Are we supposed to grieve over the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia? Because I’ve been wondering for a long time what was taking Lucifer so long to take him out. He was a worthless bum. Every time one of these bozos die people start to panic that a reactionary will be appointed to the court. Could any be more reactionary than this fool?
May he fry in hell for all eternity. No RIPs from me.
Egypt’s highest appeals court today overturned the conviction of the police officer sentenced to 15 years in prison for the execution of unarmed protester Shaimaa el-Sabbagh on January 24th, 2015.
This is the junta’s flouting of justice since there is no dispute about the circumstances of her execution. It was filmed & photographed by several journalists & bystanders as she participated in a small, peaceful demonstration to commemorate the hundreds killed in the 2011 uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak. According to many witnesses at the scene, police also refused assistance as she lay dying on the street.
Shaimaa was 31-years-old & the single mother of a five-year-old boy. She was a poet, studied folklore & documented traditions in small villages; she was an activist in the small socialist group which organized the march.
Those who knew her described her as a kind & calm woman who was supportive to others. Despite the restoration of military rule, she was optimistic about the political future of Egypt.
Hosni Mubarak had quite a different experience with the junta courts. After a few years of dog & pony legal spectacles, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption, abuse of power, & failing to halt the murder of peaceful protesters during the 2011 uprising. “Failing to halt” when it is certain he ordered them to be shot. Six months later, another court overturned that sentence & ordered a retrial, along with his corrupt sons. The retrial worked out real well for them. They got prison sentences in 2015 but the sons were sprung out 6 months later. Mubarak is reportedly detained in a military hospital. What do you bet, he’s really lolling in his mansion?
This kind of justice is all backed by the US, originally brokered by then Secretary of State Clinton, & part of the long-term deal brokered in 1978 by then President Jimmy Carter in the Camp David Accords which armed Egypt against its own people in return for the regime turning its back on support for Palestinians.
Our fullest solidarity with activists in Egypt & our deepest respect.
This photo of Shaimaa is from the protest where she was murdered in Cairo.
(Photo by Mohammed El-Raaei/AP)
The resistance of the oppressed must surely be hell on earth, especially when the persecution is unremitting & if they stand alone without international solidarity for decades on end–like Palestinians & Kashmiris. There is another side to Intifada that receives too little attention but highlights the absolute imperative of building active solidarity.
In both Gaza & Kashmir, suicide rates among the young are soaring & appear to be directly related to the political conditions. It would actually be idiotic to suggest otherwise.
It’s very much to the point that suicide rates among Black teens in the US are also dramatically rising. It has long been epidemic among Native American teens. Latino teens may have a lower rate of suicide but they have a higher rate of playing with the idea & higher reported rates of feeling sadness, hopelessness, worthlessness.
This is not the world our children deserve. We have to mobilize the big battalions of international solidarity.
Watching the GOP candidates debate, you see they’re deranged, vicious, small-minded, stupid, racist up to their eyeballs. You compare that to the two Democrats outdoing each other with the populist thing. Then you realize the barbaric phase of capitalism is running out of options & it’s reflected in the crisis of leadership because it has no solutions to the problems it creates. All of the proposed solutions are at the expense of working people, especially refugees & immigrants.
If there’s a better explanation for this fiasco, please don’t hesitate to elaborate it.
Lesser evil rationalizations are going into overdrive. If people want to vote for Sanders, just do it with pride & without apology. That’s your democratic right. There’s no need to lie your ass off about his views on Israeli apartheid. And anyway, that is not the only issue he stinks on. He is rotten on immigration rights & publicly said undocumented immigrants threaten the integrity of the nation-state. That’s an artful expression of xenophobia. He is absolutely deplorable on war, pretending he’s against some of them but always voting appropriations.
Own up to it if you support him. Don’t be bullied. Stand by your own judgements & convictions. But for heaven’s sake, stop misrepresenting what he stands for. It just has to be said that if you oppose Israeli apartheid & also support him, you are wallowing in contradictions of the kind you should be uncomfortable about.
Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of Bahrain’s “Arab Spring” uprising in 2011. Bahrain is a small country but strategically located & sponsors the US Fifth Fleet–which partially explains the ferocity of the monarchical regime against democracy protesters & its ability to draw on allies like Saudi Arabia, the US, & UK to crush the uprising.
In 2012, Hamad al-Khalifa, the king of Bahrain (& client of Amal Clooney), hired John Yates, a corrupt UK cop famous for his use of wire-tapping & police surveillance, & John Timoney, a US cop notorious for militarized methods against peaceful protestors (rubber bullets, tasers, concussion grenades, pepper spray, tear gas, electrified riot shields, baton charges). Ostensibly these two thugs were hired to reform police & military to conform to “international policing standards” after Bahrain was cited by an international commission for using excessive force, torture, summary execution, & countless other human rights crimes to crush the democracy movement. Clooney’s defense of al-Khalifa was against the condemnations of the international commission.
The UK has been involved in Bahraini military & intelligence training for decades. Along with Yates, a team from Scotland Yard trained & directed the police force & trained Saudi national guards deployed against protestors in Bahrain in 2012. The UK has a long history of orchestrating police violence in Bahrain–from 1966 to 1998, Ian Henderson, a former British colonial officer led Bahrain’s secret police, gaining the sobriquet, “Butcher of Bahrain” because of the extreme kinds of torture used against thousands of dissidents, including children. Repeated calls for the UK to prosecute Henderson under international law have been ignored because of Britain’s close ties with the Bahraini dictatorship.
Both the US & UK have economic, political, military, & strategic interests in Bahrain which conflict with the democratic needs of the Bahraini people. That’s why the US under Obama & UK continue to stand by the murderous regime with armaments, combat vehicles & helicopters, communications equipment, a missile system, & a training role in the use of death squads. The US & UK claim the weaponry is for Bahrain’s external defense but Bahrain is not a country under military siege by outside armies; it is a regime conducting an all-out war against it’s own people.
With such logistical support, the regime has been emboldened to escalate violence & repression; they use special force units to target & round up human rights activists; death squads; torture (without doubt, the CIA is there training torturers), beatings, kidnappings, disappearances (including of children); indiscriminate but methodical use of pellet guns (like India uses in Kashmir) & tear gas in residential areas (termed “carpet gassing”) resulting in maiming, blinding, deaths; incarceration; house raids; road check points for routine stops, searches, & intimidation.
Standing up against all that is what makes the Bahraini democracy movement so extraordinary & such a beacon of defiance against tyranny. Here a young man at a protest today in Sitra (one of several all over the country) is holding off against riot police in front of a wall of posters with the image of dissident Saudi cleric Nimr al-Nimr who spoke out for democracy against the Saudi regime & was one of 47 people beheaded on January 2nd this year.
Bahraini protesters pelted armored vehicles & police jeeps with paint bombs, stones & petrol bombs but the US & UK-trained police moved in with tear gas to violently disperse the protest.
Our deepest respect & fullest solidarity with the democracy movement of Bahrain.
(Photo by Hasan Jamali/AP)
George Clooney has made a name for himself as an affable prankster. Why doesn’t he stick to what he does best? Why does a guy who spends most of his time looking pretty think he’s believable as an activist for justice? But every few years, he puts aside celebrity shindigs to grandstand around something political. This is where things get hairy for George, where he either gets in over his head or exposes that he’s not so affable after all when it comes to politics.
Usually, he comes on the scene lobbying for the US to send troops against Sudan to save Darfur. He’s always escorted on those occasions by John Prendergast, a nefarious US (probably CIA) operative in Africa. They both testify in Congress & Clooney gets arrested at a protest of himself, Prendergast, & a few movie extras–then he goes back to red carpet affairs where he’s most at home.
Now George accompanied Amal Clooney & David Miliband to Berlin to meet with Angela Merkel & discuss refugees & the work of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Amal Clooney is always promoted as a human rights lawyer but her legal resume is quite a mixed bag. She has a few prominent human rights cases but mostly she’s on the wrong side of human rights. She came to prominence defending Enron; most egregiously, she defended the king of Bahrain whilst he was brutally, monstrously crushing the Bahraini uprising. For those who witnessed that extraordinary uprising for democracy so violently crushed, her defense of the king is more than enough condemnation for one lifetime.
David Miliband heads up the IRC–speaking of nefarious. It’s a front group for unspecified establishment malevolence. The board of directors includes Timothy F. Geithner (a protégé of Henry Kissinger & the Obama official who presided over the Wall Street bank bailouts). Its trustees include Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell (the war crimes of those four need no elaboration); Elie Wiesel (who publicly accused parents in Gaza of using their children as human shields to justify Israel’s carpet bombing siege in 2014); magnates from JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, including Felix Rohatyn (who presided over the dismantling of social services in NYC during the 1970s) & James Wolfensohn (past president of the World Bank who dismantled social services on several continents); & the usual cosmetic array of celebrities like Clooney.
Too harsh on George? If he ever abandons his nefarious allies like Prendergast & the IRC & if he ever speaks out against US wars or takes a stand with Black youth against police violence, we can reconsider our contempt. Until then, he’s either a fool or a shill for the power elite. We don’t like to insult people’s intelligence, so it’s likely the latter.
Of course, the real question here is, what is the IRC up to with its phony concern about refugees? If the front group had any real concern, it would be denouncing NATO for sending warships against unarmed refugees in plastic dinghies & demanding the EU open the borders. Anything short of that is collusion.
(Photo of the Clooneys & Merkel from Reuters)
Some may think my posts too hard on people like Sanders, Steinem, & John Lewis. The times call for uncompromising, fearless activists like Palestinians & Kashmiris so why should we settle for two-bit operators in one of the countries causing most of the world’s miseries?
Madeline Albright apologized for saying women who don’t support Clinton deserve a special place in hell. Who gives a rat’s ass! There’s nothing she could ever say that would excuse her for what she said about the children of Iraq.
Bernie Sanders nailed Clinton last night for her political friendship with Kissinger. But when you support the Democratic Party, that’s the dilemma since it includes a few smooth-talkers like Sanders but more war-makers like Albright, Obama, & the Clintons. Incidentally, Steinem’s primary political mission remains stumping for the Democratic Party every election. She apparently remains untroubled by the unsavory associations. Conclusions can be drawn from that.
To photo is Steinem & Albright; bottom photo is Kissinger & Clinton (who Steinem is stumping for)
(Photographer unidentified)
I’ve been a participant in the antiwar movement since 1966–now fifty years. I’m not alone; the US antiwar movement today is sustained by the activism of my generation who cannot reconcile to US militarism & its barbaric wars. That’s likely true around the world because in the Vietnam War era, antiwar activity was massive & international.
For decades, on a moment’s notice, thousands could be mobilized to protest military escalations. That prevailed throughout the 1980s & the US proxy wars in Central America but declined dramatically after the Gulf War began in 1990. To my mind that decline has never been sufficiently evaluated politically to understand why. But as an activist who watched the process, I think it has to do, at least in part, with the overwhelming savagery employed by the US military against Iraq. It was terrifying & it may have daunted the fighting spirit of many activists.
Now we are again faced with terrifying & daunting savagery as NATO deploys warships against unarmed refugees in dinghies; with bombers from several nations over Iraq & Syria; with periodic Israeli carpet bombing sieges over Gaza. The 14-year war in Afghanistan has inured us to wars as a permanent fixture of life on planet Earth.
But the only reason that savagery escalates is because there has been no countervailing & international political opposition like existed against the Vietnam War. It is the most imperative political mission of our era to rebuild that movement which was comprised of students, women, Blacks, Latinos, church groups, trade union members, LGBT activists, liberals, communists, socialists, young, old. We cannot stand daunted & let the war-makers tear this planet asunder.
My political generation was taught by our elders that war is a clarion call, a priority to which every other political commitment is subordinate. We learned to integrate our activities into the antiwar movement: as example, contingents of women marched to express the special concerns of women about war; contingents of Black & Latino activists marched because they understood the racism of war.
It is time to rebuild that movement–if necessary, one placard at a time. War is not an abstraction nor a tertiary issue to those sustaining the bombing. Some claim there is no antiwar movement because cynicism allows them to sit on their duffs deploring the state of the human race. If there is no antiwar movement in your area, take initiatives to make it happen. Find allies because they do exist. Everywhere there have always been men & women of good will who deplore war & are willing to take a stand against it.