The ruthless little stone pelter, three-year-old Palestinian Mohammad Rabee Alayan, who has one of the most high-tech, fully-loaded armies in the world up in arms. He could be sentenced to 20 years in an Israeli military prison for lobbing rocks at police & army jeeps. Israel should be facing Nuremberg charges for traumatizing a little guy like this.
Build BDS.
India has about 800,000 troops deployed to Jammu & Kashmir making it the most militarized region in the world with a ratio of nearly one soldier to every 15 residents. It’s hard to imagine the psychological magnitude of such an overwhelming fully-armed & hostile presence. At the request of the J&K state government, India is now deploying & airlifting in another 10,000 paramilitary forces on top of 10,000 additional forces deployed last February & 40,000 recently deployed for the Hindu pilgrimage to Amarnath. It would be safe to call this a massive provocation & a threat to public safety.
We should be afraid for Kashmiris & outraged that they, for the most part, stand alone on the front lines of oppression without international support. It should be our commitment to, at the least, educate others about their struggle against occupation & colonialism &, at the most, begin to build an active solidarity movement to support their struggle for political power.
(Photo of Indian troops from Reuters)
This very powerful image is from December 15, 2018 when Indian occupying forces opened fire at unarmed Kashmiris (in the Pulwama district about 45 km south of Srinagar) marching toward the site where three militants had been killed in a hunt to kill operation. Eleven Kashmiri civilians died & over 200 were injured. Medical personnel treating the victims said all of the injuries were to the head, abdomen, & neck, proving the occupying army intended to kill the civilian protesters.
Nationalism is so corrupting & hateful that in response to this photo, a Hindutva creep posted a cartoon depiction of independence leader Syed Ali Geelani manhandling a small child, with the inscription: “The dangerous teacher in Kashmir: terrorism plus stone pelting equals azadi.” Hindutva nationalism, Zionism, Assadism are on a continuum of political amorality that dehumanizes the oppressed. It’s a fatal amorality if not silenced by political power, as the US Civil Rights Movement demonstrated so powerfully.
This photo is a Kashmiri woman grieving over a civilian during his funeral prayers at Prichoo village in the Pulwama district.
(Photo by Javed Dar/Xinhua)
Mehbooba Mufti & Omar Abdullah are going at each other on Twitter. As chief minister of Jammu & Kashmir, Abdullah introduced pellet munitions & in her tenure as chief minister, Mufti endorsed their use against unarmed protesters. Hopefully they’ll clobber the hell out of each other since Kashmiris are done with them. May they rot in hell.
Twitter just suspended the account of the Russian embassy in Syria. One would be a fool to think they did it to monitor ‘fake news’ or advance the truth about Syria. Russia has several media venues to peddle their rubbish including RT, Sputnik, Tass, Pravda, Mint Press, Duran, Global Research, the buffoon Pepe Escobar, an entire stable of professional propagandists, & guppies like Ben Norton, Max Blumenthal, & Rania Khalek. It does not serve those who want to fight tyranny to have governments or social media censoring what we don’t agree with. We don’t have to read it, we do have to know what they’re saying in order to politically respond, & we are always most protective of human rights if we do not join with the jackass chorus demanding censorship. In the long run, it is the voices of social transformation who will be silenced if we do not stand for freedom of speech.
According to the White Helmet rescue workers, since the Syrian & Russian bombing offensive began on Idlib, Hama, & Aleppo on April 26th, 830 civilians, including 199 children, have been killed. Since the regime is targeting civilians, not terrorists, there is no report on the number of ‘al-Qaeda affiliated Salafi-jihadi terrorists” killed, if any. Media has shown precious little interest in reporting either the deaths of civilians or of terrorists–if they even know how to identify terrorists from freedom fighters.
Propagandist Eva Bartlett has written & reposted her RT rubbish several times about how White Helmets use children for propaganda purposes. Alas poor Eva has only been in politics for a few years & entered them as a professional propagandist for Assad based on her associations with demented anti-Semite David Icke. She has no political history as an independent activist, especially in antiwar politics. Her interests are solely in supporting the status quo of power & not the struggles of working people against injustice, inequality, & dictatorship. So she might not know, although she is masterful at lying through her ass, that photojournalists often focus on women & children because that is the most compelling way to tell the story of war, occupation, & genocide.
This photo is not a made-for-propaganda moment. It is White Helmets recovering & trying to save the life of a little girl buried by Syrian or Russian bombing of civilian neighborhoods, market places, farm fields in Idlib. If the White Helmets publish this photo, it is not to peddle lies against the Assad dictatorship but to show the character of the regime bombing offensive against civilians.
Stop the bombing of Idlib. Demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Russian, Iranian, US-coalition, Israeli, Hezbollah forces & mercenaries from Syria.
(Photo from White Helmets, July 30 2019)
Israeli military authorities summoned three-year-old Mohammad Rabee Alayan in for interrogation about stone pelting police & military jeeps in the West Bank town where he lives. There have been hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank shot down or assaulted by settlers & occupying forces & thousands in Gaza bombed or shot at by Israeli snipers. And Israel dragged a little kid just out of diapers in for interrogation on stone pelting?
Build BDS.
(Photo is little Mohammad Rabee Alayan)
When Duterte took office as president of the Philippines on June 30th, 2016, he vowed to eradicate drug addiction. Even those who have followed the so-called ‘war on drugs’ in the US involving racist hysteria about ‘narco-terrorist Black youth gangs’ & martial law in the Black community were aghast at the vigilante violence of Duterte’s campaign. Using police & vigilantes, the homicidal campaign did not target drug traffickers so much as the urban poor who the government has been attempting to forcibly remove from slums for years. Images of the young victims bound with duct tape & left like road kill on the public streets traumatize all who view them.
In the first eight months of the campaign, a Filipino newspaper kept track of those extrajudicially executed, including how many & their names. By February 2017, the number executed had reached 11,000–over 1,000 victims every month. For some reason, the newspaper then stopped keeping an account. It’s possible the numbers became overwhelming but more likely they were threatened by the regime. Now there are only guesstimates of the death toll since the Duterte regime maintains its vigilante war under close wraps. Some media with sloppy reporting claim about 5,000 have been murdered in the past three years. Al Jazeera estimates–based on what we do not know–as high as 20,000. There are also tens of thousands of poor people who turned themselves in for imprisonment hoping to escape the death squads. They remain imprisoned in squalid overcrowded prisons under Auschwitz conditions.
The UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) has denounced, sometimes more like chided, the Duterte regime for the death squads but has never taken decisive action. However, on July 4th the UNHCR voted to investigate the human rights situation in the Philippines. Eighteen members of the UNHCR voted to approve the investigation, 14 voted against (Angola, Bahrain, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, Hungary, India, Iraq, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia), & 15 countries abstained from voting. Most of the countries that voted against the investigation are also signatories to the letter endorsing China’s genocide of Uyghur Muslims. If Cuba & China are so damn revolutionary, we’d like an explanation for why they continue to side with the most reactionary forces in world politics, including Duterte, Assad, Putin.
Drug addiction is a mass problem everywhere but murdering poor people & desecrating their bodies is not the way to cope with what is a public health & social issue. Part of any thorough, respectable UNHCR investigation should necessarily, though it will not, include the sources of drug trafficking to the Philippines & elsewhere, especially the trafficking of methamphetamines & other drugs from Burma & China & any involvement by the CIA which has been historically up to its eyeballs in drug production, processing, & trafficking in Southeast Asia.
This photo is Filipino protesters at a funeral march for 17-year-old student Kian Delos Santos who was killed by police during an anti-drug raid in Manila. One of the remarkable things about Filipinos is their fearless protests against US militarism & against Duterte’s war on the urban poor despite the danger it places them in.
(Photo by Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images, December 2017)
There really needs to be an analysis of the integration of sectarian socialist groups into Stalinism & their convergence with fascism & Assadism. You can’t tell any of them apart these days. True to form for Stalinism, Assadism, & fascism, they are denouncing the protests of thousands in Moscow against government corruption & the Putin regime’s attempts to manipulate municipal elections by removing all opposition candidates.
One does not have to do a political anatomy or demographics of participants in those protests to support their right to protest. We don’t have to agree with the politics of all 30,000 protesters which are likely very disparate. We only have to stand with the right of people to publicly protest governmental policies they disagree with–even if we disagree with the politics of the protesters. We certainly agree with the democratic demand that elections be free of governmental interference. Or have the Assadists cum fascists already forgotten their own vituperations against charges of Russian interference in US elections?
It is reported that 1,400 people, nearly half the protesters that came out last Saturday, were arrested after being brutally assaulted by police. Echoing Putin authorities, Assadists cum fascists denounce the protests as “unauthorized”, led by Alexander Navaly (who is actually in jail), & justify the crackdown because the protest held up traffic on a main street in Moscow. Even if the protesters had applied for a permit, their right to protest would have been denied. But to Assadism cum fascism, political power makes right & popular protests are to be denounced. In which country have they ever supported popular movements against repression & dictatorship? Syria? Venezuela? Nicaragua? China? Sudan? Egypt? Bahrain? Russia? the US? the Philippines? Kashmir? Algeria? Tunisia?
Photo is from the protest in Moscow last Saturday where police are assaulting protesters demanding free & fair elections & ballot status for opposition candidates.
(Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)
The NY Times, one of the leading voices of American Zionism, came out this week with two major articles about BDS written by ‘liberal Zionists’. A liberal Zionist is one who supports a Jewish-only state & a bantustate solution for Palestinians but is squeamish about the most violent aspects of Israeli colonialism like occupation & outright genocide. Like Bernie Sanders, who typifies that point of view, they focus criticism on Netanyahu & distinguish him from the apartheid policies that are the very nature of Zionist Israel.
The article on July 27th, written by David M. Halbfinger, Michael Wines & Steven Erlanger (Erlanger was NY Times bureau chief in Jerusalem; Halbfinger presently holds that position) is titled “Is BDS Anti-Semitic? A Closer Look at the Boycott Israel Campaign” & was republished on July 28th under the title “A Look at the International Drive to Boycott Israel.” On July 29th, the Times published an article by Eric Alterman, a Zionist columnist for the liberal journal The Nation, titled “Does Anyone Take the BDS Movement Seriously?” Using the restrained language of liberal Zionists rather than the rabid vituperations of right-wing Zionists, the authors of “Is BDS Anti-Semitic” do a sophisticated smear job on the political forces behind BDS, attempting to associate it with terrorism & even snidely with anti-Semitic vandalism clearly identified by police authorities as coming from nationalists of the fascist sort, not from BDS activists. Mostly, the authors attempt to disparage the impact of BDS in the US. Alterman also tries to disparage the impact of BDS, saying with undisguised disdain, “Like vegetarian diets & carbon-neutral living, it has become something that is vital to espouse, but much less important to explain, let alone carry out.”
But why, if BDS is so ineffectual, did the authors of “Is BDS Anti-Semitic” enumerate the mountains of legislation in the US attempting to outlaw it, including the US House resolution last week condemning it because it will delegitimize Israel & undermine support for a bantustate solution? Why didn’t they discuss the hundreds of attempts by Zionists on US campuses to ban BDS activism? And of course, they only talk about the US, not the hundreds of Zionist initiatives around the world attempting to outlaw BDS.
Actually, Israel doesn’t need BDS to delegitimize it. Apartheid, colonialism, massive demolitions of whole villages & expropriations of Palestinians lands, genocidal bombing of Gaza, Israeli snipers shooting down unarmed protesters at the Great Return March are more than enough to expose the Zionist state for what it is: a death trap for Palestinians & Jews. As for undermining that bantustate solution? Behind the chimera of a two-state solution, the Oslo Accords, which legitimize occupation, expropriation, ethnic cleansing, speak for themselves. As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, once a supporter of bantustates for Palestinians, pointed out so cogently a few weeks ago, the two-state solution was never a serious proposal by Israel but only a stalling tactic & political maneuver.
If BDS is so ineffectual, why have 28 US states passed legislation restricting or banning individuals & companies from boycotting Israel if they have state contracts? Only eight US states have not already introduced anti-BDS legislation or resolutions. Why are Zionists willing to trash the Bill of Rights in order to make it impossible to criticize Israel, let alone boycott it if BDS is as harmless as vegetarianism or carbon-neutral living? Why are professors being fired, BDS panels being banned & even litigated against if it’s just a way for anti-Semites to discredit poor little righteous Israel?
Photo is from the one-year anniversary of the Great Return March on March 30, 2019. Palestinians in Gaza appeal to the world to defend them against genocide by building BDS.
(Photo from BDS movement.net)