Turns out the skeletal baby Chihuahua my Annie & Juan-Pierre rescued is an old miniature Pinscher who is a very sick little guy.
Sometimes, rescue is just giving the poor little ones a home to die so they aren’t alone. No comfort to those who watch them die so bereft of love.
They’re reporting record low turnouts for elections in Kashmir today. That should be read as a massive “no” vote. It was Ather Zia who said last year that Kashmiris have already voted a “referendum in blood.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.in/ather-zia/azadi-resurrected-a-referendum-in-blood/
One woman read my post about Salah Skaff mourning the death of his infant daughter Amira & commented: “As it may sound too rational, this war has been going on for at least six years, people should not (have) been having babies in the middle of a war zone.”
No sister, it doesn’t sound rational at all. It sounds supremely racist, insular, ignorant, & despicable.
Monitoring people on social media isn’t my job but I run across many friends on other people’s walls. It used to be that I would see Palestinian solidarity supporters liking up rubbish about Rothschild bankers & the Illuminati. Hate combined with stupidity is a hell of a cognitive disorder to overcome so they were all deep-sixed.
Now I’m seeing friends liking up Assadist rubbish about Syrian gassing of civilians being a fake news thing. Could be mindless liking, could be a learning curve issue, could be confusion, could be agreement. It’s also not my job to interrogate people about their beliefs. But my tolerance for that kind of confusion has flown the coop.
Lots of people don’t bounce over things like that. I have a waiting list of Kashmiri & Rohingya activists I want to engage with so what’s the point of holding on to confusionists when I can learn something?
While the Hands Off Syria Coalition was out in force over the bombing of a couple airport hangars, this young father Salah Skaff was mourning the death of his baby girl Amira killed in a Syrian airstrike over Douma. Several other cities were also bombed with casualties & serious injuries in every one.
You can feign outrage over dead airport hangars (which are back in action today for further bombing missions) but you cannot fake this kind of grief nor the trauma of baby Omran in Aleppo.
Rebuild the international antiwar movement to demand Syria stop the bombing of civilians & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of US, Russian, Iranian, & all foreign military forces from Syria.
We can never compensate Salah & Amira Skaff & all who have paid such a price for the epic failure of international solidarity but we can begin to do the right thing for those still fighting against dictatorship.
(Photo by Bassam Khabieh/Reuters)
There’s a lot of suffering in the world, a lot of treachery. It can seem daunting & pointless to protest what could be a losing battle. It’s easier to take the low road of cynicism & misanthropy.
We only lose the moment humanity refuses to stand against oppression, if we decide wallowing in discontent matters more than fighting for our children.
If we learn nothing else from Palestinian & Kashmiri Intifada, from the Syrian revolution & all the Arab uprisings, it is to stand our ground against dictatorship, colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, social hatreds of all kinds, whatever the odds. The weakness is not that they stand & fight but that the battalions of international solidarity have not yet roused to stand with them.
This is a little Kashmiri boy looking out the window of a van to relish the rain which is causing flooding all over Kashmir. When you get the “there’s no use in fighting” blues, keep this little guy in mind & get over it.
(Photo from Basit Zargar)
The general secretary of the BJP party in India (the political arm of the fascist movement) Ram Madhav announced that occupying forces in Kashmir will continue to rule with an iron fist. “We cannot allow militants & terrorists to have a field day, we will go after them with the utmost harshness.” Utmost harshness of course means tear gas attacks, shooting live ammunition at unarmed protesters, pellet munitions that will injure, blind, disable thousands more youth & children.
Showing the soft side of barbarism, Madhav continued: “At the same time, we have to win hearts & minds, we have to deliver development. Let me tell you, we are not against the Valley people. Were that so, we would have choked them. On the contrary we want them to prosper, & as the Prime Minister has said, tourism is the way, not terrorism.” Translated from the language of barbarism, that means we would have choked & killed them with our bare hands but we need those kids to work the ski lifts & carnival rides.
Madhav says the Indian occupying army expects the summer in Kashmir to be “relatively peaceful.” Relatively peaceful compared to what? To last year when the military went on another rampage that killed, injured, & disabled thousands? Or to the last encounter that killed three more unarmed civilian protesters?
This is a photo of Kashmiri youth protesting the killing of three civilians March 31st. Kashmir won’t be relatively peaceful again until India removes 700,000 soldiers making life in Kashmir a living hell.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir. Build international solidarity with one of the most intransigent & important freedom struggles.
(Photo by Basit Zargar)
We know there is opposition to the Putin regime from the tens of thousands who recently protested across Russia. What we don’t know is the depth & breadth of opposition to Putin’s alliance with Assad & Russian bombing of Syrian civilians. Finding that out & connecting with them for coordinated actions should be a political priority.
“Western leftists” or “anti-imperialist leftists” is what some call the mucky pro-Assad conglomerate of erstwhile socialists, retired FBI & CIA agents & US military officers, Muslim & Jewish haters, fascists, nationalists & white supremacists like David Duke, libertarian apostles of Ron Paul & David Icke who believe reptilian Jewish bankers run the world.
Those aren’t the right terms politically or epithetically & terminology matters in clarifying what this stinking political morass represents. What they represent is the political & theoretical dominance for the past two decades of libertarianism. One can argue that Noam Chomsky’s kind of libertarianism should be excluded in that definition but then one would have to explain why he agrees with the rest of the conglomerate on Syria & is willing to stand with those who believe the reptilian Jewish bankers crap.
Libertarianism is the theoretics of fascism filled with obscurantism, mysticism, conspiracies, Lucifers, anti-papists, shape-shifting, blood-drinking, corpse-eating extraterrestrials & reptilian Jewish bankers. One can see in the writings of Bartlett & Beeley how seamlessly it transitions for use in opposing the Syrian revolution against dictatorship.
The term that defines the politics of Assadism is libertarianism. I make a concession referring to them as libertarian leftists because not all have fully transitioned to fascism. History will use much less flattering terminology for those who support crimes in Syria of the scale of Hitler & Stalin.
One of my mother’s favorite song. She would sing along as though she were Maria Callas. Since she was in the church choir she could also sing a mean Gregorian chant. We loved her singing, even when it was plaintive WWII songs.
A truly beautiful song almost impossible to sing along to. Though we try.