Mary Scully Reports

Sketch from an eyewitness photo: White Helmets are helping recover bodies from a massacre of civilians in a busy marketplace attacked yesterday by Russian war planes.

The artist Marc Nelson said, “If you ever wondered how you would act during the Holocaust, you are doing it now.” That is something the corrupted antiwar & socialist movements should take to heart since their support for this slaughter condemns them & places them on the side of the oppressors. “US regime-change operation,” my ass! We are looking at a Syrian & Russian holocaust of civilians.

(Sketch by artist Marc Nelson)

This little girl just survived (albeit with considerable physical & psychological trauma) heavy shelling by Syrian forces on civilian neighborhoods in Khan Shaykhoun, Idlib. When she is recovered enough to understand, we are certain she will agree with the corrupt antiwar & socialist movements that her trauma was, as Madeleine Albright would put it, “worth it” to defend the Assad dictatorship’s right to self-determination.

Stop the bombing of Idlib. All foreign military forces & mercenaries out of Syria.

(Photo from Syrian Revolution (SRLW) on Twitter)

This little guy is one of 300,000 Syrian civilians displaced in nearly three months of Syrian & Russian bombing in Idlib. Better to show the photo of a child who survived than to show those of children mutilated by bombing & buried in rubble.

They are civilians, not terrorists.

Stop the bombing of Idlib. All foreign military forces & mercenaries out of Syria.

(Photo from journalist Asaad Hanna on Twitter)

These little boys named Batoul & Ahmad are the only members of their family who survived Syrian & Russian bombing of Idlib yesterday. The bodies of their mother, father, & newborn baby brother were recovered from the rubble late last night by White Helmet rescue workers.

The Assad dictatorship, its propagandists & guppies continue to denounce these little guys, their family, neighbors, & the White Helmets as “Salafi-jihadi terrorists.” But they are civilians, just two little boys, not terrorists.

May the deceased Rest In Peace. Stop the bombing of Idlib. Stop the slaughter.

(Photo from journalist Asaad Hanna on Twitter)

Funeral preparations from a detail in the embroidery work of Rollie Mukherjee & her mother Sumita Mukherjee.

(Photo of work by Sanna Irshad Mattoo)

I’ve been an active political dissident for over 53 years. I don’t do armchair dissidence. My commitment is that if you see something wrong, you should try to do something to change it. I am hardly what one could call a patriot but I don’t hate my country. I love & respect my fellow Americans as much as I do every other people on the face of the earth. We are not special nor certainly more civilized. As someone who cares about human life more than anything else, I do detest US capitalism & what it has done & is doing to Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, refugees, Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Somalis, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Salvadorans, & so many others.

The distinction between the US government & US citizens is an important one because it is the latter who have the will & capacity to end the violence of US foreign & domestic policies. Those who continue to harbor delusions about the capacity of the US government to end wars, occupations, genocides cannot be faulted for ignorance so much as credulity–a credulity that the oppressed in the US cannot afford & that those in other countries being bombed cannot tolerate.

India has a population of nearly 1.4 billion people. Jammu & Kashmir has a population of 12.5 million. Since Trump speaks for US capitalism, where do you think US political & economic interests lie? With Indian dominance & exploitation of Kashmiri resources or with Kashmiri self-determination?

Trump says that he could win the 18-year-long war in Afghanistan in 10 days because he has plans that could wipe Afghanistan off the face of the earth & kill 10 million people, but “I don’t want to go that route.” Anybody really think his mediations would ‘resolve the Kashmir issue’ with any more sanity?

Those who had high hopes in Pakistan PM Imran Khan might want to reconsider his political sanity in asking Trump & the US to intervene between India & Pakistan to settle the ‘issue of Kashmir’. Trump’s response was that two weeks ago Modi had already asked him to mediate between India & Pakistan to resolve the conflict & that he “would love to be a mediator.”

What’s glaringly wrong with that scenario? How about the absence of Kashmiris? Where would the citizens of Kashmir who have been fighting for 70 years for self-determination have a say in the ‘resolution of this conflict’? Their voices are the only ones that matter in how this issue is mediated & resolved since they have seen their leaders, activists, citizens disappeared, jailed, tortured, raped, hung, beaten, their homes razed to the ground in hunt to kill operations, thousands of their young people disfigured, disabled, blinded, demoralized by pellet guns.

After the screwing the US has given Palestinians in the Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, & the ‘deal of the century’, is any Kashmiri willing to put their fate in the hands of Trump & the US? Who would play the role of Jared Kushner? Indian Army chief Bipin Rawat who is heading up hunt to kill operations in Kashmir? Or possibly Major Leetul Gogoi, the guy who tied a young Kashmiri man to the hood of a jeep & paraded him around as a human shield? Or maybe one of those saffron Hindutva monks who belongs to the BJP? How could anyone imagine that the US would deal more equitably or reasonably with Kashmiris fighting colonialism & occupation than it does with Palestinians? How could anyone imagine that Trump & the US care any more about the human & democratic rights of Kashmiris than it does about Rohingya, African, Central American, Syrian, Afghan refugees?

How exactly would Trump & the US resolve the issue of Kashmir? The same way they do Israeli colonialism & occupation? By sending in more CIA operatives than they already have in Kashmir? By training paramilitaries to counter Kashmiri militants when Israel already has that covered? By building barrier walls between Pakistan & Kashmir & India & Kashmir? By introducing or bankrolling carpet bombing like the Pentagon does in Gaza, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen? By moving in Hindutva settlers to take over Kashmiri lands like they do Zionist settlers in the West Bank?

Kashmiri popular resistance is central to their struggle for self-determination & any proposal that leaves them out, that compromises on their full demands, or tries to make an end run around self-determination doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of resolving the conflict. These young protesters are resting after the funeral procession of a teenage boy killed by Indian occupying forces. If, after fighting for self-determination, they are left out of the resolution process, it isn’t worth a rat’s ass.

(Photo by Dar Yasin/AP is undated but is from between 2016 & 2019)

It boggles the sane mind how criminally governments are dealing with the refugee crises they are creating with war, occupation, genocide, sweatshop economics, neoliberal plunder. The US with its concentration camps for refugees & criminal misconduct toward children & Bangladesh with its surreal plan to deport thousands of Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char, a monsoon & cyclone prone island in the middle of nowhere. The housing is army barracks, there is no economy & no way to survive, & there is no way to get away from the place. It would essentially become a dumping ground or a penal colony like Devil’s Island.

The deranged plan to deport thousands of Rohingya to Bhasan Char is supposed to be on a volunteer basis but in the few years they’ve been promoting it Bangladesh hasn’t found a single Rohingya volunteer. Except the UN which has offered to help implement the deportations. Since the island only emerged from the sea about eight years ago, they don’t even know if the damn thing is stable enough for human life.

Here’s a counterproposal: why don’t the UN officials offering to assist deportations & the Bangladesh officials who devised the plan move to Bhasan Char for a couple years & test out the possibilities before they force Rohingya to move there? If the bureaucratic halfwits think it’s good enough for refugees, why isn’t it good enough for them? Or don’t Rohingya lives matter?

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jul/19/bangladesh-prepares-to-move-rohingya-to-island-at-risk-of-floods-and-cyclones?