The targeting of children remains a primary tactic of Israeli genocide, either to kill or disable them, as reported by several human rights agencies, including the UN. Young Palestinian protesters are directly targeted by Israeli snipers to create hundreds of amputees just as Indian troops target young Kashmiris with pellet guns to blind, disfigure, & disable them. Standing against the occupations is a stand for the rights & welfare of children & against the disabling of youth to destroy Intifada & resistance to occupation & colonialism.
Only Bill Browder (the son of Earl Browder, a leading US Stalinist, Bill Browder turned financier to cash in on the collapse of the USSR) is reporting that Putin’s police are threatening to cut off the fingers of arrested protestors who refuse to be fingerprinted. Until there is other verification of that, we can be skeptical. But there is also video footage of Putin’s police ganging up on & beating the crap out of unarmed protesters.
Let’s be frank, at this point it doesn’t matter if Russia interfered in US elections that got Trump elected since Clinton was the unsavory alternative. It was a lose-lose election. But at some point, those who weep buckets over the persecution of Putin & Russia have to pull their noses out of the nether regions of tyranny & face the facts. Or is hero worship & regime-change rubbish their new modus operandi?
It does not serve Palestinians to counterpose their struggle to that of Kashmiris, Syrians, Afghans, Rohingya, Iraqis, Yemenis, Somalis, Uyghur, refugees, or others standing on the front lines of oppression, especially of the so-called ‘war on terror’. It is all of a piece & of the incitement against Muslims & should be presented as such in order to build a truly united movement of opposition. Otherwise, it does not appear to be so much solidarity with Palestinians as fetishization of Zionism which often masks anti-Semitism.
In response to the massacre at the El Paso Walmart by an avowed white supremacist, Texas governor Greg Abbott said: “The bottom line is mental health is a large contributor to any type of violence or shooting violence.” As Abu Adam said, “Not a terrorist until proven Muslim.”
Patrick Crusias, a 21-year-old white guy from Dallas, Texas shot up a Walmart in El Paso, Texas today, killing 20 shoppers & injuring dozens of others. He is a Trump supporter & white supremacist who opposes immigration & “race-mixing.” This kind of incident & these kinds of creeps will continue to come out from under their rocks until we build a massive counter-movement to the Trump agenda & inflammatory rhetoric which pits whites against Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, refugees.
Our sincere condolences to the families & friends of those killed. As one of millions living on the US border with Mexico, we are keenly aware that this could have happened to us.
No human being is alien to us.
(Photo of Crusias from reporter Anna Giaritelli on Twitter)
Perhaps some think I hammer away at the corruption of the antiwar movement way too much. But I consider its endorsement of the Assad dictatorship & Syrian & Russian bombing of Syria combined with its complete inaction against US military intervention in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, & elsewhere to be a betrayal of antiwar principles of historic proportions which has destroyed the movement beyond repair. A new movement must be built which incorporates the Palestinian, Kashmiri, Rohingya, Venezuelan, & Uyghur struggles. Building a new movement is not an easy mission. But we can use social media to forge a movement that is truly international in perspective & leadership, uncompromising in opposition to militarism, fearless & constant in support for those on the front lines of oppression.
This is little Yara Badawi from Ariha, Idlib who lost her leg in a Syrian or Russian airstrike. Her mother was seriously injured & her father was killed. Assad officials & propagandists claim this is the work of terrorists; the corrupted antiwar movement goes even further & says there are no civilians in Idlib, only terrorists. So can they tell us which al-Qaeda group this little girl was commanding when Syrian or Russian bombers caught up with her? And was this “worth it”, as Madeleine Albright would say, to prevent a “US regime-change operation”?
A child in Idlib injured in Syrian or Russian bombing of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, farm fields: we don’t know if this child recovered physically. We only know that if he did, war will mark his life forever as war, concentration camps, occupation, & genocide always do.
Stand with the children of Idlib. Demand Syria & Russia stop the bombing. Demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Russian, Iranian, US-coalition, Israeli, Hezbollah forces & mercenaries from Syria.
(Sketch from eyewitness photo by artist Marc Nelson)
If you wonder why the antiwar movement is corrupted beyond redemption & has lost the capacity, with its present misleaders, to transform itself, it can only be explained by white supremacy & acceptance of the Islamophobic ideology of the so-called ‘war on terror’. How else do you explain that they are holding forums on how persecuted Putin & Russia are or on the legal problems of a handful of grandstanders who occupied an abandoned embassy in Washington DC rather than organizing rallies against the slaughter of children & civilians in Idlib? In fact, there isn’t a single recorded objection to the bombing of Idlib by those long associated with the antiwar movement.
This sketch by artist Marc Nelson is a tribute to five-year-old Riham al-Abdullah who died last month trying to save her baby sister after a Syrian or Russian airstrike on their residence in Idlib province. She died along with her mother & three-year-old sister. May they Rest In Peace.
The most imperative mission of our times is to rebuild an international antiwar movement on a principled basis. When we see the absolute silence on the carpet bombing of Idlib, the relative passivity on the genocide in Gaza, & note that there is no antiwar response in India to the massive buildup of troops in Kashmir, we can see the problem is not just with western political forces but is an international problem. There needs to be an assessment about how this corruption of principles came to be & that analysis will be part of rebuilding a movement rooted in long-established antiwar principles, including the principle that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all.’
(Sketch of Riham al-Abdullah by artist Marc Nelson)
