In one of their now almost nightly hunt to kill operations, the Indian army in the Shopian district of Kashmir killed 17 people & injured more than a hundred, including in two other hunt to kill operations in other areas. An ambulance carrying some of the injured to hospital in Srinagar was stopped & not allowed to move forward. Attacks on ambulances & medical facilities are human rights crimes under international law. But since the US coalition in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, & Afghanistan, & Syrian & Russian bombers in Syria do it routinely, India knows full well there will be no consequences like an international war crimes tribunal.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir. May the deceased martyrs Rest In Peace.

Facts you won’t know if don’t watch Fox news: Christians worldwide are enduring the greatest genocide of all peoples since the French Revolution in 1799. This genocide is not reported in the news (except by Assadists on Syria) but Fox got it on the word of a Lebanese priest named Andre Mahanna who grew up near the Syrian border. He claims his family escaped religious persecution (under Hafez, father of Bashar) by living in caves. That’s probably why he doesn’t know about the persecution of Jews under Hafez Assad. He emerged from the caves at the age of 12 to enter a monastery in France, & then moved to the US in 1999 at the age of 23 to sound the alarm of the Christian genocide in the Middle East. No need to ask who the bad guys are in his scenario: Muslims, of course. He now preaches from a pulpit in the mountains of Colorado where he probably still lives in a cave like the wild boy of Greeley yodeling to the mountain goats. Until a Fox News affiliate picked up his yodeling against Muslims on a talk show by the local Catholic bishop.

During the election campaign, Mahanna became associated with Trump & Pence because he’s convinced “Trump can be a voice for Christians being persecuted.” Maybe he designated Trump’s apostolic mission as preaching the gospel to porn stars & strippers, to convert & bring them to Jesus. That must be why the good padre directs every one of his apostolic tweets to Trump. But it could be he’s just a suck-up or tired of yodeling to the goats.

Lest you think him a deranged voice crying in the wilderness, it was only a few years ago that Pope Francis claimed there are more Christian martyrs in the 21st century than were killed under Roman emperor Nero 950 years ago. After Nero set Rome on fire in 64 AD he blamed it on Christians & apparently arrested & executed some but historians don’t report how many. Nero died in 68 Anno Domini, only 35 years after Jesus died, so there probably weren’t that many Christians & most of them lived in the Middle East, not in Rome. Do the math, Pope Francis.

The Vatican claims 70 million Christians have been killed due to their faith since the time of Jesus & are being killed now at the rate of 90,000 to 100,000 every year “partly by other believers.” “Other believers” must be code for Muslims & Jews but with that ecumenism thing it wouldn’t be diplomatic to spell that out although the pope does locate it in the Middle East. Could it also be ‘partly’ by women exercising their reproductive rights & using birth control or abortion? Come clean here, Vatican. Do you include birth control & abortion statistics in your crazy-assed statistics? If in fact, Christians were subject to widespread genocide, that would be a matter of concern. But even if it were 70 million since the time of Jesus, that is dwarfed by the colonial slaughter of millions of non-Christians just in the past 600 years which is well over 100 million people. It is political derangement to claim Christian genocide today when it is overwhelmingly Muslims who face persecution, war, occupation, genocide. After Pope Francis went to Burma during the genocide of the Rohingya people, banqueted with the genocidaires, & didn’t utter a peep of moral or political outrage, his judgement about what is & is not genocide might not be of any value whatsoever.

Photo is Fr. Andre Mahanna with Fr. Trump, missionary to the godless strippers.

Damned if one can tell the difference between the Islamophobic vitriol Zionists use against Palestinians & what fascists & Assad supporters use against the Syrian revolution & now Kashmiris, the Rohingya, & Moro too. If you call yourself antiwar or socialist & are still standing with the Assad dictatorship, bend over & kiss your sorry ass goodbye. Nobody wants you when you’re walking dead & stink like hell.

An enigmatic dark moment in the Indian occupation of Kashmir: a menacing soldier & two small vulnerable children, one seemingly protecting the other. There was no caption to this March 2013 photo taken by Kashmiri photojournalist Abid Bhat. But it can stand as metaphor for the threat that racism, persecution, war, occupation, & genocide present to children, from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Kashmir, Burma, the refugee camps in Bangladesh, Somalia, Libya, to the Black & Latino communities in the US. Children & youth are never accidental victims but always, in one way or another, the intended targets.

Protect our children & stand against war, occupation, genocide.

(Photo by Abid Bhat, March 2013)

So let me tell you why cynicism about the human race just doesn’t work for me. Too many people are just too damn kind to me & it would be extreme ingratitude for me to think ill of most of us. The latest instance out of many: this is the last day of the month so like most retirees, my dough is low. No big deal. I sold an old phone to a pawn shop & headed to the supermarket for groceries–mind you, just to last a day. When the clerk rang it up, I was $1.55 over so she pulled out three apples. It was still .05 over. A young woman behind me in line said, “I’ve got your back. Five cents is nothing,” & she paid the clerk. I expressed my gratitude & gave her my name in case I ever win the lottery so she can look me up. We hugged & I left the market. As I pulled out of the lot, she ran up with the apples, gave me another hug, admired my dogs, & ran off. I was overwhelmed. Forever I’m in awe of the human race.

Call me old-fashioned, but a hijab-wearing Muslim woman appearing in the Miss England contest is not a step forward for Muslims nor for women. Beauty pageants–& I speak from experience, having been in one in my youth–are the equivalent of livestock shows. They reduce women to beauty, augmented with all kinds of prosthetics, & are designed to put women at odds with each other over the issue of ‘who is the fairest of us all.’

Let me reveal to you, as a senior woman, that the ancient secret of womanhood is that youth, by its very nature, is beautiful, the energy of youth, magical. We seniors have a different kind of magic beauty. But all women should be allowed to enjoy their beauty without invidious comparisons to others for any reason. You should look at your lovely face every day in the mirror, smile & savor your incarnation, & thank your lucky stars you were born to create, love, dance, sing, make this world a suitable place for kids.

(Just for the record, I love cosmetics just like other women, & love to doll myself up. What makes me sad is that what we are is never good enough & that they keep inventing new ways to enhance our beauty which only distract from our real beauty which is based in the quality of our character.)

Thank you to those who alerted us to the misrepresentation of the photo of an orphaned Syrian boy laying by his parents’ graves. I absolutely detest those who originally set these lies in motion since they are done not to expose human suffering under persecution, war, occupation, genocide but to discredit the claims of the oppressed. My friend who posted it was no part of that deception but merely expressing horror at what she thought the reality. I’ve deleted the photo so we are not a part of the lie. The oppressed have no need to invent atrocities. Those they endure are so unspeakable that most of us are unable to face them, even photographically.

The misrepresentation of Palestinians as terrorists goes all the back to 1948 when Zionist paramilitary terrorist groups drove Palestinians off their lands & set up the military state of Israel. Such misrepresentation was a feature of media & film, including the vile propaganda rubbish “Exodus” where such actors as Paul Newman fed the lies & romantic myth about the Old Testament being a land deed to Israel. Though it was arrant rubbish, it carried more political weight because of the holocausts of WWII & was partly a way for governments like the US & Europe to cover for their culpability.

Yusuf Elhajjar, who speaks Norwegian, here shows the subtleties of language & outright falsifications used in Norwegian reporting about the deadly attacks on unarmed protesters in Gaza, which turns Palestinians into aggressors rather than freedom fighters & armed Israeli snipers into champions of self-defense.:
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“NORWEGIAN NEWS! This Palestinian guy said in Arabic the following: ”We are created by Allah as fearless people. We’ll stay here until our demands are responded to, until our rights are restored”. Whilst on the website of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, the translation in Norwegian language goes completely different (as shown on this screenshot). For those who do not speak Norwegian, the translation is: ”We are now ready to cross the border. We will not wait, we have crossed it before, and we are going to do it again”.

This is a clear manipulation of what is being said by Palestinians in Gaza, and it could be done on purpose. NB! Palestinian civilians have never crossed the eastern border of Gaza. Yesterday, Friday 30.03.2018, Israeli occupation forces shot and killed 16 Palestinian civilians in Gaza and injured over 1400 others, who were demonstrating peacefully. For more info and to see the video that includes this wrong translation, please check out the link for the news article in the first comment. Peace and love to you from the oppressed people of Gaza/Palestine.”

https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/sorgedag-i-gaza-etter-at-16-er-drept/69663985

These are photos of the 15 Palestinians gunned down by Israeli snipers yesterday at the Great Return March. Most of these young men were between 17 & 35 years of age. The march was the launching event of six weeks of peaceful protests demanding the right of return for Palestinians forcibly expelled from their lands since 1948 & their descendants. Israel, calling the march a gathering of terrorists organized by Hamas, used drone technology & snipers with live ammo, rubber bullets, tear gas. Palestinian health officials report that of the 1,400 injured, 773 were shot with live ammunition. That kind of arsenal against thousands of marchers including elderly, little kids, family groups, all of whom were unarmed & marching peacefully. Israel & its media sycophants think they discredit the protesters if they say Hamas helped organize the march. How can Hamas organizing a peaceful protest be damning?

Stand with Palestinians in demanding Israel stop the violence against peaceful protesters. Time to hit the streets across the world for the next six weeks demanding no violence against protesters, the right of return for refugees, the end of military occupation, & self-determination for Palestine.

(Photos from Twitter of Muhammad Smiry)

A profoundly sad story about Dilshada Sheikh who died today after waiting nearly 26 years for her husband Bashir Ahmad Shehikh, a working man picked up by Indian military forces in June 1992 & forcibly disappeared. Dilshada was an active member of the Association of Parents for Disappeared Persons (APDP) since 2010 & regularly participated in their monthly sit-in protests in Srinagar. APDP activists say they will continue to protest on behalf of her husband.

May she Rest In Peace.