This story from Greater Kashmir has to be read in full to be believed: a 16-year-old boy named Sahil Hamid will never be able to see again after Indian soldiers shot him in both eyes with pellets. He was not protesting one of their hunt to kill operations but was standing on the road as they returned from one. Twelve others were admitted to hospital for pellet injuries, including nine also shot in the eyes.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
On the proposed change in the Indian constitution by Mir Laieeq:
“Modi’s sadist embrace for Kashmiris means nothing but the planned revocation of Article 35A & Article 370 of the Constitution of India. The BJP/RSS wants to engineer a demographic change in Kashmir, to reduce its Muslim majority into a minority. This will further strengthen the occupation & begin a new bloody chapter in its beleaguered history, much in line with what is happening in Palestine. It is adding the violence of forced exclusion to the already existing violence of forced inclusion. Modi, like anyone else in power in India, cannot think of Kashmir except in terms of inflicting more & more violence.”
Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), Uruguayan journalist & writer, described his vision for humanity in “The right to dream”:
“the air shall be cleansed of all poisons except those born of human fears & human passions; in the streets, cars shall be run over by dogs…cooks shall not believe that lobsters love to be boiled alive; historians shall not believe that countries love to be invaded; politicians shall not believe that the poor love to eat promises…street children won’t be treated like garbage because there won’t be any street children…death & money shall lose their magical powers…in Argentina, the “mad women” of the Plaza de Mayo shall be held up as exemplars of mental health because they refused to forget in a time of compulsory amnesia; the Church shall correct the typos on the tablet of Moses – the sixth commandment shall ordain the celebration of the body; the ninth commandment, which distrusts desire, shall declare it sacred; the Church shall also proclaim an eleventh commandment which God forgot: ‘You shall love nature, which you are a part of’…every night shall be lived as if it were the last & every day as if it were the first.”
(compressed from Galeano’s El derecho a soñar thanks to Jairus Banaji)
A simple, brilliant video elaboration on the occupation of Kashmir:
https://www.facebook.com/kulgamnewsagency/videos/1384467691648758/?
The feminist in me is having a hissy fit eruption. Why is it that big men with booming voices can pontificate mousey ideas & be treated as oracles? Over five decades as a feminist & I still don’t have a grasp on what makes fools so appealing under patriarchy.
Let me just express my profound objections to the prevailing belief, expressed in so many pernicious ways, that the peoples of the Middle East, in particular Arabs, are incapable of democracy. They’re portrayed as bovine peoples suited to & content with living under dictatorship. Some, shaking their heads in pity, will say ‘that’s the regrettable heritage of colonialism.’
To rebut this rubbish, it isn’t necessary to speak of racism though that is the heart of such a belief. One only need consider the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2011 all over the Middle East, most powerfully in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, with strong reverberations in Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan. What is going on in the Middle East with massive repression in Egypt & Bahrain, with carpet bombing in Yemen & Syria is the international response to destroy every vestige of those powerful democratic movements against dictators, military juntas, feudal monarchs.
What pity is due is only to those who deny those uprisings, who mock them as CIA orchestrated, who scorned them as “Islamist,” who never understood what the hell was going on when millions of people rose up in the most powerful, fearless ways to demand democracy. And by the way, those revolutions ain’t over till the peoples of those countries say they are over.
The more astute Assadist ideologues have torn themselves away from vilifying the White Helmet rescue workers to address the associations between white supremacists, fascists, & Assad supporters made so apparent in Charlottesville. The obtuse among them don’t see the association between fascists & Assadists as a problem.
It’s called being between a rock & a hard place because in fact the social base of Assad’s supporters are the extreme rightwing: libertarians, Islamophobes, anti-Semites, & fascists. The Assad regime isn’t the least bit shy about politically associating with those forces. Bartlett & Beeley who get their marching orders from the regime regularly report about their associations with European fascist individuals & groups. They are both entirely open about their associations with David Icke who believes extraterrestrial reptiles in the form of Rothschild bankers called the Illuminati run the world & sees Syria (which no longer has Jewish citizens) as a battleground for defeating the Illuminati. (No one said their ideas were rational; obscurantism is a feature of fascism.)
The more astute among this bad lot recognize the problems of being outed as fascists. Sarah Abed, who writes more political rubbish that anyone should be allowed in a lifetime, tweeted: “Supporting President Assad has nothing to do with fascism & everything to do with being against terrorism, imperialism, & western intervention.” Abed kind of gets it because she also said if fascists “support Assad & Putin against terrorism & imperialism why is that a bad thing?” But unlike most in the Hands Off Syria Coalition crowd, she gets that association with fascism is at least a public relations problem. She has no objections to the associations since she is a fascist.
Assadists have been able to garner thousands of ill-informed, sometimes well-meaning supporters because they don’t know how to probe behind apologetics & propaganda to find the truth about the brutal political character of the Assad regime, about the massive, popular revolution against his dictatorship, about what political forces are funding, training, arming militias like ISIS & Al-Qaeda. They’ve been sold a bill of goods that Syria is only about defeating US militarism when in fact it is about an alliance of counter-revolutionary forces defeating revolution.
We need to use the tragedy of Charlottesville to educate about the deep affinities between fascist forces internationally & the Assad dictatorship & to build support for the popular revolutionary forces against him who during carpet bombing ceasefires come out in force with placards denouncing both the Assad regime & ISIS & Al-Qaeda.
According to Amnesty International’s report titled “Human slaughterhouse: mass hangings & extermination at Saydnaya prison, Syria” issued February 2017, Syria’s Grand Mufti Hassoun was one of three men deputized by Assad to sign execution orders for up to 13,000 political prisoners hung in Saydnaya prison over the last five years.
On the left is a photo of Grand Mufti Hassoun with former KKK official David Duke who just officiated at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. The photo was posted on Duke’s official website on December 3, 2005, six years before the Syrian revolution erupted as part of the Arab Spring uprisings. But Duke has made other trips to Syria after the revolution, including in the fall of 2016 where he again met with the Grand Mufti. On both occasions, according to Duke’s blog reports, the issue of Jews & Israel were foremost in their discussions–not because they both support Palestinians but because they are profoundly hateful toward Jews. Under the dictatorial regime of Hafez Assad, father of Bashar, Jews were persecuted & eventually most chose or were forced to leave Syria. During his trip last year, Duke said he learned that “Zionist Jews” just love “jihadists” of the most murderous kind, like ISIS.
On the right is a photo from Vanessa Beeley’s Facebook wall of May 10, 2017 where she comments: “Grand Mufti Hassoun, one of the greatest living peace makers on this Earth. I am proud & blessed to be called his “sister”, we are all family…”. Since Beeley frequently reports on her involvement with European fascist groups, it comes as no surprise that she & David Duke have found common cause with the Assad regime, including with one of its executioners. But it would be interesting to know what kind of political associations Beeley has with Duke. Would that finally snap some of the credulous regime-change advocates out of their reveries about the character of revolution & counter-revolution in Syria?