Mary Scully Reports

Since sarcasm is such a powerful weapon of political resistance, it’s worthwhile to repost these comments from last year mocking the patronizing social media campaign called “Talk to a Muslim” to address the murderous pogroms & murders of Indian Muslims:

Shuja Kosher: “I know many Indian Muslims who are proud Indians. They must be overjoyed that someone will finally talk to them before killing them.”

Sarwar Baig: “Look at him. Feisty little fellow, isn’t he? Observe the dense tufts of hair on his cheeks and chin. Look at the obscenely garish mehendi in his beard. Don’t get too close to the cage now. Don’t feed him. The fence is electrified for a reason. See that bulge under his bright tunic? That’s his explosive vest. Careful now. Go on. Talk to the katua.”

Puneet Maini: “India has now entered that phase where eating with Dalits and talking to Muslims are considered revolutionary acts.”

A few weeks ago, a woman, a retiree who lived in a trailer park, who I met at the dog park gave me a shih tzu dog she had found but couldn’t keep. Rather than her taking him to the shelter which euthanizes, I took him hoping the Yaqui animal shelter could find him a family. I named him Nacho until I could find his caretaker if he was lost or Yaqui could take him if he had been abandoned. If you hold on to a foundling for too long, the bonds become too deep & it’s impossible to give them over for adoption. Once they’re in your heart, they’re yours till death do you part.

The Dairy Queen ice cream shop here gives out free ‘pup cups’ to every dog if you buy something so every once in a while after the dog park I bring my crew to the DQ which they absolutely love. For at least a year, we’ve been waited on by the same young woman who is a dog lover & who always filled up each pup cup to the brim. Yesterday, my crew was due for a pup cup & she again was on the window. I told her my Miss Penny had died but that we had Nacho until we could find him a loving family through Yaqui. She said her aunt was looking for a dog just like Nacho & might be interested in taking him. I don’t trust my vetting judgement when it comes to adopting animals but after a year of interaction with this young woman, I trusted her as a person. So we agreed that I would give her the dog for her aunt & that if for any reason it didn’t work out, I would take Nacho back rather than have him passed around.

Later in the evening, I met her & her mom to relinquish Nacho. She reaffirmed that she would give him back to me if her aunt found him incompatible. This morning, she phoned to ask if she could keep him because her two boys fell in love with him, as she did, & that he slept in her bed curled up at her feet. She said whenever I bring my dogs for pup cups she would show me photos of the little guy so I can be assured of his happiness & well-being. You always worry yourself sick about dogs you turn over for adoption, that they found greater happiness & love. In this case, I feel certain that Nacho found a forever, loving home.

(Photo of Nacho)

I’m certainly not the only one who thinks Trump is setting Ilhan Omar up for an act of violence, including the possibility of an attempt on her life. He’s contemptuous of dark-skinned people, Muslims, & women, especially the fearless ones, going so far as to build concentration camps for little refugee kids. Nothing will stop his advances on human rights except massive national protests demanding his removal & until then a special anti-fascist muzzle fitted for that orange lump of lard. How do we get those national protests going?

Yesterday, Trump wound up a crowd of his followers, encouraging them to chant “Send her back! Send her back!” against Somali-born Muslim Ilhan Omar. He spoke as president of the US in the demagogic style of Adolph Hitler. He places her in extreme danger, inciting the psychotics among his followers to violence.
In response she tweeted a poem of Maya Angelou: “You may shoot me with your words. You may cut me with your eyes. You may kill me with your hatefulness. But still, like air, I’ll rise.” Omar is tough & uncompromising. But she should not have to work as a congresswoman under such racist & Islamophobic harassment.

There must be some way to take legal action, including impeachment proceedings, against the orange lump of lard inciting violence against a Black Muslim woman.

If we could just get middle-class feminists to stop glorifying & legitimizing prostitution as a form of labor rather than what it is: systematic oppression & the sexual exploitation & commodification of declassed & working class women & children. Then maybe they would put their apparently limited analytical skills to exposing the exponentially growing sex trafficking of young women & children which is an international, multi-billion dollar industry. Once again, prostitution & sex slavery are not a form of exploited labor. They are a continuum of oppression involving humiliation, violence, rape, torture, murder. There can be no talk of consensual sex when the power relations involved in prostitution & fundamental to sex trafficking are violence & degradation of women & children.

The middle-class feminists ought to ask themselves why they are fixated on legitimizing prostitution rather than focusing on sex trafficking which dwarfs prostitution. But they have exhibited little interest or none in addressing an industry involving the lives of millions of women & children. How deep does their feminism really go? Contempt for the working class is written all over their apologetics. Just like they do for their daughters, we have higher aspirations for our girls that do not include commodifying their bodies as cheap play things or objects of abuse & contempt in an extremely dangerous environment. They also ought to ask themselves why their venom is turned toward feminists who uphold the dignity & beauty of women by calling us SWERFs & carceral feminists, whatever the hell that is. Why haven’t they turned any venom towards pimps, traffickers, & johns who think of women & children as disposable toys? No matter what you call us, we will never accept the power relations involved in prostitution & sex slavery nor ever legitimize the idiotic notion that commodification of women & children is a form of labor when it is the systematic oppression of women & children.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jul/06/living-hell-of-bangladesh-brothels-sex-trafficking?

China, which once denied the existence of Uyghur concentration camps, now calls them boarding school facilities that provide vocational training & reeducation to discourage ‘radicalization” & terrorism among Uyghur. Whatever China chooses to call these facilities, they are places where Uyghur are incarcerated, held against their will, tortured & abused by camp guards, brainwashed & indoctrinated to make them abandon their cultural & religious practices, live with rotten food & substandard, overcrowded living conditions. Very much like refugee concentration camps in the US.

There’s no speculation here. We know this information from Uyghur activists & journalists. Or do creeps like Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, Tim Anderson, & the many other Assadists & Stalinists who deny the Uyghur genocide think the Chinese government which armed & supported the Rohingya genocide a more reliable source of information than the Uyghur people themselves? Just how low can their racism go?

Are there any Canadian friends willing to sponsor a Rohingya refugee? Or do you know anyone who would be willing? It isn’t a major commitment & certainly not a financial commitment. But it does allow a refugee to acquire papers & asylum. Let me know if you can.

My neighbor found a wild bird with a badly broken leg. The bone actually protrudes. I’ve successfully splintered (using straws) two cockatiels with broken legs & they recovered but this is a complex break way beyond my skills. There are no rehab centers locally & my car is not up to traveling to the closest one. Everywhere there are kind people & a woman at the closest rehab arranged for me to deliver the bird to a local shelter which will transport him/her to rehab. Wish the little one God’s blessings.

Assad propagandists produce one diatribe after another & go from one Assadist conference to the next denouncing mainstream media for biased coverage of Syria. A professional journalist doing a comprehensive analysis for Airwars concluded that US media coverage about harm done to civilians by US warplanes in its deployment against ISIS is practically nonexistent & that reporting by US media about the slaughter of Syrian civilians mainly covers the harm done by Syria & Russia. That’s a bias alright just like Assadist reporting that the only ones being bombed by Syria & Russia are terrorists.

The thing is that those who want to know exactly what is happening to civilians in Syria do not rely on US or European media at all but look to Syrian journalists & citizen journalists within Syria reporting on social media, on several Syrian human rights groups, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, & on political groups like Action Group for Palestinians of Syria who are in or who have direct contact within Syria.

Most mainstream media does not appear to do its own on the ground investigations from Syria–anymore than it does in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Yemen–but relies on information from Syrian human rights groups & independent journalists. War journalism, at least for the main media outlets, is becoming a thing of the past, especially since embedding journalists with the military is now their norm–a norm which compromises & outright corrupts journalism, turning it into propaganda, as we have seen not just with Bartlett, Beeley, Khalek, & Fisk, but also as we have seen with US journalists in Iraq & Afghanistan.

The lack of coverage in US & European media has facilitated the influence of Assad propagandists whose writings bear as little resemblance to journalism as romance novels do to love & allows them to claim there are no civilians in Syria, only “al-Qaeda affiliated Salafi-jihadi terrorists”. What matters to principled antiwar & human rights supporters is what is happening to civilians & rescue workers? How many have been displaced, made homeless, live in refugee camps, were forced into exile, injured, disappeared, tortured, killed–& what can we do to stand with them in opposing the slaughter?

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

Article on the Airwars investigation: https://airwars.org/news-and-investigations/major-challenges-with-us-media-coverage-of-civilian-harm/?fbclid=IwAR1l2PTh3Lys1DqK_E-

Airwars report titled “US Media Coverage of Civilian Harm in the War Against So-Called Islamic State:
https://airwars.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Airwars-News-in-Brief-US-media-reporting-of-civilian-harm.pdf?

(Photo is terrified Syrian child being evacuated from Homs in 2014)

We are civilians being bombed by Syrian & Russian war planes, not terrorists.