The little girl covering her doll’s eyes could be from any number of places today. She is clearly a child of trauma, a child of war, occupation, persecution, or genocide. She may be imitating her mother & trying to protect the doll from witnessing & living through what she endures. In fact, this child is Palestinian from the 2014 Israeli bombing siege of Gaza that lasted seven weeks.

The politics of social transformation are politics rooted in the protection of children. In that regard, there are no dispensations for bombing civilians in order to defend “national sovereignty” for dictators.

The historic imperative remains: rebuild the international antiwar movement.

(Photographer not identified)

A video on Twitter showed Israeli occupying soldiers protecting Israeli settler kids assaulting smaller Palestinian kids in Hebron, West Bank. There is nothing more antisocial & monstrous than teaching children to hate, to bully, to gang up on smaller kids in the name of superiority, apartheid, militarism. This will fully boomerang on Israeli society. What kind of society can you create based on hatred & racism?

This is the remarkable Canadian-Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah responding to the mantra “Why do Palestinians teach their children to hate?” Her poem is titled “We teach life, sir”,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xH

A little Rohingya boy helping his grandmother: according to Shafiur Rahman, who took this photo, children fetch water & firewood in the refugee camps & become vulnerable to traffickers when walking alone.

Certainly the most critical assistance to refugees is a system of protection for their children, including schooling, play areas, monitors.

My commitment to Kashmiri solidarity deepens every time a nationalist pinhead leaves droppings on my wall. Most of them sputter incoherent or snotty & you realize they don’t have a single compelling or cogent reason why all Indians should not oppose occupation & support Kashmiri self-determination. In this day & age, there’s no way to convincingly claim ignorance of the brutalities of the occupation or of Kashmiris historic claim to independence. That’s why they drag out the Wahabi jihadist stuff: the all-purpose defense for war, occupation, genocide.

There’s a special on Michael Flynn’s counterinsurgency work in Iraq when he was a general. Forget Russia. He needs to be prosecuted for human rights & war crimes against the Iraqi people. We’re talking torture of prisoners in Iraq. In comparison, the Russia stuff is venal & corrupt but not monstrous.

Just found out Texas not only has a border wall with Mexico but it has an anti-sharia law. I’ve never felt so safe from imaginary enemies.

A top officer in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF)–counterinsurgency troops who are part of the occupying army in Kashmir–said today that the force was fully prepared to meet any challenge. That’s more than evident from the arsenal this soldier is carrying on the way to a hunt to kill operation. The officer added that “There is a need to change the mentality of youth.” By shooting rockets at them?

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo by Basit Zargar)

These are family members of Kashmiri prisoners sustaining torture in Tihar jail near New Delhi. They are protesting in Srinagar against the torture, demanding their loved ones be shifted to prisons in Kashmir, & calling on international human rights groups to act on behalf of Kashmiri prisoners in Indian jails.

Tihar jail claims it is an avant-garde prison facility using yoga, meditation, & spiritual practices to rehabilitate prisoners but for Kashmiris it is a torture center of the Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo kind. It probably isn’t much better for Indian prisoners.

Stop the torture. Send the prisoners home. End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo from Rising Kashmir)

“Even birds die under the bombing”

Said by one of these little girls examining a bird killed in the several week bombing siege of Ghouta, Syria.

An estimated 400,000 civilians have been under siege by Syrian bombers for over four years in an attempt to break the revolution. Earlier this year, Russia, Syria, Iran, & Turkey designated Ghouta as one of the four de-escalation zones but Syria resumed bombing last month, including with cluster bombs. Bombers have targeted water supplies & medical facilities & prevent the delivery of humanitarian aid. This is causing mass starvation, malnutrition, & death from preventable diseases, especially among children. Amnesty International has called this Syrian policy “surrender or starve.”
According to one Amnesty official: “While the Syrian government’s stated aim has been to vanquish opposition fighters, its cynical use of ‘surrender or starve’ tactics has involved a devastating combination of sieges & bombardments. These have been part of a systematic, as well as widespread, attack on civilians that amounts to crimes against humanity.”

This is the full Amnesty report on Syria’s “surrender or starve” tactic to destroy the revolution against Assad’s dictatorship: file:///Users/user/Downloads/MDE2473092017ENGLISH.pdf

(Screen shot from video tweeted by Noor And Alaa‏ @Noor_and_Alaa)

Trump is going after the FBI on Twitter. Finally that ass got something right. The FBI is an agency which spies & denies democratic rights though that is not Trump’s objection to them. In 2000, the FBI falsely accused me of using a Weapon of Mass Destruction, making it impossible for me to work many jobs–though they never questioned, arrested, or prosecuted me for using an WMD. In fact, I have never used any kind of weapon, if you exclude a sharp tongue. The FBI agent who authorized this charge on my criminal record is Coleen Rowley, now a leading figure in the US antiwar movement, an ardent supporter of Assad’s dictatorship & defender of Putin.

If we’re lucky, before Trump is bounced or fakes a cardiac event so he can get back to Mar-a-Lago, he’ll have discredited every agency of the corrupt US government.