Melbourne, Australia #StandWithKashmir protest.
“Day 40/Kashmir Blockade
“Many students in Kashmir after clearing various entrance exams couldn’t finalize their admissions due to nonfunctioning internet/phone. They have lost a year! Students outside state cant reach their parents for pocket money, semester fee, rent. An entire semester for Kashmiri students in Uni’s, colleges & schools is in jeopardy!
“In one instance a Kashmiri student was seriously ill, on ventilator and “Kashir Scientist” along with other individuals raised funds for his hospital bills. His parents couldn’t be reached on time. Absence of transport has made the commute impossible. People are literally walking miles to reach hospitals, pharmacies, and food stores. Piles of garbage are on the streets, with SMC nonfunctional, there is bad odor with the possibility of serious health hazards.
“All IT companies in Kashmir moved out of state, employees told to move or quit! Many IT people who work from home due to family-related issues had to move forcefully including my own brother!
“Absolute chaos!”
–Kashmiri Tafheem Masoodi, September 11th, 2019
Artist Molly Crabapple responded to this & other photos from Max Blumenthal (millionaire playboy shill for dictators), Rania Khalek & Anya Parampil (both employed by Russian state-owned media) showing them dining at trendy nightclubs in Damascus while they attended a conference for Assad propagandists–all while Idlib is being bombed & refugees forcibly deported by Turkey back to a war zone. Crabapple scathingly tweeted, “This is some Goebbels shit. Prancing around Syria on a government luxury tour, posting tourist photos near torture centers, & mocking Syrian refugees who can never return to their country without risking being tortured to death.”
In an interview on wholly Russian state-owned RT, smarmy Blumenthal & marble-mouth Khalek were asked about being compared to Goebbels & the avalanche of ridicule & criticism they received for doing the round of nightclubs & shilling for Assad whilst Idlib was sustaining an apocalypse. Khalek answered, “This isn’t something new to us. We are used to it.” In fact, she once admitted that before she decided to advance her shabby career by sucking up to the Assad dictatorship, she was on a whirlwind of speaking engagements at Palestinian & Middle East student & solidarity groups. That ended with a thud when she began spouting Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ rubbish in support of Assad. She’s a pathetically confused fool because during her first trip to Syria a few years ago around the fall of Aleppo to Assad, she was embedded with the Syrian Army along with Bartlett & Beeley & accused Assad minions of trying to poison her food. This led to Bartlett & Beeley denouncing her vigorously. But now Khalek has had her ‘road to Damascus’ moment & has learned to love the bomb as a way to defend dictatorship & salvage her shabby career.
It’s good they’re ‘used to it’. Because while Blumenthal has a family fortune to bankroll his jaunts around the world shilling for dictators, he is now discredited except among Stalinists & halfwits (like the ones who run Verso press & publish his trash). Khalek, Norton, Parampil now rely solely on Russia to support them. They aren’t particularly intelligent & don’t exhibit an iota of investigative skills or journalistic integrity–or maybe it’s just that groveling before state power brings out the stupid in people–so that gig is unlikely to last. As Kremlin employees, they will be asked to do for Putin what they did for Assad & what Bartlett & Beeley are doing now for Assad & Putin. Political disgrace & ignominy looms in their imminent future.
Photo of their nightclub tour in Damascus: Max Blumenthal (left), Rania Khalek (center) & Anya Parampil (right).
(Photo from Khalek’s Facebook page)
Can someone remind us how the Quran says “an injury to one is an injury to all”? Someone once told me how the Quran & how Jews express that essence of human solidarity but I don’t recall. It was similar between Muslims & Jews & beautifully poetic for both.
Replies: “The children of Adam are the members of one another,
since in their creation they are of one essence.
When the conditions of the time brings a member to pain,
the other members will suffer from discomfort.
You, who are indifferent to the misery of others,
it is not fitting that they should call you a human being.”
Qur’an 60:7
Perhaps Allah will put, between you and those to whom you have been enemies among them, affection. And Allah is competent, and Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.
Qur’an 60:8
Allah does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion and do not expel you from your homes – from being righteous toward them and acting justly toward them. Indeed, Allah loves those who act justly.
Qur’an 60:9
Allah only forbids you from those who fight you because of religion and expel you from your homes and aid in your expulsion – [forbids] that you make allies of them. And whoever makes allies of them, then it is those who are the wrongdoers.
This quote states that a Muslim must fight against those who oppress or ethnically cleanse people.
Sorry Zionist allies.
A Muslim must not oppress people or give into hatred and dehumanisation – as tomorrow you might have peace even with your enemy.
Sorry Muslim extremists.
And a Muslim must never side with the oppressor.
On that account: We ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person – unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land – it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people. Then although there came to them Our messengers with clear signs, yet, even after that, many of them continued to commit excesses in the land.
The Quan : chapter 5 verse 32. Translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali
A Muslim must always use their voice to speak against oppression.
God sent Moses to campaign against Pharaoh even though Moses was disabled with a lump in his throat, causing him to stutter.
Pharaoh had burnt him as a child to prove that he wasn’t divine.
The same burnt child of the oppressed slaves was sent by God to stand against the tyrannical regime.
Moses asked God to send his brother Aaron to assist him, instead of refusing the fight or asking to be “cured”. They campaigned against Pharaoh together.
The Jewish way of saying ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’:
Frightfully ugly & sadistic old men run the world. Some are also dumb as a stump. The detestable ideology of evo psycho, so prominent now in media & academia, argues that physical beauty is an expression of one’s intelligence, character, & superiority. Normally that should be scoffed at as junk science. But in the case of the orange POTUS & Indian General Bipin Rawat, ugly goes all the way from their contemptuous sneers to their mitochondrial DNA.
A very disturbing interview with NY Times reporter Anne Barnard on the at least 120,000 Syrian political prisoners who have never been accounted for & the sadistic, Auschwitz nature of the torture they sustain. Barnard is actually an investigative journalist & not a remunerated flunky like fascists Bartlett & Beeley, the Leni Riefenstahl & Ann Coulter of the Assad dictatorship.
There is every reason to grieve for the people of Idlib being carpet bombed by Syrian & Russian warplanes & for the refugees forcibly deported by Turkey back to the killing fields of Syria. They are sustaining the unbearable with barely a peep of solidarity from anywhere in the world. It is one of the greatest political betrayals & failures of our times that no political forces emerged to organize international antiwar solidarity.
The confederation of propagandists, corrupt political forces, fascists, social climbers, idiots, & conspiracy mongers who united in support of the Assad dictatorship & the bombing of civilians is already falling apart at the seams. Fascist propagandists Bartlett & Beeley are moving on to ineptly serve Russian propaganda full time; Blumenthal, Khalek, Norton, & their ilk are scrounging for employment since no respectable media will touch them with a ten-foot pole. Mackler, Flounders, Sheehan, Baraka, Benjamin & her Code Pink, & other Assadists & Stalinists have left the US antiwar movement an empty shell blithering against Russophobia, a pro-war cult only able to mobilize a handful in support of Syrian & Russian bombing. Chomsky, Pilger, Cockburn, Ali, Hitchens, Fisk, & the whole coterie of corrupt éminences grises have proven you cannot play the authority on social transformation whilst you stand aloof from struggle without losing your bearings. All their followers will continue their couch potato lives fulminating over 9/11 conspiracies, seeing Zionists behind every world evil, hating on Jews, & fooling themselves about being progressives when they have increased the persecution & dangers for Muslims around the world.
We cannot undo this monstrous betrayal of the Syrian Arab Spring. We cannot minimize or underestimate the harm this has done to humanity’s struggle against dictatorship & oppression. There are no words that will ever make it better. But now we know that political forces which have been decaying for at least fifty years, since the end of the anti-Vietnam War movement, are facing their final moments on the stage of history & will be limping into oblivion, if only not soon enough.
A new political leadership must be forged by visionary youth among the oppressed, a leadership that can build a movement against war, occupation, genocide, a movement rooted in principles & steadfast in commitments, that will refuse to make compromises at the expense of the oppressed. That leadership will model itself on & emerge from those men & women who are part of Palestinian & Kashmiri Intifada, from Indigenous, Blacks, Latinos engaged in freedom struggles, from those who participated in the Arab Spring uprisings, like this young man named Ghiath Matar who they called ‘the little Gandhi’ from the city of Daraya, Syria. He was arrested by Assad forces early on in the Syrian Arab Spring & killed in Assad’s gulag on September 9, 2011. May he Rest In Peace & inspire us in rebuilding that which has been destroyed.
Russian bombing of a small village in Idlib: to think some dare call this liberation!
Stop the bombing of Idlib.
For Idlib.
Stop Syrian & Russian bombing of markets, schools, hospitals, mosques. Stop killing Syrian children.
This photo from March 2017 shows one way the Indian Army tries to ‘win the hearts & minds’ of Kashmiris: by humiliating & traumatizing the children. Here, paramilitary soldiers–who are trained & equipped for counterinsurgency warfare like the kind of soldier who fights ISIS–are forcing a small school boy in Srinagar to perform sit-ups while holding his ear lobes. That is reportedly a common punishment for schoolchildren in India. At least where children have schools. So much artillery & personnel deployed to Kashmir means many Indian kids don’t have schools to go too.
It is also reported that in the 1990s it was common for the Indian Army to force Kashmiris of all ages to do calisthenics on the side of the road to humiliate them & break their will to resistance. So that is what hundreds of thousands of counterinsurgency troops trained in Israeli methods do in Kashmir. To ‘win hearts & minds’ by brutalizing? To fight terrorism where it doesn’t exist? Or to destroy the struggle for self-determination by terrifying little kids & disabling or killing those who protest?
(Photo by Dar Yasin/AP, March 29, 2017)