Amador activist fights against Islamo-Fascism for Rojava, part 2

Part 2 of Winslow's story on Michael Israel was never published in the Amador Ledger Dispatch; the newspaper was purchased by a competitor before it was completed. The article below completes the two-part series. Part 1 can be read here. 

Jackson resident Michael Israel (center) spent the last two years of his life fighting against ISIS as part of the YPG.

Amador activist fights against Islamo-Fascism for Rojava, part 2
By Eric Winslow

Michael Israel, a 27-year old Amador County resident currently risking his life in the autonomous northern Syrian region of Rojava in order to fight a pseudo-Islamic guerrilla state that has taken over large parts of Syria and Iraq, has an urgent message to Amador County residents and all other people of good will: "I'm calling on all of my friends and comrades to learn about the Rojava revolution and how they have been leading the charge in the war against ISIS fascists. I'm calling on all of you who are able, to do your part in helping or sending donations so that this revolution may become stronger with the aid of the international community."

The struggle to which Israel fervently summons us is now taking shape as one of a unique and important opportunity to build a equitable, democratic community based in values of ecological sustainability and mutual aid. The Rojava experiment finds its inspiration in the thought of Murray Bookchin, a late twentieth-century theorist and writer whom many activists all but ignored during his lifetime, but whose work has become an inspiration to Abdullah Öcalan, one of the most beloved leaders in the struggle for the Kurdish liberation. Bookchin's peculiar take on an ecological and humanistic style of social libertarianism provides the vision for the way of life for which the men and women of Rojava, along with the eager comrades in the International Brigades, struggle.

Michael Israel, fighting alongside the men and women of YPG and YPJ, which are the combat units of the Rojava community, says that his current way of life among the Kurdish people is "Both the most inspiring thing I've ever experienced and also the most humbling. Many of these people have nothing by western standards. Maybe this war killed their families, or their homes were destroyed, or maybe they lived their entire lives in mud villages without running water or electricity. I've seen old Kurdish men put on uniforms and pick up rifles because their children had been killed. I've known Arab fighters in YPG who have scars on their backs from being whipped or have had fingers cut off from when ISIS conquered their villages." Israel said that he has met victims of explosive devices, called IED's, who had lost limbs, ask to return to the frontline after they had been outfitted with a prosthetic and had a minimal amount of physical therapy. "Seeing these things and hearing these stories really underscores how different, luxurious and safe our lives in the US are," said Israel, "It really is a privilege for me as an American to travel here, by choice, to help their fight, it is a privilege that they don't have."

The Kurdish people, according to Israel, fight against the odds because they must. The most amazing are the women of YPJ. Israel said, "Not only can you always count on them to fight with as much or often more ferocity than any man, but they are also breaking the ground in providing a radical feminist counter to patriarchy as a system of oppression, sexual objectification and destroying the status quo in society of power always in the hand of wealth political men and the status quo at home of power literally being the hand of a controlling husband or father."