This is an edited post from September 18, 2015. The discussion of that post, particularly comments by Peggy Mohan & Indira Krishnamurti Pradhan, added to my understanding. It is about how Israel & India use culture to render their colonial projects legitimacy.
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In September 2013, the Indian government & German embassy in India organized a ‘peace concert’ in Srinagar, Kashmir where Zubin Mehta was to conduct the Bavarian State Orchestra–the first concert of its kind in occupied Kashmir.

Mehta’s role in this is particularly odious & reprehensible. He is an Indian citizen who lives in the US & is a long-time supporter of Israel. He has been associated with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) since 1969 as adviser, has been its director since 1977, & was appointed its musical director for life in 1981. He is an outspoken opponent of the cultural boycott of Israel, insisting that music unifies people while he uses the IPO as a public relations tool to promote & legitimize Israel.

When he agreed to India’s request to direct a peace concert in Kashmir, whilst India had 700,000 troops deployed there, he cynically claimed he wanted to perform in Kashmir to bring Hindus & Muslims together, as if the conflict were religious. He knew exactly what he was doing to legitimize the Indian military occupation of Kashmir.

Kashmiri activists & political organizations (including Khurram Parvez for the Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society) called on Mehta to cancel his concert because the event would be used to whitewash & render normality to the Indian occupation & human rights crimes, including thousands of deaths & executions, disappearances, mass rapes, torture & incarcerations.

Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a noted Kashmiri leader, said “We are under occupation. The majority of people here are suffering from state terrorism; people are being killed. People are suffering. There is no relevance for a music program. India, with the help of the German government, is trying to say the situation should be forgotten.”

Several activists, writers, academics, & religious leaders wrote to the German embassy in India asking them to cancel the concert. Their letter said, “Legitimizing an occupation via a musical concert is completely unacceptable. Art as propaganda, as abundantly documented, was put to horrific use in Nazi Germany. We are sure you will understand that we cannot welcome anything even remotely analogous in Jammu & Kashmir.”

The German ambassador to India replied: “Music is a universal language. Music connects. With the magic power of music, crossing geographical, political & cultural borders, we want to reach the hearts of Kashmiris with a message of hope & encouragement.” The same exact rubbish Israel claims & echoed by Mehta.
In unintentional irony, India had to set up more checkpoints & beef up security forces to hold a peace concert that was protested by Kashmiri activists.

It ended on a discordant note when Nikolaus Bachler, the general manager of the Bavarian State Orchestra, learned the audience was only invited guests—1,500 business leaders, government officials, & diplomats. He said the 80 members of the orchestra waived their fees because they were under the impression they would be playing a public concert for the Kashmiri people & not at an elite embassy event with restricted access. Bachler said, “We were misled by the German embassy. We will raise this issue with the German government that art can’t be exploited by anyone, be it governments or by embassies or any political groups.”

Photo is Mehta with the Bavarian State Orchestra at the Srinagar concert.

(Photo by Danish Ismail/Reuters)

The kangaroo courts of the Indian occupying army will have a difficult time documenting the charge of encouraging stone pelting against Khurram Parvez since he has a substantial body of postings both on Facebook & on Twitter. Those who follow him know there isn’t a single post Indian authorities can point to. On the contrary, his posts concern human rights for Kashmiris.

As for inciting people to protest? Isn’t the right to assemble a basic democratic right? Isn’t massive protest one of the ways India gained its independence from Britain?

As for stone pelting, since I cannot be tried in an Indian court, let me say honestly that people under military occupation have a right to defend themselves by any means necessary. It is a travesty that stone pelting is prosecuted & not the use of pellet guns, tear gas & sound grenades, & live ammunition.

Khurram Parvez is accused of inciting stone pelting & protests & legal proceedings have begun against him. He remains incarcerated & has been moved to another prison.

Please like & share this Facebook wall in his defense:

https://www.facebook.com/freekhurram/

Media doesn’t often report the details of what’s going on with the refugee crises in the Mediterranean. There’s complete silence about what NATO ships are doing in the Aegean Sea to thwart Syrian, Afghan, & other refugees on the Turkey to Greece route. They call that mission “stemming illegal trafficking & illegal migration.”

This week, in a breach of the usual silence, Reuters reported that Libyan patrol boats have intercepted & turned back more than 11,000 refugees so far this year. Just in the past few days they turned back 1,425 refugees, including children. They report that 120,000 have managed to reach Italy where another set of horrors awaits them, including rampant sexual abuse of unaccompanied children.

Reuters also breaks the silence on the number of fatalities on the Libya to Italy route. As of September 6th, nearly 3,200 sub-Saharan refugees have drowned this year according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). UN refugee officials reported in May that drownings in the Mediterranean are up 35-percent this year. How does Frontex (the European Union’s naval operation against refugees) explain that when for over a year they’ve had fleets of European warships & sophisticated aerial surveillance equipment monitoring that route? How have drownings increased when rescue ships are on the spot?

How is forcing them back to Libya a solution to the refugee crisis when the country is the center of a new war between ISIS & US special forces?

The worst part is that this crisis isn’t going to end. The UN refugee agency reports this week that the number of South Sudanese fleeing civil war is now over one million, including many orphaned children. Keep that in mind the next time you read panegyrics on the humanitarian work of George Clooney & his associate (& likely CIA agent) John Prendergast. Clooney, Prendergast, Jimmy Carter & Kofi Annan played a role for the US in brokering the secession of South Sudan from Sudan which has proven a humanitarian tragedy of civil war, starvation, repression.

These refugees awaiting rescue & return to Libya are in a partially punctured dinghy about 13 miles off the coast of Libya.

(Photo by Santi Palacios/AP)

Was chasing down the source of this Islamophobic cartoon on Twitter which the tweeter said was from Le Monde. It resonates with Charlie Hebdo’s so-called satiric genre & it would be alarming, though not surprising, if that genre became the acceptable norm. Maybe losing that burkini battle really inflamed Islamophobic editors in France.

Incidentally in my search, I came across an archive of 129,000 articles debating whether Hebdo is racist or satiric. To my mind, “Charlie Hebdo est raide mort” (that’s “dead as a doornail” to google translate) so I hate to add another paragraph to the debate. But let me say that if you have to explicate every one of their cartoons to persuade us they are not racist but in fact hilarious social commentary, perhaps you need to consider where your purpose in life is taking you. Off the deep end, if you ask my opinion.

Isn’t there an ancient canard going as far back as the first bum joke by Homo Erectus that if you have to explain the joke, maybe the problem is not its subtlety but its lack of wit? Readers still laugh themselves silly at Greek & Roman satirists. The Canterbury Tales is over 600 years old & it’s been a while since I read it but its fart jokes remain among the most memorable moments in world literature: “No deeper toot was ever heard in hell.” Nobody has to explain that even to a ten-year-old.

One of the most worthless arguments is that Hebdo’s humor is particularly French, meaning ‘oh so sophisticated.’ If the magazine itself leaves you cold, those defending it with that argument will have you in stitches. Moliere doesn’t need 129,000 articles to explicate his wit; Daumier doesn’t need professorial tracts to make us laugh. They’re brilliant & even though I’m an unsophisticated rube from the American Midwest, I really get their wit. They make Hebdo look like trash.

There was one defense of Hebdo that rankled & did not amuse me & that’s the one by Katha Pollitt in The Nation titled “The Courage of Charlie Hebdo.” I don’t find The Nation a particularly insightful magazine & as a feminist I have a lot of problems with Pollitt’s politics on the issue of targeting Muslim women. She’s an Islamophobe & at least once, maybe twice in the past few years I have responded to her articles to protest her prejudice pawned off as feminism. Only Pollitt could turn loud-mouthed racism into courage.

After that trip down bad memory lane, I was unable to verify that this cartoon came from Le Monde. I post it because Muslim women are particularly targeted by the haters & war-mongers. Satire is to skewer the debaucheries of the oppressor, not make a laughing stock of the oppressed.

Wondering if accusations against Assad for human rights & war crimes would be taken more seriously by activists if his wife were not so fashionable & they were not so Western in style? Say, for example, if he looked like Idi Amin (charged with the same atrocities), dressed in a military uniform, or if he dressed in traditional garb like the monarchs of Bahrain & Saudi Arabia?

Wondering also if the glorification of Putin would withstand scrutiny of his political practices in Russia? Say, for example, his 2014 law making homophobia state policy which incited street violence against gays & led to raids, prosecutions & incarceration for being gay?

Or maybe his treatment of immigrant workers who built the stadia for the 2014 Sochi Olympic games? After the stadia were built, his regime launched raids on them, incarcerated them under abusive conditions in overcrowded or outdoor cells without food or medical care, & then deported them. Or perhaps his use of forced immigrant labor on the Sochi stadia where authorities confiscated passports, denied required work permits, cheated workers out of wages (an estimated 50,000 workers)? Is all that just demonizing, Western propaganda?

The struggles today against racist oppression in all its malignant forms–including the war on Black youth in the US, expropriation & cultural destruction of indigenous peoples on every continent, caste oppression In India, anti-immigration campaigns–are among the most important struggles historically. Racism of such violence & mayhem has not always existed & it can be ended. But not without titanic & committed struggles against those who profit so lavishly from it.

Racism is integral to modern capitalism which could not function without such violent & ignominious inequalities. Racism is integral to war & to the oppression of women. The pity is, it’s all a big fat ugly stupid lie that some human beings are born superior & some inferior & it’s a lie humanity can no longer live with because it has caused & continues to cause genocides & unspeakable crimes against millions of people.

Jignesh Mevani is a young Dalit activist in the Indian state of Gujarat leading the resurgence of the anti-caste movement in India. Yesterday, on returning from a speaking engagement in another state, he was arrested by Indian police & his whereabouts are still unknown.

His arrest & that of Khurram Parvez, the Kashmiri human rights leader, are of a piece with prime minister Modi’s political agenda for India which includes maintaining caste oppression, Kashmir as a colony, pogroms against Muslims, & the entire panoply of neoliberal capitalist economic inequalities & plunder.

Their fate as leaders against racist oppression is of consequence to all humanity who care about human rights & who detest the squalid concepts of racism.

Those of you who live in India can take immediate action by calling the numbers listed to protest. Dalit & human rights activists in India are preparing ways we can all participate in Jignesh Mevani’s defense if that becomes necessary.

The arrest of Khurram Parvez with no legal basis brings up the issue of all Kashmiris arrested in protests since July 9th. It’s likely that in the turmoil of the military siege many have been arrested & are not yet accounted for. On August 8th, only four weeks into the ten week siege, Indian military officials admitted to arresting 1,300 youth. Many were picked up in nighttime raids for participating in protests.

How many more have been arrested since then? Where are they? Have they been charged with a crime & provided legal counsel? Or are they buried in the gulag to be held indefinitely without charge under administrative detention–as is used so profligately against Palestinian youth by Israeli military officials? This is a matter of grave concern since India, like Israel, employs systematic torture of its political detainees, including beatings, electric shock, & other methods too gruesome to describe.

Investigating illegal arrests, torture, disappearances is the kind of political work Khurram Parvez & the JKCCS engage in. He is now being held under administrative detention so defending him is part of defending the other activists from being lost forever in the gulag or ending up disappeared in mass graves.

#FreeKhurram

(Photo of protest in Kashmir from Twitter)

TwitterStorm for #FreeKhurram

https://www.facebook.com/events/794438803993209/

According to the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), Khurram Parvez has now been in police custody for 16 hours without charge, certainly without having committed a crime, & is being denied access to lawyers. Human rights organizations & activists around the world echo the alarm of JKCCS & are sending messages of concern.

Khurram is a leading human rights activist in Kashmir. He is program coordinator of JKCCS which has brilliantly documented human rights crimes by the occupying army, particularly disappearances & mass graves for thousands of Kashmiris. He is also chairperson of the Asian Federation Against involuntary Disappearances (AFAD).

For India to arrest him so boldly without cause must be condemned & opposed. The Intention in arresting such a prominent & uncompromising human rights figure is certainly to send a message to Kashmiri activists that no one is beyond the scope of their gulag justice. If he is not released soon, there will certainly be an international campaign demanding his immediate, unconditional release.

The linked article is the press statement by JKCCS on Khurram’s arrest. Please circulate it widely.

http://kashmirconvener.com/index.php/2016/09/16/jkccs-condemns-arrest-of-khurram-parvez-calls-it-unlawful/