RT reports:
The US-led coalition fighting Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) on Wednesday admitted to killing at least 855 civilians in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in the past four years. “To date, based on information available, CJTF-OIR assesses at least 855 civilians have been unintentionally killed by coalition strikes since the start of Operation Inherent Resolve,” the US Central Command said in its monthly civilian casualty report. The coalition conducted a total of 29,225 strikes between August 2014 and the end of February 2018, and during this period the total number of reports of possible civilian casualties was 2,135. The total number of credible reports of civilian casualties during this time period was 224, according to the statement. It said that 522 reports are still open.
That's what they are now admitting to. You can be sure the actual count of civilians killed in airstrikes is much higher.
Not that I think the gun violence march in America was irrelevant but the children of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine would like to be safe
in school and at home.
Where are the marches for these children? Why is the world so silent when it comes to them?
Yes, we're back to the issue of does violence only matter when effects White kids in the US? Do the lives of Iraqis -- including Iraqi children -- not matter at all?
Ajamu Baraka (BLACK AGENDA REPORT) observes:
So, it was a good week for both bourgeois parties. The Democrats didn’t get called out for their collaboration with Trump and the Republicans on the budget. The Trump folks have more ammunition to use to mobilize their supporters in opposition to what they will frame as efforts to violate the constitution and take away their guns and give more power to a repressive government. Even the intelligence agencies benefited from the week’s events with attention being shifted away from the FBI scandal that is threatening to blow the cover off of official criminal activity to undermine the electoral process, not by the Russians, but unelected forces in the U.S. state.
But for those of us from the colonized Black and Brown zones of non-being, we can never allow ourselves to be distracted by the diversionary and accommodationist politics of the latest carefully crafted spectacle, especially one that purports to be advancing a superior moral politics.
We must always remind ourselves that some can march with the confidence that “their” government might be trusted with regulating weapons and protecting their lives but that the protection of our fundamental human rights rest with our ability to defend our collective rights, and no one else.
Through our painful lived experiences, we understand and must live by the insight provided by our dear brother, James Baldwin, who counseled us that we must be vigilant when our oppressors speak of morality and the sanctity of life:
“The “civilized” have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their “vital interests” are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death; these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the “sanctity” of human life, or the conscience of civilized world.”
Distraction can be deadly, let’s us get and stay woke.
Saturday's look-at-me-look-at-me tantrum accomplished nothing and was never going to accomplish anything while rubbing elbows with the likes of Senator Dianne Feinstein and others. It was an effort to release some steam from the system, a moment to distract from reality. When elements of Congress and the press stroke themselves to stroke the event, you know it was meaningless. As Glen Ford (BAR) points out:
There is “movement” afoot in the U.S., but it does not “arc towards justice.” Ever since Trump’s electoral victory, the collective national consciousness has been smothered in a maddening fog of manic, industrial-scale propaganda, spewed non-stop by corporate communications conglomerates working hand-in-glove with the most aggressive elements of the surveillance-intelligence “community” and the bi-partisan War Party. We are enveloped in a toxic miasma of Russia-hate that, by sheer weight and repetition, has infested every aspect of American political thought, distorting and subverting even the most progressive-minded “movements” struggling to find a way towards human dignity under late stage capitalism in a profoundly racist country. Voices for peace and social justice are asphyxiated in the pestilential plume -- unless they find their own air.
Damn right, there is a conspiracy -- possibly the loudest one in history! -- megaphoned by a billionaire-owned media screaming “War, War, War” day and night, fouling the public mind with pure reactionary malice. The duopoly contest has devolved into a dance of death between Donald Trump’s raw white supremacist nationalism and Democratic Party corporate imperial warmongering. Only fools claim there is space for progressive maneuver in the interstices between such forces.
We've been "Down So Long" Jewel notes but doing for-show and feel-good fauxtests won't change a thing ("Down So Long" first appears on Jewel's SPIRIT).
The realities of faux 'protest' and real protest were addressed when Ann Garrison interviewed Riva Enteen (BAR):
RE: Of course we support the cause of protecting lives, but there is an exceptionalism to believing it only applies to American lives and especially white lives. In a promotional video that Democracy Now played repeatedly during their broadcast of the Washington, DC March for Our Lives, former US soldiers said that they’d learned how to put assault rifles to good purpose in US wars, but didn’t want them aimed at US citizens.
Isn’t it time to stop aiming those guns—and our missiles, fighter jets, and drones—at the rest of the world? My mother was a member of Women Strike for Peace, founded in 1961 with the slogan “Stop the Arms Race, Not the Human Race,” and that has never been more true.
Women, the givers of life, are confronting the Pentagon in Washington, DC, October 20-21. We hope that all peace-loving people will consider this a chance to make a stand for peace. There will be local antiwar actions springing up, as they did during Occupy, so keep your ear to the ground, and watch for updates on our websiteand our Facebook page .
The action in DC is the Women's March on the Pentagon. This is the event Cindy Sheehan is one of the organizers of and that we've been noting here:An Open Invitation:
Women's March on the Pentagon
UPDATED ENDORSER'S LIST:
CLICK HERE ***
UPCOMING LOCAL ORGANIZING MEETINGS FOR
THE MARCH
(CINDY WILL BE LEADING):
NATIONAL ORGANIZING CONFERENCE CALL
WED, MARCH 21 (COMPLETED) CLICK HERE FOR SUMMARY AND RECORDING OF CALL
*
April 5th in Washington DC
CLICK HERE FOR WDC MEETING INFO
*
April 9th in Boston
*
April 12th in Long Island
APRIL 13TH: LANCASTER, PA
JUNE: CHICAGO, IL
contact Cindy Sheehan for
more info, to organize a meeting/action
in your area or ??
CindySheehan@MarchonPentagon.
TAX DEDUCTIBLE
People are dying. Don't expect kids raised on media fawning to tell you that. Certainly don't expect the corporate media to tell you that. All the corporate media does is lie.
Iraq has defeated IS and avoided the wave of Shia-on-Sunni violence that many thought would follow
Things are great in Iraq!
If you forget the fact that people are protesting in the streets because there are so few jobs. Or that the medical situation in Iraq is actually worse now than at any point in the history of this wave of the Iraq War. The brain drain got a big kick in the last six months but no one bothers to notice that -- the flight of needed professional from Iraq. There are enough beds for the orphans but Iraq did open a cat hotel this year so I guess that's the 'great' that THE ECONOMIST sees taking place.
B-b-b-but ISIS is defeated! Except they are not. ANADOLU AGENCY reports that yesterday saw 5 Iraqi soldiers killed when ISIS ambushed them at "a fake checkpoint on the road linking Mosul and the Tal Afar district."
But the corporate press can't stop their waves of Operation Happy Talk. It's been going on for years now and it's never turned out to be true. Hayder al-ABadi, for example, has promised to get the trains running. When I saw that a few days ago, I rolled my eyes as I remembered when we were sold that lie -- in THE NEW YORK TIMES, among other places. The trains were working, running and doing great! It took Deborah Haynes (TIMES OF LONDON) to expose that as a lie. But here we are, about twelve years later and they're trying to re-sell that failed talking point.
The following community sites updated:
