https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwowpuUCT-s
Sunday, September 5, 2021
Journalist Assaulted at Anti-Vax Protest Shares SHOCKING New Detail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THjDbzwzypg
THE DRAFT HAS BEEN EXPANDED TO WOMEN
https://popularresistance.org/the-draft-has-been-expanded-to-women/
House And Senate Armed Services Committees Voted On The 1st.
Today the House Armed Services Committee joined the Senate Armed Services Committee in voting 35-24 to expand registration for a possible military draft to include young women as well as young men.
Following today’s House committee vote and an earlier Senate committee vote in July (before Congress’s summer vacation), the versions of the annual “must-pass” National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to be considered later this fall in both the House and Senate will include provisions requiring women to register for the draft within 30 days of their 18th birthday and report to the Selective Service System each time they change their address until their 26th birthday, as young men have been required to do since 1980.
An alternative compromise amendment to suspend draft registration unless the President declared a national emergency and put the Selective Service System into standby was submitted before today’s committee session, but ruled out of order on the basis of arcane PAYGO procedural rules. Under the same rules, the amendment to the NDAA to expand draft registration to women was ruled in order, considered, and adopted without any antiwar opposition from members of the committee.
Floor amendments may be proposed when the NDAA is considered by the full House and/or the Senate to repeal the Military Selective Service Act, end draft registration entirely, abolish the Selective Service System, or put Selective Service into “standby” as it was from 1975-1980. But even if such amendments are proposed and put to a vote, they have little chance of success in either the House or the Senate.
It’s now overwhelmingly likely that the Fiscal Year 2022 NDAA to be adopted in late 2021 or early 2022 will authorize the President to order women to register for the draft at age 18, starting in 2023 with women born in 2005 and after.
It’s Time To Shift Our Anti-Draft Focus From Congressional Lobbying To Resistance.
In the most obvious sense, the attempt to get young women to register for the draft and report changes of address to the Selective Service System is bound to fail. Few young men comply with the registration and address reporting requirements, and even fewer young women are likely to do so. Widespread noncompliance has rendered registration of men unenforceable, and the proposed legislation to expand draft registration to women includes no plan or budget for enforcement.
Women have all the same reasons to oppose the draft as men do, plus additional reasons of their own. As I pointed out in my testimony in 2019 to the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (which invited no draft-age women to testify about whether they should or could be forced to register), “Both feminist and anti-feminist women will be more likely to resist being forced into the military than men have been, and more people will support them in their resistance. There’s a long tradition of antiwar feminism that identifies militarism and war with patriarchy. Women have been an important part of draft resistance movements even when only men were being drafted and when most public attention has been on male resisters.”
Now the tables are turned, and it’s time for men to support young women in their resistance to the expansion of draft registration, just as it’s time for older people to support young people as allies in their resistance to an age-based draft.
But if expanding draft registration to women is bound to fail, draft registration is already unenforceable and has been so for decades, an attempt to bring back the draft is unlikely, and the registration database would be less than useless (in the opinion of a former Director of the Selective Service System) for an actual draft, why should we care about draft registration or make it a priority to support draft registration resistance?
The flaw in the thinking behind this question is the mistaken assumption that the primary goal of anti-draft activism is to protect young people from being drafted.
It should go without saying — but unfortunately doesn’t —that the primary victims of a U.S. draft are not draftees but the much larger numbers of people, mainly civilians, against whom draftees are deployed to wage war around the world, and the civilians at home, especially women and children, who are impacted by the violent masculinity in which soldiers are trained. That this is not taken for granted, and that draftees are conceptualized primarily as passive victims of the draft rather than as potentially empowered agents of obstruction of the war machine, is symptomatic of the ageism of most observers, even otherwise progressive ones. The ageist conceptualization of young people as passive “victims” of the draft denies them agency and blinds older people to the success of their nonviolent noncooperation with a system that seeks not only to oppress them but to use them to oppress others.
Since 1980, resistance to draft registration has won a profound victory over the state and the war machine: It has rendered draft registration unenforceable and prevented a draft.
But that victory is only partial. The function of draft registration is not so much to enable an actual draft as to enable war planners to pretend that the draft is a viable policy option, so that they can contemplate and commit the U.S. to larger, longer, less popular wars without having to consider whether enough people will volunteer to fight them. The real victory of draft resistance will be when the failure of draft registration and the consequent unavailability of a draft as a military “fallback” option is widely enough recognized that U.S. war planning and war making begin to to be constrained accordingly.
The failure of older allies to publicize and follow through on the success of draft registration resistance in preventing a draft, and thereby to realize the potential of that resistance to rein in military planning and adventurism, is directly attributable to their ageism.
Misconceiving their goal from the start as protecting vulnerable (read: powerless) young people from the draft rather than helping young people protect the world from wars that depend on young people as warriors, ageist anti-draft activists have assumed that as long as the threat of a draft has been eliminated, there is no further need or reason for anti-draft activism. As a result, many of them redirected their energy and their priorities for activism away from the issue of the draft, just when the success of draft registration resistance had brought it to the brink of a larger victory over planning and preparation for unlimited war(s).
Since the government has not yet been forced to admit that draft registration has failed, it has continued to plan and initiate one war after another on the assumption that, if it needs to do so, it can always fall back on a draft.
Draft resistance is not a lobbying strategy but a tactic of nonviolent direct action. Its success does not depend on Congress. Just the reverse: the government’s ability to wage war depends on the willingness of (young) people to fight. Young people have the power to prevent wars by opting not to fight them — and now young women are about to be given that power as well.
As Congress moves toward a vote to expand draft registration to young women as well as young men, it’s time to support all young people in their resistance and to educate, agitate, and organize against the draft and draft registration.
AFRICA’S UPRISING IS FROZEN, ITS CRY SWOLLEN WITH HOPE
By Vijay Prashad,
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
September 3, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/africas-uprising-is-frozen-its-cry-swollen-with-hope/
On 26 August, two deadly attacks on the perimeter of Kabul’s international airport killed over a hundred people, including a dozen US soldiers. The bombings struck people desperate to enter the airport and flee Afghanistan. Not long afterwards, the Islamic State of Khorasan (IS-K) took credit for the attack. Ten days before this attack, Taliban fighters had entered Kabul’s Pul-i-Charkhi prison and executed the IS-K leader Abu Umar Khorasani, also known as Zia ul Haq. Two days before his execution, as the Taliban advanced into Kabul, Abu Umar told the Wall Street Journal, ‘They will let me free if they are good Muslims’. Instead, the Taliban killed him and eight other IS-K leaders.
Since its formation in October 2014, IS-K, which operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has conducted over 350 attacks against Afghan, Pakistani, and US targets in these countries. The initial leadership of the group, Hafiz Saeed Khan and Sheikh Maqbool, came from Pakistan’s Tehrik-e Taliban (TTP); they joined with a former Taliban commander, Abdul Rauf Khadim, to create IS-K in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar. In 2018, a United Nations report pointed out that ISIS leadership in Iraq and Syria facilitated ‘the relocation of some of its key operatives to Afghanistan’, including Abu Qutaiba from Iraq and other fighters from Algeria, France, Russia, Tunisia, and the five Central Asian states. In 2016, the US government designated IS-K as a terrorist organisation; three years later, the US dropped a massive bomb on IS-K positions in Nangarhar. On 27 August, the US bombed targets in Nangarhar in retaliation for the Kabul bombing. ‘We know of no civilian casualties’, US Central Command credulously announced. A few days later, a US drone strike allegedly against IS-K targets killed ten Afghan civilians, including small children.
Since 2014, the Taliban has captured more and more territory in Afghanistan. In this period, IS-K forces clashed with the Taliban repeatedly, with IS-K contesting the Taliban’s claim to political Islam and deepening the sectarian attacks on Afghanistan’s minorities. The execution of Abu Umar Khorasani and the victory of the Taliban certainly provoked IS-K into the deadly attacks at Kabul airport. There is little danger of a return to the civil war of the 1990s, since IS-K simply does not have the capacity with its hundreds of fighters to contest the Taliban for power; nonetheless, it has the zealotry to cause damage to a country already badly broken by war and corruption.
Far to the southwest of Nangarhar, across the Arabian Sea, are the northern provinces of Mozambique. Here, armed fighters swept through the province of Cabo Delgado in 2017, attacking the city of Mocímboa da Praia. The fighters called themselves al-Shabab (‘The Youth’), with no connection to the terrorist organisation of the same name from Somalia. Rapidly, the fighters took their war to six of Mozambique’s main northern districts, taking five of their capitals. The one capital that was not captured in the early burst, Palma, is the centre of a massive project developed by the French energy company Total and by the US energy company ExxonMobil. They have a stake in one of Africa’s largest natural gas reserves, which is worth more than $120 billion. Both companies suspended their operations as the fighters advanced on Palma, which they took in March of 2021.
Researchers at Observatório do Meio Rural (OMR) and Cabo Ligado have shown that these fighters are from the region and are not affiliated with any international Islamist project. OMR’s João Feijó found that the leaders of al-Shabab are mainly from Mozambique, but a few are from Tanzania. The main leader of al-Shabab is Bonomade Machude Omar, who was born in Palma, raised in the government and Islamic schools of Mocímboa da Praia, and trained in Mozambique’s military forces before he began gathering several youths under his wing to fight against the extreme poverty of Mozambique’s northern provinces. They formed al-Shabab.
After al-Shabab’s rapid advances, Bonomade Machude Omar is known to have talked about his connection to the Islamic State, although there is no evidence of any organisational connection between the groups in West Asia and southern Africa. Nonetheless, on 6 August, the US State Department designated al-Shabab – or ISIS-Mozambique, as the United States calls it – as a terrorist organisation and defined Bonomade Machude Omar as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. Once al-Shabab was described as ISIS-Mozambique, full military force could be deployed into northern Mozambique.
A senior advisor at the Southern African Development Community (SADC) told me that African capitals buzzed with fearful anticipation that the United States and France would launch an assault on northern Mozambique to protect the assets of Total and ExxonMobil. ‘That is perhaps why they called the fighters ISIS-Mozambique’, he told me on the day that the Taliban entered Kabul. On 28 April, Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi met with Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame in Kigali to discuss al-Shabab. Ten days later, Rwandan officers arrived in Cabo Delgado on a reconnaissance mission, followed shortly afterwards by 1,000 Rwandan troops. The senior advisor says that the United States and Israel – which is close to Kagame – authorised the mission. Shortly afterwards, SADC sent a Mission in Mozambique (SAMIM) with troops from SADC countries (Botswana, Lesotho, and South Africa) along with troops from Angola and Tanzania. They have weakened al-Shabab’s hold on the cities of northern Mozambique.
Both SADC’s Stergomena Tax (whose tenure as executive secretary came to an end on 31 August) and South Africa’s Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula complained of Rwanda’s unilateral decision to intervene. While both Rwanda and SAMIM are interventions of African states, the main institution of the continent – the African Union (AU) – has not deliberated on this at its Peace and Security Council (the AU’s chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat, did, however, welcome Rwanda’s intervention). Neither Mozambique, SADC, nor the AU have crafted a comprehensive plan regarding northern Mozambique; the country’s problems are rooted in its inequality, poverty, and corruption, intensified by the influence of French and US transnational energy firms.
The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier on US-French military intervention on the African continent offers a framework to understand the role of US-French commercial interests. In June, France’s Emmanuel Macron said that he would withdraw half the French troops from Operation Barkhane in Mali; this kind of ‘withdrawal’ is part of Macron’s presidential campaign for the 2022 elections and not a real withdrawal. In fact, France’s real intervention is in the creation of platforms such as G-5 Sahel (a French-led military project that consists of Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Chad, and Burkina Faso), whose existence undermines the advancement of the African Union and of African sovereignty. Groups such as G-5 Sahel justify their existence by saying that they are fighting groups such as the Islamic State. They do not honestly state their objectives: to maintain control over key regions and countries of the continent and, in so doing, retain exclusive access to their mineral and natural resources.
The UN is correct in its July report that the expansion of the Islamic State in Africa is a ‘striking development’. But even more striking are the underlying problems: the control and theft of resources and the attendant social problems produced by this theft, namely the great distress experienced by the people of Africa. For example, half of the population of the Central African Republic (CAR) struggle with hunger; the entry of Rwandan troops into the country in 2019 is hardly the solution to the crisis. In Afghanistan, just like CAR, half the population lives in poverty and a third are food insecure, while two thirds lack access to electricity.
In Mozambique, meanwhile, it is estimated that 80% of the population cannot afford an adequate diet, while 2.9 million people face high levels of acute food insecurity. The real security problems are food insecurity and the humiliations of poverty, which produce all kinds of unrest – including al-Shabab.
Mozambique’s liberation in 1975 started in Cabo Delgado, which is now torn by the current conflict. That liberation war ran from 1962 and was led by the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO). A significant part of the liberation war was the war to decolonise culture, which produced Moçambicanidade, the sensibility of the new revolution. Noémia de Sousa was one of the great poets of Moçambicanidade, whose work was published in O Brado Africano (‘The African Roar’). Her words from 1958 dance through this newsletter:
If you want to understand me
come, bend over my African soul,
the black dockworkers’ groans,
the Tshopi’s frenzied dances,
the Shanganas’ rebellion,
the strange melody which flows
from a native song through the night.
And ask me no more
if you want to know me…
for I’m nothing more than a shell of flesh
where Africa’s uprising froze,
its cry swollen with hope.
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