other Asian nations to model Myanmar’s “remarkable journey” toward democracy. Hillary Clinton, today’s populist champion, also made a pilgrimage to Myanmar praising its democracy. What is it about genocide that escapes their grasp!?

But of course, let’s not fool ourselves. Obama & Clinton know exactly what is going on in Myanmar. One of the biggest navies in the world couldn’t send a single ship to rescue tens of thousands of Rohingya afloat in death ships. Because to neoliberal politicians (& as we know from the refugee crises all over the world & the Greek euro crisis, politicians don’t come sleazier or more criminal than the neoliberal kind) some lives are expendable. Millions of human lives just don’t count in their calculations so genocide gets coupled with eugenics as state policy. That’s why neoliberalism is the barbaric phase of capitalism.

Our fullest solidarity with Rohingya Muslims. Our deepest regrets little Thek Kay Pyin has no options right now. But sure as shooting, we cannot let media bury this genocide any more or as thoroughly as they also bury other human rights monstrosities like in Gaza & Kashmir.

(Photo by James Nachtwey/Time)

Media generally operates by the mantra “out of sight, out of mind” when it comes to ethnic cleansing & massive human rights crimes–like in Myanmar (or Kashmir). Instead, we are subjected to endless panegyrics about Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who is not so much silent on genocide as in tacit agreement.

For several weeks it was reported that 25,000 Rohingya had fled persecution, violence, & concentration camps in Myanmar to find refuge elsewhere. The world witnessed days of boats filled with Rohingya drifting without food or water in the Andaman Sea. We were coached by media to denounce the traffickers who abandoned the ships & ignore that they only abandoned when they weren’t allowed to port & discharge refugees & faced detention themselves.

But now all’s well: Indonesia & Malaysia took in 3,500 refugees; a Turkish military vessel said it was doing search & rescue; Myanmar picked up a few boats & dragged them back to the hell they fled from; & Obama “urged Myanmar to end discrimination.” Boy you don’t get tougher than urging, do you!? How about talking about genocide in Myanmar even half as tough as he does about ISIS?

But questions remain: what happened to the other 21,500 Rohingya? Are they still out there floating in death ships? Were they rescued? Did Turkey actually deploy a ship & rescue anyone? If they did, where did they take them? And what happened to those “rescued” by the Myanmar navy? Were they tortured or arrested for embarrassing the regime & its ignoble Nobel recipient? Or were they returned to concentration camps?

Just because media turns a blind eye doesn’t mean we should be fooled that all’s well in this worst of all possible hellholes. There’s some accounting to do to justice. What exactly has happened to the 21,500 Rohingya not yet accounted for?

Our fullest solidarity with the Rohingya.

Photo is of refugees in Indonesian refugee camp taken in late May.

(Photo by James Nachtwey/Time)

Many of you will be interested in hearing Haidar Eid, a leading Palestinian figure of the BDS campaign (who lives in Gaza & survived the three murderous bombing assaults on Gaza since 2009) explain the importance of BDS & Palestinian solidarity, & his views on the situation in Gaza.

Today I received a lovely note from a Facebook friend who said he appreciated my posts but finished reading “every piece with gripping sadness.” It isn’t my intent to add to the quotient of human sadness in the world; it’s hard enough to live. But it is my intent to create not just discomfort–& certainly not guilt–but indignation over how human beings are treated in this world. How can we commit to changing things if we don’t know exactly what’s going on?

American socialization teaches us we are the only truly civilized people in the world, the only ones who matter & puts us at odds with other people. I’m steeped in the gestalt of the 60s generation who could not/cannot live with such provincial horizons. That’s why so many seniors remain the backbone of social protest around the world.

There’s a wonderful quote from Terence, the Roman writer, which several writers have modified & used, including Marx & Tennessee Williams. I modified Williams’ version from Night of the Iguana: “Nothing human is alien to us, except violence & cruelty.” You can’t identify with such a high-flown statement without telling the truth about that which is alien to us.

And that’s why I’m the bearer of sad news.

This is 60-year-old Anna Kousoula, a pensioner who lives just outside Athens. Her pension is 300 euros (US $328) & on this she also supports her son who has been unemployed for over four years. Here she’s complaining about her empty refrigerator since due to bank freezes she’s unable to withdraw her pension. We can see she doesn’t live in splendor because a one bedroom apartment plus utilities costs nearly 100 euros more than her pension; just a gallon of milk is 4.60 euros. She can’t drink away her misery because a bottle of wine is 5.00 euros–in the oldest wine-producing region in the world.

It cannot be said capitalism is hanging by a thread but it is in massive, global crisis. How do you maintain oligarchic rule, balance competing economies, negotiate irreconcilable differences, & maintain your own privileges & wealth when protest is erupting everywhere, challenging your ability & right to rule? That’s where repression comes in, with police forces using tanks, assault weapons, tear gas against unarmed protesters. Popular democracy, ushered in with the great democratic revolutions that overthrew feudalism, has now become completely at odds with neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism.

The system may not be hanging by a thread but a sign of its panic & lack of options is that they’re trying to resolve the crises with bank maneuvers, hustling money from one country & one bank to another to prevent bankruptcy & collapse. Most importantly, they’re trying to resolve it on the backs of working people, especially seniors & young workers.

Why should pensioners like Anna Kousoula, who lives at a deficit, be asked to bail out the banks? Because as we know from the US bank bailout (under lesser-evil Obama), bankers & oligarchs made a bundle in that operation while millions of homeowners were repossessed.

There’s something fundamentally, fatally flawed with the system & whether or not we all agree it should be dumped, we can agree that working people should not have to bear the brunt of its problems or bail out the banks at our expense.

Our fullest solidarity with Greek working people (we feel no such thing with Greek bankers) because the more you can push back against predation, the stronger we will be when they come for us. “An injury to one is an injury to all” remains the iron law of social transformation.

(Photo by Yannis Kolesidis/EPA)

These are refugees on the Macedonian-Greek border where they will try to catch a train to Serbia & move on to northern European countries if they are able to traverse the razor wire fence put up by Hungary at the Serbian border. Thousands of refugees are trekking through the Balkans. Military & covert operations & economic plunder by the US & European regimes in league with reactionary regimes have completely undone several countries in the Middle East & Africa (& the Americas) & created one of the most colossal breakdowns & refugee crises since WWII.

According to Amnesty International estimates, the number of refugees apprehended trying to cross the Serbia-Hungary border increased from 2,370 in 2010 to 60,602 this year. Apprehended & not allowed to move on because Hungary (an EU member) is now functioning as proxy EU immigration control in the way Greece did before SYRIZA (& in the way Greece is certain to again under Troika austerity). The Hungarian parliament recently passed legislation tightening asylum rules. Those able to enter Hungary are abused by authorities, arrested & placed in overcrowded squalid conditions.

Their treatment in Macedonia & Serbia is not better. In fact, Amnesty accuses the Balkan regimes of abusing refugees passing through their territories in a replay of what Central American refugees face passing through Mexico: extortion & assault by both police authorities & criminal gangs. Last month Serbian authorities arrested 29 police officers & nine customs officials for accepting bribes to let refugees pass into Hungary. What likely rankled the regime was not the extortion & corruption but allowing refugees safe passage.

Refugees report being pushed, slapped, kicked, & beaten by Serbian police near the Hungarian border. An Afghan refugee told Amnesty they witnessed a pregnant woman being beaten. They are also arrested without legal recourse or the possibility of asylum in either country. Serbia gave refugee status to one person in 2014 & Macedonia to only ten. One Amnesty official called the Balkans a “no-man’s land” for refugees. And you can bet your bottom dollar both regimes are operating in league with the EU from which they derive no benefits.

Immigration is a human right–a right writ large in human history. Open the damn borders!

(Photo by Robert Atanasovski/AFP/Getty)