Pre-election mantra: “We need Trump to win so people mobilize.”

Trump wins. People, mostly high school students, mobilize.

Post-election reproach: “Why didn’t you protest Obama? Being in grade school is no excuse!”

More protest in Bangladesh today in Dhaka against genocide in Burma (Myanmar ).

Photo from Rohingya Community in Norway – RCN

The anti-Trump protests are not a post-election phenomenon. Thousands have protested Trump in hundreds of rallies since June 2015 when he announced his candidacy. Since the election, there have been hundreds of protests & thousands of participants, overwhelmingly college & high school students, in dozens of US cities & around the world.

The thrust of the protests is against the rightward shift in politics & the placards focus on the social issues: Black & Latino rights, women’s rights, against the DAPL pipeline, LGBT rights, immigration rights, targeting Muslims.

What is not apparent in the protests is antiwar opposition. When there are several US wars going on that’s a real problem. But if you think it’s a problem among youth, you should take a look at what a catastrophic mess the antiwar movement is among longtime activists. The most distressing aspect is political disunity because many activists oppose only US intervention & support the Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians. Many are expressing exuberance at the bombing rampage against Aleppo going on now.

This photo of civilians, one carrying a wounded infant, is not from the current assault on Aleppo but from a barrel bomb attack in June 2014. They have sustained this kind of barbarism for over five years whilst antiwar forces denounce them as “jihadists.”

Principled antiwar activists demand: the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians; the immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Syria of all foreign military forces, undercover operatives, & mercenaries. Get the hell out now!

(Photo from Getty)

Aung San Suu Kyi & the military junta she fronts for in Myanmar have no reason to be disappointed in their hireling Kofi Annan, the former UN head now reduced to singing for his supper. They commissioned him September 5th to head up an investigation to whitewash genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

Nearly six weeks of reports from Rohingya & international human rights groups (including high resolution satellite imagery from Human Rights Watch) that the Burmese military is on a murderous rampage against Rohingya civilians & finally our man Annan issues a statement ‘calling for an end to the bloodshed.’ And what an appalling statement it is: “I wish to express my deep concern over the recent violence in northern Rakhine State, which is plunging the state into renewed instability & creating new displacement. All communities must renounce violence & I urge the security services to act in full compliance with the rule of law.”

“All communities must renounce violence”? Which communities are those? The unarmed Rohingya civilians? The community whose homes are being torched? Who are being hunted & shot at like animals? Whose women & girls are being raped? Who are the victims of systematic genocide?

There is also the community of right-wing nationalist Buddhists being armed by the Burmese military to participate in the genocide against Rohingya Muslims. Certainly our man Annan doesn’t consider the Burmese army a community. Or does he?
This is a photo of Annan with Shimon Peres, an architect of apartheid Israel who recently croaked. The photo was taken at the 2007 Petra III conference of Nobel laureates in Jordan. The event was co-hosted by the Elie Wiesel Foundation & Abdullah II of Jordan, still called “his majesty” by those who think groveling is copacetic rather than demeaning.

Wiesel, who also recently croaked, addressed the conference with this inspiring rhetoric: “Is it possible to transcend religious beliefs for the sake of peace? Can national loyalty & ethnic allegiance become creative links rather than instruments of suspicion, hatred & death?” It takes steroidal hypocrisy to talk this rubbish while being a theoretical apologist for Israeli apartheid & ideologue of modern Zionism.

Wiesel is famous for saying ““I swore never to be silent whenever & wherever human beings endure suffering & humiliation. We must always take sides.” In his acceptance speech for the 1986 Nobel he said “Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must, at that moment, become the center of the universe.” He’s a cornucopia of that kind of stuff but when Israel was carpet bombing Gaza for seven weeks in 2014, he put out a full-page ad in several media sources claiming Palestinians in Gaza were using their children as human shields.

Maybe Annan learned from Wiesel how to talk out of both sides of his ass–how to feign human rights concerns while representing a state engaged in ethnic cleansing. If he were truly committed to human rights he & has posse of commissioners would head straight for Arakan state to document what the military is doing there. Since that isn’t going to happen, we rely on Rohingya & other human rights activists on social media for denunciations of the Myanmar military & for solidarity with the Rohingya.

End the violence against Rohingya. Full human, democratic, & citizenship rights for Rohingya in Myanmar.

Some international human rights groups have expressed dismay at Aung San Suu Kyi’s refusal to denounce the scorched earth genocide of Rohingya Muslims by the Burmese military going on since October 9th. This chiding of Suu Kyi has been going on since the 2012 military siege against Rohingya. At some point, you have to drop the credulity routine & accept that she has by no means been silent about the genocide but has fully endorsed it & functions as the cynical, smarmy face of the military junta (which really runs Myanmar) to give a human rights image to genocide. She owes her stature as a state functionary to compromises with the junta & is not going to jeopardize that sinecure with protestations about Rohingya human rights. It’s a reciprocity of who’s playing who here: the murderous junta or the sly Suu Kyi.

Some media reports say, for no known reason, that the military operation against the Rohingya has sharpened tensions between Suu Kyi’s six-month-old civilian administration & the junta. You wouldn’t know that from what Suu Kyi says when asked about the charges of mass executions, mass rapes, torture, arrests without charge, the displacement of 30,000 Rohingya after military torching of entire villages. What she has repeatedly said like a ventriloquist’s dummy since the murderous siege began is that little evidence exists to accuse the military of waging genocide against Rohingya but that the government will investigate & release their findings. Wouldn’t you think, given the nature of the charges, that she would feel some urgency to do that investigation before the military has touched the entire state? It’s been nearly two months & she hasn’t sent some minion to look into things?

On November 4th—nearly one month after the military poured into Arakan state by land & air & started torching villages & shooting down civilians—Suu Kyi was in Japan to drum up investment in Myanmar & to receive an honorary degree from Kyoto University for “advancement of democracy in Myanmar & in the world as a whole.” You can’t make up those kind of sarcasms: presiding over genocide & receiving another human rights award she should stuff where the sun don’t shine. No one in the politically stupid or amoral assemblage was so impertinent as to ask her about the Rohingya. Why embarrass her when kissing ass is so much better rewarded?

She spoke at a press conference in Japan where a reporter questioned her about the genocide. She’s become quite masterful at talking gibberish to evade the issue of genocide. She must have learned it from hanging out with Kofi Annan. Make sense of this crap: “The problem in Rakhine state is extremely delicate & care is needed in responding,” & “The Myanmar government is responding to the issue of Rakhine state based on the principles of the rule of law.” She told the press conference there is little evidence to accuse the military of genocide & thus “have been very careful not to blame anybody in particular.”

Human Rights Watch has published high resolution satellite imagery of entire villages torched by the military; Rohingya activists in Arakan have circulated mobile videos of Burmese soldiers committing human rights crimes against Rohingya. All of that is circulating on social media & Suu Kyi thinks she can continue to play stupid?

This is Suu Kyi at the press conference on November 4th in Tokyo–wearing that peculiar constipated mouth thing that we know so well from lying-assed US politicians.

(Photo by AFP/JIJI)

Sometimes it feels like “I am just a sad song.”

Jannatun Nayeem Nayeema posted this today & it seems to so succinctly & poignantly capture something about the disconnect & grief people often feel in a troubled, complicated world.

Poignant always means a Lorena McKennitt song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzFEtt94R4Q

Ordinarily I don’t post gruesome photos, especially of children. But the cavalier attitude of Assad supporters & of those who support Russian & Syrian bombing of civilians in Aleppo & other cities must be countered with the harsh & ugly realities. This small child is being treated by medics at a field hospital in Aleppo, Syria after Russian airstrikes today.

People like Max Blumenthal, Tim Anderson, & Vanessa Beeley are establishing their authority among confused & libertarian people by vilifying rescue workers in Syria but much more reprehensibly by mocking the children of Syria who are suffering the unspeakable as a result of Syrian & Russian bombing.

It’s so politically peculiar, if not completely unsavory, to attempt to discredit child victims of war. But in fact that derangement has deep psychic roots in right-wing politics. When you ridicule little Omran as a hoax, as a two-bit ham actor & son of a rescue worker associated with “throat-cutting jihadists,” you come perilously close to the racist caricatures of Black infants & children prior to the US civil rights movement. You also have to explain how ridiculing child victims of war differs from how occupying armies target children, particularly Palestinians & Kashmiris. Of course ridicule isn’t the same as bombing or disabling children but when you use it to justify bombing you place yourself in politics on the side of the barbarians. In this day & age, that’s too close to fascism for comfort.

Children are not fair game in war, occupation, genocide—nor in propaganda & justifications for them. I don’t wish to advise or improve the war propaganda of Assad supporters but to discredit & shame it with the reality of children’s lives under Syrian & Russian bombing.

(Photo by Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters)

This is one of Vanessa Beeley’s unsavory, puerile attacks on baby Omran: 

Someone set up a Facebook group named “Friends who like Mary Scully, Socialist candidate for US president” without telling me & made me the admin of the group. Didn’t know about it till someone asked me to approve their membership in my fan club.

Do you know how embarrassing it is for someone who hates grandstanding in politics to be the admin of her own fan club? As far as I can tell, there’s only one or two members & this does not speak well to my popularity. But it does explain the low turnout voting for me at the polls.

Pratik Parmar, a filmmaker from India has produced a three-part documentary on the lives & conditions of Dalits, an oppressed caste once despicably called “untouchables.”

Caste is one of the deranged social organizations that developed under class society. It could be called the excrement & dry rot of class society with its notions of inferior & superior human beings.

There have long been social & political struggles in India among Dalits & other oppressed castes to end this monstrous system. It is one of the most monumental freedom movements in the world.

This is Project Heartland/Episode 1, The land struggle of Ramji Bhai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FftSZLnsmVA&feature=share

This is the link to episode 2, “Straight from the Tannery”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XtR3tglQ6k

This is the link to episode 3, “When a Dalit Woman Leads”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka3605qBaR4

Ziaur Rahman sent this photo of a protest today against the scorched earth genocide by the Myanmar military junta against Rohingya Muslims going on now in Arakan state.

Rohingya refugees in collaboration with the Malaysia Islamic party & NGOs in Malaysia organized the march & rally in front of the Myanmar embassy in Kuala Lampur.

Not every one has a Myanmar embassy to rally in front of but Aung San Suu Kyi can be contacted via her FB wall at: https://www.facebook.com/aungsansuukyi/