Category Archives: News

Trump is going to find that cell at Attica State Prison very uncomfortable because he’ll be meeting a lot of residents who turned to a life of crime after they lost their NYC apartments because of his predatory landlord practices. He’ll be begging Putin to stick him in a Siberian gulag. The more they circle in on him, the more my heart sings.

Haley Vail July 2017

My cousin Haley Vail who just graduated from high school. Her grandmother is my first cousin & friend Jane Vail Schroeder; her great-grandmother is my mother’s sister & my favorite aunt Rosemary Vail. I used to babysit Haley & her younger sister Brianna when they were small. They’re from the Vail clan who are more siblings than cousins.

My aunt Rosemary met her husband Wayne in the small village outside St. Paul that my parents moved to after they got married. Wayne’s parents, who both lived to over 100, got the first TV in town in 1948 & everyday at 4:00 would open their house to let the town kids come in & watch Howdy Doody.

Haley is just an awesome kid.

The OJ Simpson phenomenon is so psychologically remarkable. We know he was a wife beater & is probably a murderer but there’s something so endearing, almost mesmerizing, about his personality. Is it his good-looks or the warmth of his smile? Or just that he has the talents of all good con artists? It used to be a literary conceit to describe character by one’s physical description but hopefully writers have evolved beyond that nonsense. You can’t tell much about others based on how they look.

TV news today is all OJ Simpson’s parole hearing all the time. Quite frankly, I think he was sent to prison not for stealing his own property back but because they were trying to get him for murdering Nicole Simpson & Ron Goldman. A jury found him innocent of those 1994 murders. He probably did murder them but if the police hadn’t planted evidence to nail him & the forensics team hadn’t mishandled evidence the overwhelming evidence would have been more persuasive to a jury. If he hadn’t had the resources for a dream team of lawyers & was a Black working class kid, he’d have been sent up the river for life without parole.

What to me is most memorable about the 1995 verdict is that media immediately began beating the drums of polarization about the incompatibility of Blacks & whites. This incited racists to come out from under their rocks which was a very scary phenomenon to witness. Serendipitously, just two weeks after the verdict, Black organizations held the Million Man March in Washington, DC which had conservative politics but was a show of Black power that drew at least a million people. The racist crap in media stopped on a dime & the racists went back under their rocks. That is why I am an advocate for Black power.

Twelve-year-old Aroofa Farooq was struck & killed by an Indian army vehicle today near her home in the Shopian district of south Kashmir. With 700,000 troops deployed to Kashmir, India must have thousands of armored vehicles that endanger especially small children. They are probably as reckless driving the damn things around Kashmir as they are shooting off pellet munitions that blind, disfigure, do serious, permanent physical harm, & kill children, youth, elderly. In such a situation, this cannot be considered an accident but should be condemned as a war crime.

Go back India, go back!

“Al-Qaeda & Assad regime have one goal in common: Elimination of the Syrian Revolution.”

–Mohanad Mezghiche

The funeral of Parvaiz Ahmad in Kashmir, July 16th, 2017

Parvaiz Ahmad funeral July 16th by Basit Zargar July 20 2017

The funeral of Parvaiz Ahmad in Kashmir, July 16th, 2017:

We should never forget there was a media blackout about the occupation of Kashmir until Kashmiri activists on social media obligated media to begin reporting in order to establish a counter-narrative to that of a freedom struggle against occupation. Before the 2016 uprising & military siege in Kashmir, photojournalism was mostly Kashmiri women’s prayer rituals, snow-covered trees, flower patches & serene images of Dal Lake. Then in 2016, borrowing from coverage of Palestinian Intifada, media began using photos of the lone stone pelter, as though they were antisocial hooligans isolated from mass resistance & the thousands of protesters they defended.

It is once again on social media where we learn about the character of the ongoing occupation & where we see that, like in Palestine, the most pervasive image of occupation–after that of resistance–is of funeral corteges/protests where they grieve & bury young martyrs & protest the occupation at the same time.

Our fullest solidarity with Kashmiri freedom fighters.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo by Basit Zargar)