Let me just say that it is deranged to make comparisons & weigh the levels of human suffering between the carpet bombing of civilians in Ghouta by Syrian & Russian war planes & the carpet bombing of civilians in Afrin by Turkish war planes. Fifty-two years of antiwar activism & it never dawned on me to make such odious comparisons. Only someone who looks to US war planes to liberate Syria from Assad could even dream up such crap.

Photo is Turkish photos taking control of Afrin city, March 18th. Sane minds do not parse the misery quotient of carpet bombing or occupation.

(Photo by Bulent Kilic/AFP)

There’s so little to celebrate these days in the ways of justice. But the arrest of Nicholas Sarkozy for accepting suitcases of cash from Muammar Gaddafi to finance his 2007 presidential election is a bonanza of jubilation. Of course money laundering & payola are the least of his crimes. He ought to be standing trial before an international human rights crime tribunal for his persecution of the Roma people by raiding their camps & deporting them against EU policy; for his xenophobic & anti-immigration policies; for inspiring hate crimes & discrimination against Muslims & denying them freedom of religion by outlawing the burqa; & by his role in the 2011 war against Libya. Gaddafi was a dictator & no prize package but it was up to the Libyan people to depose him (as they were in the process of doing), not US & European bombers.

With that mouth thing in this photo, our man is using the international language of politicians caught in the act. But he has no shame for his crimes; only regret he got caught. He has friends in high places. So like IMF heads Christine Lagarde accused of financial corruption & Dominique Strauss-Kahn accused of rape, it’s likely Sarkozy will walk. We can only hope he’ll rot in hell someday & that French working people will complete what they began in 1968.

(Photo from AAP)

This article by Pakistani journalist Usman A Khan Tahir from a year-ago commemorates the beginning of the Syrian revolution against Assad’s dictatorship. It is worth rereading because it brings clarity against the white noise of Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, & fascist propaganda.

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/03/20/syria-the-ultimate-mirror/

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit was held this past weekend in Sydney, Australia hosted by prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. There were no political breakthroughs in the character of ASEAN which is a trade & military alliance between ten repressive regimes in Southeast Asia, including Burma, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Brunei, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore. Other countries are involved with ASEAN (China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, New Zealand, Russia, & the US) just in case repression, death squads, occupation, & genocide need additional reinforcements. But of course most of those countries are already involved by supplying arms & military equipment (as in Burma against the Rohingya people), by refusing to impose sanctions or denounce the crimes against humanity & by providing justification for those crimes.

The issues of the Rohingya genocide in Burma, vigilante death squads in the Philippines, military repression in Thailand, & political repression in Vietnam & other nations never came up because the primary concern was thwarting the growth of terrorism in Southeast Asia. It’s reported that Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak took a diplomatic jab at the Burmese junta by saying the “suffering” of the Rohingya people “posed a threat to regional security because they could be more easily recruited by Islamist extremists.” Are we supposed to applaud this detestable evasion of the issue of genocide; the attempt to portray political resistance to the persecution & genocide of Muslims as terrorism; the attempt to portray the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) as Islamist terrorists rather than freedom fighters?

In a deplorable expression of white supremacy, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a briefing paper titled “Human Rights in Southeast Asia” on the condition of human rights in eight of the ten ASEAN member nations & called on the Australian government to intervene at the summit on behalf of human rights. HRW is not unaware of the unspeakable human rights crimes of the Australian government against immigrants, refugees, & its indigenous peoples. Why would they posit the delusion that Australia could or would play a progressive role in addressing human rights criminality in Burma or elsewhere against considerable evidence to the contrary?

The most consequential thing about the ASEAN summit were the protests by thousands of Rohingya, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, & Thai refugees denouncing human rights crimes in their native countries & demanding action from the Australian government instead of complicity with repression & genocide. The Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen actually threatened refugees who protested saying “If you dare to make an effigy of me & burn it, I will pursue you & beat you in your homes.” Consider his arrogance in threatening refugees living in another country. That did not stop them from burning his effigy.

Photos are from protests at ASEAN summit.

THE HUNT, by Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain:

Masood is the artist who did the series of digital art portraying child pellet gun victims. He said: “I couldn’t bear the fact that our kids are being blinded by the pellets. I decided to protest through my artwork & let the world know what is happening in Kashmir.”

Art is visual & best left unexplained. But this work about the hunt to kill operations, now a daily fixture in Kashmiri society, renders a dark & almost mythical barbarism to what Kashmiri men, women & children live with under military occupation.

Kashmir artists, poets, & musicians lend their voices & are an essential part of the struggle against occupation & for human freedom.

#Azadi

What the world does not need is another photo of Justin Trudeau crying like a baby about Syrian refugees. It wasn’t that long ago that Canadian war planes were dropping bombs in Syria. It is not entirely certain if they still have ground troops there or are providing military aid in another form to the US coalition as they did in Iraq & Afghanistan. What we do know is that Canada, under Trudeau, sold weapons to Saudi Arabia whilst it is bombing Yemen to smithereens; that Canada has warships deployed to the Aegean Sea to prevent refugees from crossing into Europe from Turkey; that he didn’t lift a finger or impose sanctions against Burma to help the Rohingya people against genocide. So he can stuff those crocodile tears where the sun don’t shine.

One FB site declared Trudeau “the pride of the world, a great hero of the time.” That’s called bootlicking a war criminal. He’s no hero to the people of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, or to principled antiwar, refugee rights, or human rights activists anywhere in the world.

(Photo is screen shot of weeping Justin.)

People keep telling me to make my wall private because it gets “infested by a lot of nasty critters” or “attracts worms.” On the contrary, it has introduced many of us to those fighting the most important political struggles in the world today. If Kashmiris looking for solidarity & allies had not read my posts about other struggles, they would not have introduced us to theirs. What’s a worm or two compared to that? Get past the nasty critters to the solidarity.

A very succinct portrayal of the Indian occupation of Kashmir:

https://www.facebook.com/soankashmir/videos/198041004125415/

This is a poem Rafiq Kathwari wrote in 2003 in response to the US invasion of Iraq. Today is the 15th anniversary of that monstrous event.

ASSIGNMENT

Only Muslim in the workshop
I went on a bit about
Shock & Awe
Weapons of mass destruction
Axis of evil
Mobile chemical labs
Slam dunks
Curveball
Smoking guns
Mushroom clouds
Cakewalks
Liberators
Regime change
& Mission Accomplished.

Civilization’s Cradle,
I said, is broken.
I am a witness
I must howl.
In every well in Baghdad
A rafiq is weeping
While long black coats
(With gas masks)
Huddle at the Wailing Wall
As if prayers could halt
Smart bombs.

“Rhetoric, not lyric,”
My peers echoed Yeats
“Argue with yourself not others.”
An adjunct admonished,
“A warhead soaring
From the earth’s womb
Was over the top. Navy Seals
Stockpiling kneepads was sick.
Not ars poetica.”

(Photo is poster Rafiq bought at Sinn Fein shop in Dublin)

Syria is extremely complicated militarily because of the nearly 70 militaries involved plus an estimated thousand-plus paramilitary groups, including ISIS & al-Qaeda. You don’t have to be a military strategist to take a position but you do need to be scholarly if you want to understand it. Scholarly does not mean rounding up all the media articles about the conflict & going with the preponderance of opinion. That is becoming way too evident in commentary on the role of Kurdish forces in the conflict & on Turkish military intervention in Afrin against the Kurds.

Turkey has the second largest military within NATO & is no ally of the revolution against Assad. It may appear to operate at cross-purposes to the US, but it is part of the US counterrevolutionary coalition, including allowing the US to use its airbases for sorties into Syria. Turkey has been bombing Afrin, a Kurdish stronghold in northern Syria, for over two months & announced yesterday that the city is now under Turkish control. The Kurds, or at least a section of them, have been collaborating with the US coalition, both in Mosul & Raqqa in the ostensible fight against ISIS which involves carpet bombing of civilians. The Guardian newspaper has been publishing articles portraying the Kurds in Afrin as democratic, even socialist, with ethnic & female equality, ecologically advanced, & as LGBT-friendly. Drawing from other media sources, there are commentators who portray the Kurds as Stalinists & as American stooges.

The complexity & duration of the Kurdish struggle for self-determination deserves more respect than such ‘analyses’ are serving up. There are up to 45 million Kurds who live in Kurdistan in the border regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Armenia. To understand their struggle, one would have to do a scholarly study of who they are, when their marginalization & persecution arose, what their demands as a people are, their relationship to regimes in Turkey, Iraq, et al, the character of their political leadership, why they got involved with the US in the war against ISIS, why they called on Assad to protect them against Turkey. Collaborating with the US in Syria & Iraq out of political expedience speaks to the character of their political leadership & in no way invalidates Kurdish grievances or their just demands for self-determination.

Most people don’t have the time for the scholarship required to understand the Kurdish struggle. Since every scholar comes with a point of view, one has to weed through volumes of tendentious rubbish to understand any complex political issue. But that doesn’t mean we can go lazy & just accept what the Guardian or NY Times say as if it were the gospel truth. Or that we accept what influential commentators say based on media reports combined with their prejudices & impressions.

Without doing that scholarship, we need to hold the glorifications & vilifications. We stand on solid ground by supporting the Kurdish struggle for self-determination without compromise or equivocation; by opposing the collaboration of some Kurds with the US coalition & now with the Assad regime in Afrin; & by steadfastly opposing the bombing of Afrin by the Turkish military. Self-determination for the Kurdish people is linked inextricably with the Syrian revolution against Assad.

Photo is Kurdish civilians fleeing Turkish bombing of Afrin.

(Photo by Nazeer Al-Khatib/AFP/Getty Images)