Mary Scully Reports

How do you like Trump, dumb as a stump, telling two Black women, one Latina, & one Palestinian woman who are members of the US Congress to ‘go back’ to their ‘corrupt’ & “broken & crime infested” countries before “telling the people of the United States…how our government is to be run”? One of the women was born in Michigan, one in Massachusetts, one in New York. Only Ilhan Omar was born outside the US but is a war refugee from Somalia.

His racism & misogyny are only made more detestable by his stupidity & the low level of his nationalism & hatred.

In July 2014, as Israeli bombs rained down on Gaza, BDS activists waged an aggressive education campaign with American rapper Talib Kweli who was scheduled to perform at an Israeli musical festival in August along with other prominent rappers. Kweli honored BDS & canceled his participation though at the time he did not seem well informed about the Palestinian struggle. He is however a political thinker very much involved in the struggle against police violence in the Black community.

He became well-informed about the Palestinian struggle & by 2017 was debating BDS on social media with Remedy, a Jewish Zionist rapper also from NYC. This month, he was asked to renounce BDS in order to perform at the Open Source Festival in Düsseldorf & when he refused his tour of Germany was canceled. Since May 2019, an official statement passed by the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, declares BDS to be anti-Semitic. In response to being disinvited from the festival, Kweli said: “…what they’re saying is support for BDS is hate speech. Well, how? Show me on the BDS platform where there’s hate speech. You can’t, it’s not there, so let’s move to the next point. Are you saying that support for BDS is hate speech because you say that BDS supports Palestinian organizations that have committed terrorism? No, you can’t say that, either.”

In an interview, Kweli compared the pedagogical but aggressive treatment he received from BDS activists in 2014 to those he received from Zionists when he canceled the Israeli performance. He said, “The worst trolling I ever got in my life was when I canceled that Israel show. The Zionist trolls came at me….the pushback from the BDS & the supporters of Palestine that I got was…fierce. People were frustrated with me, people were upset with me, but for the most part, that community was respectful in their critique of me. It wasn’t any, “You’re a n*****, you’re a coon, you’re a monkey.” But when I canceled the Israel show in solidarity with BDS, I got called n*****, & monkey, & all types of sh*t from these Zionist trolls, & it immediately made me feel like I’d made the right decision.”

(Photo of Talib Kweli)

It’s worth reposting this beautiful tribute by Rollie Mukherjee to Kashmiri women’s leading role in the struggle for azaadi. Just a simple google search will show hundreds of photos of Kashmiri women protesting. They lead the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons. They play a leading role internationally in the campaign against sexual violence in war, occupation, & genocide. They are central to one of the most important freedom struggles of our times.

“this painting titled “unframed ‘histories’” depicts a Kashmiri woman with a mike. She is not a mute beautiful showpiece as represented quite often. She is a reminder of the horror & wounds they are made to exist with. She is a speaking agency, speaking aloud to the whole world & thus breaks the patterned “way of seeing” of the Indians. The kashmiri design in this painting acts as a trope for peace & unity on the one hand & on the other hand sneer at how its beauty is relished & their pains are cornered & erased.”

Turkish president Erdogan is a big talker when it comes to genocide, another master of the empty gesture. In 2015, an estimated 25,000 Rohingya refugees were turned away from asylum in Thailand & other countries & left to float in rickety boats in the Andaman Sea. Not a single navy sent a fleet to rescue them although Erdogan in one of his big-talking moments promised some Turkish naval boats. There’s no report that any Turkish boats ever showed up & still no accounting for the lives of thousands of Rohingya refugees. During the height of Burma’s 2017 genocidal assault on Rohingya Muslims in Arakan/Rakhine State–a genocide armed & politically supported by China–Erdogan did some more big talking & sent his wife for a media tour of Cox’s Bazar refugee camps. It’s not certain how much actual aid Turkey has ever delivered.

In February of this year, the Turkish government issued a statement calling China’s forcible “assimilation” & concentration camps for Uyghurs a “great shame for humanity.” On his recent state visit to China, Erdogan told Xi Jinping that Uyghurs are ‘living happily in Xinjiang’. Not even six months & our big talker goes from forcible assimilation in concentration camps to ‘living happily’ in concentration camps. What changed his mind? Realpolitik recognizes no principles, especially those of human rights. In truth, Erdogan heads a regime as repressive as the Chinese regime. His big talking does not express his commitments but the political expedience of the moment. Shame on his sorry ass.

(Photo of Erdogan meeting with Xi Jinping from SupChina)

Last Saturday, there were a couple tiny gatherings of the Assadist/Stalinist antiwar cult demanding “US out of Venezuela & Iran.” Since the US is doing some serious saber-rattling against those two countries, it is certainly appropriate to protest. But the real US wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, or the genocidal Syrian & Russian bombing of Idlib were not even mentioned. The Assadist/Stalinist antiwar cult insists that Syria & Russia have a right to bomb because they are defending Assad’s right to self-determination & anyway they’re only bombing terrorists. Those gatherings were tiny & will continue to get tinier because their politics are entirely corrupt, if not also politically deranged & squarely rooted in the Islamophobic “war on terror.”

Because Syrian & Russian bombing of Idlib is so sustained & genocidal, my posts have focused on that & I have been unable to pay sufficient attention to the struggles of Kashmiris, Palestinians, Rohingya, Uyghur, & others–not to mention the monstrous wars in Afghanistan Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Libya. Those struggles are all extremely urgent & my inattention is not to suggest they are not. All of these struggles are anyway connected in the so-called ‘war on terror’ which is a euphemism for the modern form of colonialism.

This video report by Basharat Amin is about how the Indian government uses vandalism & destruction of homes as a weapon of occupation & colonialism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL3hI91ggxg&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1X7heRHDUVGUJfkpIDSugqjzlIYJAx02dNicudIoqASfPBiryCCzMc-LY

The Facebook accounts of Kashmiri photojournalist Aasif Shafi continue to be censored. His photojournalism sites with over 150,000 followers were simply deleted. Anyone who follows his work knows he is a serious, committed journalist, not an inflammatory instigator. Please follow his page to show political support for his work & to express outrage at Facebook’s continuing censorship.

https://www.facebook.com/aasifshafiofficial2/

“Pro-Assad/Russia loons & propagandists have been so effective in muddying the waters, casting aspersions on Assad’s victims, & deflecting criticism away from this century’s most brutal dictator that they undermine any coordinated & sustained international effort to protect the Syrian people from a genocide.”

–Saad Bin Muhammad

Last week 22 countries sent a letter to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva denouncing China’s concentration camps for Uyghur Muslims. The list of signatories is not impressive since most of them have troops deployed in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, & elsewhere. They include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, & the UK. The US was not a signatory since they had earlier walked out of the UNHCR.

In response, Cuba, Venezuela, & Syria were among 37 of the worst human rights violators in the world, including Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, North Korea, UAE, Qatar, Nigeria, Angola, Togo, Tajikistan, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Myanmar, & Belarus, in signing a shameful letter to the UNHRC praising China’s remarkable achievements in human rights & claiming that concentration camps for Uyghur Muslims are necessary to fight “separatism” & “terrorism.”

We’d like the propagandists & guppies of the Cuban, Venezuelan, & Syrian regimes to explain why those three governments which they declare bastions of democracy sided with genocide if they are so damn progressive? Or does that explain why, among Assadists, denial of the Uyghur genocide is now as de rigueur as kissing the asses of those three regimes?

(Photo of one of the concentration camps where China holds more than a million Uyghurs from Reuters)

Amir & Tasnim Zakareya Hussein al Sayyed were killed yesterday along with their mom & dad by a Russian airstrike on Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib province. Authorities have not been able to identify which faction of “al-Qaeda affiliated Salafi-jihadi terrorists” the family belonged to because they were just civilians.

(Photo from journalist Asaad Hanna on Twitter)