pictures of demonstrators at Zuccotti Park from last week’s protest in solidarity with the demonstrators being beaten down and tear-gassed in Istanbul.

I got some great pictures at the protest last Saturday for Occupy Wall Street. There were several thousand people at Zuccotti /Liberty Plaza for the festivities (the media, even the left friendly media, stated ‘hundreds’. Off by a zero). While many were Turkish, many were old veterans of the Occupy Movement. People’s Puppets was on hand, as was Guitarmy. There was a drumming circle or two.

Of course, can’t show you my pictures–they’re locked up owing to an O/S clusterf*ck on my old Dell machine. Someday they’ll be posted. I’m becoming a Luddite, how about you?

Some concerns voiced post-demonstration about the factions within Turkey that are rising up. Turkey has always been something of an odd man out in NATO–they’re the only Muslim country in the alliance, and that has lead to some divergence between the stances taken by the leadership and the desires of the ‘man in the street’ in Istanbul. And many in Turkey have a very different opinion on the conduct of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza than the rest of NATO–and the country has acted accordingly. Also, this–Many years ago (when I was researching the life and death of Green Party founder Petra Kelly), I found out some interesting positions the Turkish government had taken in the 1990’s with regard to the Free Kurdistan movement, and the way the US was playing the Kurdish activists (a Free Kurdistan would carve territory out of Turkey). It’s worth a book all by itself, but one of the many interesting factoids that always makes my ‘spidey-conspiracy sense‘ go into high gear is a lot of deaths at the same time. It’s awfully odd that one of the last campaigns Kelly had embarked on was support for an independent Kurdistan, and she and virtually everyone in the leadership that she’d met with in the summer of 1992 was murdered within a two month period (though Kelly’s death was ascribed to murder/suicide by her lover Gert Bastian. You can look it up).

My sense is that Turkey’s history puts their uprising on a somewhat different path than what Occupy has been part of up to now. That said, people who are engaging in non-violent civil disobedience against their politicians deserve support.

Salaam, Shalom, Pax, Namaste.