Hands off Syria Coalition hasn’t gotten around to defending Trump against this treason stuff–though several of the leaders have. The Coalition’s too busy working out an infantile disorder about the White Helmets. Or maybe some are smarter than the rest & understand that in Syria, Assad, Putin, & Trump are a confederacy against the revolution. They can all live with ISIS better than they can democracy.

I detest emoticons. Especially vomit & poop ones. There, I said it. So denounce me.

What’s with the credulity about Richard Gere on Israel? The guy, who calls himself a human rights advocate, has been involved with Israel for at least two decades. In all that time he hasn’t been able to figure out what’s what with colonialism & apartheid?

The guy is my age. There are no magical political transubstantiations after 60. He’s doing what he’s always done: siding with colonialism & doing the good guy schtick with Palestinians. He’s pretending to play both sides of the street.

t is profoundly disturbing, actually horrifying, to learn the author Alice Walker, a long-time supporter of Palestinian solidarity & a participant in the 2011 Gaza Flotilla, has been a public & ardent apostle of libertarian David Icke since 2013 & advances his ideas on her website & in media.

Icke’s ideas, as deranged as they are hateful, can be called the theoretics of fascism. The core of his ideas, which Walker explicitly defends, is that the world is run by the Jewish Illuminati, a corporate & banking elite of blood-drinking, flesh-eating, shape-shifting extraterrestrial reptiles trying to create a new world order of global fascism.

Like KKK & white supremacist David Duke, Icke & his apostles like Eva Bartlett & Vanessa Bartlett, associate with Palestinian solidarity only for a platform to spread the hatred of Jews. Their role as propagandists for Assad are manifold: support for his fascism & contempt for working people; hopes the Syrian counter-revolution will help to destroy Israel & massacre Jews; admiration that the Assad dynasty has expelled all Jews from Syria. The struggle of Palestinians against colonialism & apartheid is no part of their considerations. Their goal is not a democratic, secular state for Palestinians & Jews to live in harmony but the extermination of Jews–before they then turn on Palestinians, the Semitic cousins of Jews.

Walker’s association with David Icke absolutely excludes her from participation in Palestinian solidarity events of any kind, including as a forum, rally, or honored keynote speaker, or in any formal capacity at all. She can no longer be allowed to speak on behalf of solidarity because she compromises its integrity in the most despicable way by endorsing the notion that Jewish bankers run the world, which was the ideology of German fascism & the Jewish holocaust. Her presence should be barely tolerated as a participant in public protests open to all.

Walker’s prestige isn’t a good enough reason to tolerate hating on Jews in Palestinian solidarity. That isn’t imposing a purity test on the movement; it is the standard of basic principles social movements employ to protect the movements from disgrace, dissension & destruction. In the same way hating on Jews is incompatible with Palestinian solidarity, the women’s movement of the 1960s-70s distinguished our support for abortion rights from those of eugenicists who wanted legalization for ethnic cleansing purposes.

Walker has taken on the honored status of guru among women, Black, & other progressive activists & is honored by Palestinians & their supporters. Now she should face the music for promoting the wretched hatred of Jews & apparently for Muslims since she has not publicly differed from Icke’s support for Assad. Hopefully her glory days as a guru are over because in the politics of liberation you can’t play both sides of the street.

(Photo is David Icke tweet from September 2016: https://twitter.com/davidicke/status/780821818970034176)

Neil Gorsuch–whose performance at his confirmation hearing for Supreme Court is nothing less than contemptible–is being treated like a toy poodle by senators.

He will be adjudicating issues like the Muslim ban, women’s reproductive rights, refugee & immigrant rights, civil liberties for Black & Latino youth incarcerated for minor offenses, the incursions of the surveillance state & the character of his interrogation by the US Senate is an international embarrassment, if not mostly a love-fest. The appropriately named Senator Flake from Arizona asked Gorsuch, “Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?”

We would like to ask Senator Flake “Would you like your ass kicked by 100 irate feminists or one irate refugee who nearly died from hypothermia because of racist immigration policies? Take your pick buster.”

(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

An article showed up in my news feed titled “How the Vatican created Islam” from the David Icke website. By the time I got to paragraph three, the Jews were fighting with the Christians & then Satan & the Roman army got involved so to calm things down Satan set up a fake church, they called it counterfeit in those days–& Roman Catholicism was born.

There’s only so much derangement you can take at one sitting. So I never did learn how this led to the Vatican inventing Islam but if you really want to know, just say so & I’ll work my way through the rest of this rubbish.

That “nature red in tooth & claw” thing isn’t easy to reconcile to. You’d think domestic animals would get past that. My Schnauzer girl Sophie broke out of the yard again with Franky the three-legged Chihuahua. After two hours of searching, the gas man pointed them out under a neighbor’s house which was fenced in.

I did a break & enter job & grabbed Franky but Sophie was in the crawl space under the house attacking a litter of newborn puppies. She’s smart enough to go to college & moved deeper so I couldn’t get at her where she played with a baby that wasn’t more than the size of mouse. They play with their prey. It sickened me but the neighbors weren’t home so I could get her out of there nor could I get under there.

Now she’s back & I have a terrible reaction to her; I don’t want her in the house & don’t want her near me. I’d also like to talk to the neighbors about their puppies but am afraid they’ll call animal control on Sophie the psycho Schnauzer.

By tomorrow this too will pass. I had the same reaction when she killed my beloved little bird but you can’t blame a dog long for being what a dog is.

The Unbroken by Rollie Mukherjee: a tribute to Kashmiri women & girls.

“You can kill us, but you can’t break us!”

This is a beautiful article about Rollie’s paintings of Kashmir where women’s struggles & strengths are a constant theme: http://twocircles.net/2017feb23/405234.html

Interesting that so many western women are Assad apologists, even if they exhibit little knowledge about what is going on in Syria: Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett, Rania Khalek, Sarah Abed, Abby Martin, Mnar Muhawesh, Cindy Sheehan, Ann Wright, Sara Flounders, Donna Nassor, Coleen Rowley, Margaret Kimberley, & several other hangers-on.

Fox News has an entire stable of such ideologues, including Ann Coulter & Michelle Malkin, who seem to hold the status of deranged crank who will say anything. It’s an ironic form of misogyny.

Perhaps we’re expected to pull our punches in criticizing them, especially when like Sheehan, Khalek, & Nassor they’re way over their heads. They’ll have to learn the hard way that if you side with counter-revolution there are no remedial education programs available nor dispensations for ignorance.

According to the Rappler which is monitoring the death toll from Philippine president Duterte’s death squad war against the poor, there have been 7,080 people killed like animals on the street since July 1, 2016.

The Rappler number is however doubtful since it has remained the same since early February 2017 when until then there were about 1,000 executions per month.

Our deepest respect & solidarity with the human rights activists campaigning against this monstrous war. Our sincere condolences to the families. We consider the victims our own. May they Rest In Peace.