Irfan Mehraj, the editor of Wande Magazine, has been running a series of interviews with the Kashmiri women co-authors of “Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?.” It’s such a valuable series about how they deal with the sensitivities & brutalities of state-sponsored sexual violence. We need to understand in our bones what they do: that the shame of these crimes adheres to the perpetrators unleashed by oppressive governments & not to the victims. It is the educational part of mobilizing to end this monstrous crime all over the world.

These are three of the series not yet posted on this wall (if you want the others reposted here again, just say so.)

http://www.wandemag.com/sexual-violence-women-used-break-men-sexual-violence-men-used-break-men-essar-batool/

http://www.wandemag.com/army-knows-kunan-poshpora-case-goes-proper-trial-will-implicated-thats-prolonging-munaza-rashid/

http://www.wandemag.com/people-remember-rape-women-kunan-poshpora-people-remember-resistance-samreen-mushtaq/

These are Kashmiri women at funeral/protest of 23-year-old Bilal Ahmad Bhat in August 2015.They are protesting Indian paramilitary thugs executing Bhat & opening fire on protesters who later protested the killing. There are countless photos of Kashmiri women protesting.

Our deepest respect & fullest solidarity.

(Photo by Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)

Palestinian Intifada: these are Palestinians protesting today outside Israeli’s Ofer Prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah. It’s a frequent place for protests in defense of Palestinian political prisoners warehoused there. Just as frequent, the protests are attacked by Israeli soldiers.

Ofer is built for 800 prisoners but now houses 1,250 Palestinians, including many kids & many under administrative detention, meaning indefinitely without charge. There are many reports by human rights agencies of abuse of children who are mostly there for throwing stones.

You look at photos of Palestinian Intifada–or Kashmiri Intifada–& marvel at the intransigence & courage of resistance to occupation & colonialism. But what can never be lost in admiration is that this is not the way life should be for young people: having to defy military brutality while maligned as haters, terrorists, & suicide bombers. These young people could be writing poetry, novels, plays; they could be singing in a chorus or playing in a band; they could be inventing & pioneering breakthroughs in science or new cures for human illness. They could just be living peaceful, happy lives. Instead they’re on the front lines of struggle for survival against the mightiest military forces on the planet.

We owe these young people everything. Mostly we owe them solidarity. Build & honor BDS–the cultural & economic boycott of Israel. Buy nothing that begins with barcode numbers 729.

(Photos by Mohamad Torokman/Reuters)

The media caption to this photo taken on March 4th reads: “A man cries as he carries his daughter while walking from an Islamic State-controlled part of Mosul towards Iraqi special forces soldiers during a battle in Mosul, Iraq.”

Kind of suggests he is fleeing into the arms of the salvation army when what he is more likely fleeing is a war zone being bombed & shelled because there are ISIS fighters in the area.

It isn’t one whit conciliatory toward ISIS to say that bombing civilians is not the way to fight them. There are options to that method which include arming civilians to defend themselves. US military intervention in Iraq has created this problem & is no part of the solution.

US out of Iraq now!

(Photo by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

Liberation US-style, Kabul Afghanistan: a little boy is selling boiled eggs to workers–almost certainly including children–at a coal dump site near Kabul. Consider the health problems this child will have from inhaling coal dust; consider the trauma & bereavement the little guy thinks is his life sentence. Then consider that Afghan refugees are among those the EU targets for deportation back home.

Sixteen years of US-NATO war & occupation & this is what the Pentagon has to show for it.

US out of Afghanistan. Massive war reparations to the people of Afghanistan. Our deepest apologies that the international antiwar movement has not sufficiently rallied in opposition & in solidarity with the people of Afghanistan.

(Photo by Mohammad Ismail/Reuters)

Liberation US-style in Mosul, Iraq: you don’t have to graduate from war college to know bombing & shelling cities with nearly 1.5 million civilians to take out less than 5,000 guerrilla fighters is a catastrophic strategy.

The overwhelming number of victims will be civilians caught in the crossfires, bombed out of their homes, subject to chemical attacks from one side or the other–likely both–& traumatized & terrified from living in a war zone. Parents can hardly comfort the children when they are sustaining shell shock themselves & while fleeing for their lives.

Recent media reports say 60,000 civilians have fled Mosul since the offensive began last October (with men & boys subject to arrest, harassment, assault by the Iraqi army) but the estimate is almost certainly dead wrong since it was reported three weeks after the offensive began that 40,000 had already fled.

This little girl in a wheelchair is waiting for a truck to pick her up & carry her to a refugee camp or at least out of the crossfires.
ISIS has to be defeated but making life a living hell for hundreds of thousands of civilians is not the way to do it. It is not a liberation but an occupation.

US out of Iraq.

(Photo by Suhaib Salem/Reuters)

It’s important to know what Palestinians think about their misguided or malignant supporters who malign Syrians fighting a brutal dictatorship as head-choppers & instead support the counter-revolution of gulags & carpet bombing of civilians. It’s no coincidence that Palestinians & Kashmiris express solidarity with Syrian working people.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdFSTpAOCdPRU5e1iP11GDrWPu5pXrdVMzGumApRGd8lil2jQ/viewform?c=0&w=1&fbzx=6424724117704390000

Do Assad & his coterie of propagandists & useless idiots really think harping on about the White Helmets & demonizing little kids like Omran & Bana is the best approach to selling counter-revolution? Are there no fresh ideas coming out of propaganda school? They had a good thing going with that head-chopping crap but the photo shopper they hired gets the heads on backwards.

It’s a mystery of human consciousness why some people sell their souls to the devil for bucks. But then some never had a soul worth peddling.

Several well-known Assad supporters have accused the Palestinian solidarity movement of blacklisting Rania Khalek. There is no such blacklist & there would be no way of enforcing it if there were. There’s only revulsion at her Muslim-hating, Assadist bile impugning Syrians trying to oust a dictator as head-chopping terrorists. Choosing not to associate with that malignance is a democratic right called freedom of association. It’s the way politics work.

What happens to the Syrian revolution is integral to Palestinian liberation & we don’t have to be collegial in our debates with such propagandists who lie & malign & try to destroy solidarity with Syrians against terrorist groups & bombers–any more than we would be collegial with David Duke or David Icke or any other supremacist. These are life & death questions for millions of human beings.

One fellow who supports Khalek & is apparently just as clueless said this dispute about Syria is a “big distraction” for Palestinian solidarity. You read such comments & you want to weep that such is the state of antiwar solidarity.

Media is questioning the mental stability of Trump in no uncertain terms. What took them so long? It’s not the imaginary deep state that’s trying to take him out but mental health professionals coming with straitjackets.

Kashmiri writer Jamsheed Ramsool calls this newly published book by Mir Khalid a “magnum opus.” This is the blurb from Amazon which indeed makes it look quite compelling:

“In 1989, an adolescent schoolboy from downtown Srinagar watched as his elders extricated themselves from university campuses, high-school grounds, handloom machines & farms to bear arms & fight a war of attrition against the Indian state.

Twenty-two years on, Jaffna Street was born from his explorations of the human dimension of the conflict appositely termed the Kashmir tragedy. Combining anecdotes, personal memories & extended interviews, the author takes us behind the scenes & headlines into Srinagar city’s ‘notorious’ perpetually politically charged downtown as well as its upper cityside belt to create a panoramic portrait of recent Kashmir history. He profiles ordinary people—hitmen, insurgents, artisans, failed Marxist intellectuals, mystics, exiles, gangsters & ordinary individuals—who wouldn’t make it even to the footnotes of history but have been crucial first-hand witnesses, participants or victims of some of the important events that marked the tumultuous & violent years of the insurgency.”