Facebook policy is to cover up photos that appear widely in international media. Are its censors more sensitive than those of world media or human rights activists? Or just acting on behalf of governments that don’t want their barbarities exposed?
Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez & his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, drowned Sunday, June 23rd, in the Rio Grande River near Matamoros, Mexico across the river from Brownsville, Texas (just one hour from McAllen). Señor Martínez, his wife Tania Vanessa Ávalos, & their little girl left their home in El Salvador last April to immigrate to the US. They intended to apply for asylum at the international bridge between Matamoros & Brownsville but found the offices closed & hundreds ahead of them in line so they decided to take their chances crossing the river.
Señor Martínez first carried his daughter across the river & then turned back for his wife but when the little girl saw her dad swimming away, she jumped into the water after him. He tried to pull her out of the water but both were swept away by the current. Their bodies were found Monday a few hundred yards from where they attempted to cross.
The deaths of Oscar & Valeria Martinez, along with the refugee concentration camps, represent US immigrant & refugee policy & resonate with that of the European Union which mandates the drownings, deaths, & forcible exclusions of thousands of African, Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan, Palestinian, & other refugees.
This is a photo of Oscar & Valeria Martinez. May they Rest In Peace.
Open the borders! Immigration is a human right. Asylum to refugees is mandated by international law.
(Photo by Julia Le Duc)
The photo of Oscar & Valeria Martinez resonates with these images:
Three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylun Kurdi, September 2015
16-month-old Rohingya refugee Mohammed Shohayet in Naf River, January 2017
Unnamed Rohingya refugee child in Naf River, August 2017
Zero Impunity is an organization that addresses the use of rape in war, occupation, genocide. This is their presentation on the Assad regime’s use of child rape & sexual torture.
https://zeroimpunity.com/how-the-assad-regime-used-child-rape-as-a-weapon-of-war/?
India Today reports that sound cannons will soon be used by the the Indian army “to control stone-pelting mobs in Kashmir” as an alternative to pellet guns which have blinded, disfigured, & killed thousands of unarmed protesters. As DNA India reports it, “during crucial anti-terror operations in Kashmir {the Indian Army} will no longer depend on pellet guns to disperse the human obstacles.” DNA India also refers to protesters against colonialism & occupation as ‘rampaging mobs’ who use children as human shields.
The Indian military has only initiated the process of transition by submitting requests to manufacturers asking them to detail specifications of their sound cannons by June 30th, 2019 & to give an assessment of the impact on human ears. This is a dog & pony show put on by the Indian Army. India has experience with using sound cannons since the Delhi police have had five of them since 2013 “to tame unruly protesters.” They can also draw on experience & studies from several other countries which use them: Australia, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Georgia, Honduras, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Philippines, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, UK, UK, Vietnam, Romania, Norway, Algeria. The CIA uses them as a form of torture in Guantanamo & other torture centers. The use of cacophonous sound to torture & harm is a long-established practice of war.
Sound cannons were first used in the US in 2009 against G20 protesters in Pittsburgh & have become part of the militarization of the police in several states. Most egregiously, they were used against the Ferguson, Missouri Black community in the 2014 protests ignited when unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot down by a policeman without provocation. They were also used in Washington, DC against the Women’s March in 2017.
A Kashmir Walla article called this transition from pellet guns to sound cannons “a major development” but that is far too much credulity. Pellet guns have proven so effective in disabling protesters & civilians, that it is highly unlikely India will replace them but will only augment them with sound cannons, technically called Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD). From repeated studies, it is already known that sound cannons can cause permanent hearing damage or loss, neurological damage, long-term injury to the brain & central nervous system, lung & cardiovascular damage.
Rather than being part of a more humane approach to destroying the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination, sound cannons are a weapon to increase harm to protesters. In their specification requests to manufacturers, the Indian government said they would require certification from Indian & medical organizations about their impact on human hearing & the “normal threshold of pain for children.” That could be called an admission by the Indian government that they intend to harm children with the sound cannons or at least know that children will be adversely affected. But does anyone really believe that a government which disfigures & disables thousands of unarmed protesters with pellet guns, uses mass rape, arrests without cause, barbarically tortures, & disappears thousands of young people, actually cares about hearing loss or neurological damage among civilian protesters?
(Photo by Brian Blanco/EPA is sound cannon used at 2009 G20 protests in Pittsburgh)
Bernie Sanders just proposed a plan to cancel $1.6 trillion in student loan debt for about 45 million people. His minions are drooling. Next he’ll be proposing a bill to cancel climate change & they’ll still believe him. At some point, people have to grow up politically & learn to distinguish populist campaign rhetoric from political realities. The banks hold those debts so just how likely is this plan to get past the US Congress (most of whom are beholden to those banks) let alone Wall Street?
When you consider how Israeli snipers target the legs of young protesters, creating hundreds of amputees; how India uses pellet guns to blind, disfigure, & disable hundreds of unarmed protesters; how Burma created long-term disabilities by shooting at fleeing Rohingya (as documented in the Physicians for Human Rights report “Shot While Fleeing”); it seems that creating mass disability is a primary military tactic to destroy political resistance to occupation & genocide. That puts the struggle for disability rights in the heart of the struggle against occupation & genocide.
Disability has always been an issue in war, including for the armies deployed. Just in Afghanistan, land mines & unexploded ordnance cause 140 civilian incidents every month, at least 30-percent of them killed & the others sustaining amputations. Over the course of 18 years of war, the disability rate would be upwards of 20,000. That’s just in one country. That puts the struggle for disability rights in the heart of the struggle against war.
The photo is 29-year-old Ibrahim Abu Thurayyah who was killed by an Israeli sniper in December 2017 while protesting at the Gaza border. He was a double amputee who lost both legs & a kidney in the 2008 Israeli bombing siege of Gaza. May he Rest In Peace.
(Photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
Physicians for Human Rights report on how the Burmese military shot & disabled unarmed Rohingya men, women, & children fleeing genocide.
This article is based on the report released last month by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) & Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) about India’s use of torture in Kashmir.
The full report can be found at: http://jkccs.net
A recent statement by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Kashmir on the relationship between torture & forcible disappearance.
There are new reports that Syria & Russia are using white phosphorous in bombing Idlib. The US State Department said several weeks ago it had received numerous reports about chemical bombing in Idlib but had ‘made no definitive conclusion’. The US is in no position to be condemnatory since it used white phosphorous in its 2017 bombing siege of Raqqa which wiped out entire families & turned the city into a wasteland of bombed-out concrete. It also routinely used it in Iraq (including Mosul in 2017), Afghanistan, & bankrolls Israel which uses it in Gaza. This new report came from Daily Sabah, a conservative Turkish daily often called a propaganda outlet for the Turkish government. They published video footage of Syrian warplanes dropping 18 phosphorus bombs on the town of Khan Shaykhun, Idlib. The White Helmet rescue workers have reported similarly going back to April when the Idlib siege began.
Assad propagandists & their guppies will immediately leap to a defense of Assad, mocking the sources of the reports & making long juridical arguments about how Assad has no need to use chemical weapons since he is winning the war. (Their tacit defense is that he’s a snazzy dresser who looks European, not Arab, & wouldn’t do such a thing.) When you ask why Syria & Russia are bombing hospitals where chemical exposure could be definitively proven or disproven, Assadists claim they were not medical facilities at all but depots where ‘al-Qaeda affiliated Salafi jihadi terrorists’ hole up & store weapons. They have an answer for everything because Assad pays them well for sowing confusion & distrust. Nihilism is the nature of fascism & Assad’s propagandists have made it an art form of the Leni Riefenstahl kind. Truth is, one of the main reasons that Syrian & Russian bombers target hospitals is to exclude the possibility that medical personnel could confirm & document that those treated showed symptoms consistent with chemical exposure.
Since Syria & Russia are carpet bombing Idlib, one can ask whether chemical weapons are a more gruesome way to die than the barrel bombs (oil drums filled with shrapnel & explosives) they’re also using. Being bombed & burned to death is a hellish, unimaginable way to die but survivors of such weapons sustain deep, disfiguring, disabling burns, eye & respiratory infections, gastrointestinal irritation, organ damage to liver, kidney, heart, lung, or bones.
Principled antiwar activists would not be running interference for the Syrian & Russian air forces. They would be in the streets demanding, as these children of Idlib, that Syria & Russia stop the bombing.
(Photo of children in Idlib from Help Refugees on Twitter)