Meghan McCain, rightwing talk show host & daughter of war criminal John McCain, broke into crocodile tears saying she has no Jewish family but takes Ilhan Omar’s criticism of Israel very personally. I have no Palestinian family but I take Israeli genocide very personally. I have no Jewish family & I take anti-Semitism very personally. I have no Vietnamese, Iraqi, Afghan, Libyan, Somali, Syrian, or Yemeni family either & I take her & her father’s support for all US wars very personally. What I don’t take personally is McCain’s crocodile tears or hypocrisy.
Whether the Palestinians win their freedom struggle against colonialism & genocide or not has the greatest consequence for the future of all suffering humanity. To my mind, there should be no compromises with those who waffle on the issue of Palestinian solidarity & no tolerance for those in Palestinian solidarity who compromise with anti-Semitism. Not when genocide is at stake.
An Al Jazeera video on cow vigilantes (Hindutva nationalists) in India attacking & killing Muslims. The video is not straightforward enough in pointing out that the motivation is not the welfare of cows but the persecution of Muslims. In the US under Jim Crow (the US form of apartheid), lynchings of Black men were widespread ostensibly to protect white women from allegedly sexually rapacious Black men but there was no noticeable improvement in the violent & misogynist treatment of white women by the lynchers. It wasn’t about the women & it isn’t about the cows. It’s about justifying persecution.
If it weren’t for Kashmiri activists on social media, this halfwitted article in the Guardian would be what the rest of us are being fed on the Kashmiri freedom struggle against occupation & colonialism: “Standoff in Kashmir: ‘Our last hope is that a war will sort this once & for all’.” The two writers, one a Kashmiri & the other the South Asia correspondent for the Guardian based in Delhi, found the only two guys in Kashmir who think in their despair that war between India & Pakistan will resolve the Kashmiri conflict with India.
This photo from the article was captioned: “A Kashmiri Muslim woman looks on as Indian government forces stand guard after clashes with separatist protesters.” Now doesn’t that just clear things up about what the war mongering in India is all about? A more coherent & honest caption would say “Some of the 700,000 Indian occupying soldiers in Kashmir are hassling pedestrians while they wait for the next hunt to kill operation where they will terrorize civilians, shoot up their neighborhoods with pellet guns, & raze homes under the guise of hunting down terrorists.” This is a shameful article & outside of a brief synopsis of Kashmiri history & a few sentences about the repression in Kashmir after the Pulwama incident, it is worthless.
Article from Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/02/kashmir-india-pakistan-stand-off-war-border?
(Photo by Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)
This is the stuff of military occupation: in occupied Palestine, ambulances, women in labor, extremely sick Palestinians are frequently held up at Israeli military checkpoints, often leading to their deaths. It’s one form of the genocide. Here in this video of occupied Kashmir, military convoys block roads & force a man to carry a patient to hospital. Ambulances are also often detained by Indian occupying forces so that injured civilians die. It is part of the genocide.
The Bangladeshi government is proceeding with its deranged plan to deport up to 103,000 Rohingya refugees to the island of Bhasan Char. The island only emerged from the sea about 20 years ago & is one of many shifting, unstable islands called floating islands in the Bay of Bengal. British & Chinese engineers are working with the Bangladeshi navy to turn the remote island (30 km/21 mi from the mainland) into a concentration camp even though it is uninhabitable. It is frequently flooded by cyclones & during a normal high tide is under three to four feet of water. During the full moon & new moon some areas are under four to eight feet of water.
The Sheikh Hasina government says Rohingya refugees will not be forcibly deported to Bhasan Char but odds are infinitesimal that they will find anyone to volunteer being sent to certain death. One of Hasina’s advisers told Reuters that once on Bhasan Char they will not be able to leave unless it is back to the killing fields of Burma or for asylum to a third country.
All pressure must be put on the Bangladeshi government to abandon this insane plan & to instead send the politicians & engineers who devised this plan to spend all eternity on Bhasan Char. Or at least until the first monsoon takes them out.
(Map of Bhasan Char from Human Rights Watch)
The Action Group for Palestinians of Syria has documented the deaths of 3,920 Palestinian refugees in the Syrian war since 2011. 1,198 refugees were killed under shelling; 1,069 were gunned down, 572 others were tortured to death in Assad’s prisons. Over 1,733 Palestinians have met mysterious fates in Syrian dungeons. Scores of Palestinian refugees have also been left wounded, including many who sustained limb amputation or eye loss.
Just to clarify, my post about the hijab is being misunderstood & I don’t know if it’s because of language or the form in which I posted it. As a feminist, I believe in the rights of women to decide how they dress & don’t concern myself with telling Muslim women what to wear anymore than I do women who wear bikinis. My concern is solely with the way governments & rightwing forces are using the veil to justify persecution of Muslim women. Personally, I think the hijab is quite flattering but it’s not a fashion choice so much as a right for Muslim women to decide what to wear.
This young boy is Burhan Fayaz from Pulwama, Kashmir. This photo was taken in March 2017 during the funeral prayers of Burhan’s classmate named Aamir who was killed by Indian occupying forces in Pulwama. Perhaps his grief can put the political furor over the suicide bomber who killed 42 counterinsurgency troops at Pulwama in better perspective. At the time, was there international condemnation of Indian terrorism in Kashmir for killing a child? Did Indian media & celebrities go ballistic with nationalist sloganeering against Pakistan for inciting terrorism in Kashmir? Because most of us only recall Kashmiris grieving the death of the young boy or denouncing all the crimes committed against Kashmiris by occupying forces.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.