Mary Scully Reports

“Strengthening a unified human rights voice on the genocide of Rohingya is critical to educate the world about who we are, how we have been attacked, & the genocidal violence we have suffered. We do not have a country to advocate for us. And so, we need an alliance of survivors & allies.”

–a call to build the Rohingya solidarity movement from Ro Nay San Lwin, coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition & leading voice of the Rohingya struggle for full human, civil, & democratic rights

(Photo of Rohingya child with her mother collapsing after the flight to Bangladesh from September 2017. Photographer not identified)

A Canadian lobbying firm headed by a former Israeli intelligence operative has signed a US $6-million public relations deal with Sudanese general Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo to clean up his media image. General Dagalo heads the military dictatorship that millions of Sudanese are attempting to overthrow & is the commander of the Janjaweed paramilitary death squads which committed atrocities & massacres in Darfur.

What sayeth crocodile tears Justin Trudeau about this unspeakable deal?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-canadian-lobbying-firm-hired-for-us6-million-to-polish-image-of-sudan/?

Reposting my anti-obituary for Elie Wiesel who died three years ago today at the age of 87. As one of the most feted Zionists & defenders of Israeli colonialism, he is renowned for his statement: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” It’s unfortunate that he drew the wrong political conclusions from his own experience in the holocaust & used it instead to side with the oppressor & support the genocide of Palestinians.

There are so many ways to write the obituary of Elie Wiesel. We’re going to get a belly-full of the panegyric kind over the next few weeks. This isn’t that kind.

Being a Buchenwald survivor & losing close family members in the holocaust deeply affected Wiesel. But instead of putting his grief to good purpose by joining with others in the international struggle against racism & colonialism, he wedded himself to Zionism, the rightwing nationalism based on belief in Jewish supremacism.

Within a few years of his release, at the young age of 20, he began his descent into nationalist supremacism by translating articles for the Irgun, a criminal paramilitary death squad that helped create the state of Israel by the use of terrorism, including bombings & massacres of Palestinians. The Irgun eventually formed the basis of the Israeli army, still notorious for unspeakable brutality against Palestinians.

With growing prominence as a writer, he began to grasp the commercial value of milking the horrors of the holocaust for personal gain & to promote a Jewish-only state. He became a master at self-serving platitudes like in his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech when he famously said, “I swore never to be silent whenever & wherever human beings endure suffering & humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Our man wasn’t silent. Nor certainly neutral. His bullhorn of choice was taking out full-page ads in international media to promote Jewish immigration to Israel, illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, & most despicably at the height of the 2014 bombing siege in Gaza, he justified that assault. While Israeli warplanes were bombing hospitals, schools, residences, refugee centers for seven weeks, this nationalist jackass took out an ad accusing Palestinians of using their children as human shields. That’s a hell of a condemnation that should be put on his tombstone.

For honing the art of propaganda in support of Jewish supremacism over Palestinians & to promote the state of Israel, our man has a pile of awards that go a mile high. He may be one of the most feted people in the world. That’s what you get for supporting colonialism & ethnic cleansing.

You’re supposed to find something good about a person when they die. There’s no reason to do that since the impending panegyrics will invent entire catalogs of virtues to attribute to him. If we must find some, let it be said he aged well & was a snappy dresser.

Let his epitaph reflect the life he led: he supported colonialism & the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by carpet bombing that targeted children. He lived his own damnation. In his support of Israel, he knew no shame.

(Photo of Wiesel by Michael Fattal)

A report by Physicians for Human Rights on the widespread & systematic use of bodily mutilation by the Burmese military against Rohingya civilians, especially women. Now will UN human rights officials continue to whitewash Suu Kyi’s public role in this by making a distinction between the Burmese generals & the so-called civilian government led by Sui Kyi?

https://phr.org/resources/branded-myanmar-military-mutilations-of-rohingya-civilians/?

Over 300 academics associated with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum have written an open letter in the New York Review of Books protesting the museum’s rejection of the analogy between the Nazi holocaust & the US refugee concentration camps for children. This is actually an old issue with the museum going back to its foundations as a bastion of Zionism & support for Israel as a Jewish-only state. Elie Wiesel, who died three years ago today, was instrumental in setting up the museum to promote the idea that the Nazi holocaust of Jews was a unique atrocity for which there is no equivalent in human history. Not even the WWII atomic bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki nor the Atlantic slave trade where millions of Africans died.

In “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.” Norman Finkelstein did a brilliant excoriation of how Zionists exploit the holocaust to advance support for Israel’s colonialism, apartheid, & genocide of Palestinians. Wiesel was so corrupted by Zionist supremacy that in 2014, while Israel was targeting children in its seven-week bombing assault on Gaza, he took out full-age ads in several major newspapers claiming Palestinians used their children as human shields.

Many of the academics who signed this open letter will remain committed Zionists. Many are undoubtedly sincere in their objections to the museum’s insular racism toward refugee children. But there are likely some who signed to counter the damage the museum is doing to Zionism with such boldfaced racism toward children. It isn’t cynical to question motives but an expression of hope that these professors & researchers will come to terms with the supremacy inherent to Zionism & to how the Nazi holocaust is taught & that in doing so they will make the analogy between the Nazi holocaust, the US concentration camps, & Israel’s colonial & genocidal policies which target Palestinian children.

US taxpayers paid $58 million this year to support the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Speaking of holocausts, how much did the US Congress allocate to memorial museums educating about the extermination of Native Americans, the history of slavery & Black Lives Matter, or Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Palestine? No one can object to educating about the Nazi holocaust of Jews. It’s imperative, but only as part of educating about the entire human history of colonialism, racism, white supremacy, genocide, war.

This photo is Palestinians in Gaza during funeral prayers for baby Saba Abu Arar who was killed along with her pregnant aunt Filastin Abu Shihma on May 5th, 2019.

(Photo by Ashraf Amra/APA images)

The growth of the Palestinian solidarity movement appears to be stagnating & there are several likely reasons for that. The escalation of threats against Palestinians–including declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, the ‘deal of the century’ scam, an acceleration of Israeli settlements & expropriations in the West Bank & genocidal violence against Gaza–make an analysis imperative of why the movement has stalled from 2014 when millions across the world marched to protest the bombing siege of Gaza.

One of the primary reasons is the association of prominent pro-Palestinian activists with Assadism, an ideology rooted in anti-Semitism (greater Israel rubbish) & Islamophobia. Because of their influence, people like Ali Abunimah, Max Blumenthal, Rania Khaled, Ben Norton & others have been able to disorient many & attract many others prone to hatred of Jews. But they have not confused Muslim, Arab, Jewish community groups who want no part of their ‘war on terror’ & international Jewish conspiracy rubbish. Their Assadism has deeply divided & immobilized, if not paralyzed Palestinian solidarity.

Another reason is the international Zionist campaign to outlaw BDS & make it a criminal offense to promote the economic & cultural boycott of Israel. But in a self-defeating loop, there is almost no organized opposition by Palestinian solidarity activists to these violations of freedom of speech & association which in the US directly impact & restrict the Bill of Rights.

Thirdly, those engaged in political organizing have observed for decades that every electoral cycle negatively impacts independent political action. Even at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, protests which normally drew hundreds of thousands, even millions, went down to tens of thousands. In the 2016 presidential campaign, Palestinian solidarity activities were preempted by lining up behind Bernie Sanders populism even though he was wretched on the 2014 bombing of Gaza. Sander’s 2020 campaign promises to be a repeat of that capitulation to false promises.

It’s very difficult to stand against the tide & attempt to organize events & rallies in defense of Palestinians but there has never been a more urgent time to do so since what the ‘deal of the century’ means to Palestinian self-determination is that Israel & its US, European, Indian, Middle East, & other allies are preparing the ‘final solution’ for Palestinians.

Photo is Israeli occupying army manhandling & arresting a Palestinian teenager in the West Bank in December 2017.

(Photo by Wisam Hashlamoun/Apaimages)

Amidst a public furor, Trump signed an executive order (which has the force of law) in June 2018 to end his ‘zero tolerance’ policy, stop kidnapping children from their refugee parents, & reunite 3,000 kidnapped children with their parents. So why, by their own admission, are his officials still kidnapping children & stuffing them into concentration camps? Isn’t Trump breaking the law & shouldn’t Democrats, especially those running for 2020 president against him, be making a giant legislative & political stink about this? Or, as is more likely, do Democrats agree with Trump’s concentration camps?

(Photo of July 2018 protest in New York by Don Emmert/AFP/ Getty Images)

For a few years, I lived in a house with mold toxicity & developed chronic respiratory & sinus problems–primarily a catarrhal condition. My doctor, who dismisses the mold toxicity, has tried different medications, mostly allergy medicines & something that made my teeth turn green, & nothing has worked in now almost two years. Consultations with Chinese herbalists & acupuncturists has not helped. Knowing catarrhal conditions lead to more serious health issues, I realized if this would be solved, I would have to do investigative work on my own.

In my explorations, I’ve come across the book “Toxic: Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, & Chronic Environmental Illness” by Neil Nathan, MD. Dr. Nathan & his wife both suffered from mold toxicity. His book is very scientific because the maladies are very complex & he lays out the whole field of new medical science in dealing with these health issues. He talks about the Shoemaker Protocol of Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker & the protocols of other pioneers in this field. You can go to Dr. Shoemaker’s web site & find a whole cornucopia of sources, including doctors in the US trained specifically to deal with these health issues.

I report this because I know many suffer from these same issues, sometimes without knowing the source of their symptoms. A friend who also suffers mold toxicity issues recommends “Mold: the War Within” by Kurt & Lee Ann Billings.

Syrian children’s art: in 2014, an exhibit titled “Light Against Darkness” was held in Beirut highlighting Syrian refugee children’s therapeutic art. In this one, there is a regime tank & a helicopter strafing while a little girl holds her mother’s hand as a gun is pressed to her head.

Palestinian children’s art: this is one of several drawings by Palestinian children in Gaza that was supposed to be shown at the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland, California in September 2011. After Zionist organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area pressured the museum & despite considerable counter-pressure from Palestinians & their supporters, the exhibit was cancelled.

The Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) published the censored art in a book titled, “A Child’s View from Gaza: Palestinian Children’s Art & the Fight Against Censorship.”