Under US law, little children arrested for entering the country don’t have the right to demand a court-appointed lawyer or interpreter. Watch this video to see what inhumanity & mockery of justice that means. The criminality begins when they arrest a child, dump them in concentration camps, & then bring them to these kangaroo courts.
Some who oppose economic boycotts do so because they think it hurts working people. You should see the righteous ‘left Zionists’ get on their high-horse about BDS hurting Israeli workers. I’ve been working class all my life & that’s where my loyalties lie. But I don’t think it’s wrong to put the squeeze on workers if they support & benefit from apartheid, genocide, occupation, war. When right-wing workers came out marching to support the Vietnam War, there wasn’t a single working class antiwar activist that cried crocodile tears for them. When farm workers in the US were trying to organize a union, they didn’t hesitate to call boycotts of produce harvested by non-union workers.
There’s a fallacy in the reasoning that boycotts hurt workers. The reason they’re so effective is that they hurt capitalists to whom profits are the almighty. What really hurts workers is the exploitation of sweatshops & child labor which Indian capitalism thrives on. What really hurts workers is militarism which drains the economy, puts nothing back into it, & turns young men & women into killers with no rehabilitation services when they’re sent home. But then how do you rehabilitate those who under orders did the unthinkable?
Haaretz just reported that, with the exclusion of the elite, their public education is ‘lousy’ & Israeli adults have ‘lower levels of basic workplace skills as a result’. That isn’t just malicious neglect of working class schools but the fact that Israel has all its resources tied up in the occupation, in bombers, in snipers, & the entire military edifice of colonialism. The US steals money from the Social Security trust to bankroll its endless wars; its veteran hospitals & services are rotting, it’s systematically trying to destroy public education, social services, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, all just to pay for its wars. India has an estimated 18-million kids working in the streets, a huge percentage of them homeless. Eighteen-million children is almost double the entire population of Kashmir. But India has billions tied up in the occupation with hopes it can solve its economic problems by the ‘unfettered exploitation’ of Kashmiri resources like hydroelectric power. It isn’t the 18-million Indian children nor any Kashmiris who would benefit from that but only Indian billionaires.
One could go through every country of Europe, China, Burma, & elsewhere & find the same story. One could write hundreds of volumes about the colossal cost of militarism on the lives of working people. But you couldn’t write much at all about the cost of boycotts on working people because they are intended to put economic & political pressure on oppressive governments run by capitalists to force them to change their policies.
Photo from #StandWithKashmir rally in Lahore, Pakistan:
Photo from the August 10th #StandWithKashmir rally in Auckland, New Zealand.
Sikhs in San Francisco #StandWithKashmir rally.
Letter to Editor in an Indian magazine to which one doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry:
“I hope Kashmiri people affected by the communications blockade & unable to enquire about the well-being of their dear ones can now relate to their uniformed fraternity–the Indian Army soldiers & police personnel who don’t get to speak to their family members back home for weeks.”
Indian activist Satyadeep Satya’s response: “The only decent response to this ignorant & inhuman bully’s words: ‘Bring Your Boys Back Home!’ (or ‘Go India, Go Back!’
#EndTheOccupation #StandWithKashmir”
A 28-year-old Honduran woman–in a group of refugees trying to cross the Rio Grande River at El Paso, Texas around 1:30 am last Monday–drowned when she & her 3-year-old son were swept away by a strong current. Her body was recovered downstream; the little boy’s body has not yet been recovered.
May they Rest In Peace. To hell with the border wall! Open the damn borders. No human being is alien to us.
“Having worked briefly in India as a doctor, the one thing that shocked me the most was the complete denial of the patient’s consent. This wasn’t just true of government institutions but private too. Although in government institutions this was far worse. The patient was treated with little more dignity than a guinea pig. The more disenfranchised, the more poor, the more voiceless the person was the more doctor treated him as an experimental object. Doing whatever he/she wanted to do without explaining what was happening to them, why and what for.
“Women coming in for childbirth were the most vulnerable and consequently the most abused group. Without asking their consent, the junior doctors were allowed to learn their skills on them without as much as “by your leave”. In private practice, they were routinely subject to procedures that were not clinically warranted for financial gain. The other most vulnerable group were the people with mental health issues who were given no support, explanations except pumped full of medication which left them more disabled than helped.
“I am not therefore surprised when the majority of physicians in India support the brutal denial of health and human rights of Kashmiris. Standing with a beleaguered people requires professional, ethical, moral and probity standards that a doctor should have and majority of Indian doctors demonstrably do not possess. A discussion about why this is for another day but millennia of dehumanising casteism doesn’t disappear with a few years training.”
–Shuja Kosher
The Great Return March in Gaza today: 70 unarmed, peacefully protesting Palestinians, including children & three paramedics, were injured by Israeli snipers.
Stand with Palestinians. Build BDS.
(Photo from Younes Arar)
Allow me to say that I hate these kind of articles. They posture as hard-nosed realism & they do present the immense obstacles Rohingya refugees face in their struggle for human, democratic, & civil rights in Burma. But there’s an undercurrent here, entirely intentional, of trying to present the Rohingya struggle as a hopeless cause.
The Rohingya refugees are not passive victims of genocide but have campaigned, including on social media, for their right to live as a free people in Arakan state which is their homeland. They have organizations, tribunals, hearings, conferences, protests, bloggers, journalists, human rights campaigners, supporters working tirelessly to achieve their political goals. Theirs is not a lost cause until the Rohingya say so & that will not be forthcoming so long as millions live in refugee camps & diaspora.