First up, Jimmy Dore.
Rachel Maddow is a fake ass. She's never given a damn about anyone. She was a conservative lesbian until she went to AIR AMERICA RADIO. She faked her concern about immigrants when Donald Trump was in office -- even though she'd never used her time at MSNBC or, before that, at AIR AMERICA RADIO to even note immigration issues.
Now Joe's president and, like a good whore, Rachel Maddow is there to pretend like there are no immigration problems today when, in fact, Joe Biden's putting ''kids in cages.'' Rachel is a liar and a fake ass and if MSNBC had any brains, they would've let her go, because she's got no career left. The young people are on to her and her limited audience is aging.
I forget, everyone doesn't read THE COMMON ILLS. Rachel is a conservative. And she hangs with conservatives. After she became big on MSNBC, Bob Somerby was surprised that she was friends with this conservative and that conservative.
Bob's not very smart or informed.
C.I. is. That's what makes THE COMMON ILLS required reading. Ann Coulter had a little admirer. He was getting slammed -- rightly -- for lying to praise her. And Rachel took to her AIR AMERICA post to defend the article in question and to justify it. She forgot to tell listeners that the writer was her friend. Oops! It was left to C.I. to expose that friendship and to make clear that the writer Rachel pretended on air not to know was in fact her friend and someone who called her "my angel." Rachel spent a week's worth of shows on AAR defending the piece this man wrote but never found time to tell listeners that it was written by someone she knew, let alone one of her best friends.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Cook has an important article at ICH which concludes:
That won’t have made you a clearer thinker. It will have simply made you an angrier, less compromising, less compassionate thinker. It will have encouraged you to think in zero-sum terms. It will have pushed you away from anyone who does not espouse exactly your pieties. It will have made you less willing to consider the arguments of anyone who no longer echoes your binary view of the world. It will have made you a liberal-left version George W Bush, with his warning: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
That should not surprise us. A tribal left is bound to be the mirror image of a tribal right. They have different pieties, different slogans, but the same intolerance, the same self-righteousness, the same anger.
In tribal times like these, those who see the dangers of tribalism – that it is a tool for dividing us, for weakening us against the power-elites and a billionaire-owned media that relishes and stokes our tribalism – will struggle to be heard. Anything they say that isn’t for the tribe is assumed to be for the enemy. They have moved to the dark side.
In a time of tribalism, the left’s duty is to speak out loudly for solidarity. We need to remember that we are no less exposed to propaganda than the other tribe. That doesn’t mean we have to abandon our principles. But it does mean we have to remember they are as human as we are, that they have the same rights as us, that it is crucially important that we are fair and consistent, that our blindspots can be as big as theirs. Because otherwise we not only entrench our own tribalism, we entrench theirs too.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Those protests are being ignored -- again -- by the western press.
The protests continue this morning. And so does violence against the protesters. AL AHMAD TV reports today:
To mark the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, the Civil Development Organization in Sulaymaniyah launched an event to raise awareness on violence against women. The event featured women dummies lined up in the garden, who represented victims of violence. Visitors can hear their sorrowful stories through microphones attached to those dummies. According to the latest statistics, the number of victims of violence has surged despite deterrent laws. In the last 8 months, 10 women lost their lives in an honor killing.
Why was The #MeToo movement necessary in the US? Because women's rights are given lip service from time to time but not truly honored or recognized. And that is reflected in what US news outlets choose to cover when they cover foreign countries. Certainly, THE NEW YORK TIMES' go-go boys in the Green Zone, while getting really close with Iraqi women (prostitutes) elected to ignore the women of Iraq in print. To read those early year reports is to think that Iraq had no women in the whole country. THanks for all your 'ehlp John F. Burns and Dexy. Will you ever attone for what you did? Your wrok really does qualify as a journalistic crime.
And those crimes continue to this day. The pattern set by the 'golden boys' continues. So when Iraqi women fight for their rights, the western press looks the other way. Over and over. It's really past time that women with spaces -- coumnists like you, Michelle Goldberg -- started using your space to point out how your own outlets disappear women from the coverage.
JINHA WOMEN'S NEWS AGENCY reports:
Women in Southern Kurdistan are subjected to domestic violence. They are subjected to physical, psychological, verbal, and economic violence by their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. Many women set themselves on fire to get rid of violence. Neşmik Resul, a psychologist working at a hospital in Sulaymaniyah spoke to our agency about what causes women to set themselves on fire.
Emphasizing that the rate of women, who set themselves on fire, shows the rate of violence against women, Neşmik Resul said, “Before, we worked on survivors, women, men, and children, of self-immolation. 30% of women living in Sulaymaniyah have set themselves on fire. Some of them died before being taken to hospital. We don’t know exactly how many women and young people have set themselves on fire until now but their number is more than we know.”
Stating that the ages of women, who set themselves on fire, are between 14-35, Neşmil Resul said, “Domestic violence and economic problems are the main reason for women to set themselves on fire. Female survivors have received psychological support at the hospital now. They tell us, ‘If there was another choice, we wouldn’t have set us on fire.’ Women set themselves on fire because they think they don’t have another choice.”
“Female survivors are subjected to more violence”
Mentioning that women are afraid of telling violence against them, Neşmil Resul said, “Women don’t report violence faced by them because they are afraid. Female survivors are subjected to more violence by their husbands. Women have no right to make their decision.
“I am ready to provide psychological support to women”
“The survivors need psychological support and I am ready to provide psychological support to them,” Neşmin Resul told us.
These are stories that mater and they are stories that the few western outlets that bother to cover Iraq now manage to regularly miss.
They certainly missed a death in the region yesterday. Khanzad Organization notes:
A police officer was killed by an armed suspect while responding to a domestic violence call late Saturday in Sulaimani according to officials. Several others were injured.
A person who was subject to a complaint clashed with police units from Sulaimani’s Directorate of Combatting Violence Against Women who were in the process of arresting him, the directorate’s media head Jamal Rasul told Rudaw following the accident.
Police officer Mohammed Latif was killed and three others were injured, he added. The alleged suspect also set the police car on fire, Rasul noted.
