A Palestinian boy rushes to help a man injured by Israeli snipers at the Great Return March. Such is the spirit of Intifada.
It’s appalling how many socialist academics are decrying how white supremacist the US electorate is based on the results of these elections. They don’t exhibit the analytical skills considered de rigueur for a 7th grade book report. Has the electorate changed that dramatically from the landslide election of Obama in 2008 & 2012? Have these smarty-pants gone through the elections state by state to assess if Black, Latino, or Native American voters were disenfranchised? What percentage of eligible voters of any ethnicity even registered or voted? What are the demographics of voters? Was it rich white voters who elected white supremacists or was it working people who have much more daily & personal contact with Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans through school, work, & social life? How many white supremacists were actually elected? Does being a Black or Latino candidate mean you should be voted in regardless of your politics? Is it true that white women make up the majority of white supremacist voters? Or is that just the usual schtick of blaming women for everything that goes wrong in the world?
If you’re a serious political person engaged in political organizing, you require an accurate assessment of where things stand in the fight against racism in this country & through war, occupation, & genocide. But it takes a hell of a lot of nerve for dilettantish, hermetically isolated professors to vilify American working people as majority white supremacists when they don’t pay enough attention to know or understand & when the Palestinian, Kashmiri, Rohingya, & Uyghur genocides are going on & so few of the geniuses have uttered a peep of protest.
Amen.
What a rousing concession speech congressman Beto O’Rourke made to Ted Cruz in the Texas senatorial race. He’s a real man of the people & “so f**king proud” that Texas voters gave that Cruz a run for his money because now O’Rourke has become an A-list player in US politics & can confidently put his hat forward as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. Even though he lost the senate seat, it’s a win-win situation for our giant among the toadies who make up the Democratic Party.
There’s just one peccadillo in O’Rourke’s rhetoric (because let’s face it, political candidates are mostly all hot air) that should give pause: his ‘proud’ commitment to Israel & his opposition to BDS. We could review his voting record which is consistently for military aid to Israel; his associations with the Zionist lobby groups AIPAC & J Street; his ardent proclamations of support to Israel & just as ardent opposition to BDS. But let us just cite him in 2015 after J Street toured him around Israel only months after the seven-week Israeli bombing siege of Gaza in 2014. Speaking to members of an El Paso synagogue about that siege, O’Rourke “spoke of the fear described by Jews he met who lived at ground zero of the rocket & terrorist tunnel attacks” from Gaza. Does he mean the Israelis in the hills of Sderot who sat night after night in easy chairs sucking down beers, cheering & waving the Israeli flag while they watched the bombing & annihilation of Gaza?
The 2014 operation which Israel called Operation Protective Edge is called a ‘war waged on Gaza’s children’ by several human rights groups & the UN. In seven weeks of carpet bombing, 2,220 Palestinians were killed, 547 of them were children; 11,100 Palestinians were wounded, including 3,374 children, 2,088 women, & 410 elderly people; 1,500 children were orphaned & 1,000 were permanently disabled. Five Israeli civilians, including one child were killed. Judging from these statistics, O’Rourke’s support for Israel isn’t such a peccadillo after all but a fatal political flaw, whether from bad judgement, ignorance, or most likely in O’Rourke’s case, from opportunism & bad character. If there is any quality that does not bode well in politics, it is opportunism which is the willingness to sell your soul (if you even have one) for personal aggrandizement. Or in O’Rourke’s case, the willingness to support apartheid, racism, colonialism, genocide to gain a seat in the US Senate.
Why does his support for Israel & opposition to Palestinian justice matter to voters in Texas or in the US? The most imperative & compelling response is that Israel, with US support, is engaged in a genocide against the Palestinian people. So what, some may respond, when he can do so much for Texans as a senator or for Americans if he becomes president? Do men & women of good will really want social security, Medicare, food stamps to be based on support, or at least turning our backs, on a genocide? Are Palestinian lives of so little matter? Are they not human beings too? If O’Rourke is willing to turn his back on genocide, what makes us think he will not put the screws to us if it serves his career better in his climb to the presidency? Opportunism is like that; it has no loyalty, no principles. So if voting for military aid to Israel means cutting food stamps or social security, what will our man of the people do?
Zionism is a pernicious ideology with a corrupting stranglehold on American politics. It impacts women’s rights, immigration & refugee rights, civil liberties, civil rights, reproductive rights, Islamophobia, war, occupation, genocide, film, literature, journalism. That assertion can be demonstrated over & over again in practical politics going back 70 years. Zionism, which is rightwing, racist, colonialist, must be politically challenged as one of the greatest impediments to social justice in US domestic & international politics. Beto O’Rourke is part of the problem in US politics & no part of the solution.
This photo is Palestinian children attending the funeral of the four little boys bombed to death on a Gaza beach in July during the 2014 bombing siege. They’re probably not “so f**king proud” of Texas voters.
(Photo from AFP/Getty Images)
Recently, Phyllis Chesler has been cited in several articles & in a TV documentary as an authority on Second Wave feminism–probably because she just published a gossipy autobiography. She is indeed a well-known feminist thanks to her talent for self-promotion & social climbing. She once wrote unreadable books about women’s psychology, always exaggerates her place in feminist history, & now writes volume after volume of hateful scurrilous screeds against Palestinians & Islam–in one piece calling Palestinian supporters & BDS activists “brownshirts.” In hatred & deceit & to align feminists with Israeli apartheid, she has proven indefatigable. What most distinguishes our girl is her preoccupation with her own superiority–a superiority highlighted by contrast to her contempt for the rest of women, her admiration for lowlifes like Brett Kavanaugh & her close association with Alan Dershowitz.
Those who would like to test their adrenalin levels can google her for articles on Islam but be advised you do so at your own peril. When it comes to lies, insults, abuse, malice, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has her beat hands down. From unreadable she has progressed to rabid Zionist, petulant & mean & has become one of us whom she calls “mean girls.”
(Screensho of Chesler on video where she explains how superior & politically incorrect she is–by which she means willing to spew hatred toward Muslims without the slightest bow to human decency.)
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has resigned at Trump’s request. We are losing a great public servant with an unfortunate resemblance & intellectual affinity to a troll doll. He once said “I thought the KKK was ok until I learned that they smoked pot.” What distinguished this giant figure among his peers like Mitch McConnell & Lindsey Graham was that he didn’t have an ounce of self-respect before others he deemed superior. His sniveling & groveling for approval from Trump even whilst Trump was publicly berating & humiliating him bear unfortunate comparison to a whipped puppy. We would suggest assertive training classes but the troll-man seems to have no problems humiliating those he deems inferior to himself. May he now proceed to the oblivion that he so richly deserves. Amen.
Zulkarnain Bandey, the editor of Lost Kashmiri History (LKH), on FB’s deletion of that account:
Article on censorship of LKH:
Dear friends and allies,
Yesterday at around 6:30 PM, after Lost Kashmiri History (LKH) posted a document detailing the deaths in Kashmir for the month of October, I got a few texts informing me that the Facebook page of LKH has been banned in India and Kashmir, some people outside India can’t see it too. Although the page is intact and I can post stuff the accessibility to the audience has been curtailed. The page has more than 70k+ followers.
This is not for the first time Facebook in collusion with Indian state and has removed content related to Kashmir. I have lost count of how many times my facebook profile has been either blocked temporarily or content removed because apparently, it doesn’t suit their community standards.
LKH acts as a digital archive of curated content about the blood-soaked history of Kashmir. It features over a hundred books and presents historical events in chronological order through various multimedia tools, using newspaper articles and research papers as its primary sources.
The content we share on LKH, both website as well as social media, go through cross-checks and verifications and I take full responsibility for that. Nothing on our website or social media is without reference and source citation. What we write or post is nothing but India’s brutal history in Kashmir.
I fail to understand why Facebook chooses to censor pages and accounts that are critical to India in Kashmir or are simply writing the facts, regardless of how old they are. LKH has never had nor will ever have a political affliction. This is not only Facebook’s attack on freedom of speech but also a war on dissent.
We will soon publish a mirror page for Lost Kashmiri History. Support us in growing.
P:S This is the original page that has been censored in India, all other pages with our name are fake. https://www.facebook.com/LostKashmiriHistory/
Regards
Z
Since my dogs go in & out all day to pee, the door is constantly open & the house swarms with flies. They aren’t the smartest or swiftest little creatures on the planet so it’s easy to swat them where they gather in the windows. But they were beginning to engulf my head in herds, not unlike the villainous character Flyface in the old Dick Tracy comic strip. So against my sense of fair play in the fight against insects, I bought a box of fly ribbons, those sticky things you suspend near a window to attract & kill them. Seemed almost cruel even though I hate the damn pests.
Karma is a bitch. In two days, only one fly has gone near the ribbons. But I have glued my head to the window twice, been wrapped in that damn ribbon repeatedly, & am covered in gummy crap. The flies have won.
(Picture of Flyface from Dick Tracy comic strip)
Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF) held its annual fundraising event in Los Angeles ostensibly to raise money for the Israeli army (IOF) which is already bankrolled up the yin yang by the US Pentagon to the tune of $38 billion over the next ten years. All of it to be used against the Palestinians who are an unarmed people. All of it to be used for genocide, for the snipers shooting unarmed protesters & bombing civilians. The IOF has no need to cry poor-mouth for its veterans when it also has a multi-billion defense industry selling weapons to Burma & India for use against the Rohingyas & Kashmiris.
This FIDF gala put on by billionaire Zionists Sheldon Adelson & Haim Saban is really a public relations political event to involve celebrities in supporting Israel. All sorts of singers & movie stars attend including Arnold Schwarzenegger, singers Gene Simmons & Seal, Helen Mirren & this year Fran Drescher, Pharrell Williams, Ashton Kutcher, Katherine McPhee, David Foster, Andy Garcia, Gerard Butler, & a couple retired athletes. Is there a single one among those who anyone looks to for political guidance? The last time anyone heard a peep out of Andy Garcia was in 2000 when he tried to get 6-year-old Elián González kidnapped by rightwing relatives in Florida from his father in Cuba.
This year Pharrell Williams was the featured performer. Mr. “Happy” taps is particularly detestable since in 2015 he was scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv & South Africa. The BDS movement informed him about the cultural boycott & prevailed on him to honor it. He performed first in Cape Town where hundreds of Palestinian supporters greeted him with protests. He then cancelled Tel Aviv & many hoped he was taking a step back to assess the situation. He has had three years to smarten up about the character of Israeli genocide but instead he performed at this years FIDF gala which celebrates soldiers who shoot at, bomb, & forcibly dispossess Palestinians.
Before he sang, Williams offered condolences to the Pittsburgh synagogue but remained silent on the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians by the IOF. He closed the program with a performance of “Happy” but earlier in the week had sent a cease & desist letter to Trump demanding he not play “Happy” at any of his rallies after it was played at a Trump rally in Indiana on the day of the synagogue massacre. There will never be an occasion when Williams will have to send such a letter to Palestinian solidarity events since we include him & that damn song in the cultural boycott of Israel for genocide against the Palestinian people. He can shove that Happy crap where the sun don’t shine.
(Photo of 2018 FIDF event by Shahar Azran)
There is considerably more jubilation over US election results internationally–especially the election of 100 women, including Muslim, Native American, & a Palestinian women–than there is among the estimated 40-60% of US eligible voters who don’t bother to vote because they haven’t discerned a modicum of difference between the two parties in several decades. Rhetorical differences between the two parties certainly exist but no meaningful policy differences. Regardless of their intentions, those women will not change the character of the Democratic Party (DP). On the contrary, that party will change them, especially on the issues of war, occupation, genocide, immigration, Palestine. If they do not toe the line, DP officials will make it impossible for them to function.
The DP is a capitalist party in a two-party system with an electoral system rigged top to bottom against third party opposition. It is not really a membership organization so much as it is an electoral apparatus. If you want to see how little democratic control its members have, one only has to attend a precinct caucus which are stage-managed events without any political power or say-so over the program of the DP. But it isn’t just its electoral fraudulence as the party of the underdog that is of concern. More important is how the DP functions outside the electoral arena where it plays a central role in managing & controlling progressive forces, primarily by undercutting independent action & massive popular social movements. Most shamefully, it functioned to neutralize & demobilize the US civil rights movement. Similarly in the women’s movement of the 1970s, there was a wrenching political conflict between those who wanted an independent movement & those like Gloria Steinem who wanted it subordinated to the Democratic Party. That subordination is central to why there is so little consistent opposition to the attacks on the Black, Latino, & Native American communities or to the attacks on women’s reproductive rights. The DP also functions to neutralize immigration rights groups by providing them millions in foundation grant hush money so that they actively prevent a mass movement from developing.
If some want to vote for the DP in what they see a do or die election, that’s their right. We should all actively oppose the mass disenfranchisement & gerrymandering of Black, Latino, & Native American voters who traditionally vote for the DP. But to chide the 40-60% of American non-voters for white privilege or indifference is misanthropy & misunderstanding. If they thought voting made a difference in their lives, they would be chock-a-block at the polls.
(Photo is voting line November 6th in Ponte Vedra, Florida by Carlo Allegri/Reuters)
Indian scholar Jairus Banaji on the affinities between India’s extermination of Muslims & the Spanish Inquisition’s extermination of Muslims & Jews:
Faizabad becomes Ayodhya. The drive to obliterate the Muslim heritage from the fabric of India’s society and history by, for example, renaming places is tantamount to progressively stripping away the cosmopolitan element from India’s culture and transforming this into something hideously artificial, lifeless and drab, and of course irreducibly caste-ridden. The surge of hatred which drives it is like a series of amputations. The BJP loves to talk about ‘surgical strikes’, but their bonehead in UP is wielding a mechanical saw on his battered patient. He reminds me of nothing so much as the Spanish Church in the middle ages and its own drive to eliminate the last traces of Spanish Islam in the sixteenth century.
It was in Spain that fascism first appeared in its strictly medieval avatar, in sucessive expulsions of Jews and Moriscos for a whole period from the end of the fifteenth century down to the early seventeenth. The process was brutal, violent and protracted. Spain was the only European country that actually had the chance to evolve a unique civilization because it both inherited its Catholicism from late Rome and saw large parts of the country ruled by (mostly Syrian) Arabs. What it chose instead was the extermination of cultures which its bigoted leaders decided were antithetical to Christianity. Spain “became” Catholic the way India will “become” Hindu, unless the modernist strand in India’s politics, culture and society is able to put a stop to this appalling catastrophe. 2019 may be a good chance to do so.