NYC teach-in on the the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination, September 14th, 2019.
“They threatened me, they tried to buy me, they suggested I was a bad mother for neglecting my other children and for taking my infant daughter with me to wait endlessly in front of police stations and the courts, they spread rumours about my motives, they harassed me, they raised false charges against me – they wanted me to give up. But I never stopped asking “Where is my son?”
–Parveena Ahangar
Just happened across this 2017 post about Modi’s use of yoga to serve Hindutva ideology & the persecution of Muslims in India & Kashmir.
June 21, 2017
This is the third International Yoga Day, declared by the UN in December 2014 after a campaign by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi–probably as a way to remove the stench of disrepute from his involvement in the 2002 pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat.
For Yoga Day 2017, Modi chose to lead asanas in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to teach Indians to “yoke body, mind, & soul,” as he said in a speech to thousands assembled in the rally ground. The choice of venue isn’t because Yogi Adityanath is known for facility with yoga asanas–because the guy is more unhinged than yoked–but because he is a rabid Hindutva nationalist also involved in violence against Muslims & Christians.
In 2015, the Indian government attempted to make Yoga Day compulsory, at least for schoolchildren. Muslim organizations objected because in yoga there is an asana sequence called Surya Namaskara or Sun Salutations bowing to the Sun God & as a monotheistic religion, Muslims bow only to Allah. Our man Adityanath supported compulsory Yoga Day saying those who don’t agree can “leave Hindustan” & those who oppose Surya Namaskara should drown themselves in the sea.
Adityanath is a polarizing figure renowned for demonizing & inciting hatred & aggression particularly against Muslims. He proposed installing statues of goddesses & gods in every mosque, is a supporter of Trump’s Muslim ban, & most egregiously incited Hindus to drag Muslim women from their graves to rape their corpses.
So if Modi hoped Yoga Day would remove the stench of pogroms, his choice of leading the event with Adityanath shows he has a political agenda yoked to the persecution of Muslims & to advancing extremist rightwing nationalism. He can stick that downward facing dog where the sun don’t shine.
Photo is Modi leading Yoga Day in Lucknow. Appropriately, he looks more flatulent than yoked.
“Jihad is to struggle. Greater Jihad is to struggle against ourselves to be better humans and lesser Jihad is to struggle to fight against corruption. My Greater Jihad is to ensure that I never support oppression against anyone for my sense of “nationalism” or any religious or familial ties. And my lesser Jihad is to stand with the oppressed people today regardless of their background, and to speak where they are being silenced.”
–Waqar Nadeem Rajput clarifies the beautiful Islamic concept of Jihad so distorted & misrepresented to serve Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ ideology
One cannot even imagine the stress that Kashmiris are living under cut off from each other, from medical care, from their loved ones outside Kashmir. The stress that children, the elderly, the infirm, those pregnant must feel is beyond imagination. There’s a barbarism to this lockdown & the presence of nearly one-million soldiers that can only be called genocide.
#StandWithKashmiris
Modi is making me famous. Anyone want my autograph? Being banned by the Modi regime is an honorific worth having. Let me say it again, put that on my tombstone. It is an honor to #StandWithKashmir.
https://thewire.in/government/kashmir-twitter-modi-government-takedown-orders-transparency?
I’m so sorry for the long delay but events in Kashmir have taken my energies. I will attempt to catch up with my blog in the next few days.
Maybe some are thinking it’s too much about Kashmir too much of the time. You make a commitment to solidarity, you stick to it. You stand steadfast with those on the front lines of oppression facing down nearly one-million war-equipped trigger-happy, pellet shooting soldiers engaging in nighttime home invasions to kidnap kids, make mass arrests, sexual assaults & humiliations, torture, disappearances. If we were in that situation, we would not consider there was ever too much solidarity. Thinking ahead, we would understand that today it’s Kashmiris (Palestinians, Rohingya, Syrians, Afghans, Uyghur, West Papuans) & if we don’t stop them, tomorrow it will be us. That ‘they came for the Kashmiris & I was not a Kashmiri so I did not speak out…then they came for me’ thing is real. The iron law of social transformation is ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ though the Quran puts that much more poetically.
Following the lead of Russian state-owned media, Assadists & Stalinists are making quite a stink about Hong Kong protest leader Joshua Wong meeting White Helmets director Raed Al Saleh at the Bild100 Fest in Germany. Like that’s a bad thing!? Being fools, they’re trying to build a conspiracy around the encounter, suggesting a ‘color revolution’ in the making which is another of their terms for a ‘US regime-change operation’. Good lord, but they make a mockery of politics. The meeting between Wong & Al Saleh was an encounter between freedom fighters to be welcomed by human rights activists everywhere.
The BILD100-Fest 2019 was dedicated to the fight for freedom in Hong Kong, the struggles against dictatorship & oppression around the world & for democracy & freedom. Does Russia really want to come out publicly & oppose all that? There’s really no need for such admissions since their aggression in Ukraine & annexation of Crimea, their carpet bombing of civilians in Syria, their arming & support for the Rohingya genocide & for the siege & blockade of Kashmir tell us everything we need to know about Russian politics. Russiagate & meddling in the US elections is chump change compared to those monstrous crimes.
(Photo is left to right, White Helmets director Raed Al Saleh, Iranian-Austrian political activist Mina Ahadi, Hong Kong protest leader Joshua Wong, & Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko by Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters)
As Syrian & Russian war planes turn Idlib into a killing field & as thousands of Syrian refugees in Turkey are being forcibly deported back to Syria where they face arrest, torture, execution, the Assad regime called a trade union conference in Damascus to express solidarity with the counterrevolution. Since trade unions are outlawed in Syria, except for the state-sponsored, Assad controlled federation, it wasn’t really a trade union conference but a dog & pony show.
We know it’s not a trade union conference since legal unions do not exist in Syria but also because the US delegation included at least seven people who have no associations whatsoever with trade unions but are corrupt Assad propagandists. Paul Larudee (first row far right) is a piano tuner, Rick Sterling (behind Larudee) is a retired engineer, Judith Bello (2nd from far right second row) is a retired engineer & yoga teacher, Ajamu Baraka (second row far right) works for a think tank of some kind. Rania Khalek & Anya Parampil (3rd & 6th from left in second row) work for Russian state-owned media, & Max Blumenthal (4th from left in second row) is an all-around rightwing jackass who as a millionaire travels the world supporting dictators & denouncing popular movements against them as ‘US regime-change operations’. Who knows who the hell the others are!? Who cares? All of them are in Syria to promote the Assad dictatorship & Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians going on as they posed for pictures.
Whilst Idlib burns with at least 550,000 in flight for their lives from bombing with no place to go, Blumenthal, Khalek, & Parampil were posting photos of themselves dining in swank & trendy nightclubs. Blumenthal’s investigative journalism turned up the invaluable info that Damascus has forty new nightclubs & that more couples are cohabiting without marriage now that Assad’s secular regime is triumphal. Since they were there to party on Assad’s propaganda expense account, they didn’t bother to investigate the massive bombing in Idlib or the crisis faced by thousands of refugees forced to return to a war zone. What kind of people go to war zones & slaughter of such apocalyptic dimensions & post photos of themselves grinning ear to ear in nightclubs?
This delegation at the September 8-9 propaganda event in Damascus is from US Labor Against the War, a group whose social media followers are all Assadists & Stalinists. If they ever served a progressive role in US politics, that is long since ended. May they rot in hell.
(Photo from US Labor Against the War)
Photo of Blumenthal, Khalek, Parampil dining in style while Syrian refugees starve and thousands of civilians are being bombed: