Justice for Asifa rally in London making the connection to the broader issue of sexual violence against women in India & to the military occupation of Kashmir. Standing with Asifa will strengthen the struggle for justice for those who endured mass rape & torture at Kunan Poshpora.

(Photo from Kashmir Ultimatum)

The fact-finding mission of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was delayed from entering Douma to investigate allegations of the April 7th chemical weapons attack because the Assad regime claimed their paperwork was not in order, or as Assad official Fares Shehabi said, OPCW didn’t follow proper procedures. It was announced yesterday that OPCW investigators were on their way from Damascus to Douma. But now OPCW is announcing that a UN security team made a reconnaissance visit to two sites to determine safety for the fact-finding mission. They were forced to withdraw from the first site by a menacing crowd & from the second site because they came under small arms fire & an explosive was detonated. Assad propagandists & their guppies will claim it was terrorist fire but they have been evacuated & Douma is under the control of the Russian Military Police. The UN security team does not consider Douma safe for the OPCW fact-finding mission. They have returned to Damascus & do not know when they will be allowed unhindered access to the sites.

Let me correct myself about Starbucks & BDS: the BDS administrators report that Starbucks is not on the list of companies to boycott because of associations with Israel. They no longer have retail outlets there & claim they have no other business ties with Israel or the settlements. The confusion is that Starbuck’s Executive Chairman Howard Schultz is prominent in Zionist politics. Some suggest that he has distanced the company from Israel as a business strategy but for a while he kept no such distance himself. He accepted Israeli awards & honorifics for promoting the alliance between the US & Israel & described Palestinians as terrorists. He seems to have toned down some of his grandstanding for Israel in the past several years because of its impact on the business. So the verdict is that Starbucks is not on the BDS list. It’s a public company & Schultz reportedly only owns a 4-percent share.

There’s a guy on Twitter named Thomas Linder who claimed he was a cardiologist. He also claimed he was neutral on Syria though he copied all his posts to Assad propagandists Eva Bartlett & Vanessa Beeley accompanied by an overdose of flattery. On April 14th, he posted this photo from the chlorine gas attack on Douma where medics were treating toddlers with ECG electrodes on their chests & he commented that the electrodes were positioned wrong so they could not receive signals. This, he said, exposed the White Helmets & the photos as fake. That post was retweeted 12,563 times & liked 13,551 times. Just a few days later, he was found out & had to tweet a retraction admitting that the ECG electrodes were in fact correctly placed for the medical procedure. His retraction has been retweeted 28 times & liked 40 times.

Our “neutral cardiologist” also tweeted that a hospital in east Aleppo used dolls in place of babies in incubators for a 2017 news report on aerial bombardment by Russia & Syria. What’s deplorable is that the truth of what happened in Douma is of so little matter to apologists & guppies of Assad’s dictatorship that they feel no compelling need for journalistic or political integrity. Lying is a political method that speaks for itself. But what’s unspeakable is that the suffering of Syrian children is mocked & belittled as fake news. That is a level of political corruption that cannot be corrected or retracted.

(Thomas Linder is probably a Russian bot & not a real cardiologist. But if, on the outside chance he is real & lives in your town, you might consider keeping a safe distance from a guy who doesn’t know where to place ECG electrodes & will lie through his teeth if caught in malpractice.)

(Photo is from video released by White Helmets via AP)

This boy is 12-year-old Palestinian Abdul Rahman Nofal, an unarmed protester at the Great Return March who was shot in the leg by Israeli snipers. It is feared he will lost his leg because Israel won’t allow him to seek necessary medical treatment outside Gaza.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Palestinians. Honor the economic boycott of Israel (BDS)

(Photo from Palestine Information Center)

This disturbing photo is from the village of Inn Din in September 2017 when ten Rohingya men with their hands bound–fishermen, shop owners, high school students, & an Islamic teacher–were executed by Burmese paramilitary forces & buried in a mass grave. There are certainly hundreds of stories like this from the height of the genocidal onslaught in Arakan/Rakhine state but this instance became notorious when Burma arrested two Reuters journalists named Wa Lone & Kyaw Soe Oo while working on the story. The two reporters are accused of violating the Official Secrets Act & face several years in prison.

The Burmese government made a dog & pony show of justice by arresting seven of the soldiers implicated in the execution of the ten men. But it’s reported today that Burma’s new president Win Myint, an Aung San Suu Kyi ally who took office as president last month, has amnestied all seven soldiers. Their amnesty was sandwiched so no one would notice into an amnesty for 8,500 prisoners who were mostly drug offenders, those in ill health or aged. Fifty foreigners & 36 political prisoners were also released. It’s a far cry from the barbarity of jailing a person for drug addiction to jailing them for genocide. But what about Wa Lone & Kyaw Soe Oo? Why weren’t they included in the amnesty? Because the touted Suu Kyi civilian government considers genocide less an offense than exposing it.

Release Wa Lone & Kyaw Soe Oo.

(Photo from Reuters)

There’s a report on Twitter that female students in Baramulla were beaten & teargassed at a rally demanding justice for Asifa. Does any Kashmiri friend have information about that incident?

There won’t be any eulogies of Barbara Bush coming from me. The less said about her the better. Suffice it to say, she was married to Bush, Sr., a CIA director & war criminal, was the mother of Bush, Jr., a war criminal, & mother of a common criminal who laundered money for drug traffickers. She’s remembered for being witty & outspoken by those who admire her but what she had to say was reactionary & antisocial, elitist & arrogant. Amen.

God bless the doctors & medics in so many places like Syria, Palestine, Kashmir, Cox’s Bazar, & elsewhere who treat the victims of war, occupation, & genocide. It’s a profession that could earn them a one-way ticket away & a very comfortable life far from the trauma of pellet guns, artillery, & bombing. But they serve in circumstances with a potential for debilitating PTSD. A heartfelt salute to their commitments.

Many of us are deeply grieved by the turn of events in Syria, by the imminent defeat of the Arab Spring uprising against Assad. I once grieved the loss of political allies from the antiwar & socialist movements, some of them going back over 50 years, who have gone over completely to the camp of Assad & Putin, camouflaged in a stink bomb of disembodied quotes from Lenin about national sovereignty. I don’t grieve their loss anymore. I hold them accountable for justifying dictatorship & the merciless deaths, displacements, disappearances, torture, executions of hundreds of thousands of Syrian working people. I hold them accountable for allying with fascists, Islamophobes, anti-Semites & turning their backs on an entire heritage of antiwar & solidarity principles. Did they do so ignorantly? Does that matter when millions of Syrians are paying such a horrific price for their betrayals? For so long, many of us held out hope that the bombing of civilians would bring them to their senses. But it did not. It must be said quite frankly that for most of them, it’s all over but the crying. May they rot in hell.