Media is hoping for a presidential & empathetic response from Trump when he visits Houston. Those were their very words. What do they think changed in him since he cheered on fascists & white supremacists in Charlottesville?
Media is interviewing some of the shattered Houston evacuees who have lost everything & will likely have to relocate to barrack housing in other cities & live in such conditions for quite a while. Millions of people around the world have sustained such natural catastrophes which so violently change their lives forever.
It reminds me of an educational experience I had in the 1980s when a boyfriend offered me “The Mountain People” a 1972 book by Colin Turnbull, a British anthropologist. It became a renowned book & is still considered authoritative about the Ik, an African tribe of about 10,000 people who live in the mountains of Uganda on the border with Kenya. He described them in the most racist terms, almost as sub-humans who had no social structure & were completely bereft of social & personal relations. Parents ignored their children, abused their parents, hoarded food, let others starve in front of them, had no love or familial relations at all. Turnbull “inspired” other writers to pump out moralistic, racist accounts making an anthropological spectacle of the Ik. There were several scathing reviews of Turnbull’s book by reputable scholars but racism has a strong appeal to many & it still carries influence today.
Turnbull had a cement head filled with racism & had no right to be doing anthropology–even though the origins of the field are in racism. A better career choice for him would have been hauling manure in a horse barn where he could do no harm. What he did not grasp is that the Ik had been a hunting & gathering society but in the 1960s the government confiscated their ancestral lands & turned them into a wildlife preserve. The Ik way of life was outlawed & they were reduced to poachers on government lands. Like the people of Houston, they lost everything & were shattered. When Turnbull was doing his numb-skulled study, the Ik were still trying to get their bearings & recover as a society.
Turnbull became a follower of the Dalai Lama & died in 1994. The damage he has done outlives him. I dumped the boyfriend for finding such a book credible.
(Photo is Ik children from Family Care Uganda)
Trump is headed for Houston. They’ll have to triple the disaster relief budget.
Conan O’Brien, the twitchy not-that-funny comedian, is filming an episode in Israel for his show “Conan Without Borders.” When not filming he’s ingratiating himself with Israelis, including posing in a tee-shirt from the Israeli army. Netanyahu posted a video of O’Brien visiting him & playing with his dog to show how endearing a man can be even when he shills for apartheid.
How does that differ from Steve Bannon agreeing to speak at an event of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), a rightwing group which promotes settlements in the occupied West Bank? The ZOA invited Bannon because he is a supporter of Israel despite his notorious anti-Semitism expressed openly & repeatedly on Breitbart.
Dr. Maung Zarni is a Buddhist genocide scholar in exile from Myanmar who is well-known & respected by Rohingya activists for his collaboration with them to educate about, denounce, & actively campaign against the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. Rohingya Blogger often circulates his invaluable articles & one can follow him on his blog, on FB, on Twitter, & on YouTube.
His blog: http://www.maungzarni.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/drzarni
FB: https://www.facebook.com/maung.zarni.9
In this article from his blog he addresses attempts to blame Rohingya militants for the military onslaught in Arakan state:
Mostly I delete comments by rightwing ideologues & nationalists from Burma, India, Israel, the US & those who are Assad supporters because they’re so hateful & because they all sound like the KKK to me.
The Putin & Trump supporters gloating that the Russiagate investigation has gone south need to read MSM once in a while. Mueller is on your man like a Pit Bull with rabies.
Voices from the Dark: Torture & Sexual Violence Against Women in Assad’s Detention Centres
How the Assad dictatorship became a cause célèbre for so many who call themselves progressives is a case of the triumph of propaganda, deceit, & dogma added to Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, & misogyny. There is overwhelming documentation of monstrous human rights & war crimes committed by the Assad regime. Assad supporters deny the evidence or claim those crimes are the price paid for national sovereignty but the question is: national sovereignty for the Assad regime or for the people of Syria who rose up to oust him? It’s a switch & bait maneuver to attempt to identify Syrian revolutionary opposition to Assad with the counter-revolutionary terrorist groups.
It’s estimated that 65,000 Syrians have been tortured & executed in Assad’s gulag in the past six years. Several thousand more were detained & tortured but not executed & managed to flee into exile after release. The Syrian NGO named Lawyers & Doctors for Human Rights (LDHR) issued this report in July 2017 titled “Voices from the Dark: Torture & Sexual Violence Against Women in Assad’s Detention Centres.” Trained doctors examined & lawyers took testimony from eight Syrian women who had been detained, tortured, & sexually assaulted in Assad’s prisons. None of the women knew each other nor were they detained in the same prison.
The LDHR report in full: http://guernica37.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voices-from-the-Dark.pdf
On the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARFA)
Any suggestions that alleged actions of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) are responsible for the military onslaught against Rohingya are to be rejected with contempt. Unconfirmed charges are circulating that ARSA militants attacked Myanmar security forces with knives, guns & homemade explosives. Maybe they did; maybe they didn’t. Since the source of the charges are the Myanmar government, there isn’t an ounce of credibility to the claims.
According to some reports, ARSA has been active in Arakan state since the genocidal military onslaught in 2012; according to other reports, they were behind the October 9, 2016 attack on border patrol that unleashed the military onslaught that lasted for several months. The Rohingya people have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary but there’s something about ARSA that doesn’t quite add up. It’s origins, existence, & alleged actions have proven an advantage to the regime in justifying genocide. It’s not certain what their politics are or if they do more than issue occasional videos on YouTube. Even if they turn out to be behind the attacks on security forces in Arakan state, they are not responsible for the genocidal onslaught on Rohingya villagers.
Rohingya stranded on Bangladesh-Burma border because denied asylum by Bangladesh
These are among five-thousand Rohingya, mostly women & children, stranded on the banks of the Naf river at the Burma-Bangladesh border. Many have managed to cross into Bangladesh but thousands are being denied asylum & many who managed to cross are being forcibly returned to Myanmar by Bangladeshi border patrol under orders from the government.
Since Friday when the Aung San Suu Kyi regime relaunched a genocidal assault on Rohingya in Arakan state, an estimated 15,000 Rohingya men, women, & children have taken shelter in hills & forests; nearly 500 Rohingya men, women, & children have been killed by gun fire, arson, & slaughter; 1,000 are seriously injured; 300 to 400 houses have been torched along with mosques & other buildings; livestock have been killed in large numbers.
We stand in full solidarity with the Rohingya struggle against genocide & for human, democratic, civil, & refugee rights.
(Photo & information from Arakan TV)