Behind the extraordinary resistance of Palestinians is the grief & loss they have endured for 70 years. It’s overwhelming just to witness but there is a concrete way to stand with them & that is to commit to honoring & building the economic & cultural boycott of Israel. Check the label on every product to make sure its country of origin is not Israel. That initiative is from Palestinians as a peaceful & powerful way to bring apartheid & genocide to its knees.
Pope Francis will be traveling to Ireland, most likely to intrude into the abortion debate. The Irish should make sure he knows their proper name & doesn’t call them “Mick” or “Paddy” since he had trouble with that when he visited Burma at the height of the Rohingya genocide. He really ought to consider visiting Chile before Ireland since 34 Chilean bishops have tendered their resignations over the church’s cover-up of the pedophilia scandal which has devastated its credibility in Chile.
You heard right. It wasn’t lost in translation: when an Irish reporter asked an Israeli spokesperson why they were killing Palestinians, she answered, “Well we can’t put all these people in jail.”
Video of Israeli spokesperson:
UN stands mute while Israel commits genocide against Palestinians
The UN Human Rights Council voted today to send a team of international war crimes investigators to examine the sniper shooting of thousands of unarmed protesters in Gaza. Of course this is a good thing. But it’s part of a vicious dead-end cycle of genocide, UN & other human rights investigations, & ritual condemnations that go nowhere. It’s been 70 years of this charade. It isn’t that the UN & its member states don’t know exactly what is going on in occupied Palestine. In this day & age, if they don’t trust photojournalism, Palestinian accounts, or the number of dead & injured Palestinians, there’s satellite imagery for documentation. In the age of satellites, no one can claim stupid.
It’s true that there have been a few Democrats in the US who’ve expressed squeamishness over the level of Israeli violence against unarmed Palestinians. There’ve been a few governments like South Africa, Turkey, Canada, & Belgium who expressed “concern.” But their squeamishness & concern will go nowhere without a massive popular & coordinated international movement forcing them to sanction Israel in the harshest ways, but mostly by cutting all military & other aid.
It may be time for activists around the world to take initiatives to organize & formalize structures of international collaboration. The freedom struggles of Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingyas, & others are so important & politically epic for the future of all humanity that they cannot be left to chance or to hopes that activists will organize support rallies & activities. Such a collaboration is organizationally & politically daunting but imperative so as not to fritter away the massive phalanxes of solidarity already assembled. Such collaboration would be a way for Palestinian, Kashmiri, Rohingya, & others to collaborate, to strengthen each other & for efforts of supporters to be maximized. One thing we know after watching the UN in action (more aptly, inaction) is that it cannot be trusted to do the work of solidarity. That is entirely our mission.
(Photo of grieving children in Gaza from Al Jazeera)
Indian army cowers from Kashmiri stone pelters
“Helmets, leg guards, arm guards, chest guards. Slingshot & marbles in pockets. Armed with AK 47s, pellet guns, chilli grenades & teargas guns. These are Indian soldiers on the streets of old Srinagar, yet piss in pants when confronted by a teenager with stone in hand.”
—Muhammad Uzair on Twitter
(Photo of protests today for Gaza in Srinagar by Basit Zargar)
Kashmir stands with Gaza against Israeli massacres
Kashmir stands with Palestinians: there were protests today, including confrontations with occupation forces, at Nowhatta in Srinigar against the massacre of unarmed protesters in Gaza. There will be other protests today in Kashmir in solidarity with Palestinians. Palestinians & Kashmiris are kindred in occupation & resistance.
(Photo by Basit Zargar)
Let me just say that Facebook policy of covering difficult photos is about as reptilian as it gets. When Facebook colludes with Modi, Netanyahu, & other ruthless psychos to censor violent military occupations, it has no claims to sensitivity or squeamishness for crimes it tries to cover. It’s like mama trying to protect us from harsh reality but in truth it is repressive in a puerile way.
Portrait of Russian & Syrian “liberation” by bombing
Portrait of Russian & Syrian ‘liberation’ of Eastern Ghouta by barrel bombs & chlorine: or as Assad’s corral of hired propagandists would put it, crisis actors forced to play dead & foam at the mouth on cue. As the corrupt antiwar & socialist movements would put it, this carnage of children is necessary to protect Assad’s right to national sovereignty against US regime-change. Meanwhile children die bereft in the public streets because somewhere in Syria, the principles of solidarity & opposition to war got bombed to smithereens when Stalinism allied with fascism.
The only principled demands are for the immediate cessation of bombing & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.
(Photo is from Eastern Ghouta in mid-March 2018. Photographer not identified but in several Arab publications.)
https://thekashmirpress.com/2018/05/17/deafening-silences-of-the-indian-intellectual-on-kashmir/
“In his seminal work The Indian Ideology, Perry Anderson tears apart the contradictions of India’s political system and argues that “Indian intellectuals might be unknowing participants in a grand hoax”.
That hoax Anderson alludes to, a graduate student at Harvard University Yahya Chaudhry argues, “is India’s secular democracy, which is eagerly marketed as the world’s largest and most diverse, but in reality, is soiled and riven by chauvinistic politics, religious parties, a calcified caste system, and the ongoing catastrophe of Kashmir”.”