#Kashmir Siege Day

[workersolidarity]

🇮🇳🇵🇸 🚨

KASHMIRI INDIANS RALLY IN SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE ON INTERNATIONAL AL-QUDS DAY

📹 Scenes from a rally held in solidarity with Palestinians under siege and bombardment in the Gaza Strip in Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir, in far-northwestern India, on Friday April 5th, 2024, celebrating International Al-Quds Day (occupied Jerusalem).

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[bonmonjour]

Some Thoughts

“A few years ago, I was in DC in the summer. The week of July 4th, to be specific. On America’s Independence Day, I was on the wharf, a few miles south of the Mall. This was during Trump’s presidency, and this year, he had decided he wanted his own military parade. There, on the wharf, the most I saw of that was the planes. I saw Air Force One fly by, though I didn’t get a picture. At one point, a few fighter jets flew over and it was at that moment that my outlook changed completely. “The wharf on that day was not a war zone but hearing those jets and feeling how they hurt my ears, I pictured what hell those in the Middle East must live through. Imagine those planes and the bombers flying over your land, over your house, day after day for years. Imagine a star of metal, falling from the sky and lighting your neighborhood ablaze. Imagine the sound and sight of those buildings collapsing, the rubble falling. The things that are usually relegated to the newspaper once before moving on with their lives suddenly became real for a second.  “That is the reality for the millions living in occupied zones all around the world. In Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and (most relevant to the past week) Palestine.”

I wrote that more than two years ago at this point (writing October 9th, 2023) and unfortunately it still holds true. It was the week that the IDF shot worshippers in Al Aqsa during Ramadan, and civilians chanted “may their names be erased.” I think the reason I never finished what I started writing last time is because I bit off more than I could chew. I was all over the place, frankly. With this, I hope to talk about what Palestine is like, what this conflict is about as far as I understand it, (de)colonization, settlers and violence, and perhaps end with some thoughts on propaganda and the international “community.”

This week, Gaza broke down its prison walls. War has broken out, Netanyahu has promised genocide on the captive population of Gaza, and the international press stands against Palestine. All too predictably. Many, incredibly many, official statements include the word “unprovoked” in their descriptions of Palestine’s rebellion. For some reason, perhaps even intentionally, no one’s memory can be bothered to be longer than that of a goldfish. The very state of Gaza’s existence today is horrid proof of Israel’s wrath–the open satisfaction of its anger and hatred against the people it dispossessed. 

I don’t even have to go back to 1948 to find examples of cruelty, nor to 2014. Nor really to 2021, but I wrote this then and I’m re-using it. The second week of May 2021 began with the seizure of Sheikh Jarrah by Israeli settlers. Imagine if, one moment, you’re sitting in your house, and the next, your door’s been broken, and an Israeli family starts moving in. You try to argue, they harass you. Attack you. Force you to the streets. They break the shop windows and burn the buildings. These aren’t terrorists working for some shadowy organization, these are average everyday Israeli men and women who participate in this theft. On top of the seizures, Israel controls Palestine’s food, their mud that passes for water, their electricity, and their movement. ("I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly." —Yaov Gallant) They could be bombed at any hour of night or day without warning. Residents are frequently subject to the whim of Israeli military and police; they are always at risk of physical violence, lethal and sexual. The whole of Gaza has been blockaded since 2005. 44% of its population is under 15 years of age, with a further 21% being 15-24 years old. Half of Gaza’s population has lived their entire life–their entire development–inside this open-air slaughterhouse, never having been allowed to venture out.

What’s perhaps even worse is that the children trapped there are used to it. Two years ago, there was a video going around of a little girl jumping on her trampoline while in the left of the video, a building goes up in flames with thunder ascending from the earth. She kept on jumping. This literal hell, this world of fire in the sky and brimstone on earth, is the only one they’ve ever known. What happens to the ears when all one hears are bombs exploding, guns firing, jackboots marching, and children crying? What happens to the eyes when all one sees is stars of fire and brimstone on earth; structures falling and your impending death a furlong in front of you? What happens to the mouth and stomach when the food is dung and the water is mud? And to call that just another Thursday takes an inhuman, immorally inflicted amount of desensitization. Each day, nay, each hour, you hear of how so and so many kids were killed in such and such a bombing. Those kids had families, mother and father, brothers and sisters, they had dreams and hopes. They wanted to live, and they were snuffed out, and relegated to being a statistic in the morning paper that peoples’ eyes skip over. Even right now, Israel orders houses, apartments, schools, and hospitals be bombarded. White phosphorus has gotten involved.

These hellish conditions are part of the reason for why Palestinians even fight: freedom from that. This conflict that has raged for over 70 years now has never been about religion, as some might be inclined to believe. It is not a simple story of Jews contesting the Holy Land with Muslims. Yes, no one should ever forget the atrocities of the Holocaust committed against Jews, but Jews are not immune from fascism–no group of people is. From its very inception, Zionism was meant to be a colonialist project intended to drive out the mostly non-Jewish Palestinians, settle the land, and create a Jewish nation-state. When you have a nation (ein Volk) and a state (ein Reich), it shouldn’t come as a surprise when eventually someone decides to complete the quote. On the other hand, Palestine is not all Muslims. There are plenty of Palestinians of other religions, most notable for European Christendom, Christians. If this were strictly a religious war, a crusade for the Holy Land, why would European Christians, many of whom are anti-semites (let’s face it), side against Christians in the Holy Land? Just as Spanish colonialism was never about which god the Aztecs should worship, the conflict in Palestine was never about which of Abraham’s children should get exclusive right to live there. I have not seen many liberals come at it from the religion angle, but for the few that do, they always side with Israel because to them Islam is a barbaric backward religion that murders queer people and rapes women, and so why should they support that. Almost always, they end up being ridiculously racist, and the one I had the misfortune of seeing was arguing with a Muslim woman. 

Israel is a settler-colonialist state founded on the dispossession of Indigenous people. As such, the only way forward for Palestine is decolonization. Eve Tuck and K.W. Yang’s 2012 paper, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” gives the definition of settler-colonialism, what it entails in terms of relations, and its incommensurability with other social justice movements.

Settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between the metropole and the colony. For example, in the United States, many Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their homelands onto reservations [mirroring the removal of Palestinians from their homes into Gaza or the West Bank], indentured, and abducted into state custody, signaling the form of colonization as simultaneously internal… and external… with a frontier… The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of profit-producing fragments (5). Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event (5). In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there… For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and policy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource. Indigenous peoples must be erased, must be made into ghosts (6).

Basically, what these passages illustrate is that due to Israel’s very nature as settler-colonialist, apartheid ends up being the only situation. Israel lays claim over the whole land, but as long as a pocket of Palestine exists, it exists as a colony within Israel’s contiguous claim. Thus, Palestinians are turned into colonial subjects, subject to different law than that of the metropole. To make this relatable to Americans, many of the indictments against George III are the unfair application of the legal system between Britain itself and the colonies across the Atlantic. In the region, if an Israeli and an Arab commit the same crime, they are subject to different laws in different legal systems: the Israeli to civil court, and the Arab to military court.

Furthermore, it’s not just the internal colonialism of Arabs that Israel is interested in, such as “segregation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalization.” No, Israel needs Palestinian land as well, for lebensraum and for capital. The violence of this (recent, remember Sheikh Jarrah) settlement is reasserted every day that the settlers remain settled, and the Indigenous people remain dispossessed. The need for land as lebensraum also necessitates the total elimination of Indigenous peoples from the land “because the presence of Indigenous peoples–who make a priori claims to land and ways of being–is a constant reminder that the settler colonialist project is incomplete” (Tuck and Yang 9). That is, the very existence of Palestinians is a daily reminder to the Zionists that Zionism is incomplete. Thus, the only way to complete Zionism, to complete the project of a “Jewish homeland,” is for Palestinians to be made into ghosts.

They go on to say the following about decolonization:

In this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent [or European Jewish, in this case], and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts. This tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial forces… Decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation (7). Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity. “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). Settler colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone (7).

What they mean here is that real geopolitics is complicated. There is no one demographic that is completely the victim or completely the perpetrator. In the US, there have been many, many people who came here fleeing from hard times in their own countries or were brought over to face a hard time in this country. It doesn’t matter what non-Indigenous group it is (the Africans who were stolen to be slaves, and their descendants; the Irish, Italians, Swedes, Germans, Poles; immigrants from China, Japan, India; refugees from Central America and the Middle East), they are still settled on stolen Indigenous land. They are still settlers. And so, it doesn’t really matter who lives in Israel, how they got there, or why they came, because ultimately, they settled there on stolen Palestinian land and thereby continue the everyday settler-colonialist violence against Palestinians. 

Tuck and Yang further bring up the complication of immigration. Basically, immigrants must abide by pre-existing laws; settlers upend pre-existing laws. As an immigrant in Canada, I do not establish my own laws, I have to abide by Canadian law. The settlers who came here hundreds of years ago did not abide by pre-existing laws of the Indigenous peoples. And even in me having to abide by Canadian law, I am upending the pre-existing Indigenous laws. Israeli settlers in Palestine do not follow the pre-existing laws of the Palestinians, they bring their own law with them. Immigrants who come to live in Israel have to follow the Israeli settlers’ laws (and be complicit in the upending of laws and ways of being that went before.)

I think this is one of the reasons why decolonization is such a fraught issue, incommensurable with many other social justice movements. To me, decolonization is a non-negotiable that every colonized people deserve. My own great-grandfather, who I knew for about 6 years, was probably one of the worst people I’ve known: he yelled at me, he was mean to my grandma, he was apparently a physically abusive father. Despite all his flaws that I would never defend, he was born and grew up under British colonialism. Even he deserved to have Britain’s knee off his neck. I’ve seen quite a few posts I can bring up here. 

Many people, usually liberals, are offended at the mere suggestion of supporting Palestine because apparently Palestinians (just in general, I guess. Twitter: where nuance goes to die) are racist, they’re misogynists, they have a barbaric religion, they hate queer people, and on and on and on. I frankly don’t give a single shit. I don’t care if they were even the rudest, meanest, ugliest people on the planet interpersonally. For the sake of argument, even if every Palestinian was a barbaric racist, sexist, and queerphobe, they would still not “deserve” Israeli colonialism. Being colonized is not some punishment doled out by the colonizers for some flaw of character. J.K. Rowling is a horrible, wretched woman responsible not only for crimes against humanity (the Harry Potter books /j), but also for spreading her vile transphobia all across Britain and the rest of the world. Even on her, I would not wish rape. Because it’s not some punishment for flaw of character.  It is easy enough to fight for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to fight for the miserable and corrupt.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen some people defending Israelis (is that the right phrase?) by pointing to anecdotes about how nice the Israelis they know are. I’m sure they’re sweet, kind people who say nice things to you, and bring you gifts and knick-knacks and so forth. They’re still settlers on Palestinian land. Not to compare everything to the Nazis, but I’m sure many, many German citizens who moved to SS-occupied Poland as part of the Race and Resettlement Bureau’s initiative were good and fine citizens if you knew them. They probably greeted you friendly, threw parties, gave gifts, and so forth. And yet, they were complicit in the actions of the Reich. My own grandma is one of the nicest people I know. Frankly, she spoils me whenever I visit. She’s nice to all her grandchildren, she gives us all gifts and money, she’s well respected in her community. She still thinks “Hitler wasn’t that bad” (real quote) and supports Modi’s BJP. Even the nicest people can be complicit in horrible violence, and even the most wretched can be victims of that violence. Personality and attitude mean absolutely nothing.

One thing that all this discourse around settlers seems to take for granted is that the situation in Anglo countries today is at all anything like Israel/Palestine today. The people who throw out strawmen about “if the Native Americans started decolonizing, should they gun you down too?” and the people who say “Yes” both seem to hold to that. The reality is that in the Anglo countries, most of the settlement was done hundreds of years ago. All the Native land has already been divided up and settled by the White men, the freed slaves, the European migrants looking to get their free acres. The Homestead Act and Dominion Lands Act were passed more than 150 years ago. For settlers and recent immigrants who buy land today, they buy it from another settler/immigrant, and so on. No, the situation in Israel/Palestine is much more akin to the first European settlers that came to the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries. There is a reason Opechancanough and his men killed 347 people in Jamestown. Maybe it wasn’t justified, but they did have reasons. Maybe another example is the German settlers in SS-occupied Poland. Their very presence, very settlement, in Germany’s eastern occupations was predicated on the resettlement of the Poles that were there before elsewhere. 

And let’s be honest, it’s not like the average Israeli citizen is the paragon of morality. Israeli civilians chanted from the Book of Judges “may their names be erased” when Al Aqsa mosque was thought to be on fire during Ramadan. Civilian children signed missiles meant for Lebanon. Ordinary civilians are largely the ones seizing Palestinians’ homes. It was civilians treating the massacre of Gaza as “the best reality show in town.” It’s Israeli civilian settlers calling for lynchings in occupied Jerusalem. I could sit here, safe in Canada, saying Palestine should’ve done this or that, but I am not the victim of Israel’s daily violence. I will not make grand-standing moral judgments on how the victims of colonialist abuse should respond to their abusers. I could debate whether an Algerian child wanting to cut a Frenchman into pieces was morally right, but I can’t deny that there were very real and valid psychological conditions for the child wanting that.  

Someone also brought up the notion of “sins of the father” and I think that’s very interesting to think about. In general, I say it’s not very leftist to blame children for their parents. Children are not their parents’ property, nor are they responsible for something done before they were even born. But as I’ve mentioned, settler colonialism is a structure. It doesn’t matter whether you personally went out and killed a Native and stole his land, you live on stolen Native land nevertheless. You materially benefit from your ancestors’ settlement and perpetuate settler-colonialist violence. Without any notion of “sins of the father,” projects like reparations or LANDBACK do not make any sense. After all, who am I to give this land back to the Musqueam, I didn’t take it. I think perhaps a comparison to other structures like patriarchy or white-ness might be apt here. Even though any given man might never have committed violence against a woman to explicitly maintain patriarchy, nevertheless he benefits from the structure of patriarchy. I did not come up with laws or social norms treating women as lesser, but still I inherit them and am responsible (at least in part) for what happens to them: whether they are perpetuated or abolished. A white person living today never invented the concept of race, played no part in coming up with concepts of racial supremacy or polygenism, but still they materially and psychologically benefit from being white in a world where white people are still at the top at the expense of others. However, despite the complicated web of relations involved in settler-colonialism, the fact of the matter is that no one chooses to be born a white man, but many a white men have chosen to be settlers. Or in this case, nobody chooses to be born Jewish, but many Jews have chosen to settle.

I keep coming back to this quote from Gerrard Winstanley, a proto-communist writing during the time of land enclosures in England:

The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land. (A Declaration, p. 2)

Notice that he does not say, “till you, bloody thief, be rooted out of the land.” No, he says, “the power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword” and “that sins of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children… till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.” The power of settler-colonialism is what needs to be rooted out, not necessarily the people. 

Palestine’s only main way out is violent rebellion because no peaceful supplication will ever be satisfying to Israel or its friends. Israel doesn’t want a subjugated Palestine; it wants an extinct Palestine. And also, a note on terminology, under Israeli law, every resident of Palestine is a combatant. Every bit of violence in the name of resistance Palestinians do can be labeled as the action of combatants. Palestinians are often called “terrorists,” and Palestinian resistance “terrorism.” The word itself means nothing. Groups like ISIS, the Taliban, Hezbollah, etc. can all be called terrorists. As can the US government. And so can the protestors fighting against Cop City or against pipelines. Thus, the usage of “terrorism” gives a very easy way for anti-Palestinian people to portray their resistance-violence as akin to ISIS-violence. These takes often come from those who think Hamas is Palestine or statements like “What did you think decolonization was going to look like?” are blanket excuses for war crimes.

All that said, rape and the indiscriminate killing of children is morally reprehensible and should be condemned equally. I say “equally” because Israel massacres Palestinian children everyday, and commits sexual violence against Palestinian men and women, boys and girls. And yet, there is never any international outrage at these daily occurrences. After all, Palestinians are not human, right, why should we care? I don’t know if the video of the woman in the back of the truck is real. If it is, then obviously Hamas’ actions should be condemned. Hamas is not a paragon of virtue either: they’re a right-wing anti-communist Islamic fundamentalist organization that openly wants to kill Jews. They should not be praised for who they are. But still, they are the enemy Israel created for itself. Even today, they threatened to air the killing of civilian hostages.

However, funnily enough, that woman is the only incident I’ve heard brought up against Palestinian rebellion. Every day Israeli men rape Palestinian women, and I don’t see the outrage online. But when those ‘barbaric’ Palestinians might have done it, suddenly the whole timeline is equating “support for Palestine” as “support for rape and beheading and etc.” This, even though many Palestinians say the evidence is lacking. I do think a part of this selective outrage is the racism involved. Palestinians fighting against their oppressors are “terrorists;” Ukrainians fighting against theirs are brave warriors. Israeli war crimes are downplayed; Palestinian groups’ war crimes are blown up to “those brown savages are coming for our women”-levels of racist. The number of posts I've seen along the lines of “Palestinians are sand-dwelling rape monkeys” is so incredibly disheartening. In short: war crimes are bad; Hamas and Israel both doing war crimes is bad; resorting to racist caricature to criticize Palestinian groups is also bad. The unfortunate reality is that pretty much every armed force has partaken in sexual violence against women and children. This does not change the validity of the cause they fight for. Sexual violence is not legitimized by anti-colonialist causes, nor does it delegitimize the causes.

I’ll end this by just mentioning how none of the violence that Israel does ever matters to those outside. Israel can commit flagrant war crimes–collective punishment, executions, rape, white phosphorus–and receive no backlash from the leadership or media in its ally countries. Israel knows that it can do this with total impunity. It can steal homes and massacre children on camera, have that video footage published by major outlets and still expect no punishment. Not even a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to. It’s that same gall, that same flagrant arrogance that allowed them to literally bomb and collapse a building that housed the offices for the Associated Press, Al Jazeera, and others back in 2021. It truly speaks to the effectiveness of their propaganda and the sickness of their ideology that other press outlets will voluntarily cuck themselves by defending Israel in attacking their fellow journalists. The amount of brain worms it takes to look at reality, refuse to accept it because it doesn’t fit your preconceptions, invent a fictional narrative, and then accuse the victims of being the real aggressors is truly staggering. Israel will constantly play up their “right to self-defense” so that people will sympathize with them, and they will accuse anyone critical of them of antisemitism. No matter what Israel does, the reaction will always be “Israel has a right to defend itself – full stop,” without an ounce of support for Palestine’s right to not be wiped off the face of the earth.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 10.1 (after 1950)

1953 – Andhra State is formed, consisting of a Telugu-speaking area carved out of India's Madras State. 1953 – A United States-South Korea mutual defense treaty is concluded in Washington, D.C. 1955 – The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is established. 1957 – The motto In God We Trust first appears on U.S. paper currency. 1958 – The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics is replaced by NASA. 1960 – Nigeria gains independence from the United Kingdom. 1961 – The United States Defense Intelligence Agency is formed, becoming the country's first centralized military intelligence organization. 1961 – East and West Cameroon merge to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon. 1962 – James Meredith enters the University of Mississippi, defying racial segregation rules. 1963 – On its third anniversary as an independent nation, Nigeria became a republic. 1964 – The Free Speech Movement is launched on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. 1964 – Japanese Shinkansen ("bullet trains") begin high-speed rail service from Tokyo to Osaka. 1966 – West Coast Airlines Flight 956 crashes with no survivors in Oregon. This accident marks the first loss of a DC-9. 1969 – Concorde breaks the sound barrier for the first time. 1971 – Walt Disney World opens near Orlando, Florida. 1971 – The first practical CT scanner is used to diagnose a patient. 1975 – Muhammad Ali defeats Joe Frazier in a boxing match in Manila, Philippines. 1978 – Tuvalu gains independence from the United Kingdom. 1979 – The MTR, Hong Kong's rapid transit railway system, opens. 1982 – Helmut Kohl replaces Helmut Schmidt as Chancellor of Germany through a constructive vote of no confidence. 1982 – EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) opens at Walt Disney World in Florida. 1982 – Sony and Phillips launch the compact disc in Japan; on the same day, Sony releases the model CDP-101 compact disc player, the first player of its kind. 1985 – Israel-Palestinian conflict: Israel attacks the Palestine Liberation Organization's Tunisia headquarters during Operation Wooden Leg. 1987 – The 5.9 Mw  Whittier Narrows earthquake shakes the San Gabriel Valley with a Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe), killing eight and injuring 200. 1989 – Denmark introduces the world's first legal same-sex registered partnerships. 1991 – Croatian War of Independence: The Siege of Dubrovnik begins. 2000 – Israel-Palestinian conflict: Palestinians protest the murder of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah by Israeli police in northern Israel, beginning the "October 2000 events". 2001 – Militants attack the state legislature building in Kashmir, killing 38. 2003 – The popular and controversial English-language imageboard 4chan is launched. 2009 – The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom takes over the judicial functions of the House of Lords. 2012 – A ferry collision off the coast of Hong Kong kills 38 people and injures 102 others. 2014 – A series of explosions at a gunpowder plant in Bulgaria completely destroys the factory, killing 15 people. 2014 – A double bombing of an elementary school in Homs, Syria kills over 50 people. 2015 – A gunman kills nine people at a community college in Oregon. 2015 – The American cargo vessel SS El Faro sinks with all of its 33 crew after steaming into the eyewall of Hurricane Joaquin. 2016 – The leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, Pedro Sánchez, resigns. He would return to the position a year later. 2017 – Fifty-eight people are killed and 869 others injured in a mass shooting at a country music festival at the Las Vegas Strip in the United States; the gunman, Stephen Paddock, later commits suicide. 2018 – The International Court of Justice rules that Chile is not obliged to negotiate access to the Pacific Ocean with Bolivia. 2019 – Kuopio school stabbing: one dies and ten are injured when Joel Marin, armed with a sabre, attacks a school class at Savo Vocational College in Kuopio, Finland. 2021 – The 2020 World Expo in Dubai begins. Its opening was originally scheduled for 20 October 2020 but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[newscafe-asifistan]

New York’s Time Square lights up for Kashmir Siege Day

Kuala Lumpur, 06 August 2020: New York’s Times Square has lit up with words for Kashmir on Wednesday, marking one year of stripping the Jammu & Kashmir of its statehood with plans to change the Muslim majority demographics in the valley.

According to media reports, the Indian American Public Affairs Committee earlier had planned to advertise images of the Hindu deity Lord Ram as well as 3D images of the Ram Temple scheduled to be built on the land of the demolished Babri Mosque on August 5.

The same day, the Bhoomi Pujan was held in India, which started with India’s Prime Minister setting a silver brick into the ground of Babri Mosque, marking the ground-breaking ceremony of the Temple’s construction. 

For displaying the advertisements, a giant NASDAQ billboard was leased, along with a 17,000-square-foot wrap-around LED display screen.

However, the ads did not run as planned when the day began.

The billboards lit up with “Kashmir Siege Day”, “Kashmiri Lives Matter” and the hashtag “#KashmirisWantFreedom” instead, as booked later by the Kashmir-affiliated activists.

The activist groups also wrote a letter to New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio, asking him to stop the “brazen celebration of hatred and Islamophobia.

After few hours, the Lord Ram Temple’s ads did appear briefly for every 15 minutes, but was stopped on the early afternoon.

While the ads were running, a minivan circled around Times Square with counter-ads with vivid descriptions on the background of the Lord Ram Temple and Babri demolition, according to sources.

Later on, multiple protests broke out at the scene against the ads, led by various groups. Pro-Hindutva groups were also present there, who clashed with the Anti-Hindutva Sikh groups later on.

The ads for Kashmir were not taken off when the day ended, sources have said.

Media reports have later confirmed that the billboards will run for a week to protest the abrogation of Article 370 on its first anniversary.  

06 August 2020, 03:30 PM 

[queerbrownfeminist]

Kashmir - Don’t Blink

tw: police brutality, graphic images of injuries, rape, flashing/epilepsy tw

[video id: This is Kashmir under occupation in 107 seconds. Ready? Try not to blink. 3... 2... 1.... In August 2019, India revokes Kashmir’s semi-autonomous special status. Insert is a clip of India’s Prime Minister Modi saying, “This is dawn of a new era” in hindi. Escalating their reign of terror. Communication shut down. Media blackout. Propaganda. Fake News. Because India (really) wants to hide its OPPRESSION. Insert is a clip of state sanctioned violence. In the background, chants of “Azaadi,” freedom in Urdu is heard. Seventy two long brutally fascist, record-shattering, completely inhuman years later, this is what Kashmir looks like: 738,000 Indian troops deployed. That is one solider for every eleven civilians in Kashmir. $1.4 billion lost in two months. (Economy shattered) 8 million people disconnected. Every single one. Every last one. 4000 people arrested. Bye Bye Democracy. Countless injuries, wounds, death and the Kashmir Valley, yes the Kashmir Valley now looks like this. Insert images of heavily militarized Kashmir Valley. While the Indian army has complete impunity to kill, abuse, rape. Yes, we said rape. 5000+ reported victims. Fact. Just how India has turned Kashmir into the world’s largest prison in 2019. Oh yeah, and the pellet guns. License to blind. (ICYMI) Shot in the face. Insert images of people shot in the face with pellet guns and showing other injuries.  17 killed, 6211 injured. 718 blinded. Even children. Tick Tock. And it gets worse. Nearly 6000 unmarked graves. Abductions. 8000 people have “disappeared.” All leaders under arrest. No political representation allowed. #Fascism. #RealFascism. And its not just physical. 45% adults under distress. 50% women suffer depression. 22% women have PTSD. Only one psychiatric hospital and 215,000 children are orphans. But Kashmir won’t give up on its DREAM. Insert is numerous clips of protests. A man cries out, “What do we want?” in hindi, following the crowd chants back, “Azaadi” multiple times. Are the leaders of the world listening? And oh, check out all this other stuff: Kashmiris have endured electrocution, stripped naked, electrocuted in genitals, hanged upside down, aeroplane stress position, head dunked..... [video cuts to all the violence inflicted upon Kashmiris] And now you know. Which means it is the the time for you to act. #StandWithKashmir end id]

[likhdoo]

It's better to die fighting for freedom than to live life in chains. Let's show solidarity for the people of Kashmir.

[areyoufuckingserioussenpai]

Re blogging because its been a year under siege and the world leaders sit.

Kashmir Issue

How long are we gonna stay silent for those who can't raise their voices?

How long till this genocide continues?

Who decides who is worthy of living and who isn't?

We've turned a blind eye to so many for so long, just because there's nothing in it for us. There's no money, no business. So we ignore it. We ignore people being killed by people. We're so divided and yet claim that the world is "progressing"?! Where is this progress? Does is come with the right to kill and take over anyone's land as we wish, just so that you can benefit from the loss of thousands? The world is full of hypocrisy.

[addnoral]

Youm-e-Istehsal observed

Youm-e-Istehsal was observed across Pakistan Friday to mark the completion of the third year of Indian military siege of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir and denounce an illegal and immoral step to end its special status. A series of activities, including seminars and conferences, to mark the day were held in the federal capital, like the rest of the country, to express solidarity with…

[zfyn]

Please pay attention to what is going on in Kashmir right now. Please discuss this even if you aren’t Kashmiri. Please spread the word.

Kashmir is going through an internet blockade. Over 35,000+ Indian troops have been deployed in a region with reportedly half a million Indian troops already present. In the past couple of days, leaders, activists, and journalists have been detained. Businesses, schools, and all transportation have been shut off. City streets and rural villages are being patrolled by Indian military forces. People continue to be locked in their homes as a curfew was declared. 

All this without a clarification or explanation from the government. However, the government has scrapped Kashmir’s special status pertaining to a law (section 35A) that gives the Kashmir government the right to decide who qualifies as a ‘permanent resident’. (Only permanent residents can acquire land, settle, and get government jobs, scholarships in Kashmir.)  Former chief ministers and leaders of Kashmir have warned the Indian government against tampering of the law as it could lead to increased distress in the region. 1/3rd of the the world’s second largest army is currently in Kashmir. The region (which is already intensively militarized for the past 3 decades) is under siege. The people of Kashmir have no say in this major decision that is being made about their homeland by the Indian government and their response to it being silenced. The current Indian government also has a lengthy record of fascism, fear mongering and promotion of communal disharmony within the country.

The people of Kashmir have been exposed to extreme militarization, human rights violations, and brutal responses to their resistance. As militarization peaks up in Kashmir within the last few days, the international community must take action before it’s too late. It is critical to make sure the future of these people is secure and safe. As Kashmir goes under communication blackout, it becomes our duty to amplify their voices.

More info: guardian & aj  | via withkashmir, standwkashmir and mc

[saintvellum]

thank you so much for 1k. i truly appreciate it so much, youʼve paid this awkward girl way too much attention!

this might be a little strange, but that I have even a bit of a substantial following makes me feel responsible for highlighting an issue that hardly anyone is talking about, for how terrible it is. in case you have not heard about it, kashmir is under siege. I encourage you to read about the abrogation of article 370 and how it affects the kashmiri people.

currently the curfew means that there are women in labour who do not make it to the hospital, patients who cannot get medical facilities. Indian doctors are not being allowed to go into kashmir to offer services. there are people in the world who have family in kashmir that they have not talked to in weeks (I want you to think about what it feels like to not be able to have any news of your loved ones who you know are located in a politically violent, critical region). two days ago there has been a 5.6 earthquake in pakistani-administered kashmir (that is adjacent to the Indian-occupied territory) and people do not have news of their families. not only that. the Indian forces are killing people. there is footage of huge stretches of roads with these enormous blood stains all over it. there is roughly a soldier for every 10 civilians. 70,000 people have been killed. 8000 have disappeared. countless women are being raped and there are people in the government upholding this curfew who are making rape jokes about kashmiri women. there is a genocide going on and I donʼt understand how the world can possibly choose to be silent about it. we went blue for sudan. it made a difference. why is there not moral outrage, why does no one outside of india and pakistan care about what is happening? we really need international support because there is likely no way for a peaceful resolution without intervention. we have a voice. we can choose to make our dissent known so the authorities are pressured to act.

please talk about kashmir. I am begging this of you. the largest democracy in the world is holding 7 million people under siege. please talk about it.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 10.1 (after 1950)

1953 – Andhra State is formed, consisting of a Telugu-speaking area carved out of India's Madras State. 1953 – A United States-South Korea mutual defense treaty is concluded in Washington, D.C. 1955 – The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is established. 1957 – The motto In God We Trust first appears on U.S. paper currency. 1958 – The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics is replaced by NASA. 1960 – Nigeria gains independence from the United Kingdom. 1961 – The United States Defense Intelligence Agency is formed, becoming the country's first centralized military intelligence organization. 1961 – East and West Cameroon merge to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon. 1961 – The CTV Television Network, Canada's first private television network, is launched. 1962 – James Meredith enters the University of Mississippi, defying racial segregation rules. 1964 – The Free Speech Movement is launched on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. 1964 – Japanese Shinkansen ("bullet trains") begin high-speed rail service from Tokyo to Osaka. 1966 – West Coast Airlines Flight 956 crashes with no survivors in Oregon. This accident marks the first loss of a DC-9. 1968 – Guyana nationalizes the British Guiana Broadcasting Service, which would eventually become part of the National Communications Network, Guyana. 1969 – Concorde breaks the sound barrier for the first time. 1971 – Walt Disney World opens near Orlando, Florida. 1971 – The first practical CT scanner is used to diagnose a patient. 1975 – Muhammad Ali defeats Joe Frazier in a boxing match in Manila, Philippines. 1978 – Tuvalu gains independence from the United Kingdom. 1979 – Pope John Paul II begins his first pastoral visit to the United States. 1979 – The MTR, Hong Kong's rapid transit railway system, opens. 1982 – Helmut Kohl replaces Helmut Schmidt as Chancellor of Germany through a constructive vote of no confidence. 1982 – EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) opens at Walt Disney World in Florida. 1982 – Sony and Phillips launch the compact disc in Japan; on the same day, Sony releases the model CDP-101 compact disc player, the first player of its kind. 1985 – Israel-Palestinian conflict: Israel attacks the Palestine Liberation Organization's Tunisia headquarters during Operation Wooden Leg. 1987 – The 5.9 Mw  Whittier Narrows earthquake shakes the San Gabriel Valley with a Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe), killing eight and injuring 200. 1989 – Denmark introduces the world's first legal same-sex registered partnerships. 1991 – Croatian War of Independence: The Siege of Dubrovnik begins. 1994 – Palau enters a Compact of Free Association with the United States. 2000 – Israel-Palestinian conflict: Palestinians protest the murder of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah by Israeli police in northern Israel, beginning the "October 2000 events". 2001 – Militants attack the state legislature building in Kashmir, killing 38. 2009 – The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom takes over the judicial functions of the House of Lords. 2012 – A ferry collision off the coast of Hong Kong kills 38 people and injures 102 others. 2014 – A series of explosions at a gunpowder plant in Bulgaria completely destroys the factory, killing 15 people. 2014 – A double bombing of an elementary school in Homs, Syria kills over 50 people. 2015 – A gunman kills nine people at a community college in Oregon. 2015 – Heavy rains trigger a major landslide in Guatemala, killing 280 people. 2015 – The American cargo vessel SS El Faro sinks with all of its 33 crew after steaming into the eyewall of Hurricane Joaquin 2017 – An independence referendum, later declared illegal by the Constitutional Court of Spain, takes place in Catalonia. 2017 – Fifty-eight people are killed and 869 others injured in a mass shooting at a country music festival at the Las Vegas Strip in the United States; the gunman, Stephen Paddock, later commits suicide. 2018 – The International Court of Justice rules that Chile is not obliged to negotiate access to the Pacific Ocean with Bolivia.

[diaryofanangryasianguy]

12/30/19

Kashmir remains under siege on 148th day today

Besides restrictions in force under Section 144, the continued suspension of prepaid mobile phone, text messaging, and internet services has compounded the miseries of the besieged people of the occupied territory. The Internet ban has dealt a severe blow to all small and big ventures employing hundreds of thousands of employees.

Meanwhile, in blatant violation of the local and international laws, the occupation authorities have opened jobs for non-locals at the High Court of the territory. Some 33 non-gazetted posts were advertised in different categories without restricting, for the first time, the outsiders to apply for the jobs. The move is seen by locals as transgression on their fundamental rights.

[fdhfjdafdajfa]

Troops surging in Manipur, prices on bulk foods skyrocketing. Colleges requisitioned for housing of soldiers. 

This is exactly what Kashmir was like the day before the siege.

This is no longer a Kashmir problem. India has gone full military dictatorship, days after patting itself on the ass for its democratic “victory” -- two fascist parties have to share power in Maharashtra in order to form a majority.

[x]

[museumofkashmir]

A day after the #GawKadalMassacre, the city was under a siege. An armoured vehicle accompanied by Indian troops stands in the old city of Srinagar. #Kashmir #KashmirHistoryProject #KashmirInPhotos — view on Instagram https://ift.tt/38yfvXt

[awesome-qb-news-5-us]

PTI Sindh conducts train march on Kashmir Siege Day

PTI Sindh conducts train march on Kashmir Siege Day

[ad_1]

KARACHI: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Sindh chapter has conducted a ‘Train March’ from Karachi to Sukkur on the occasion of ‘Youm-e-Istehsal-e-Kashmir’ being observed across the country and other parts of the world today to express solidarity with Kashmiri people, ARY News reported.

PTI Member Provincial Assembly (MNA) from Sindh Haleem Adil Sheikh symbolically labelled the train…

[taruntejpal]

Tarun Tejpal - The Thin Red Line

I WAS AMONG several who saw him die. His name was Surjit Singh Penta, and the year was 1988. A smartly calibrated siege of the Golden Temple had just ended in the surrender of all the militants holed up inside the Harmandir Sahib, the Temple’s sanctum sanctorum. As they filed out and squatted in the courtyard of the serai on the Temple’s periphery, a sudden commotion broke out. The police spotters had recognised a major militant. But before they could lay hands on him, he had swallowed his cyanide pill, and though the police threw him into a jeep to rush him to hospital, he was dead. Penta’s story deserves telling because it illustrates the pathology of oppression. The young Sikh was a national-level athlete representing Delhi before he became a witness to the brutal Sikh massacres of 1984. By the time he committed suicide a few years later more than 40 killings were attributed to him.

Before he became a terrorist Penta had been terrorised by the state — or its malign absence. That is often the sequence: the state’s excesses, followed by those of the individual. The line between law enforcement and high-handedness is always very thin. In India, dangerously, it is being smudged every day. Are Naxalites victims before they become perpetrators? Are young militants in the north-east and Kashmir brutalised before they become brutal? Is the ordinary citizen meted out insensitivity before he becomes desensitised? What does one say about a country where one turns to the police with trepidation, where no one expects the men in khaki to do the right thing?

While extreme viewpoints have a right to exist in a free society, it goes without saying that no one ought to have any sympathy for the positions of bigoted groups and individuals. The kind who base their existence on perilous ideas of divine rights, exclusion of unbelievers, intolerance, violence, and a preferred way of life to which everyone else must conform. If SIMI is one such organisation, it deserves our criticism and scorn. If it is breaking the law and fomenting hatred, it deserves to be rigorously investigated and brought to justice. But what if it is a target of widespread and growing prejudice? What if the drive against it is misdirected and designed to seed more terror than it aims to suppress? And while steel may cut steel, as the old Hindi saw goes, can prejudice ever neutralise prejudice?

For the seven years since SIMI has been outlawed, state agencies have been insisting that the outfit is an anti-national organisation engaged in conspiracies to destabilise the government through acts of terror; and that it brazenly preaches sedition, being closely linked with Pakistanbased terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Tyaba, Hizb-ul- Mujahideen, and the Jaish-e-Mohammed. Alleged SIMI activists stand accused of some of the worst terrorist crimes on Indian soil, including bomb blasts that killed 187 people in Mumbai’s local trains two years ago.

BUT A three-month long investigation by TEHELKA — carried out all over the country — reveals that a large majority of these cases are redolent of a chilling and systematic witch-hunt against innocent Muslims. Sadly, the expose shows it is not just the policing and intelligence agencies that are to blame — even the judicial process is often complicit in the terrible miscarriage of justice. Ajit Sahi’s painstaking and remarkable reportage reveals a shocking web of dubious cases being pursued against so-called operatives of SIMI — cases which lack evidence, cases which flagrantly ignore standard procedures of criminal investigation and trial, cases that callously destroy the lives of young men and their families.

The Indian state must tread carefully. The individual tragedies point to a wider psychosis. For the last many years — abetted by global trends — the state’s actions and utterances seem to be deepening a prejudice against Muslims. Catching the mood, Bollywood’s arch villains are now mostly Islamic. India has 160 million Muslims - more than Pakistan, more than any other country save Indonesia. Even if 10,000 are radicalised it’s barely a tree in a forest. To create an atmosphere that blights the entire forest is a mistake. To foster a psychology of siege in an entire community is a disaster. Before it seeks further bans, the state ought to vigorously introspect. William Faulkner wrote that “prejudice is shown to be the most destructive when it is internalised”. TEHELKA’s detailed investigation suggests, alarmingly, that in the shining struggling India of today there is a real danger of that.

In a 28-year career as a journalist, Tarun Tejpal has been an editor with the India Today and The Indian Express groups, and the Managing Editor of Outlook. He is the founder of Tehelka- which has garnered international fame for its aggressive public interest journalism. In 2001, Asia Week listed Tarun j Tejpal as one of Asia’s 50 most powerful communicators, and Business Week declared him among 50 leaders at the forefront of change in Asia. Tarun Tejpal's debut novel, The Alchemy of Desire, was hailed by The Sunday Times as ‘an impressive and memorable debut’, and by Le Figaro as a ‘masterpiece’. In 2007, The Guardian, UK, named him among the 20 who constitute India’s new elite.

Tarun Tejpal’s second novel, The Story of My Assassins was published in 2009 to rave reviews. Pankaj Mishra has said, ‘It sets new and hauntingly high standards for Indian writing in English’, while Altaf Tyrewala has called it ‘an instant classic’.