Mary Scully Reports

A friend reports that he’s unable to post about Kashmir on Facebook. He isn’t the first to report that. Anyone else having that issue?

This useful blog sent to me by a friend shows all the #StandWithKashmir actions going on around the world this weekend & later.

https://beenasarwar.com/2019/09/21/global-standout-for-peace-in-solidarity-with-standwithkashmir/?

This is a video of Indian police in the state of Uttar Pradesh attacking unarmed unemployed youth protesting for jobs. It resonates so strongly with police attacks on Black civil rights protesters in the 1960s & with police attacks on protesters now all over the world, especially against the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 & the anti-austerity protests from Europe to Latin America. It’s part of glorifying militarism & the militarization of police. The right to protest without fear of violence is a human & democratic right that we must be fearless in defending. It should be added that this is what Kashmiris have sustained on a daily basis for decades & what will exponentially increase in India if the colonial occupation of Kashmir is not defeated.

Kashmiri resistance art exhibit in Toronto, Canada, today, showing the immense creativity & stamina of this new international movement.

Kashmiri solidarity activist Lina Ewald asked sardonically why the Gates Foundation was giving their award to Modi–rendering it more useless than used toilet paper–rather than to the hundreds of thousands of scavengers in India who manually clean the sewers, ‘a profession you can find nowhere else in this world”?

These are two articles that raise the question of why the Gates Foundation would even consider giving Modi such an award when those sanitation workers are dying of suffocation. Maybe they could explain what the Modi gang really did with that money if scavenging sewers is still an occupation in India?

https://scroll.in/latest/937715/in-no-country-people-are-sent-to-gas-chambers-to-die-sc-asks-centre-about-sewer-workers-deaths?

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/seven-including-four-sanitation-workers-die-of-suffocation-while-cleaning-hotel-drain-in-gujarat-new-2053655?

A word to the wise & the young: never lose faith or give up on yourself. Despite testing high, I was told three times by people in authority that I was too stupid to go to college–by a high school counselor, the chaplain at my nunnery, & a college admissions officer. My desire to learn outweighed their hatred for working class kids. So never let yourself get down because of the rotters in the world.

“Only idiots believe India is threatened by Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and has therefore enforced the siege of Kashmir. Simply put, if India says it had to enforce this siege on Kashmiri people in order to fight Pakistani terrorism, then it is obviously lying. The siege proves that the only form of terrorism in Kashmir today is Indian rule, and what India calls ‘terrorism’ is actually people’s resistance against its colonial terror. That’s common sense, which idiots who support the Indian State do not possess.”

#StandWithKashmir

–Indian activist Satyadeep Satya

Howdy Modi organizers report that the US is India’s largest trading partner in goods & services with an increase from US$126 billion in 2017 to US$142 billion in 2018. #BoycottIndia is going after that to make it zip, nada, zero US$.

Can you imagine that I had a friend here who was liking up posts over on the Howdy Modi rally wall? When I first began writing about Kashmir, there was an avalanche of nationalist friends who went berserk in the same way Zionists & Assadists do. They’re all in blockland now since they thought abuse, epithets, haranguing, threats were the way to persuade me Kashmir was an integral part of India. I was sorry to see them go but I hate nationalism & Islamophobic war mongering even more. I haven’t spent a moment crying over their loss, only over their reactionary delusions.

You don’t change people’s minds by arguments very often. They have to be confronted by the political power of the oppressed. That was something I learned from the US Civil Rights movement in comparing the state of racism before & after it & it’s stuck with me through all my political work. I’ve never had reason to change my mind.