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Pakistani bombing near Afghan-Pakistan border causes massive flight

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Afghan girl refugee July 6 2014

Starting with the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, millions of Afghans fled for sanctuary to the border region in Pakistan. The Afghan-Pakistan border, devised in the 19th century by British colonialists, continues to be contentious because it divides Pashtuns of the same cultural, religious, & historic heritage. But now, the Pakistan military, bankrolled & probably functioning as a proxy to the US Pentagon, is bombing the smithereens out of Pakistan’s North Waziristan region along the same border. So tens of thousands of Pashtun residents–both Pakistanis & Afghan refugees–are fleeing, including back across the border to Afghanistan. The barbarisms of the US-NATO war & of Pakistan’s involvement are highlighted in all their treacheries by this frantic diaspora.

As of November 2012, the US Pentagon stopped reporting on drone strikes in Afghanistan so there is no data on how many strikes there have been or how many civilians have been killed–all by US & UK aircraft. We do know that in the three-year period from 2009 to 2012, there were 1,273 drone strikes launched in Afghanistan. That is three times more drone strikes in Afghanistan than the CIA admits to carrying out in Pakistan over the past ten years.

According to a recent UN report, after the Pentagon clammed up on drone data, civilian drone deaths in Afghanistan tripled in 2013 & drones are not the only bombing aircraft used. The UN report identifies 19 separate incidents in which civilians were killed by drones & raised the possibility of negligence. How about raising the possibility of war crimes against the people of Afghanistan!?

This child is a Pashtun refugee from North Waziristan seeking asylum from the bombing by crossing the border into Khost, Afghanistan. The barbaric irony of all this takes ones breath away.

No US-NATO war in Afghanistan! No US war in Pakistan! No US war in Iraq!

(Photo by Bilal Sarwary)

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No civil rights for Israeli Palestinians

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Israeli soldiers in West Bank July 7 2014

This scene is from Ar’ara, described as an Arab Israeli town in northern Israel. Check out the arsenal those soldiers are packing against unarmed Palestinian protesters. There is no news coverage about Palestinian protests within Israel except this photo & another showing a protester being arrested. Zionist mythology claims Palestinians within Israel have civil rights & as we can see from this photo, they use the military to make damn sure Palestinians don’t exercise them.

Ar’ara is a contentious region because of its concentration of Palestinian towns & its proximity to the border between Israel & Palestinian bantustates. After the establishment of Israel in 1947, the government began confiscating Palestinian land in Ar’ara without notifying the owner. In 1954 an Israeli court ruled that Israeli law (which they were likely extemporizing on the spot) did not require the owner to be notified & excluded even the possibility land owners could contest confiscations in court. So all that mythology about civil rights for Palestinians in Israel is nothing but hogwash & hasbara.

Support civil rights for Palestinians; boycott all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729); support the cultural boycott of Israel; demand “No military aid to Israel!”

(Photo by Oded Balilty/AP)

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Chomsky on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel for apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

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Intifada July 5 2014

There is no need to genuflect to the contributions Noam Chomsky has made to understanding Zionism. With the collapse of the left, he has long stood alone on the campus circuit educating thousands about the nature of Israel. But for those who came of age politically in the 1960s (& earlier) there were many who elaborated the nature of Zionism even more cogently & without the compromises Chomsky makes to left Zionism. Those teachers include Abraham Leon, the Belgian Jew who died at Auschwitz; activists from Matzpen, the Israeli socialist group (now defunct); & many anti-Zionist Jews & socialists around the world, including Ilan Pappé, the Israeli now resident in England.

Chomsky, despite his criticisms of the violent excesses of Israel, believes in the Zionist project of an only-Jewish state, reflecting a deep conservatism & cynicism in his thinking which makes him unwilling or unable to thoroughly anatomize the reactionary character of Zionism. Because he’s a principled person, this cynicism seems to put him at odds with his own theoretics; it certainly puts him at odds with reality & with Palestinian justice. Because if there was ever an instance where you can’t possibly have it both ways, that would be Israel as a Jewish-only state & Palestinian justice.

Chomsky has chosen just this moment in time–when Israel is bombing the hell out of Gaza, conducting a barbaric jackboot occupation in the West Bank, & inciting racist mobs against Palestinians in Jerusalem–to publish a smarmy attack on the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement in The Nation magazine. Using the legalistic parsing employed by Norman Finkelstein, he attempts to discredit the characterization of Israel as an apartheid state. Both men expose their support for Israel as a Jewish-only state by appealing to the most conservative international agencies like the United Nations & Human Rights Watch–not to mention the US State Department.

Neither has respect for Palestinian intifada & rooted in academia, neither has a clue about how to build a social movement. Chomsky at least has always been candid in admitting that weakness. But most importantly, neither wants BDS & Palestinian solidarity to succeed because it threatens the possibility of a Jewish-only state. In their cynicism, they cannot envision a democratic, secular state where Jews & Palestinians & Africans live in harmony as brothers & sisters. Theoretically, like all Zionist ideologues, they capitulate to racism & antisemitism & the status quo of colonialism.

Both Chomsky & Finkelstein are media celebrities called on frequently for commentary on Israel. In opposing BDS with such arrant contempt they are trying to eliminate the economic boycott, a non-violent political weapon, & leave unarmed Palestinians to the savageries of bombers & jackboots. It may not be politic for Palestinians to sever relations with these two erstwhile allies, but sure as hell Palestinian supporters can call them out for such contemptible, shameful betrayal of justice.

Here a Palestinian responds to Israeli bulldozers expropriating Palestinian lands in the West Bank village of Kufr Qaddum in the spirit of intifada (on June 13th).

Stand with intifada & BDS: boycott all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729); support the cultural boycott of Israel; demand “No military aid to Israel.”

Long live intifada!

(Photo by Nedal Eshtayah/APA Images)

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Anti-immigration protest in Murrieta, CA: a gathering of racist trolls

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Anti-immigration march July 5 2014

The 150 anti-immigration protesters harassing buses of undocumented immigrants at a Border Patrol station in Murrieta, California near San Diego are making a lot of news–even though the LA Times reports they were outnumbered by immigration rights activists. That’s the media’s way of making it appear anti-immigration sentiment is a groundswell in the US–& thus helping to create one.

When the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced in 1995, the media was thunderous about how it exposed polarity between Blacks & whites in this country. It was alarming to hear many whites emboldened in their most primitive thinking & discussing how the verdict showed the impossibility of “racial” harmony in the US.

Serendipitously, the Million Man March in Washington, DC was just a week after the verdict. It was more a religious parade than a civil rights protest but it was a massive show of power when close to a million Black men & women showed up. It muted, in one fell stroke, all the bellicose rhetoric against Black people both in the media & among racist whites.

That’s what is needed now so that anti-immigration sentiment does not crescendo. Power is a very daunting thing but it needs to be mobilized.

Immigration is a human right! Open the damn borders! Close down the immigration jails!

(Photo is the handful of anti-immigration protesters by Mark Boster/LATimes)

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The racism of Zionism

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Israel African immigrant July 4 2014

Zionism had a different kind of dream than Martin Luther King. In opposing US apartheid (called Jim Crow), Dr. King said “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal” & “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” It was that kind of vision that inspired the great US Civil Rights Movement, which while it lasted ended the worst savageries of US apartheid & inspired millions of oppressed around the world to stand against tyranny & colonialism.

Zionism isn’t built on equality & all that hope stuff; it’s built on a cynical & twisted sense of Jewish superiority, separating Jews from other ethnicities in a shtetl surrounded by an apartheid wall & fortified by one of the most heavily armed militaries in the world. From earliest on, those who opposed the Zionist project of Israel claimed it would be a death trap for Jews. It has proven worse than that.

Right now Israel is engaged in a murderous bombing campaign over Gaza & a jackboot occupation of the West Bank, brutalizing & rounding up hundreds of Palestinians. Politicians are inciting Israelis to barbarous acts of violence against Palestinian youth as revenge for the murder of the three teenage settlers–when no investigation, charges, legal proceedings have even been initiated. In other words, mob rule is in force in place of legal justice.

And in this photo, an Israeli cop & immigration officer brutalize an African asylum seeker who along with 1,000 others left Holot immigration jail in Israel & marched to the Egyptian border to get the hell out of the country. They preferred to return to their own war-torn countries or to make the perilous trek across the Mediterranean Sea than to stay in the hellhole called Israel. It doesn’t get more damning or more wretched than that.

Supporting Palestinian justice & opposing Israeli apartheid is the only vision that ‘will be able to hew hope out of the mountain of despair’ that is Israel. Boycott all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729); support the cultural boycott of Israel, & demand “No military aid to Israel!”

(Photo by Oren Ziv/AFP/Getty Images)

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Abortion rights and the failed electoral strategy of women’s groups

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SCOTUS Hobby Lobby July 3 2014

Since the 1973 US Supreme Court ruling on Roe v Wade legalizing abortion, the right-wing has relentlessly pursued its reversal. They have organized & bankrolled hundreds & hundreds of legislative initiatives, court challenges, public protests including at abortion clinics, & some have not stopped at violence & assassination.

This has gone on for over forty years with very little response from abortion rights activists. The reason for the lack of political opposition is that early on leading figures of the feminist movement like Betty Friedan & Gloria Steinem won a ferocious battle within the movement to tie it to the Democratic Party, the graveyard of social protest movements. When abortion rights were won in January 1973, the movement went into a prolonged eclipse. The thousands of women’s groups that had been formed from every kind of constituency–lesbian, Chicano, Black, disabled, religious, military, socialist, even Republican–now became little more than an answering machine or post office box. The movement that gets charged by know-nothings with so many crimes & receives so little credit for its monumental achievements actually only existed as a social movement for a matter of years. But its thrust was so massive & so powerful that it changed the lives of millions of women for what then seemed forever.

The primary feminist organization remains the National Organization for Women (NOW), which has an electoral & legalistic perspective & engages very little in massive mobilizations to defend reproductive rights. On the few occasions since Roe v Wade that NOW did put out a call for national protests in Washington, DC, hundreds of thousands of abortion rights activists responded.

Given the unwillingness of NOW to mobilize women & instead depend on the courts, it is no surprise that state by state major inroads against reproductive rights have been won or that we have seen just in the past few weeks two major Supreme Court rulings against reproductive rights: a ruling to allow right-wing vigilantes to harass women at clinics & the Hobby Lobby ruling giving corporations religious rights while denying them to women. The ultimate goal in all these attacks on reproductive freedom is of course to reverse Roe v Wade & send women back to coat hangers & back-alley abortionists. Every time a victory is won against reproductive freedom, Roe v Wade totters on its feeble legs–& that is precisely the strategy of those opposed to women’s reproductive rights.

You can’t just snap your fingers & materialize a social movement, no matter how dire the need. But those who value women’s rights must begin to collaborate, agitate, organize because an assault on Roe v Wade is rolling in piece-meal & right along with that a wholesale attack on every right won by millions of women in hard-fought battles.

Many pro & anti-reproductive rights protests have been held in front of Hobby Lobby stores but there are other corporations included in this decision. They should all be identified, boycotted, protested, & notified that they are under economic siege for daring to challenge women’s right to reproductive freedom. NOW should be strongly encouraged to organize local & national protests in defense of women’s rights.

Hands off our bodies! Hands off our rights!

(Photo of March 2014 protest at Supreme Court by Larry Downing/Reuters)

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Teenage immigrant found dead in Texas: a victim of racist U.S. immigration policy

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Gilberto Francisco Ramos Juarez July 3 2014

Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago the Obamas claimed they wanted their two kids to experience the character-building reality of minimum wage jobs? They meant to sound egalitarian; instead they exposed a wretched noblesse oblige & contempt for working people. But patronizing us is one thing; going after our kids is quite another. 52,000 Central American kids have been arrested since October 2013 crossing the US border to find jobs that pay even less than minimum wage. They’ve been jailed in squalid, overcrowded conditions & are now threatened with deportation by the Obama regime. Is that about character building too?

There’s no reason to beat around the bush or continue to flog the shibboleth that Obama’s crimes are all George Bush’s fault. Those 52,000 children testify differently. But the most damning condemnation of all comes from the graves of 445 immigrants, including children, who died crossing the US-Mexico border last year.

While Obama utters pieties about the humanitarian crisis on the border, he sent his two hapless lieutenants Kerry & Biden to work the politicians in Central America. There isn’t much they can threaten them with since US military aid to those countries to facilitate the drug trade & other plunders isn’t going to stop over a massive immigration embarrassment.

The line peddled by all three politicians is that the kids are being “enticed” to the US by lies & promises of amnesty or they’re being urged to leave by their parents. So the US is starting an ad campaign throughout Central America to discourage the kids from coming. And here they have officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol, & Texas Rangers talking tough to the kids, warning them not to come since they’ll just be sent home. And of course the local media operates like another flank of bully boys.

The Democratic Party has the Rio Grande Valley sewed up nice & tight & Obama wouldn’t want to rattle that cage. So he blithers pieties about the humanitarian crisis while he’s calling on Congress to dish out more money for “flexibility to speed the youth’s deportation”, $2 billion for more judges to process asylum applications in kangaroo immigration courts, & more detention centers to warehouse the kids. Because all that is really character building.

But then we have the story of Gilberto Francisco Ramos Juarez, a 15-year-old boy who left his remote mountain village in Guatemala against his mother’s wishes so he could earn money to treat her epilepsy. He was trying to join his older brother in Chicago but his decomposed body was found only a mile from the Rio Grande River. He died likely from heat stroke. If his mother’s pleas couldn’t deter him from trying to help her, does the Obama regime, complete with all his attendant stooges like Kerry & Biden, really believe a billboard campaign would!?

Photo is Gilberto Ramos. May he RIP. And may we keep this young boy in mind as we join with immigration rights activists in demanding: Immigration is a human right! Open the borders! Open the immigration jails!

(Photo from yahoo)

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Farming is the oldest profession for women

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Woman farmer June 28 2014

This is a woman farmer in Khokana, Lalitpur, a district in central Nepal. It’s not certain what she’s so happy about since the work looks like hell. We’re taught to assume farmers are mostly men when in fact it’s the primary work of most rural women. Contrary to the repugnant slander against our ancient mothers, farming is the oldest profession for women & they played a key role in the development of agriculture.

What’s interesting about the village of Khokana, with an economy still based on agriculture, is that it has an ancient Mother Goddess temple. Mother Goddesses personified the fertility & bounty of the Earth, often referred to as Mother Earth.

Cultural feminists from the women’s movement of the 1970s played the central role in popularizing interest in the Mother Goddesses & forged Wicca at one time as the fastest growing religion in the US & elsewhere. These feminists didn’t go back to farming but played an important role in educating women about our bodies & in advancing healthcare for women–which was a travesty in many ways prior to the women’s movement.

Whether religious or not, whether drawn to “pagan” goddesses or not, many women love to read about these Mother Goddesses because they represent a time in history when women were held in high esteem, when we were creative & powerful & not threatened with violence in a thousand different ways. It’s good to keep our ancient mothers in mind for inspiration because we have a long row ahead of us to plow to bring back those old glory days.

(Photo by Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters)

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Graffiti campaign in Yemen: a form of political protest

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Yemen graffiti campaign June 28 2014

This is a graffiti mural from Sana’a, Yemen but it’s uncertain if it is part of the 12th hour graffiti campaign or was already there–since graffiti has long been a form of political protest in Yemen & played a prominent role during & after the uprising in 2011.

We are told the purpose of this mural was to depict the disproportionate impact of poverty on women. The poignant & powerful image is universal, resonating with the oppressed everywhere.

Many try so hard to divide the human race by religion, gender, ethnicity, & everything else under the sun that makes us different. Artists & poets are here to silence the cacophony & disharmony & remind us to keep perspective; that we are all human beings with far more in common than at odds.

Once we rid this magnificent planet of the things that stink it up like injustice & inequality, the human race has a brilliant future.

(Photo from Yemen Times)

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Graffiti campaign for disappeared in Yemen

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Yemen- portraits of disappeared June 28 2014

This is another graffiti mural from the 12th hour graffiti campaign in Yemen depicting those disappeared by the regime. One of the most prominent manifestations of political discontent since the end of the uprising in 2012 has been continuous protests over those still unaccounted for by the regime. Graffiti portraits of victims of violence either murdered or disappeared are all over Sana’a.

(Image from Yemen Times)