by SAROJINI SAHOO

(A still picture from the video ‘Original Sin’ (1993/94) by Polish female artist Alicja Zebrowska, who critically explores sex and sexuality. Setting the female body alongside religious symbolism has been a recurrent motif of avant-garde female Polish artists since the 1990s. )

Rebati, a country girl of Orissa in India in the end of nineteenth century, had intended to read and learn more though she could manage to learn many devotional songs, the bhajanas and could memorise the verses of Holy Bhagwat. Her father Shyambandhu Mohanty, a village tax collector for the local landlord Zamindars arranged for a private tutor named Basudev Mohapatra. This teacher, popularly known as Basu Master, was the only teacher of the village upper primary school and was graduated from Cuttack Normal School. Rebati’s grandma was against such a type of liberation to Rebati as she thought reading and writing were not the job for a girl. Instead, she should learn cooking, housekeeping, sewing or other skills which were meant for a girl. But Shyambandhu did not pay attention to his mother’s complaints.

During their tuition, a silent love affair was developed between that teacher and the student, although they did not express their feelings in a verbal manner. The story turned tragic mode when Shyambandhu and his wife died of Cholera, one after the other. The Zamindar overthrew the facilities given to Shyambandhu and the family was in distress. As Basudev was the only male person closer to that family, he came forward to take the responsibility of these two dismayed women. But perhaps God was more cruel than we thought and Basudev, while he was on a short tour to another examination, also died of Cholera, leaving Rebati and her grandma totally alone and without any support or shelter. Adding to these serial deaths and other consequences, Rebati’s grandma began to believe that these misfortunes were the result of a curse for Rebati’s education. She blamed and began to rebuke Rebati for her unusual role of showing interest in male chores. Rebati was harassed, mentally broken after the death of her parent and of her lover mentor Basudev and she felt herself sick and at last died, leaving the grandma lonely.

“Rebati,” written by Fakir Mohan Senapati in Oriya in 1898, is a landmark story of Indian fiction with many extraordinary and advanced qualities in comparison with other stories written at that time in Indian literature. It is the first story, written about middle class life. The stories of that time were mostly based on the royal family. It is also the premier story which dealt with feminism and especially with women’s right for education.

Some queries and doubts have been expressed by my students from time to time of how it could be possible for a ten-year-old girl to find herself mentally involved with a grown up man and why Shyambandhu did not send her to school when there was an upper primary school in the village. In the story, all the supporters of women’s education had died while the grandma, who differed with them and opposed female education remained alive until the end of the story. Did Fakirmohan want to send a message that education of females was a fatal decision for society?

Rebati was only a ten-year-old girl. Assuming the present day’s situation, a ten year old girl was a mere child for either marriage or for love. But if we consider the nineteenth century Indian culture, a ten-year-old girl is quite old enough for starting her young-age activities. In 1806, the age of marriage for a girl had been set at ten years old. The Special Marriage Bill raised it to 14 years old for Brahmos in 1872. And in 1891, the age was raised to 12 years old for all girls. But reformers considered this to be barbarically low and their attempts to raise the age of consent still further were seen by conservatives as an attack on Hindu culture.

The story was a unique presentation of social conditions in the countrysides in India. When contemporary readers try to imagine these conditions in comparison with those of today, it seems to them somehow unbelievable, impractical, and impossible, though these conditions were prevailing at that time. These consequences and change in scenario prove the tremendous social changes in our social life in the last century only.

In the eighteenth century, there was no standardised institutional education facilities for young children in India. They were taught reading, writing of Vernacular language, specially aimed with reading skill for all Puranas and Shastras, and perhaps a little arithmetic and Sanskrit. Reading and writing were not so mandatory for girls; they were taught cooking, sewing, and household management. Above all, education was a family responsibility, not a social obligation. The administration or the King’s court had nothing to do with this education system.

Perhaps the best known educational arrangement in pre-colonial India was lying with the hand of private tutors who opened the ‘village schools’ (known as ‘chahali’, ‘chatsala’ or ‘pathashala’) and it was a traditional ancestral occupation for such teachers. A legal entitlement to standardised instruction for all children was first implemented by the British in the eighteenth century and schools and colleges for vernacular and English education and even Madrassas for Arabic or Persian educations were established. But the education of females still remained in miserable condition as middle-class parents still did not like the idea of educating their girls with language or arithmetic.

At the beginning of nineteenth century, a British company started to educate Indians and opened schools for the children. In 1821, the Church Missionary Society of India decided to establish 30 schools for Hindu girls and Miss Mary Anne Cooke was asked to manage them. The first boarding school for girls was founded in Thirunelveli in that year. By1840, six schools with a total enrollment of 200 Hindu girls were constructed. Until the mid nineteenth century, the Church Missionary Society had an enrollment of 8,000 girls under its banner. In 1871, for the first time, a school for Hindu girls was set-up at Cuttack and even after the school ran for ten years, the number of girls had only increased to a mere 25 (Source: Utkal Deepika, Vol 16, No 44, Nov 5, 1881).

“Rebati” was written in 1898, where the protagonist’s father employed a village master for her daughter’s tuition at home. The story was not merely a love story as Rebati never asked for love from her mentor Basu Master. In the story, except a ‘smile,’ the readers could not access any picturisation of love ideas.

Fakir Mohan was associated with the first girls’ school of Orissa and after ten years after the school was established, it only four Hindu girls were enrolled. Senapati was one of the persons who got the attention of parents and urged them to send their girls to the school in larger numbers. But in his story, the family of Rebati has been ruined and her grandmother believed that this disaster was a result of enforcing girls’ education against tradition. Fakir Mohan was not an idealistic propagandist unlike other writers of his time. He didn’t want to glamourise girls’ education but tried to portray the idea of his contemporary society regarding this education.

Some critics try to project the central theme of the story of being confined to women’s education. But really, it is the first Indian short story which deals with the identity and sexuality of women. Female sexuality in the nineteenth century was oppressed by a patriarchal society. Though girls were married-off between the ages of 8-10 years old, the age limit of their grooms was not confined by the society of that time and it was normal to find a middle-aged man getting married to a girl his daughter’s age. Remarriage for a man was not banned while remarriage of a widow was not allowed.

Widows were supposed to live pious life after their husband died and were not allowed entry in any celebration. Their presence in any good work was considered to be a bad sign. Sometimes the heads of widows were also shaved.

Also, as a result of these child marriages, there were more problems such as increased birth rate, poor health of women due to repeated child bearing, and a high mortality rate among women and children.

The use of veil or the ‘purdah’ system in North India was also widely prevalent in nineteenth century. It was used to protect the women folk from the eyes of foreign rulers who invaded India in the medieval period. But this system also curtailed the freedom of women. Indian patriarchy at that time wanted to control a woman’s sexuality by subjecting different ethical moral rules on them.

It is no doubt a trauma for a girl to be married before she reaches puberty and to subject herself to ‘sex’ when she is not mentally or physically prepared for a ‘sexual relationship.’ Normal marital sexual relations for women [and girls] at that time often resulted in feelings of being raped. And they were supposed to live under these inhuman conditions for the sake of some implicit false moral code.

‘Gender’ was a central issue for the nationalists and reformists in colonial nineteenth century India. In middle of the twentieth century, when India gained independence, these issues were a central theme in democratic constitutions. The constitution laid the term and idea of ‘woman’ disuniting from the idea of ‘woman’ lying with colonial concept in the minds of people. [can’t figure this sentence out!]

The 86th constitutional amendment has also made elementary education a fundamental right for children between the ages of 6 and 14 years old. According to the 2001 census, the total literacy rate in India is 65.38 percent while the female literacy rate is only 54.16 percent. The gap between rural and urban literacy rate is also very significant in India. This is evident from the fact that only 59.4 percent of rural population is literate as compared to 80.3 percent of the urban population, according to the 2001 census.

In 1971, only 22 percent of Indian women were literate but by the end of 2001, 54.16 percent had achieved literacy. This represents an increase of around 33 percent. The growth of the female literacy rate is 14.87 percent as compared to 11.72 percent for males. These results would seem to indicate that there were now many ‘Rebatis’ emerging in Indian social life to greatly contribute to the needs of women for a free life away from and outside the control of patriarchal values.

Soon after, these ‘Rebatis’ found themselves in ‘bread-earner’ status, unlike their previous status of being solely dependent on ‘patriarchy’ for their own existence. They also have benefited from the results of self-determination, statehood, democracy, progress, modernity, and development. Thus, the total outlook on their new status lead to confirm their identity and right over their own sexuality. It was not like that in colonial times; nobody raised her voice about feminine identity.

There were some writers like Toru Dutt (born: 1856) who signified the binary gender theory with egalitarian outlook. In her Sonnet—The Lotus, both Cupid and Flora engage in a deliberative process—carefully weighing the merits and claims of each flower—but, ultimately, the poetess stresses upon us that it is Flora, not Cupid, who decides the question. The proclamation of women’s sexuality within the Indian tradition incorporates Eastern as well as Western allusions. In her poem “Savitri,” included in her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882), she portrays Savitri as a free woman. It is true that Toru Dutt was not a suitable person to represent an Indian poetess of that time as most of her time she lived in Europe. Her parents moved to Europe when she was a mere child of 13 years. Her parents were more inclined to Western culture and Toru Dutt continued her writings in both French and English.

In later periods, many such ‘Rebatis’ emerged in Indian literature and contributed greatly to women’s rights over their sexuality away from an outside control of patriarchal values. Ismat Chugtai (born: 1911), Amrita Pritam (born: 1919) and Kamla Das (born: 1934) were three prominent personalities in Indian Literature, who were born in colonial India and used to write in post-colonial days, and put the status of women relating to their sexuality in their writing. Their creative output added a philosophical base to claim that sexuality is not a hidden subject, and they tried to write on the topics which the patriarchal society often considered very scary, unspeakable, and shameful to contemplate.

Chughtai’s most famous Urdu story is “Lihaf” (The Quilt) included in her short stories collection The Quilt and Other Stories is a pioneering achievement. When it was first published, Chughtai had to defend herself before the Imperial Crown Court of India. The story deals with a lesbian encounter in a Zenana (an all-women setting) in a traditional Muslim household. The protagonist in the story, a housewife, is so lonely in her husband’s house that she takes a female servant as her lover. In another story “The Veil,” the beautiful young bride is forbidden by Hindu tradition to remove her own veil, and thus, is forced to disobey her husband. Indeed, Chughtai’s stories offer insightful glances into the rebellious character of the female mind over a patriarchal system. She began writing in Urdu at a time when South Asian women were still sequestered and their voice suppressed.

Chugtai was born in a not-so-orthodox Muslim family where her father was a civil servant. She was the ninth of ten children (six brothers, four sisters), and since her older sisters got married while she was very young, most of her childhood was spent in the company of her brothers and according to her, this contributed greatly to the frankness in her nature and writing. Ismat Chugtai was at her best when she wrote about ordinary people, especially women. The better part of her writing shows a deep and abiding preoccupation with women’s issues, particularly their cultural status and their myriad roles in Indian society. By underscoring women’s struggles against the oppressive institutions of her time, she brings to her fiction an understanding of the female psyche that is unique.

Another frank-speaking writer, Amrita Priatam, also deals with the politics of female sexuality and questions of gender identity in her writing with an immediate political context. Born in a school teacher’s family in Gujranwala, Punjab, now in Pakistan, she got married at the age of sixteen and later she found it was difficult to stay with a man to whom she never ever loved. She was in love with Sahir Ludhianvi, a Urdu poet and left her husband but Sahir then had a new woman in his life and did not marry Amrita. Later, she lived the last forty years of her life with the renowned artist and writer, Imroz. Amrita’s life was like an open book (so to speak) and she neither wanted to hide anything nor did she deny anything in her writings. Her own life made her beliefs strong and she used her poems and fiction to depict the sexual politics played against woman by society of that time. Whatever she experienced, she recorded in her poems and novels. Her legendary love for Sahir Ludhianv or for Imroz was the subject of so many of her anecdotes which revolved around her love for these two men. Once her son asked her, “People say that I am Sahir Uncle’s son.” Imagine the inner courage and conviction of a woman who could reply, “I wish you were Sahir Uncle’s son.” Though writing in Punjabi, Amrita Pritam could represent the south Asian women’s voices regarding love and sexual politics.

Another bilingual writer who could make her voice prominent to protest patriarchal values and established her will to proclaim sexual politics over female body was Kamala Das. She had a natural flair for both Malayalam and English. She was born in a conservative Hindu Nair (Nallappattu) family having Royal ancestry. Her father was a former managing editor of the widely-circulated Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, and her mother, Nalappatt Balamani Amma, was a renowned Malayali poetess. Her formal education stopped at the age of 15 when she was married to K. Madhava Das. She was 16 when her first son was born and she said once, “I was mature enough to be a mother only when my third child was born.” Because of the great age difference between Kamala and her husband, Mr. Das often played a fatherly role for both Kamala and her sons. Her husband often encouraged her to associate with people of her own age. My Story is considered as her outspoken autobiography and is also a source of controversy. It contains the clear picture of her multiple affairs, her strained relationship with her husband and so many hidden facts of her life.

In an interview, she admits that her husband was the greatest supporter of her writing career and even when controversy swirled around Das’ sexually-charged poetry and her unabashed autobiography, My Story, Das’ husband was “very proud” of her (Warrior interview). After the death of her husband, in 1999, Das converted herself to Islam and married a young chap. The poetess who always wrote about Lord Krishna and imagined to be his Radha suddenly started to address Allah. Her statement, “I converted my Krishna to Islam” evoked much opposition from conservative Hindus in Kerala. However, she was bold in her decisions and continues her life according to Muslim beliefs.

The sexuality of women, which was depicted in Chugtai’s fiction in generalized form, became more personified with Amrita and Kamala Das’ writings. In comparison with Amrita, Das more honestly extends her exploration of womanhood and love, but her poetess self can think while sleeping in her lover’s arm, ‘What is it to the corpse if the maggots nip?’ (See Das’s poem In “The Maggots” from the collection, The Descendants) Indian women, however, do not discuss these experiences in reverence to social customs. Das consistently refuses to accept their silence. Feelings of longing and loss are not confined to a private misery. They are invited into the public sphere and acknowledged. Das was so daring to describe her idea in total frankness that she could tell: “(the) musk of sweat between breasts/ The warm shock of menstrual blood” should not be hidden from one’s beloved. (See Das’ poetry collection: The Descendants). The poetess argues, “A woman should stand nude before the glass with him” and “allow her lover to see her exactly as she is.” (See the poem ‘The Looking Glass’ from The Descendants ).

What would be the differences of time between old Rebati and these new Rebatis? Say merely fifty years? But the time, the tone, the outlooks, and the surroundings were totally changed and created a gap between colonial and post-colonial milieus. The Rebati of Fakir Mohan did not speak a word to her lover Basudev, but only smiled once during the tuition. But the Rebati of Kamala Das could say:’

“(They) Ask me, everybody, ask me

What he sees in me, ask me why he is called a lion,

A libertine, ask me why his hand sways like a hooded snake

Before it clasps my pubis. Ask me why like

A great tree, felled, he slumps against my breasts,

And sleeps. Ask me why life is short and love is

Shorter still, ask me what is bliss and what its price….

(‘The Stone Age’ from Kamala Das’ The Old Playhouse and Other Poems)

(To read the English translation click “Rebati”)

Dr. Sarojini Sahoo’s website is Sense & Sensuality

by JAYATI GHOSH

Public strategies that are explicitly oriented towards reducing and redistributing unpaid work will do more than just help the women in the economy.

Work defines the conditions of human existence in many ways. This may be even more relevant for women than for men because the responsibility for social reproduction – which largely devolves upon women in most societies – ensures that the vast majority of women are inevitably involved in some kind of productive and/or reproductive activity.

Despite this, in mainstream discussion, the importance of women’s work generally receives marginal treatment simply because so much of the work they regularly perform is “invisible” in terms of market criteria or even in terms of socially dominant perceptions of what constitutes “work”. This leads to the social underestimation of women’s productive contribution and also means that inadequate attention is typically devoted to the conditions of women’s work and their implications for the general material conditions and well-being of women.

This is particularly true in developing countries, where patterns of market integration and the relatively high proportion of goods and services that are not marketed have implied that women’s contributions to productive activity extend well beyond those that are socially recognised and that the conditions under which many of these contributions are made entail significant pressure on women in a variety of ways.

In almost all societies, and particularly in developing countries, there remain essential but usually unpaid activities (such as housework and child care and community-based activities) that are seen as the responsibility of the women of the household. This social allocation tends to operate regardless of other work that women may perform.

For working women in lower-income groups, it is particularly difficult to find outside labour to substitute for household-based tasks, which therefore tend to devolve upon the young girls and aged women within the household or to put further pressure on the workload of the women workers themselves. In fact, it is wrong to assume that unpaid tasks by women would continue regardless of the way resources and incomes are allocated. “Gender neutral” economic policies may thus result in possible breaking points within the household or the collapse of women’s capacity.

Social provision for at least a significant part of such services and tasks or changes in the gender-wise division of labour with respect to household tasks, therefore, become important considerations when women are otherwise employed.

The relative invisibility of much of women’s work is now more widely recognised. Since many of the activities associated with household maintenance, provisioning and reproduction are not subject to explicit market relations, there is an inherent tendency to ignore the actual productive contribution of these activities. Similarly, social norms, values and perceptions also operate to render most household-based activity “invisible”. This invisibility gets directly transferred to data inadequacies, making officially generated data in most countries (and particularly in developing countries) very rough and imprecise indicators of the actual productive contribution of women.

Inaccurate data

Frontline for more

by VINAY LAL

Why is it, I have asked myself, that the American relief efforts in Haiti appear to be dominated or headlined by American troops? Why is it that the military seems, as it has so often in the past, to be the face of the United States in such endeavors? A few days after the earthquake, American troops were described as having “secured Haiti” – secured from what, one should also ask, if not from its own supposedly errant citizens; and, a week into the relief efforts, the New York Times on its front page stated, one suspects rather proudly, “U.S. Troops Patrolling Haiti, Filling Void Left by Quake” (20 January 2010). The Washington Post, on January 22, was similarly to headline the role of the military: “U.S. troops to help oversee Haiti ports, roads in earthquake relief.” The answer, many will aver, is self-evident: when a catastrophe of this magnitude takes place, only the United States armed forces have the infrastructure, manpower, authority, and organizational experience that can meet the requirements of the situation. Moreover, the United States has long been accustomed, as is well known, to thinking of Haiti, indeed all of central America, as its own backyard: and in its backyard the dispatch of American troops is certainly the default reaction.

But, so long as such reasoning exists, the likelihood that the United States, whether acting in concert with the so-called ‘international community’ or independently, will ever put into place an organization drawn from civil society that can perform relief functions on a gigantic scale is negligible. Whatever the mechanisms already in place at the United Nations, and associated relief agencies – Medicin sans Frontiers [MSF], the Red Cross, and many others (such as, for the Haiti Earthquake, “Partners in Health”) – for what is these days termed ‘disaster relief’, it is transparent that the existing infrastructure is woefully inadequate. “The number of weather-related disasters”, an Oxfam 2007 report states, “has quadrupled over the past twenty years and the world should do more to prepare for them.” Does this situation furnish the US military with a continuing mandate to make its presence felt in the Western hemisphere and across the world?

The deployment of American troops on such occasions should be recognized for what it is, namely an aspect of the militarism that is so deeply entrenched into the very fabric of American society. Though the separation of the civilian and military spheres of life is one of the most fundamental and enduring principles of a democratic polity, its subversion is an aspect of everyday existence in the US, from the largely unquestioning ease with which the military conducts recruitment campaigns on college campuses to the ubiquitousness of ‘support our troops’ stickers and yellow ribbons across the front yards of American homes. The anomalousness of American democracy, relentlessly paraded as a model to the world while grounded firmly in principles of militarism – a militarism that extends well beyond the distressingly abundant occasions for which the US has found cause to deploy the military for wars fought in the national interest and to secure America from its sworn enemies – has never adequately been confronted, either in public discourse or scholarship.

Haiti has long had an acquaintance with the presence of American troops on its soil. In early 1915, the country came under American occupation. If the Civil War, fought not only to preserve the Union but also to give some teeth to the Emancipation Proclamation, would compel Lincoln in 1862 to grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti almost 60 years after the slaves rebelled and proclaimed a free republic, it is not accidental that another war should have furnished the pretext for American intervention. Fear of German infiltration of the Caribbean was enough cause to send marines to Haiti. The historian Foster Rhea Dulles is candid in his appraisal that the US set up “virtual protectorates” in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua in an endeavor to transform the entire Caribbean into an “American lake from which all trespassers were rigidly barred.” Then, as now, as US troops entered Haiti, to enforce an occupation that would last nearly 20 years, the New York Times would stand forth to celebrate the heroic achievements of the military: “It was almost hopeless to expect an orderly government to be established without [military intervention] on the part of the United States.”

The need to project the Marines and the US military more generally as an indispensable force for good can never diminish as long as the military remains the backbone of American foreign policy and the desire to remain the world’s dominant power is undiminished. In recent years, as the US fights two wars, both of which have discredited the US and neither of which can be defended as having advanced global stability and peace, the US will strive to put a good face on its military and its humanitarian missions. The New York Times, among other American newspapers, is already circulating reports of the ‘warm reception’ being given to the Marines as they continue with their relief efforts among the earthquake’s victims. To be sure, there is also the recognition that some Haitians at least might be wary about the presence of American troops on Haiti’s soil. The present mission to Haiti might not have the overtones of the ‘liberation’ missions to Iraq and Afghanistan, but humanitarian missions have all too often been the guise under which violations of the sovereignty of other nations have taken place.

Professor Vinay Lal teaches at UCLA; his website is Lal Salaam

by BRADLEY BROOKS (AP)

RIO DE JANEIRO — She is the Shirley Temple of samba, a 7-year-old named to a coveted Carnival role normally reserved for barely clad models who have undergone more plastic surgeries than little Julia Lira has seen birthdays

Naming the girl drum corps queen for the Viradouro samba group is raising eyebrows even in a city that has seen everything during the annual mega-party that begins next week.

A judge is considering blocking Julia’s participation. A state agency that defends children’s rights says she’s too young to take on a traditionally sexy role. But the girl’s father, who happens to be the president of the Viradouro group, says Julia is a natural who can easily samba through the 80-minute parade route in Rio’s sweltering summer heat.

“Any man who looks at a 7-year-old child and feels any sort of excitement should go see a doctor,” Marco Lira said before rehearsal this week. “She has the aptitude to be a drum corps queen — you’ll see it tonight. She has a seriousness inside of her when she is on the stage.”

At the delicate core of Julia’s case is the queen’s traditional role in Rio’s Carnival: that of sexy muse. Unlike other participants, she is usually not bare-chested and wears more than just glitter. But queen costumes would be considered revealing by any estimation.

Brazil has long had a problem with sexual exploitation of children, especially in the lawless Amazon region. Allowing Julia to be a drum corps queen “would increase the treatment of children as sexual objects in Brazilian society,” said Carlos Nicodemos, director of the Rio de Janeiro state Council for the Defence of Children and Adolescents.
“We’re not against kids participating in Carnival; it’s part of Brazilian culture,” Nicodemos said. “What we can’t allow is putting a 7-year-old girl in a role that traditionally for Carnival has a very sexual focus.”

The competition among the 12 top-tier samba groups is fierce, and the winners are hailed by fans across Brazil. Viradouro, which won the title in 1997, is no stranger to controversy. In 2008, a judge blocked the group’s use of a dancer dressed as Hitler on a float loaded with naked people representing Holocaust victims after the display caused an international outcry.

Julia’s fate is now in the hands of a family court in Rio. The judge examining the case, Ivone Ferreira Caetano, has declined to comment or say when she will make a decision.

Marco Lira said the judge requested information about the girl’s role, what time the group was scheduled to makes its presentation — now slated for just after midnight on Feb. 14 — and what Julia would be wearing.

At practice this week, Julia danced in a poofy, white miniskirt, sequined halter top and silver-heeled sandals, a tiara atop her head.

While the details of parade themes and costumes are closely guarded secrets in Rio’s Carnival, a Viradouro artistic director said Julia’s outfit would be suitable for a child.

Buenos Aires Herald for more

Waziristan, headquarters of Islamist terror, has repelled outsiders for centuries. Now the Pakistani government is making a determined effort to control the place

“YOU should enjoy this,” said a Pushtun from Waziristan, the most remote and radicalised of the tribal areas in North-West Pakistan that border Afghanistan, as he proffered a bottle of Scottish whisky. It was an excellent Sutherland single-malt; but the man was referring to the bottle’s more recent provenance, not its pedigree.

He had been given it by a fellow Waziristani working for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. This spy had received the illegal grog from an American CIA officer. Your correspondent’s friend returned homewards, Scotch in hand, driven by another Waziristani, who is also employed as a fixer by al-Qaeda.

Waziristan, home to 800,000 tribal Pushtuns, is a complicated place. It is the hinge that joins Pakistan and Afghanistan, geographically and strategically. Split into two administrative units, North and South Waziristan, it is largely run by the Taliban, with foreign jihadists among them. If Islamist terror has a headquarters, it is probably Waziristan.

For terrorists, its attraction is its fierce independence. Waziristanis (who come mostly from the Wazir and Mehsud tribes) have repelled outsiders for centuries. Marauding down onto the plains of northern Punjab—now North-West Frontier Province (NWFP)—their long-haired warriors would rape, pillage and raise a finger to the regional imperialist, Mughal or British, of the day. No government, imperialist or Pakistani, has had much control over them. “Not until the military steamroller has passed over [Waziristan] from end to end will there be peace,” wrote Lord Curzon, a British viceroy of India at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

With 50,000 Pakistani troops now battling the Taliban in Waziristan, even that may be optimistic. One of the current drivers of the steamroller is Major-General Tariq Khan, head of the army’s 60,000-strong Frontier Corps (FC), whose forebears, rulers of neighbouring Tank, were often robbed by the hill-men. For him, Waziristan is “the last tribal area”.

Despite their remoteness, these tribesmen have often had a hand in the fates of governments in Kabul, Delhi and elsewhere. In 1929 a British-backed Afghan, Nadir Shah, used an army of Wazirs to seize the Afghan throne. A force of Wazirs and Mehsuds was dispatched in 1947 to seize Kashmir for the newly formed Islamic republic, sparking the first Indo-Pakistan war. In the 1980s Pakistan, America and Saudi Arabia armed them to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. In 2001 thousands of Afghan Taliban and their al-Qaeda guests fled to Waziristan. They have resumed their jihad from across the border, this time against NATO troops—aided, Afghans say, by the ISI.

Fighting and spying on the frontier is often described as a Great Game, after the 19th-century Russo-British sparring for which the phrase was coined. And on a five-day visit to South Waziristan in December as a guest of the FC—a rare privilege for a foreigner—and in interviews with Wazirs and Mehsuds in Peshawar, Islamabad and Lahore, your correspondent was struck by how many used this phrase, speaking of the crises that periodically buffet the frontier as a “game”, and themselves, through their alliances with one power or another, as “players”. “It is all a great game,” said Rehmat Mehsud, a Waziristani journalist. “The army, the Taliban, the ISI, they are all involved, and we don’t know who is doing what.”

The Economist for more

(Submitted by reader)

by JOHN LANCHESTER

In 1982, partway through my first year at Oxford university, my father asked me a question that took me by surprise. He said, “Do you have enough money?”

It took me by surprise partly because it is somehow, in and of itself, a surprising question – not one that people often ask. What’s enough? We don’t ask ourselves that very often. I thought about what he’d asked for a moment and then said, truthfully, “I never think about money.” He laughed and said, “Then you’re rich.”

I remember this conversation so vividly partly because that seemed to me to be a profound truth: the definition of being rich is never thinking about money. But I also remember it because my father never talked about money. This was just about the only time we ever discussed it in a personal way. He could discuss it in the abstract, in terms of general issues or politics, but to talk about the effects of money made him unhappy. The issues it raised went too deep.

What was odd about that was that my father worked for a bank, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, for 30 years until he retired in 1979. That time was spent in Asia, except for a two-year spell in Hamburg where I was born. So Dad was a banker but he couldn’t bear talking about money. That was why the idea of never having to think about money struck him as the very definition of being rich.

A preoccupation with money, and especially with what money meant, was in our family an inherited thing. My father’s father, Jack, who died before I was born, was very much possessed by the idea that money was freedom. His own father had drunk himself to poverty and death in his thirties, and this left Jack with the belief that making money was the only way of being secure. This conviction propelled him from an early life as a schoolteacher in Yorkshire to study dentistry. He travelled to Hong Kong to find more lucrative work and then, when the colony fell to the Japanese, spent four years in Stanley prison, a Japanese internment camp. When he came out, he worked as a dentist for a bit, then made a living playing the stock market, but his health never fully recovered from the camp and he died in his mid-sixties.

Looking over Jack’s life, I’m left wondering whether he realised that his belief that money equals freedom ended up with him in Stanley prison. It looks obvious from the outside but it never seems to have occurred to him, and he was determined to encourage his son to do something practical – something to do with money.

Financial Times for more

(Submitted by reader)

by DAVID KENNER

Despite having served for years as a distinguished Pakistani diplomat, Akbar Zeb reportedly cannot receive accreditation as Pakistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with his credentials, and everything to do with his name — which, in Arabic, translates to “biggest dick”:

In Saudi Arabia, size does count.

A high level Pakistani diplomat has been rejected as Ambassador of Saudi Arabia because his name, Akbar Zib, equates to “Biggest Dick” in Arabic. Saudi officials, apparently overwhelmed by the idea of the name, put their foot down and gave the idea of his being posted there, the kibosh.

According to this Arabic-language article in the Arab Times, Pakistan had previously floated Zeb’s name as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, only to have him rejected for the same reason. One can only assume that submitting Zeb’s name to a number of Arabic-speaking countries is some unique form of punishment designed by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry — or the result of a particularly egregious cockup.

Foreign Policy

(Submitted by reader)

by WILLIAM BLUM

www.killinghope.org

“In America you can say anything you want — as long as it doesn’t have any effect.” – Paul Goodman

Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people. This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy; it’s a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire — men and women who would like to keep their jobs; so it’s more insidious than a conspiracy, it’s what’s built into the system, it’s how the system works. The disregard of the progressive world is of course not total; at times some of that world makes too good copy to ignore, and, on rare occasions, progressive ideas, when they threaten to become very popular, have to be countered.

So it was with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Here’s Barry Gewen an editor at the New York Times Book Review, June 5, 2005 writing of Zinn’s book and others like it:

There was a unifying vision, but it was simplistic. Since the victims and losers were good, it followed that the winners were bad. From the point of view of downtrodden blacks, America was racist; from the point of view of oppressed workers, it was exploitative; from the point of view of conquered Hispanics and Indians, it was imperialistic. There was much to condemn in American history, little or nothing to praise. … Whereas the Europeans who arrived in the New World were genocidal predators, the Indians who were already there believed in sharing and hospitality (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed among them), and raped Africa was a continent overflowing with kindness and communalism (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed there).

One has to wonder whether Mr. Gewen thought that all the victims of the Holocaust were saintly and without profound cultural differences.

Prominent American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once said of Zinn: “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.”

In the obituaries that followed Zinn’s death, this particular defamation was picked up around the world, from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the leading American wire services to the New Zealand Herald and Korea Times.

Regarding reactionaries and polemicists, it is worth noting that Mr. Schlesinger, as a top advisor to President John F. Kennedy, played a key role in the overthrow of Cheddi Jagan, the democratically-elected progressive prime minister of British Guiana (now Guyana). In 1990, at a conference in New York City, Schlesinger publicly apologized to Jagan, saying: “I felt badly about my role thirty years ago. I think a great injustice was done to Cheddi Jagan.” ¹ This is to Schlesinger’s credit, although the fact that Jagan was present at the conference may have awakened his conscience after 30 years. Like virtually all the American historians of the period who were granted attention and respect by the mainstream media, Schlesinger was a cold warrior. Those like Zinn who questioned the basic suppositions of the Cold War abroad, and capitalism at home, were regarded as polemicists.

One of my favorite Howard Zinn quotes: “The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of ‘important’, of course, depends on one’s values.” ² A People’s History and his other writings can be seen as an attempt to make up for the omissions and under-emphases of America’s dark side in American history books and media.

Haiti, Aristide, and ideology

It’s a good thing the Haitian government did virtually nothing to help its people following the earthquake; otherwise it would have been condemned as “socialist” by Fox News, Sarah Palin, the teabaggers, and other right-thinking Americans. The last/only Haitian leader strongly committed to putting the welfare of the Haitian people before that of the domestic and international financial mafia was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Being of a socialist persuasion, Aristide was, naturally, kept from power by the United States — twice; first by Bill Clinton, then by George W. Bush, the two men appointed by President Obama to head the earthquake relief effort. Naturally.

Aristide, a reformist priest, was elected to the presidency, then ousted in a military coup eight months later in 1991 by men on the CIA payroll. Ironically, the ousted president wound up in exile in the United States. In 1994 the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend — because of all their rhetoric about “democracy” — that they supported the democratically-elected Aristide’s return to power. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that after his term ended he would not remain in office to make up the time lost because of the coup; that he would not seek to help the poor at the expense of the rich, literally; and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving starvation wages, literally. If Aristide had thoughts about breaking the agreement forced upon him, he had only to look out his window — US troops were stationed in Haiti for the remainder of his term. ³

On February 28, 2004, during the Bush administration, American military and diplomatic personnel arrived at the home of Aristide, who had been elected to the presidency once again in 2002, to inform him that his private American security agents must either leave immediately to return to the United States or fight and die; that the remaining 25 of the American security agents hired by the Haitian government, who were to arrive the next day, had been blocked by the United States from coming; that foreign and Haitian rebels were nearby, heavily armed, determined and ready to kill thousands of people in a bloodbath. Aristide was then pressured into signing a “letter of resignation” before being kidnaped and flown to exile in Africa by the United States. ⁴ The leaders and politicians of the world who pontificate endlessly about “democracy” and “self-determination” had virtually nothing to say about this breathtaking act of international thuggery. Indeed, France and Canada were active allies of the United States in pressing Aristide to leave. ⁵

And then US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the sincerest voice he could muster, told the world that Aristide “was not kidnaped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the airplane willingly. And that’s the truth.” ⁶ Powell sounded as sincere as he had sounded a year earlier when he gave the UN his now-famous detailed inventory of the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that Saddam Hussein was preparing to use.

Howard Zinn is quoted above saying “The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data.” However, that doesn’t mean the American mainstream media don’t create or perpetuate myths. Here’s the New York Times two months ago: “Mr. Aristide, who was overthrown during a 2004 rebellion …” ⁷ Now what image does the word “rebellion” conjure up in your mind? The Haitian people rising up to throw off the shackles put on them by a dictatorship? Or something staged by the United States?

Aristide has stated that he was able to determine at that crucial moment that the “rebels” were white and foreign. ⁸ But even if they had been natives, why did Colin Powell not explain why the United States disbanded Aristide’s personal security forces? Why did he not explain why the United States was not protecting Aristide from the rebels, which the US could have done with the greatest of ease, without so much as firing a single shot? Nor did he explain why Aristide would “willingly” give up his presidency.

The massive US military deployment to Haiti in the wake of the earthquake has been criticized in various quarters as more of an occupation than a relief mission, with the airport in the capital city now an American military base, and with American forces blocking various aid missions from entering the country in order, apparently, to serve Washington’s own logistical agenda. But the large military presence can also serve to facilitate two items on Washington’s political agenda — preventing Haitians from trying to emigrate by sea to the United States and keeping a lid on the numerous supporters of Aristide lest they threaten to take power once again.

That which can not be spoken

“The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction,” writes Fareed Zakaria, a leading American foreign-policy pundit, editor of Newsweek magazine’s international edition, and Washington Post columnist, referring to the “underwear bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his failed attempt to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day. “Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn’t work. Alas, this one worked very well.” ⁹

Is that not odd? That an individual would try to take the lives of hundreds of people, including his own, primarily to “provoke an overreaction”, or to “sow fear”? Was there not any kind of deep-seated grievance or resentment with anything or anyone American being expressed? No perceived wrong he wished to make right? Nothing he sought to obtain revenge for? Why is the United States the most common target of terrorists? Such questions were not even hinted at in Zakaria’s article.

At a White House press briefing concerning the same failed terrorist attack, conducted by Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan, veteran reporter Helen Thomas raised a question:

Thomas: “What is really lacking always for us is you don’t give the motivation of why they want to do us harm. … What is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.”

Brennan: “Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. … [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they're] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.”

Thomas: “And you’re saying it’s because of religion?”

Brennan: “I’m saying it’s because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.”

Thomas: “Why?”

Brennan: “I think … this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”

Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.” ¹⁰

American officials rarely even make the attempt to explain why. And American journalists rarely press them to explain why; certainly not like Helen Thomas does.

And just what is it that has such difficulty crossing the lips of these officials? It is the idea that anti-American terrorists become anti-American terrorists to retaliate for what the United States has done to countries or people close to them or what Israel has done to them with unequivocal American support.

Osama bin Laden, in an audiotape, also commented about Abdulmutallab: “The message we wanted you to receive through him is that America shall not dream about security until we witness it in Palestine.” ¹¹

We have as well the recent case of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor-turned-suicide bomber, who killed seven CIA employees at a base in Afghanistan December 30. His widow later declared: “I am proud of him. … My husband did this against the U.S. invasion.” Balawi himself had written on the Internet: “I have never wished to be in Gaza, but now I wish to be a … car bomb that takes the lives of the biggest number of Jews to hell.” ¹²

It should be noted that the CIA base attacked by Balawi was heavily involved in the selection of targets for the Agency’s remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a program that killed more than 300 people in the previous year. ¹³

There are numerous examples of terrorists citing American policies as the prime motivation behind their acts ¹⁴, so many that American officials, when discussing the newest terrorist attack, have to tread carefully to avoid mentioning the role of US foreign policy; and journalists typically fail to bring this point home to their reader’s consciousness.

It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of hateful Washington policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations.

The US bombing, invasion, occupation and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the continuing Israeli-US genocide against the Palestinians have created an army of new anti-American terrorists. We’ll be hearing from them for a terribly long time. And we’ll be hearing American officials twist themselves into intellectual and moral knots as they try to avoid confronting these facts.

In his “State of the Union” address on January 27, President Obama said: “But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.” Well, ending America’s many wars would free up enough money to do anything a rational, humane society would want to do. Eliminating the military budget would pay for free medical care for everyone. Free university education for everyone. Creating a government public works project that could provide millions of decently-paid jobs, like repairing the decrepit infrastructure and healing the environment to the best of our ability. You can add your own favorite projects. All covered, just by ending the damn wars. Imagine that.

Notes

1. The Nation, June 4, 1990, pp.763-4 ^?
2. “Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian” (1993), p.30 ^?
3. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/haiti2.htm ^?
4. Statement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, March 5, 2004, from exile in the Central African Republic, Pacific News Service (San Francisco); David Swanson, “What Bush Did to Haiti“, January 18, 2010; William Blum, “Rogue State”, pp.219-20) ^?
5. Miami Herald, March 1, 2004 ^?
6. CNN, March 1, 2004 ^?
7. New York Times, November 27, 2009 ^?
8. Aristide statement, op. cit. ^?
9. Newsweek, January 18, 2010, online January 9 ^?
10. White House press briefing, January 7, 2010 ^?
11. ABC News, January 25, 2010 ^?
12. Associated Press, January 7, 2010 ^?
13. Washington Post, January 1, 2010 ^?
14. Rogue State, chapter 1, “Why do terrorists keep picking on the United States?”; this chapter ends in 2005; some later examples can be provided by the author. ^?

–

William Blum is the author of:

• Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
• West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
• Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with “add” in the subject line. I’d like your name and city in the message, but that’s optional. I ask for your city only in case I’ll be speaking in your area.

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PRESS RELEASE
February 2010

For Immediate Release
info@americanradicalthefilm.com

American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
by David Ridgen & Nicolas Rossier
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“AMERICAN RADICAL: THE TRIALS OF NORMAN FINKELSTEIN” TO MAKE ITS NEW YORK PREMIERE AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES CINEMA.

New York, February 10, 2010 Ridgen and Rossier’s new compelling documentary about controversial Jewish-American academic Norman Finkelstein is to open soon at Anthology Film Archives. The film has already played in prominent festivals around the world including the Sheffield Doc/Fest documentary festival, IDFA in Amsterdam and the Jewish Film Festival in Jerusalem.

American Radical is the definitive film about controversial Jewish-American academic Norman Finkelstein. A devoted son of holocaust survivors, staunch critic of Israeli and US Mid-East policies and author of six provocative books including The Holocaust Industry, Beyond Chutzpah and the upcoming title, This Time We Went to Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. Finkelstein has been at the center of many intractable controversies. Called a lunatic and a self-hating Jew by some and an inspirational, street-fighting revolutionary by others, Finkelstein is a deeply polarizing figure whose struggles arise from core questions about freedom, identity and nationhood. The film provides an intimate portrait of the man behind the controversy, giving voice to both his many critics and his supporters, while following him around the globe as he labors to change peoples’ minds.

American Radical is produced and directed by accomplished documentary filmmakers David Ridgen (Mississippi Cold Case) and Nicolas Rossier (Aristide and the Endless Revolution). Say Ridgen and Rossier, “We were fascinated by the idea of fighting fire with fire. Strong offense. Eye for an eye. Polarizing forces that create understanding in their collision, like filmmaker Eisenstein’s cells. That it takes a radical to tame radicalism, or perhaps to end it. Norman Finkelstein embodies this duality. For us, he is a case study for it in fact. Some important voices say he is full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Others say he is a street fighter for the downtrodden. But what is the real politick of his words and actions and existence? These are the questions we wanted to answer. The more one considers Norman and those in his realm, the more one recognizes that no radical is without sin or innocence. There is worth in being a modern firebrand, and there are great costs. And both may lie where you least expect to discover them.

Completed in 2009, American Radical was picked up for US distribution by Typecast Releasing. Typecast will make American Radical available for broadcast, theaters, festival screenings, DVD and digital distribution in the USA. Uk based Mercury Media will take care of the foreign rights.

For more information contact:
Nic Rossier and David Ridgen
info@americanradicalthefilm.com
www.americanradicalthefilm.com

Typecast Releasing
info@typecastreleasing.com
www.typecastfilms.com

Photo: Krassimir Yuskesliev

About 300 people protested in the centre of Sofia against proposed amendments to the Genetically Modified Foods Act (GMFA) on January 31 2010, Bulgarian news agency BTA said.

Protests were held in front of the National Library, under the motto “Clean food, a healthy earth! Bulgaria GM foods free.” Later, protesters marched to the buildings of Bulgarian National Television and the Bulgarian Parliament.

The protesters demanded any decision on loosening GM foods restrictions to be postponed until a wider public debate on the topic had been held, BTA said.

Organisers wanted any changes to the GMFA to limit the use of GM foods to scientific purposes. Proposed changes only served the interests of a small group of interested parties and foreign companies, organisers said.

The protests were organised by the coalition To Sustain the Nature and a committee of parents and citizens.

Sofia Echo

by BOUTHAINA SHAABAN

Every time an Arab country faces a crisis of any kind, Western powers take immediate steps to hold a conference which ends up with ready made solutions, with the necessary funding for these solutions. Such conferences are usually held in Paris or London, although experience has shown that solutions which approach crises from a geographical, historical or even political distance can never be effective.

Experience has also shown that the ‘figures’ granted generously for handling such crises remain, like most Western promises, mere figures on papers, and sometimes they better remain so rather than being sent in the form of what they used to call “support to minorities” which means in the end stoking sectarian strife between families and neighbors who are incited to regress to an identity much inferior to the Arab Islamic identity which they have and to narrow cantons which can only be useful to those who covet their land and resources.

Yemen’s Foreign Minister, Abu Bakr al-Qurabi, for instance, acknowledged in the conference held recently in London on Yemen that “the $ 5 billion in aid donors decided to give in the 2006 donor conference were not translated into development projects and activities”. Yet, another conference was held, and once again in London. Hence, we understand al-Qurabi’s concern that his country may become a “failed state”. The key phrase which we should examine carefully is “The Arab and international community”; for all calls are made on these two communities to shoulder their responsibilities towards the Arab country going through one crisis or another. At a time the line has become so blurred between the Arab and international communities in terms of security coordination, clandestine activities, joint military operations particularly in the field of intelligence. Real Arab interests are clearly contradictory with the plans being hatched against Arabs and executed against their countries under different names like fighting “al-Qaeda” which inherited the mantle of Communism as the international community’s enemy, to intelligence cooperation and coordination in the field of human rights. The same applies to economic aid most of which is spent on strengthening Arab dependence on Western hegemonic centers.

If we look at what is happening in the Arab world and the positions of countries which dominate “international” decision making we see that Arabs and Muslims all fall into the category of the black Africans as they used to be classified before 1964 in the United States.

What can one call measures like monitoring people from Arab and Muslim countries throughout flights to the United States, preventing them from covering themselves with blankets and preventing them from going to the toilets for hours before landing. The measures include humiliating searches like “searching people’s behinds and showing them naked under scans”. Does not that remind us of Afro-American literature which describes how white people used to portray the black man as a body without a soul, heart or feelings which can parallel the white man’s feeling of dignity? Does not that also remind us of the racist theories which promote the idea that Muslims love death and that Palestinian women celebrate the death of their children and push them towards it. Nothing is said of the amount of humiliation these victims have been subjected to and because of which they preferred death as a means of protecting their dignity from the atrocious insults levelled at them. In all these measures the Arab and Muslim worlds can be summarised into “Arabs and Muslims”. No difference is made between a moderate and a non-compliant country. The racist idea of considering them inferior is applied to all of them.

Such racist practices are also applied to international travellers, who are neither Arab nor Muslim but happen to make a stop at an Arab or Muslim capital; as if being an Arab or a Muslim has become a contagious disease.

On the other hand, when you get to the Arab world from the Western colonialist gate, you see identities, races, religions and regions within the same country. The West talks about Sunna, Shia, Maronite, Christian, Huthi, Copts, Kurds, Armenians, Muslims, Arabs, Africans, desert people, mountain people, people of the West Bank versus the people of Gaza, veiled women versus unveiled women. You see trenches, walls and wires separating people of the same nation.

Counterpunch for more

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

On August 15, 1975, the founder of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was killed by a group of army officers. A total of 28 people were killed that day, including Mujib’s entire family and the domestic staff. He was survived by two daughters who were on a visit abroad at that time; one of them is the current premier of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wajid. After almost 35 years, Bangladesh hanged five men who were convicted for the crime. Six other convicted officers are living in exile abroad.

Mujib’s murder wreaked havoc in Bangladesh. The country was not even four years old when it had to face a military coup after the tragic incident. The perpetrators of this heinous crime were people from the Bangladeshi army who were wedded to the idea of a united Pakistan. They blamed Mujib for taking India’s help in fighting West Pakistan and virtually becoming an Indian colony in the aftermath of the fall of Dhaka in 1971. Whether Pakistan was responsible for Mujib’s assassination cannot be ascertained beyond reasonable doubt, but the military operation and the consequent atrocities committed by the Pakistan Army against the Bengalis cannot be denied. India supported the insurgency in East Pakistan, though it could be argued that given the radicalisation of Indian’s West Bengal and the Naxalite movement, the Indians did not want another radical movement on its hands in East Pakistan. When West Pakistan denied Mujib the right to form a government even after his Awami League got a majority of seats, the emergence of Bangladesh seemed all but inevitable.

There are many interesting parallels between Pakistan and Bangladesh. Two major political players of the 1970s — Zulfikar Bhutto and Sheikh Mujib — were killed by the military, be it in the form of the direct assassination of Mujib or the alleged judicial murder of Bhutto. Both countries have seen a lot of political unrest, resulting in a series of military coups. As far as democratically elected governments are concerned, a two-party system exists in both countries, resulting in a game of musical chairs between the PPP and the PML-N in Pakistan and Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League and Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in Bangladesh whenever democracy is restored. Dynastic politics, though seen to be relatively unstable, has also played an important role in the two countries. The Zia and Mujib families of Bangladesh and the Bhutto and Sharifs in Pakistan have all been extremely popular in spite of this brand of politics. Since democracy has finally been restored in Bangladesh and Pakistan after a long struggle, it is hoped that the two countries would also move away from this type of nepotistic politics sometime in the future.

Now that a violent chapter in Bangladesh’s history has been closed, Pakistan too is waiting for justice in Zulfikar Bhutto’s case. Senior Minister Raja Riaz of the PPP has demanded the reopening of Bhutto’s murder case and quoted the example of the recent execution of Mujib’s murderers. He demanded that the chief justice of Pakistan should also reopen the Bhutto case and hold the guilty accountable.

Daily Times for more

(submitted by reader)

Medical researchers were shocked to discover that virtually all human embryonic stem cell lines being used in 2005 were contaminated. Animal byproducts used to line Petri dishes had left traces on the human cells. If those cells had been implanted in a human body they likely would have been rejected by the patient’s immune system.

Even today, with new stem cell lines approved for use in medical research, there remains a risk that these cells will be contaminated in the same way. Most research labs still use animal-based “feeder layers” because it remains the cheapest and most reliable way to get stem cells to multiply.

Materials scientists at the University of Washington have now created an alternative. They built a three-dimensional scaffold out of a natural material that mimics the binding sites for stem cells, allowing the cells to reproduce on a clean, biodegradable structure. Results published in the journal Biomaterials show that human embryonic stem cells grow and multiply readily on the structure.

“The major challenge for stem cell therapy today is it’s very difficult to make a lot of them with high purity,” said lead author Miqin Zhang, a UW professor of materials science and engineering. “So far it seems like this material is very good for stem cell renewal.”

Medical researchers hope to someday use stem cells to grow new tissues and organs. Key to the research is the fact that new cells maintain the property that holds medical promise — the ability to differentiate into any of the more than 220 cell types in the adult human body.

Growing the cells in three dimensions better resembles conditions in the human body. It also allows mass production, which will be needed for any clinical applications.

Biology News for more

by B. R. GOWANI

Every year on the tenth of Muharram, called Ashura, many Shia Muslims flagellate themselves to commemorate the tragedy of Karbala. Fifty eight years after the death of the Prophet, seventy two women, men and children were killed by Yazid’s forces, including Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein. (He was the son of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and his cousin Ali). He is considered an Imam by the Shia Muslims. In South Asia, this flagellation takes place by self beating chests or in other ways whipping oneself with chains, swords, knives, etc. This ritual is known as “matam.”

Religion has been responsible for many wars worldwide just as democracy has. However, religion has also caused many people to go to war against themselves. This happens when the believers are either made to feel guilty against themselves, through statements such as “Jesus died for your sins,” (even though Jesus died two thousand years ago), or by making you feel that you are extremely inferior in comparison to God — as if there is not already enough entities for a person to feel inferior to, as in rich relatives, nasty law officers, glamorous celebrities, political elites, etc.

Many believers take extreme measures in inflicting physical pain: in the form of starvation or by depriving self of comfort, becoming celibates, or through mortification of the flesh.

All these actions are undertaken to either please God to achieve a spiritual union with God or for the purpose of penance and repentance.

In this light, one can safely assume that Pope John Paul too must have had some sort of agony to have finally decided to whip himself.

While whipping himself, he probably thought of the following reasons:

· My Lord I did do some good today, but I did not utilize my position to do many more good deeds. For committing this sin, I need to go through penance by punishing myself. This process will be carried out in a manner whereby I will be whipping myself.

· This one is for denying pleasure to myself;
and so now this one is to stir myself up;
and many more to make up for all the lost time.

· This one is for not walking the procreation path;

· This one is for prohibiting poor helpless women from aborting unwanted pregnancies;

· This one is for not permitting the use of contraceptives;

· This one is for keeping millions of couples in miserable state by not granting them divorce;

· This one is for refusing to ordain women priests;

· This one is for not recognizing gay/lesbian civil marriage;

· This one —

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

Pope John Paul II regularly whipped himself with a trouser belt that he kept in his wardrobe and signed a secret document saying that would resign if he became incurably ill, a book published today reveals.

by NICK SQUIRES

It had long been rumoured that the Polish-born pontiff, who died five years ago, engaged in acts of penance and self-flagellation.

But the practice has now been confirmed by Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the Vatican “postulator” who has the task of reviewing John Paul’s life and preparing a case for him being made a saint.

In the new book, “Why he’s a saint”, Msgr Oder writes: “As members of the Pope’s close entourage heard with their own ears, Karol Wojtyla used to flagellate himself.

“In his wardrobe, in between all his robes, a special trouser belt hung on a coat hanger, which he used as a whip. He always took it with him when he went to Castel Gandolfo (the traditional summer residence of the popes outside Rome).”

In November a Polish nun claimed that when she stayed at Castel Gandolfo she often heard John Paul whipping himself.

“Several times he would put himself through bodily penance,” said Tobiana Sobodka, a nun from the Sacred Heart of Jesus order.

“We would hear it – we were in the next room at Castel Gandolfo. You could hear the sound of the blows when he flagellated himself.”

Self-flagellation is used by some Catholics to remind themselves of the agonies endured by Christ on the cross, in particular members of the controversial organisation Opus Dei.

In The Da Vinci Code, the best-seller by Dan Brown which was turned into a film, self-flagellation is practised by the albino monk Silas, a member of Opus Dei, who draws blood as he lashes himself with a whip.

The book also described how, as a bishop in Poland, the future pontiff would often sleep on a bare floor as an act of self-denial and asceticism.

Msgr Oder, who like the former Pope is Polish, also revealed in the new book that John Paul had decided that in the event of an “incurable sickness” he would voluntarily step down rather than stay in office until his death.

Telegraph for more

(Submitted by reader)

? WORLD DISTEMPERS
Interview

Age of Extremes ends in 1991 with a panorama of global landslide—the collapse of Golden Age hopes for world social improvement. What do you see as the major developments in world history since then?

I see five main changes. First, the shift of the economic centre of the world from the North Atlantic to South and East Asia. This was beginning in Japan in the seventies and eighties, but the rise of China from the nineties has made a real difference. Secondly, of course, the worldwide crisis of capitalism, which we had been predicting, but which nevertheless took a long time to occur. Third, the clamorous failure of the us attempt at a solo world hegemony after 2001—and it has very visibly failed. Fourth, the emergence of the new bloc of developing countries as a political entity—the brics—had not taken place when I wrote Age of Extremes. And fifth, the erosion and systematic weakening of the authority of states: of national states within their territories, and in large parts of the world, of any kind of effective state authority. It might have been predictable, but it has accelerated to an extent that I would not have expected.

New Left Review for more

Zimbabwe Independent correspondent:

NATURE has been kind in bestowing on Zimbabwe the diamond deposits at Marange, which by all accounts is one of the richest global discoveries of recent times. It’s of a scale that has the potential to transform the fortunes of this country — to fund hospitals, schools and infrastructure.

Diamonds are forever, so the saying goes. But they’re not. They are a precious and finite resource that needs to be husbanded with the greatest care.

What a tragedy therefore that the huge revenues now flowing from Marange are going not to the benefit of Zimbabwe, but into a handful of well-lined pockets. It’s a depressing and all too familiar story.

The title holder of the central concession in the Marange fields has been elbowed aside — in contravention of a High Court judgment — and the discovery gifted to two companies about which little is known.

Whoever makes such decisions has come to the conclusion these companies are more reliable partners to exploit this precious resource than a publicly listed, well respected minerals firm that has been in the business for years and is of proven integrity.

The figures tell the story of what is at stake. In the 42 days up to October 18 2009, the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC) mined the Marange concession at an average of around 69 tonnes per day.

Even at this relatively slow pace they declared 59 373 carats of diamonds. With the two new companies in place, and their machinery going full bore, the pace of extraction has accelerated hugely.

About 3 800 tonnes per day are now being processed — 55 times as much as ZMDC managed. One can safely assume the volume of carats has expanded similarly.

Medium and high-grade stones comprise a small proportion of the Marange output (around 10% and 4% respectively) but the figures are nonetheless massive.

In deposits of this type, 10% of the diamonds mined yield 90% of the profits. On that basis, Marange is generating somewhere between US$30 million and US$300 million dollars per month. I

t’s difficult to be more precise because all transparency is lacking. Where is all this money going? Of one thing we can be sure — the high-grade gems are going out the back door, while the lower grade industrial stones are put on public display. What’s happening is in direct contravention of the Kimberley Process and industry norms.

Zimbabwe’s economy made great strides in 2009 and will grow for the first time in 10 years. Sound management is in place and basic services have been restored.

But, despite increased revenues and the significant donor funds flowing in from the US and EU and elsewhere, everyone knows the going is tough. The government is struggling to deliver services on a budget of around US$100 million a month. Set alongside this, the tax revenues from Marange would have the potential to transform this situation.

There’s another aspect to this too: Zimbabwe desperately needs to attract foreign investment. With the economy stabilising, potential investors are now beating a path to Harare. They like what they see in terms of economic management but they view with great concern the manner in which property rights — whether for a diamond field or a farm — are being flouted and investment agreements disregarded.

Zimbabwe Independent for more

by JAMES SUGGETT

Mérida, September 25, 2009 (venezuelanalyis.com)– During his address to the 64th United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called on the world to join Latin American countries in constructing a new type of socialism. He also said U.S. President Barack Obama has brought the “smell of hope” to the U.N., and demanded a return of the democratically elected president to Honduras, an end to the blockade of Cuba, and “decisive” action on climate change.

“Nobody will be able to hold back the great Latin American and Caribbean revolution. The United States, Europe, and the world should support the revolution, because this revolution is the beginning of a path toward the salvation of this planet,” said the president.

“It is an indo-American socialism, our own American socialism… there is not a catalogue for constructing socialism, we must create it,” Chavez continued.

Chavez distinguished the movements toward socialism currently underway in Latin America from the socialisms of the Twentieth Century. “There was never socialism in the Soviet Union. This century will be the century of socialism,” he said.

The president explained, “This is another type of revolution. No longer does it sprout from the mountains with groups of guerrillas, no, this revolution sprouts from the cities, from the masses, it is peaceful and profoundly democratic.”

The last time Chavez spoke at the U.N. General Assembly was in 2006, when he referred to then U.S. President George W. Bush as “the devil,” and remarked that the podium where Bush had previously spoken still smelled like sulfur.

On Thursday, Chavez sniffed the area around the podium and said, “It no longer smells like sulfur here… Now it smells like hope.”

Chavez praised President Obama’s remarks to the U.N. the day before about peace and “a new era of engagement,” but challenged him to turn his words into actions, and not contradict himself. “Who are you Obama, Obama one, or Obama two?” Chavez asked in English.

“Yesterday Obama said that you can’t impose any political system on any people, that we must respect the sovereignty of every country. Well, then, Obama, Mr. President, what are you waiting for to order the end of the savage and murderous blockade of Cuba?” Chavez said.

Chavez cited nuclear proliferation as another example. “No nuclear proliferation. Ok, we agree,” Chavez said, still directing his comments toward the U.S. “Start with yourselves by destroying all the nuclear weapons you have. Destroy them, already. Do it.”

The Venezuelan leader further urged the U.S. government and the international community to take more “decisive” action on climate change. He extensively cited a previous speech by former Cuban President Fidel Castro on the rise in global temperatures, and commented, “We are bringing en end to the planet. Let’s realize it, become conscious, and act.”

“Obama said he has political will for this. Do it, Obama. Go from words to actions,” said Chavez. If the international community produces a new agreement, “Venezuela is fully willing to subscribe to that decision,” said Chavez.

Venezuelan Analysis for more

(Submitted by reader)

(Submitted by reader)

by BRUCE A. DIXON

After signing off on the biggest military budget in human history, and giving 23 trillion dollars of free money to Wall Street, much of it directly through the Federal Reserve without Congressional oversight, the president is expected to announce a “spending freeze” in his State of the Union address tonight. In keeping with his policy of waiting for “all boats to rise” the First Black President will not announce any special measures to address joblessness in African American communities, which in many urban areas has reached 50% of working age males, and has historically been double the white jobless rate, and is rising faster than unemployment among whites.

White House spokespeople assure us that the freeze will not apply to the military budget, or the uniquely American combination of policing, surveillance and corporate welfare programs they call “homeland security.” Also exempt are veterans affairs and the State Department, impossible to separate from the military and our lawless mercenary armies, and social security, and Medicare, except for the $400 million cut that program will feel if either version of the president’s health insurance reform package ever clears Congress. The corporate press describes all federal programs that don’t fit into the slots just described as “discretionary,” and the Obama White House, corporate to the core uses the same terminology. The budget freeze, they say, will affect all the federal government’s “discretionary” programs.

With the adoption of NAFTA under the previous Democratic president, the US government became a full partner in corporate America’s drive to relocate its factories outside the U.S., first in low-wage Mexico, and now in lower-wage China. That caused a radical shrinkage of local tax revenues across the country at the same time that wages fell and joblessness rose. Corporate Democrats (and Republicans) had a solution for that too — selling off public assets like highways, parking meters, water systems, public hospitals, even jails, government fleet management and payrolls, even birth and death records to the same investor class that caused the shrinkage by offshoring as much of the US industrial sector as they could.

“Black America can expect to reap enormous benefits in self-esteem at the sight of a well-suited black man at the podium delivering this august address.”

Black Agenda Report for more

Sufia Begum is especially protective of her daughter – seven months ago her four-year-old son was abducted and has been missing ever since

by LUCY ADAMS

Smog shrouds the human shadows congregating beneath the wide arc of Bangladesh’s national football stadium.

View the slideshow here:

www2.newsquest.co.uk/scotland/pdf/Slideshows/300110bangladesh/index.html

Car horns blast in the hazy darkness. It is 10pm. Babu is ­waiting to make his bed. He points to the bare concrete beneath the stadium’s outer terraces where distorted, headless-looking bodies lie curled in blankets. There are no walls, no doors.

They say my son has been sold abroad…some children are stolen for the sex trade and others for their body parts.

Sufia Begum

“This is where I sleep,” he says quietly in Bengali.

Next to Babu’s bed, a fetid dark liquid ­scattered with scraps of litter oozes from cracks in the road. To use the public toilets, they have to pay – so most of these children squat in the open.

First one floodlight goes out, then another. Only now is it safe for Babu to unfurl the dusty sheets that make his home. To lie down with the lights on makes a police beating almost inevitable. It is winter, and people are lying close together for warmth and because of the lack of space, bodies sprawled, limbs intertwining like a scene from a forensic snapshot of genocide. Nearby, one of Babu’s friends remains upright, on lookout duty for the first part of the night.

“Since I was kidnapped, my friends and I take it in turns to stay awake and keep watch,” he says. “We have a rota. We can’t all sleep at once in case the police come early or the gangs try to steal someone.”

Babu is four years old. He sleeps here every night and wakes with the 5.30am call to prayer of the nearby mosque. Three months ago he was kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken across the city by a man he had never seen before. Locked in a room for three days with little food or water, he was then sold for 4000 taka (about £35).

“He was selling me to another person when I started screaming and crying and a policeman came and caught him,” he says. “I was so very afraid. The policeman beat the man and then asked me where I stayed.”

Babu is one of thousands of permanent pavement dwellers in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the world’s most densely populated city. Official figures put the ­population at 14 million: on top of that, however, it is ­estimated that there are between 20,000 and 50,000 men, women and children living on the streets. Most are environmental refugees who have fled flooding in outlying parts of the country. When they arrive, they find themselves prey to other dangers.

As Babu tries to rest, a crowd gathers and a piercing wail begins. A distraught woman emerges from the darkness, a baby clutched to her chest, ­pleading for help and tugging at the clothes of those around her. “My daughter has gone,” she cries. “I have lost my five-year-old girl. Who has taken her? Have you seen her?” The crowd surges but the woman runs back into the night. We cannot find her. The ­onlookers seem unaffected. They say children regularly go missing.

Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, estimates that 400 women and children fall victim to trafficking in Bangladesh each month. Most are between the ages of 12 and 16 and are forced to work in the sex industry. Some become domestic slaves, and the boys are often taken to the Middle East and forced to be camel jockeys.

The annual report of the Pakistan-based organisation Lawyers For Human Rights And Legal Aid revealed that 4500 Bangladeshi girls are sold in Pakistan in a single year.

The pavement dwellers claim children are sometimes also stolen by religious cults for rituals and sacrifices and a report by the international organisation Ecpat (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) says they are sold for their organs and body parts, a claim backed by Unicef’s research.

The Poppy Project, a London-based charity that supports the female victims of trafficking in the UK, has to date helped 11 Bangladeshi women. Trafficked children have also been identified in Britain.

Parents try to protect their children as well as they can. Mothers tie their toddlers to their bodies with their saris – little deterrent to the organised criminal gangs, known as mustans. One woman uses a padlock and chain.

Herald Scotland for more

(Submitted by reader)

by VINAY LAL

As India prepares to mark the anniversary of Gandhi’s death, the tired old question of Gandhi’s ‘relevance’ will be rehearsed in the press. Once we are past the common rituals, we are certain to hear that the spiral of violence in which much of the world seems to be caught demonstrates Gandhi’s continuing ‘relevance’. Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the Presidency of the United States furnishes one of the latest iterations of the globalizing tendencies of the Gandhian narrative. Unlike his predecessor, who flaunted his disdain for reading, Obama is said to have a passion for books; and Gandhi’s autobiography has been described as occupying a prominent place in the reading that has shaped the country’s first African American President. Obama gravitated from “Change We Can Believe In” to “Change We Need”, but in either case the slogan is reminiscent of the saying with which Gandhi’s name is firmly, indeed irrevocably, attached: “We Must Become the Change We Want To See In the World.” Obama’s Nobel Prize Lecture twice invoked Gandhi, if only to rehearse some familiar clichés – among them, the argument, which has seldom been scrutinized, so infallible it seems, that Gandhian nonviolence only succeeded because his foes were the gentlemanly English rather than Nazi brutes or Stalinist thugs.

Let me, however, leave aside for the present both the question of Obama’s Gandhi and the liberal’s Gandhi, and turn rather briefly to some more general problems in the consideration of Gandhi’s place in world history. The Gandhi that is known around the world, and to a substantial degree even in India, is principally the architect and supreme practitioner of the idea of mass nonviolent resistance and the prime example of the ‘man of peace’. The general sentiment underlying this view is clear enough, even if one thought of bringing to the fore evident objections to such a characterization of Gandhi. One might argue, as some historians have, that the role of Gandhian nonviolence in the achievement of Indian independence has been overstated, or one could adopt the view, a more nuanced and interesting one, that ‘peace’ was not particularly part of the vocabulary with which he operated. The centrality of ahimsa (nonviolence) and satya (truth) to Gandhi’s way of thinking aside, if one had to add another set of terms that might signify his practices and thought alike, then one would perforce think of brahmacharya (celibacy, closeness to God), tapasya (sacrifice, self-suffering), aparigraha (non-possession), and so on. Though silence was an integral part of his spiritual and political discipline, Gandhi studiously avoided speaking of shanti (peace). One of the many reasons he did so is that peace has all too often been used as the pretext to wage war. Describing the barbarous conduct of the Romans some 2,000 years ago, the historian Caius Tacitus put it rather aptly: ‘They make solitude [desert] and call it peace’. I suspect, moreover, that if Gandhi had been alive to see how he has been packaged, sold, and denuded of all insights and vitality by the practitioners of what are called ‘peace studies’, he would have been rather pleased at his insistence on nonviolent resistance rather than on peace.

Supposing that Gandhi is a supremely world historical figure, what is being invoked is the principal figure in the twentieth century associated with peace and nonviolence. But this Gandhi, many will be surprised to hear, is a somewhat impoverished figure, one who cannot easily be reconciled with the Gandhi who was an emphatic critic of nearly all the critical categories of modern political and humanist thought. Let me, by way of illustration, take up very briefly two ideas that have reigned supreme in our times. Most political thinking in the West over the course of the last century has been riveted on the question of ‘rights’, and recent political movements in the West have, in addition to the rights of the individual, vigorously asserted the rights of groups, whether defined with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or some other marker of identity. Gandhi, at least in the received view, might reasonably be seen as falling entirely within this framework. One can surely describe Gandhi as someone who initiated the modern campaigns against colonialism, racism, and xenophobia, and in this respect he can be viewed as an advocate of the right of people to live an unfettered life of dignity.

And, yet, if one should thus be tempted to assimilate Gandhi into a pantheon of the champions of human rights, one would doubtless be obscuring his profound skepticism towards the discourse of rights. Rights are ordinarily claimed against the state, and those desirous of staking claims look up to the state to safeguard their rights. Gandhi recognized the state as, not infrequently, the most egregious violator of rights, and generally had little if any enthusiasm for the modern nation-state. Indeed, Gandhi is distinct among modern political figures in decisively rejecting the narrow association that the idea of citizenship has come to have with the demand for rights, and in reinstating the concept of duty. At the height of a struggle with the ruler of his native Rajkot late in his life, Gandhi averred that “in swaraj based on ahimsa, people need not know their rights, but it is necessary for them to know their duties. There is no duty but creates a corresponding right, and those are true rights which flow from a due performance of one’s duties.”

We can also, in a similar vein, turn to Gandhi’s unflinching skepticism towards ‘history’ as a dramatic example of his repudiation of the liberal traditions of learning of the modern West and of the categories of thought marshaled by modern knowledge systems. The story of how Indian nationalists responded to the colonial charge that Indians were deficient in the historical sensibility has been told often enough and need scarcely be repeated here, but suffice to note that nationalist thought was heavily invested in the idea of history and the commitment to history took many forms. Whatever the ideological differences between armed revolutionaries, liberals, constitutionalists, Indian Tories, and Hindu supremacists, they were all agreed that that an Indian history, for and by Indians, was the supreme requirement of the day. Here, as in so many matters, Gandhi struck a lonely path, departing from the main strands of nationalist thought. It would be trivial to suggest that Gandhi did not lack an awareness of the past; but had he lacked such awareness, it is far from certain that he would have viewed his ignorance as a shortcoming. Gandhi’s indisposition towards viewing the Mahabharatra, Ramayana or the puranic material as a historical record is pronounced; but he went much further, as in this pronouncement from 1924: “I believe in the saying that a nation is happy that has no history. It is my pet theory that our Hindu ancestors solved the question for us by ignoring history as it is understood today and by building on slight events their philosophical structure.” Though I myself am a teacher of history, Gandhi’s profound misgivings about the enterprise of history strike me as just and even prescient. Among other considerations, such as his manifest concern about the pernicious attempts to transform Hinduism from a religion predominantly of mythos to one of history, he was also fully aware that nineteenth century ideas about history, and the inevitability of human progress, were but forms of social evolutionism. Gandhi resisted the idea that the only history that India could live out was someone else’s history.

My point here may be encapsulated in the following way: Gandhi has an inescapable presence in intellectual and public spheres, and in the knowledge industry, but in the most predictable ways. The shapers of opinion and the framers of knowledge have entirely neutralized him, or, in the provocative language of Hind Swaraj, for which ‘world history’ has absolutely no use, rendered him effete. (Elsewhere, I have written extensively on the cultural politics of sexuality surrounding Gandhi’s life, and my use of ‘effete’ is quite deliberate and self-reflexive.) There is room for him as an Indian nationalist who articulated some unusual ideas of nonviolent resistance, forged a mass anti-colonial struggle against the British, fought to bring peace to communities torn apart by violence, and agitated for various social reforms. It is unnecessary, for the purposes of this argument, to point to those critics who would describe him as a reactionary, a friend of the industrialists, an enemy of Dalits, an opponent of class warfare, and so on. Recently, Mayawati and the Slovenian philosopher-clown Slavok Zizek have found common cause in describing him as more violent than Hitler. Gandhi’s admirers have, it appear to me, sanitized him enough, and evidently have little patience for his withering critique of modernity, his strictures against Western systems of education, his sexual Puritanism, or his indifference to what I could describe as the regime of modern aesthetics.

Thus, on the eve of the anniversary of his assassination, the question of his ‘relevance’ strikes me as supremely irrelevant. We should think rather of liberating Gandhi from everything that has beautifully conspired to constrain him. First there were the Gandhians, a largely unattractive and insipid if well-intentioned lot who, like many practitioners of formal religions, followed all the external signs but showed little of the creativity of Gandhi. Then there have been the infernal statues, towards which the pigeons have shown an admirable irreverence that would have made Gandhi laugh. As the Gandhians aged and the statues had normalized Gandhi, the peace studies practitioners came forward with their institutionalized programs of study for peace administrators and conflict managers. This narrative has many other chapters, but it should by now be transparent that the rhetoric of relevance has been the graveyard of Gandhi.

Vinay Lal teaches at UCLA; his site is Lal Salaam

by USHA ALEXANDER

When I visited India the summer I turned 9, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler to select pendants to bring back to the US. My brother and sister chose the gold-tipped tiger claws, still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s. But I found the tiger claws too “gee whiz”; I wanted something that was meaningfully Indian. So the jeweler trotted out his line of large, bright silver pendants shaped either as Om or swastika. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetics of the swastika designs, with their symmetry and regularity of line; the Om was alright, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I had a difficult time deciding to bring home the swastika, waffling on the matter until it grew late and even the jeweler was losing patience with me. In the end, I came away with the Om, which languished never-worn in my dresser drawer for years until I simply lost track of it. Something about the entire episode never sat quite right with me, but as a child I couldn’t puzzle out why.

I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide.

The word swastika can be translated as wellbeing (from the Sanskrit su, meaning good, and asti, meaning to be, plus the diminutive suffix, ka) and in most of the world the identical symbol (by whatever name) has long been associated with wellbeing and good luck. In South Asia, the swastika is found on artifacts dating back 4,500 years to the time of the Harappan Civilization, where it frequently occurs as a character in their symbol system. Even as Harappan culture faded into obscurity, the swastika was carried forward, becoming strongly associated with Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist religious traditions, an association that persists to this day throughout Asia. Especially in India, the swastika is the most ubiquitous of religious symbols.

3 Quarks Daily for more

by MYINT MAUNG

New Delhi (Mizzima) – District Court in Rangoon’s notorious Insein prison has set February 15 for pronouncing the verdict of four women activists including popular activist Naw Ohn Hla, who are supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi.

The East District Court on Monday announced that it would pronounce the verdict on February 15, after the court had conducted the proceedings for the past four months against the activists.

“We submitted our final arguments. And the court fixed February 15 for pronouncing the verdict,” a defence counsel Kyaw Hoe told Mizzima.

The activists – Naw Ohn Hla, Myint Myint San, Cho Cho Lwin and Ma Cho – were arrested while returning from offering alms to monks in a local monastery and for regularly praying for the release of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Rangoon Division Police Special Branch (SB) charged the four of instigating public unrest, under section 505(b) of the Penal Code. They were accused of offering 42 leaflets of the ‘Kamwa’ Buddhist scriptures to abbot U Pamaukha from Magwe Priyatti teaching monastery of Rangoon’s suburban Dagon Township.

“We argued that there are no sufficient evidences against the accused. The prosecutor was not able to present the Buddhist scriptures in court. And neither could they produce the abbot, who was said to have received the scripture, as the prosecution witness. So we argued that the case did not have enough evidences as there are no eye witnesses and no sound and valid evidence against them,” lawyer Kyaw Hoe said.

“We pleaded for their acquittal,” he added.

Kyaw Hoe said, the public prosecutor made no arguments in court but said he would present a written argument later.

“The prosecution has to defend the legal points raised by the defence. But he did not give any counter arguments,” lawyer Kyaw Hoe said.

Naw Ohn Hla, a popular activist have been leading prayer services held at Shwedagon pagoda on Tuesdays, for the release of detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from her house arrest.

The police arrested her and her three colleagues on October 3 last year, while returning from offering alms at the Magwe priyatti teaching monastery in Dagon Township.

Meanwhile, another five activists were given up to nine years of prison terms by the court last month.

Mizzima for more

by GODFREY AZUBIKE

Students of the Nsukka campus of the University of Nigeria take the battle against plans to increase fees to the doorsteps of their vice chancellor

I pray out of the inner depth of my heart that the incoming vice chancellor of the University of Nigeria, in the person of Professor Bartholomew Okolo, will be able to fit into the same shoes worn by the outgoing vice chancellor.” Those were the words of Sam Egwu, minister of education, on June 7, last year, when he visited the institution a few days before Okolo took over as the new vice chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, UNN, from Chinedu Nebo, his predecessor.

Barely seven months after he assumed office as the new vice chancellor of the university, Okolo is now battling with one of the challenges the minister had in mind in his supplication that God should grant the new helmsman of the institution the wisdom to effectively step into his predecessor’s shoes. In the past few weeks, the main campus of the university has been shut down following the destructive riot embarked upon by the students of the institution on January 16. The students claimed that they went on rampage to protest “arbitrary increase in school fees” by the authorities of the university.

The protest, which took place on the main campus of the university in Nsukka, resulted in the destruction of properties of the institution estimated at millions of Naira.

Newswatch gathered that the present crisis at the university would have been avoided if the vice chancellor had managed the situation well. According to sources, Okolo created a communication gap between him and the students by avoiding meetings scheduled between him and representatives of the students when the rumour mill was awash that the university authorities had increased school fees.

The immediate cause of the riot was the increase to N25,000 of acceptance fee charged every new student. Before now, new students of the institution paid N6,000 as acceptance fee. The new fees again which the students were protesting include tuition fees increased from N18,500 to between N100,000 and N120,000, depending on the students’ department. Accommodation fee has also gone up from N9,000 to N30,000 and convocation fee moved from N4,000 to N40,000. The new fees have not yet come into effect.

Kingsley Asogwa, senate president of the Students Union Assembly of the university, told Newswatch that when they heard the rumour of increase in school fees, they made efforts to meet the VC to discuss the matter. He said their efforts were intensified when the new acceptance fee of N25,000 was implemented. When Okolo was informed that the SUG officials would want to see him on Monday, January 11, he agreed but did not keep the appointment. The students did not give up. They were prepared to dialogue with him the following day and they told him so.

Consequently, Francis Umegudosi, the speaker of the students’ assembly, called the VC to reschedule the meeting Tuesday, January 12. The vice chancellor agreed and asked the speaker to text him the time they would be coming for the meeting. He complied. The students went again on January 12, and waited for him from 9 a.m. till 3 p.m. without any sign that he would keep the appointment.

The vice chancellor then asked that the request for them to meet with him be put in writing and signed by the SUG presidents at both the Nsukka and Enugu campuses. “We did so but the letter was not submitted to him because the dean of students’ affairs assured us that we would see the VC on Friday, January 15. On Friday, all the union leaders came. Again the vice chancellor refused to see us. While we were there, the dean, students’ affairs, wanted to address us and we said no, if he wanted to talk on the issue of increase in school fees, we wanted the VC to be present. But if it was any other matter, we could discuss,” Asogwa told Newswatch.

Newswatch for more

Source: KPRC News

Houston police started testing unmanned aircraft and the event was shrouded in secrecy, but it was captured on tape by Local 2 Investigates.

Neighbors in rural Waller County said they thought a top-secret military venture was under way among the farmland and ranches, some 70 miles northwest of Houston. KPRC Local 2 Investigates had four hidden cameras aimed at a row of mysterious black trucks. Satellite dishes and a swirling radar added to the neighbors’ suspense.

Then, cameras were rolling as an unmanned aircraft was launched into the sky and operated by remote control.

Houston police cars were surrounding the land with a roadblock in place to check each of the dignitaries arriving for the invitation-only event. The invitation spelled out, “NO MEDIA ALLOWED.”

… “I wasn’t ready to publicize this,” Executive Assistant Police Chief Martha Montalvo said. She and other department leaders hastily organized a news conference when they realized Local 2 Investigates had captured the entire event on camera.

… Montalvo told reporters the unmanned aircraft would be used for “mobility” or traffic issues, evacuations during storms, homeland security, search and rescue, and also “tactical.” She admitted that could include covert police actions and she said she was not ruling out someday using the drones for writing traffic tickets.

… Houston police contacted KPRC from the test site, claiming the entire airspace was restricted by the Federal Aviation Administration. Police even threatened action from the FAA if the Local 2 helicopter remained in the area. However, KPRC reported it had already checked with the FAA on numerous occasions and found no flight restrictions around the site, a point conceded by Montalvo.

Democratic Underground for more

To: The Cabinet and Parliament of Lebanon

Secondary only to ending the siege of Gaza and achieving Statehood, the enactment of the basic civil right to work and to own a home for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Refugees living in squalor in Lebanon is perhaps the most critical and immediately achievable goal of the Palestinian resistance and the ideals enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Friends of Palestine and supporters of basic civil rights, wherever they live, can help this happen without violence or martyrs by signing and distributing the Online Petition and by twinning with a Palestinian Refugee in Lebanon.

The Palestine Civil Rights Campaign-Lebanon and the Sabra Shatila Foundation Beirut, Lebanon-Washington DC

“We the undersigned from many countries, mindful of the urgent need for equal human rights for our Palestinian Refugee sisters and brothers in Lebanon in their Civil, Political, Social and Economic dimensions, herewith signify our solidarity with Lebanon as this great country nobly corrects six decades of injustices by enacting civil rights legislation for her guests from Palestine.

Affixing my name to this petition expresses my wish to personally “twin” in solidarity with one of Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees as they and their Lebanese hosts continue to work and prepare for their Return.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Click here to sign the petition

by GEOVANI MONTALVO

Indigenous peoples in the western Salvadoran town of Izalco commemorated the 78th anniversary of the slaughter of 30 thousand indigenous people and peasants, killed during the popular uprising of 1932.

During the dictatorship of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the dissatisfaction with the unfair distribution of wealth caused a social uprising. The dictatorship struck back, with one of the worst massacres of the continent on occurring on January 22, 1932.

On this day, more than three thousand farmers, indigenous and political leaders in Izalco, Nahuizalco, Ateos, Juayua and other places, protested low wages, unfair distribution of land and hoarding of wealth in the hands of a few elite Salvadoran families .

According to Salvadoran writer and historian Alirio Montoya, the military dictatorpshi justified the slaughter by linking communists to indigenous people as synonymous entities.

The killing, led by former President General Maximiliano, left almost thirty thousand dead, “the majority of whom were indigenous -who probably did not know [that the government considered them] communists- thus destroying much of a culture that now demands justice and recognition,” says Montoya.

“After this massacre, the Indian community was greatly reduced in the country, many of them changed their habits for fear of being killed and many customs gradually waned into oblivion” recounted the spiritual guide “Tata” Juan.

78 years later, in a place known as “El Llanito” where many victims of the slaughter are buried, an indigenous ceremony was held to “pay tribute to all the fallen who died innocently.”

“Naja nusan matiguagua su 1932 matachiwa,” [We will never forget the martyrs of 1932] exclaimed indigenous priests in Nahuatl.

The Salvadoran Indigenous Coordinating Council (CCNIS) and Ama Foundation coordinated these commemorations on January 22 and 23 in Izalco, asking the Salvadoran state to “repair the damages caused by this crime” committed nearly a century ago.

“We tell the government that it should not only apologize to [the survivors], but to help them; that would be a wonderful thing,” said the Mayor of Izalco, Robert Alvarado, during the event,.

“For years we have been fighting for the Salvadorean State to recognize the existence of indigenous peoples in the country through constitutional reform, and also to ratify international agreements, and also for our rights to be promoted and respected,” said Betty Perez, an indigenous woman CCNIS member.

“Also we want the new government [of Mauricio Funes] to develop public policies so that they recognize damage that the capitalist system has been wreaking on indigenous communities for years,” she added.

These requests and others were made during the indigenous ceremony, accompanied by the “ancestral snail shell” and “blessing of the sacred fire.”

Attorney for the Defense of Human Rights (PDDH), Oscar Luna, has expressed support and solidarity “with the struggle that indigenous communities have been undertaking on behalf of their legitimate constitutional rights”.

“The indigenous population in this country is a strong and substantial population, and therefore requires the support and recognition of their rights,” said Luna.

Indigenous peoples have the hope of achieving some of their demands with the new government of President Mauricio Funes, who has expressed support for this sector and has encouraged a rapprochement of the state with the indigenous population through the Social Inclusion Secretariat of the Presidency .

Upside Down Word for more

by RICHARD SWIFT

‘All Hands on Deck for Haiti!’ shouted the headlines in the Trinidad Express. It was ‘Hold on Haiti: We Are Here For You’ from the Barbadian Press. The echoes of solidarity reverberated throughout the Caribbean as Haitians struggled to pull themselves out from under the rubble of the Force 7-plus earthquake that devastated the overcrowded Haitian capital of Port-Au-Prince. At this writing the number of dead remains uncertain but the Haitian Government claims that 75,000 people have already been buried in mass graves without even being identified. The final death toll could top 200,000 – ten per cent of the city’s population. The ramshackle capital, where building codes are almost non-existent, has had its hardest-hit quartiers reduced to a crumble of cement and other building materials. These areas included the university sector where many buildings collapsed, leaving students and teachers buried underneath their own classrooms.

Schoolchildren elsewhere were among the primary victims as many were inside these large but precarious educational institutions at slightly before 5pm on Tuesday, 12 January, when the quake hit (the Haitian school day is in the afternoon). The UN and other expatriate aid and security workers were also prominent among the victims, as they were largely resident in the kind of large building structure that proved deadly when it collapsed. Ironically the informal squatter areas such as Port-Au-Prince’s massive Cité Soleil shantytown (‘the most dangerous place in the world’) were relatively less affected: there is only so much damage that can be done when a flimsy tin structure collapses.
Promises, promises

A groundswell of sympathy across the world and promises of a massive amount of both official and privately-raised aid from all quarters quickly followed the quake. But time was of the essence. The international press reached Port-Au-Prince long before the massive amount of promised food, water, tents and rescue equipment. So the first days were filled with images of the increasingly frustrated population trying to dig out their families and neighbours with little more than their bare hands. Predictably, the hard-hit Haitian infrastructure of ports, airports and road systems – poor at the best of times – quickly became clogged by the competing claims and demands of donors. The overall co-ordination was lacking, as both the UN and the Haitian Government were crippled by quake damage. Accusations of inefficiency, corruption and looting of food stocks quickly emerged, as did charges by small (but usually quite effective organizations) like the French Médicins Sans Frontières that the US military was monopolizing ports of entry and thus impeding the efforts of others.

The response in the Caribbean region is heartening, promising not only aid but the regularizing of the status of the thousands of ‘illegal’ Haitians who have already fled their poverty- and disaster-stricken homeland and are resident in virtually every other Caribbean country. The members of CARICOM (the Caribbean Community and Common Market) and other Caribbean states went further, offering the possibility of taking in and helping settle those who no longer felt there was a future for them in Haiti. The Prime Minister of St. Vincent spoke for many when he proclaimed: ‘We cannot treat these Haitians as if they are from another planet.’ Still, with a few possible exceptions like Guyana these small and mostly poor Caribbean states have limited capacity in this regard. The other sentiment that reverberated throughout the region was the worry that the involvement of outsiders in Haiti’s affairs would only make matters worse in the long run.

A terrible history

New Internationalist for more

Nouakchott — A recent fatwa banning female genital mutilation/cutting in Mauritania will help reduce the practice only if religious leaders take the message to the people, scholars and anti-FGM/C activists say.

Given the widespread practice of FGM/C in Mauritania and the belief that it is imposed by Islam – families cut their girls “as Allah wishes”, one woman said upon hearing of the fatwa – convincing people to stop will take time and engagement from religious leaders.

“Imams and Muslim scholars must not stop at just talking about the ban in their sermons,” Muslim scholar Baba ould Mata told IRIN. “They must go before the people, especially in remote regions where FGM/C is prevalent.”

A group of Muslim clerics and scholars on 12 January signed the religious decree against FGM/C after two days of debate led by the Forum de la pensee islamique et du dialogue des cultures in the capital Nouakchott.

A 2007 Health Ministry study showed that 72 percent of women in Mauritania had undergone FGM/C – about the same proportion as in 2001 despite years of awareness campaigns and a 2005 law punishing anyone cutting a child and “causing injury”.

But education campaigns did help bring about the fatwa, religious heads said. The Muslim leaders issuing the decree drew on a 2008 declaration by Mauritanian doctors and midwives that FGM/C is “harmful to health and can have grave consequences including death”.

In 2006 a Mauritanian association of Islamic scholars issued a fatwa denouncing FGM/C but few religious leaders agreed to sign it. The 2008 declaration put more weight behind the move this time, Muslim scholar and secretary general of the forum, Cheikh ould Zein told IRIN.

He said of the recent fatwa: “Our reasoning went like this: Are there texts in the Koran that clearly require this practice? No. On the contrary, Islam is clearly against any act that would have negative repercussions for health. Today Mauritanian doctors unanimously declare [FGM/C] threatens health; therefore it is against Islam.”

All Africa for more

by CYRIL MYCHALEJKO

Rape. Murder. Corruption. Environmental contamination. Impunity. These are just some of the charges and incidents that have plagued Canadian mining operations abroad for years. Now one Canadian lawmaker has taken on the Herculean challenge of legislating mining reform in a country that has traditionally acted like a parent in denial.

“The mining industry in Canada is too powerful a lobby,” said Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) John McKay.

Sixty percent of the world’s mining corporations come from Canada. According to a report by InfoMine, Canadian mining corporations listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange had 1,010 projects in South America, 578 in Mexico, 703 in Africa, 376 in Asia and 345 in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea in 2009. Canada also accounts for 19 percent of global mining exploration spending, which totaled at $13.2 billion. Gold, silver, copper and nickel are among the minerals the industry scours the globe for. In Canada the industry employs 193 registered lobbyists.

McKay’s bill, C-300, would empower the Canadian federal government to investigate complaints of human rights and environmental abuses leveled against mining companies. If the Ministers investigating a company find it guilty of violating social and environmental standards laid out in the bill, the company, if receiving support from the Canada Pension Plan or Export Development Canada could lose funding from the respective organizations.

“It’s limited, but a positive step forward overall,” said Sakura Saunders, editor of www.ProtestBarrick.net, a website that provides research and organizing information around mining issues, with a focus on Canadian Mining giant Barrick Gold. “But this bill is simply putting ethical guidelines on the investment and promotion of mining, oil and gas projects in developing countries. It treats the Canadian government as an investor rather than a government.”

Dirty Business

Sarah Knuckey, a lawyer at the center for human rights at New York University School of Law, testified at a parliamentary hearing in Ottawa in November that security guards working at a mine in Papua New Guinea, owned by Barrick Gold, are guilty of gang raping local women.

“The guards, usually in a group of five or more, find a woman while they are patrolling on or near mine property. They take turns threatening, beating and raping her,” said Knuckley. “In a number of cases, women reported to me being forced to chew and swallow condoms used by guards during the rape.”

Amnesty International issued a public statement on December 9, 2009 revealing that local police at the same mine in Papua New Guinea violently evicted local families and burned down and destroyed at least 130 buildings and houses. Barrick initially denied the allegations, but after the conclusions of Amnesty’s local investigation were released the company was forced to accept the findings.

Barrick was also recently accused of failing to comply with environmental standards in Chile and of anti-union discrimination in Argentina.

On November 27, 2009 another Canadian company made headlines when a Chiapan anti-mining organizer, Mariano Abarca Roblero, was assassinated. One employee and two former employees of Calgary-based Blackfire Exploration Ltd. were arrested for the murder. Other local anti-mining activists have also reported receiving death threats. Documents were later released revealing that the company was bribing the local mayor.

“We have obtained documents – which Blackfire admits are genuine – that clearly show payments of US$1,000 a month going directly into the Mayor of Chicomuselo’s bank account on the understanding that municipal authorities would keep community members opposed to the mine under control,” explained Rick Arnold, coordinator for Common Frontiers-Canada.

Less than a month later, two anti-mining activists were killed in El Salvador within a week of each other, where Canada’s Pacific Rim Mining Co. has been facing resistance to a proposed gold and silver mine in the area. The company is currently using a US-based subsidiary and provisions in the Central American Free Trade Agreement to sue El Salvador’s government for refusing to grant the company permission to commercialize the potentially destructive El Dorado mine.

“The company’s presence continues to create violence and conflict by their continued insistence on opening the mine despite widespread community opposition,” said Alexis Stoumbelis, Executive Director of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). “At this point, the only ethical thing for Pacific Rim to do is to leave El Salvador and to withdraw their lawsuits against the Salvadoran government.”

Pacific Rim refuses to acknowledge that the violence is related to their widely unpopular project.

Upside Down World for more

by HIROAKI SATO

NEW YORK — Three recent developments in a span of two days reminded me how dysfunctional and uncivil America’s vaunted democracy has become.

First, there were images of Massachusetts voters wildly cheering Scott Brown. He had just won a special election for a U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy. In an election there is a winner of course, but there were a couple of unsettling things about people cheering Brown’s win.

Here was a state that kept sending the same Democrat, Ted Kennedy, back to Washington for five decades, knowing his one goal was to achieve universal health care. It was a state, too, that had become the first to enact a statewide universal health care system, just four years ago. And in December, the U.S. Senate had passed the first serious bill, however defective, toward realizing Kennedy’s goal. Yet the residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had chosen a Republican who promised to nullify the whole thing.

Most unsettling was Brown’s vow to be “the 41st senator.” To see the absurdity of this, you must know the U.S. Senate’s rule on filibuster or “cloture.” This body requires only two-fifths of its members plus one to obstruct a particular measure.

The 100-member U.S. Senate at the end of this past year had won exactly the minimum number of supporters to pass the health care reform bill: 60 (58 Democrats, one socialist, one independent). That means that if those opposing — 40 and all Republican — added just one to their ranks in the coming votes, the scale would tip. Hence Brown’s vow.

If this rule strikes you as a travesty of democracy, the Senate as a whole is just that. It is constituted to trample on the will of the people. By giving two senators to each state, regardless of size, it simply makes a laughingstock of proportional representation. Sen. Max Baucus, of Montana, who played a central role in diluting and obfuscating the health care legislation, for example, represents less than a half a million people. Each senator from the largest state, California, represents more than 18 million.

Then, on the day the media went berserk on the advent of “the 41st senator,” another willful Senate rule, along with another undemocratic reason for using it, came to light. The nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration withdrew. The reason? A single senator on the 25-member Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee had held up his confirmation hearing. Why? The senator, South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint, feared that the nominee, Erroll Southers, might give the TSA employees — those airport screeners created after 9/11 — collective bargaining rights.

What amazes me as much as the rule that gives such power to a single senator is the fact that an elected representative of the people can openly treat workers’ rights as something akin to a criminal act and get away with it. It is, in my view, the undemocratic nadir.

Of course, this country is no different from most others in the way it has dealt with workers and labor unions dishonorably. In fact, the power and influence of labor unions in the United States lasted only about 30 years following the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s social legislation. I remember seeing often the face of the great labor leader Walter Reuther on Japanese TV and newspapers in the 1960s. But, as I later learned, already in the 1950s, conservative politicians in America had begun denouncing labor unions as “un-American.”

Antagonism to regular workers unionizing quickly spread, especially after Republican Ronald Reagan became president. From 1980 to 1999, the union membership rate fell from 24 percent to 14 percent — below 10 percent if limited to the private sector. It has fallen further since.

For some years now, however, the Gini coefficient (rich-poor ratio) of the U.S. has been as high as that of China, with the unemployment rate much higher. Isn’t it about time that some of the people’s representatives, if not a Republican from South Carolina, came out strongly for regular workers?

The only good thing that has happened in the past year is the confirmation, without much fuss, of the pro-labor Congresswoman Hilda Solis as labor secretary early in the Obama administration. But she has remained disquietingly silent ever since.

Then, on Jan. 21, the Supreme Court declared certain restrictions on campaign financing unconstitutional. It was one more case of “Damn the weaker members of society, more power to the monied.”

Japan Times for more

by MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

As we near two weeks after the devastating earthquake and terrifying aftershocks in Port-au-Prince and Zacmel, Haiti, we face the inevitable media wall, that closes up, unless a story emerges of such surprise and delight that it’s able to shine through.

For the media light, by it’s very nature, must move on — to the new, to the odd, to the freaky.

A new al Qaeda tape, a new sex scandal, a new bimbo eruption for a prominent politician, and away we go. And away we go.

But long before the earthquake of Jan. 12th, Haiti has been exposed to unique and vicious attacks for centuries, for daring to fight for, and win, Black freedom.

Many people are amazed that Haitians are being found alive, after being buried under tons of rubble, for 10,11,12 days, with no food or water. I too shared that feeling.

Be we forget that poverty and food insecurity in Haiti has meant the average Haitian ate only one meal every 2 — or 3 — days!

Think of this — with all the hours of live and taped footage of earthquake survivors – have you seen a chubby or thick Haitian? Especially when compared to Black Americans (or, for that matter, white Americans) Haitians, without Jenny Craig or Slim fast, are lean and sleek people. That’s because pay there is so low and survival is so difficult.

For decades before the earthquake, Haitians have lived amidst political, economic and social chaos, often stoked and supported by the US, which supported dictatorships of theft, repression and torture — for generations.

Of the 20 year U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti back in the 1920’s to the ’40’s, Haitian historian and anthropologist, Ralph Troullot said the Americans “solved nothing and complicated everything.”

Haitians are tough, smart and beautiful people, who did something 200 years ago that lit up the eyes and lifted the hearts of millions of Black people all around the world.

It is not fair that they were punished for doing what the famed slave rebel, Spartacus, failed to do against the Roman Empire. They bested the French Empire, and forced one of the greatest military minds in history (Napoleon) to say ‘uncle’ (or more properly, “l’oncle” in French)

They’ve deserved far more than they’ve received. They breathed freedom into the lungs, not only of Blacks, but of millions of Latin Americans who chafed under Spanish colonial rule.

They deserve wellness, health, self determination, prosperity, justice and peace.

For 200 years, they’ve received none of this.

ZNet

by KEITH GOETZMAN

Have you heard the phrase “beyond organic” and wondered what it means? If so, you have sympathizers among some certified organic farmers who believe it confuses consumers. Oregon-based organic farmer Katie Kulla writes for In Good Tilth about “beyond organic” and its effect on farmers like herself who have jumped through all the hoops to become certified:

A growing number of non-certified growers seem to express hostility toward the word “organic” and their inability to legally use it—negativity perhaps best typified by their use of the phrase “beyond organic” to describe their practices. The claim has been increasingly common in media coverage of small farmers as well—perhaps most famously in Michael Pollan’s descriptions of farmer Joel Salatin in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. …

While some might not think twice about the phrase “beyond organic,” I have been bothered by its use and its significant implications. When my husband and I [proprietors of Oakhill Organics] discuss the organic label with customers today, we hear that many people think organic “doesn’t mean anything anymore,” or that they’re worried the meaning is being diluted, but they’re not sure why. I have to wonder how much of their confusion and cynicism can be attributed to the “beyond organic” phrase and the subsequent criticisms of the USDA organic program that often accompany its use.

Kulla goes on to deflate some of the myths surrounding organic certification. She convincingly argues that:

* While organic certification is rigorous and means extra paperwork, it is not terribly onerous and is “ultimately positive.”
* A trained inspector can spot things that a consumer can’t, even if the consumer is, for example, a member of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm and can visit and observe the operation.
* Certification is simply not that expensive, especially when federal reimbursements available to many farmers are taken into account.
* Certification leaves some decisions up to the government, but the alternative is “an unregulated word usable by anyone as a marketing boost.”
* Big business may stand accused of inappropriately using the organic label on processed foods, but again, that’s no reason to ditch—or dilute—the label.

Utne Reader for more

(submitted by reader)

Investors are raising the red flag as some foreign government and conservations and animal rights groups intensify a campaign to tighten the noose on trophy smuggling

By TOM MOSOBA

A seemingly innocent and procedural proposal by the government to sell 90 tonnes of its ivory stockpiles has taken an unexpected twist that could return to haunt the nation in the long run.

Keen on pushing through with the sale to raise an estimated $15 million in much needed revenues, the government has, however, come under severe criticism that is threatening the country’s image in the international arena.

Interestingly, even though Zambia has made a similar proposal, it is Tanzania that has attracted much of the scrutiny, with influential media in the UK and US accusing the country of seeking to abet elephant poaching and illegal trade in banned trophy.

Alarmed by the negative portrayal in the campaign to block Tanzania and Zambia, tourism investors are warning that the matter could destabilise the fledging tourism sector.

The investors are raising the red-flag as some foreign governments and conservation and animal rights groups converge on a platform to intensify calls to tighten the noose on ivory trade and smuggling to stop elephant poaching.

The chairman of the Zanzibar Association of Tourism Investors (Zati) Mr Mohammed Simai says that the campaign will impede Tanzania’s efforts in recent years to promote tourism, including game viewing in prominent national game reserves like Selous, Serengeti and Ngorongoro.

“As private investors in tourism, we are foreseeing problems in this push to sell ivory. The choice of our game reserves as preferred destinations by high end tourists from the UK and US will be undermined by campaigns linking the country with elephant killing and smuggling,” warned Mr Simani.

He told The Citizen that Zati members on Wednesday wrote to the Union and Zanzibar Governments to urge for shelving of the proposal to sell the 90 tonnes of ivory for the sake of avoiding negative publicity that will hurt the industry.

“We are urging President Jakaya Kikwete to intervene and stop the move to sell the ivory,”Mr Simani said in a telephone interview from Zanzibar. He said the furore that followed the revelation did not portend well with tourism promotion and regional trade objectives.

He said Zati as a member of the Tourism Confederation of Tanzania (TCT) has forwarded its concerns to the agency and demanded that prudent decisions to safeguard the country’s tourism image be taken over the ivory saga.

“Some international environmental and animal protection campaigners are already sending warnings that Tanzania risked blacklisting as a preferred game viewing spot if it pushed through the sale of seized elephant tusks,” cautioned Mr Simani.

The TCT executive secretary Mr Richard Rugimbana confirmed on Wednesday that the body had held a meeting of members over the matter but said no concrete outcome had been reached.

“We are still consulting and have not come to a common position with the many other authorities involved,” Mr Rugimbana said.

Mr Simani warned that the tourism sector that was recovering from a decline caused by the global economic crisis last year does not deserve another round of controversy. “I urge the government to act on the long term interest of this vital sector and drop its case at the Cites meeting,” he said.

The Zati chairman noted that the $15 million envisaged from the sale was a drop in the sea compared to potential tourism arrival loses were campaigners to dissuade visitors from touring due to poaching and smuggling concerns. Tanzania earned $1.3 billion (Sh1.6 trillion) in 2008 from 642,000 tourists to account for 17.2 per cent of the GDP.

The Citizen for more

The religious beliefs (related to Islam) mentioned below are not necessarily writers personal religious beliefs.

Junaid Jamshed, former member of the music group Vital Signs.

Junaid Jamshed after joining an Islamic group.

Why Zaid Hamid is popular among the youth of Pakistan and what is actually deriving his success? Is he giving a different message that is unprecedented in nature or is he using a different strategy to communicate the same old conspiracy theories?

The analysis below will help us figure out the reasons why his theories are successful amongst the Pakistani population and whether if there is any difference between his propositions and those of the religious traditionalists i.e. the Maulvis. An illustration given below will demonstrate this:

Let’s take a look at the hypothetical scenarios and analyse these examples:

Imran is an elite middle class boy who, having completed his A levels from a posh private English medium school in Pakistan, now studies in a top notch university in Lahore. He regularly parties with his mates and goes to watch Indian and Hollywood movies with fervour, driving fancy cars (he has a collection, including a new Honda Civic). His parents are religiously and culturally inclined and encourage him to pay more attention towards religion and traditions. They are inwardly extremely proud of their child and fulfil all his whims and fancies. Imran, an obedient child, is forced to reconsider his lifestyle and finds he faces two choices…

In another scenario, Mariam, a girl from the same background loves to partake in night time entertainment with her friends, including eating out and watching movies, and her favourite past time is getting clothes tailored in the latest fashion, and applying an assortment of makeup. Her parents are worried about Mariam finding a suitable suitor and wish her to become more eastern in her manners and more religious. As the age for marriage approaches, Mariam is forced to reconsider her way of life. She finds she faces two choices s well…

The first choice for both these youngsters is to join a Zaid Hamid group, which is ostensibly silent on various religious aspects (such as ban on music, or wearing a headscarf) or to join the old school traditionalists such as Farhat Hashmi (in Mariam’s case), or Maulana Tariq Jameel, Israr Ahmed, or other such religious preachers. The Traditionalist path requires strict adherence to the principles of Islam such as complete and strict pardah (Hijab) for women, Music is absolutely haram (forbidden), gender segregated gatherings, prayers 5 times a day and excessive love of jihad.

Mariam considers these options carefully… she thinks about it… if she were to follow the traditional path, she would have to first of all change her dressing style. That would mean shrouding herself in a burqa and forgetting about the juicy designer wear she so loves. Secondly, she thinks, if she were to cover her face as required by these preachers, it would be useless to apply any makeup as everything would be hidden behind her headscarf and veil! What about all the compliments she always received on being the best dressed of all, and having the nicest hairdo and following the latest makeup trends? In addition she is also required to strictly pray 5 times a day and have no interactions with men- be they cousins or any other friends.

She next considers joining Zaid Hamid… hmmm…what would she have to give up? She muses over her checklist: clothes- no compromise (she doesn’t need to hide behind some veil), parties- no compromise, music- also no compromise, makeup- definitely no compromise. What is she required to do then?

She discovers much to a pleasant surprise that she just has to excessively love Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Iqbal -which most of the Pakistanis already do anyway since this has been taught to us from the day we started going to school- and to carry some beliefs in her heart – to hate India, Israel and America and hold only them responsible for the disastrous state of our country and to firmly believe that our army is sacred and that the Prophet (PBUH) has prophesised for it to eventually conquer and rule India (Ghazwa-e-hind).

Similarly for Imran, the thought of giving up fun parties at his friend’s places, supporting a beard, praying five times daily, and excluding women from his social life (even social events are segregated), and to give up listening to his favourite singer, Bryan Adams, was too much of a sacrifice…

So he too ponders over the alternative- the easier option: though this Zaid Hamid group also glorifies Jihad and propagates immense hatred against Jews, Indians and Americans, it does not ostensibly share the orthodox views of the traditionalists (such as hijab, Music ban, sex segregation).

In other words, by joining Zaid’s group both Imran and Mariam do not have to compromise on their sophisticated pleasures

Let’s take a look at some of these images which reveal to us the appeal for youth today that each of these groups carry, which will in turn reveal to us why Zaid Hamid’s group would have precedence in the mind of a youngster:

This picture of Junaid Jamshed gives a glimpse of the changes that he adapted to, having followed the footsteps of traditionalist Tariq JameeL (head of TJ).

AA Counterterror for more
(Submitted by reader)

by MUNA WAHOME

Nairobi — The freezing January weather in southern Maryland on the east coast of the United States could not be more different from that of Igboland in eastern Nigeria. But for years, that has not put off Clement Igbokwe, a former financial analyst turned grocer.

For the record, he is no ordinary grocer. He specialises in everything members of the African and Caribbean diasporas in his area might want. That includes stocking stuff that can only be sourced from specific African countries.

For Kenyans, that includes the Unilever food seasoning Royco that largely defines the peculiar culinary habits of Kenyans in all corners of the world.

For Nigerians, it is the soft drink Fanta — in a glass bottle and sourced directly from Nigeria!

Denizens of other countries are pampered with dried fish and chicken and baby food Cerelac straight from the home country.

But it is not just Africans abroad who are patronising the likes of Mr Igbokwe. Financial solutions providers and other business interests are stalking the African diaspora for their dollars, widely acknowledged in central bank reports on capital accounts.

The facade of his grandly named J & J International Food Store is covered by signs of money transfer firms Western Union and the Kiswahili-featuring latest addition, Kenya’s own innovation, Safaricom.

The two money transfer firms linked up a month ago, adding to Safaricom’s own transfer system aimed at the Kenyan diaspora in the United Kingdom.

“We have seen only a few Kenyans coming to use the service, but I believe that is because it is new,” said the Nigerian trader, one of over 400,000 Western Union agents in 200 countries. He volunteers that the money transfer business has been a big boon as Africans come in to shop as well as send money home.

Collectively Africans from sub-Saharan Africa transferred over $11 billion home (2007 World Bank numbers), and an African Development Bank study showed in a number countries surveyed, this accounted for between 9 and 25 per cent of their home countries’ GDPs.

All Africa for more

by TERRY LACEY

“The tide is high but I`m holding on. I´m gonna be your number one.” So sang the girl band Atomic Kittens. Indonesia is entering what will become its nuclear age, driven by a huge expansion in energy, with key companies like Pertamina and ministries like Finance, Trade, Energy and Mines led by a new and growing band of women breaking though the glass ceiling.

After initial doubts, Karen Agustiawan keeps her job as president director of Pertamina, Indonesia’s top state-owned oil and gas company, while all the directors around her have been washed away by a tsunami of change. Agustiawan is hardly alone across the government, a trend that US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton noted in a speech during her visit to Jakarta year ago as part of the new Obama administration.

“I have to compliment Indonesia for the growing role that women are playing at all levels of society,” Clinton said. “And a recognition of the role that women have to play and the opportunities for women to assume leadership positions as many of you in this room have done is another contribution that Indonesia is making. As I travel around the world over the next years, I will be saying to people, if you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity, and women’s rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.”

It has been a long time coming. Indonesian women, working for low wages, have provided the bulk of the work force in multinational factories since the 1970s, when the country started to to open to foreign investment. And, although to the outside world they are usually characterized in photos as wearing the hijab, called a jilbab in Indonesia, there are plenty of miniskirts and there is a growing if hard-fought sense of women’s role that belies their place in stricter Islamic societies. In Indonesia, often they are running things.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono reportedly understands that Pertamina could become a truly global oil, gas and energy company, pioneering renewable energy as well as optimizing gas and reducing the cost of oil imports. The failure to hold up oil-lifting against the trend of decline as reserves were exhausted reflected lack of thrust and investment, not just harder geology and deeper waters.

Now Pertamina will push oil-lifting back up from 174,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2009 to an estimated 193,900 bpd in 2010, seeking to become a global player in the Middle East or the Arab and Muslim world.

But these dreams are impossible if Pertamina, as the top state-owned enterprise in a clutch of increasingly profitable SOEs, is run in the style of an old boys club representing yesterday, as a milking cow for patronage, jobs for the boys and profits for the old elite. Agustiawan may be just the right kind of leader to change it.

State SOE Minister Mustafa Abubakar has now confirmed that the president director “will not be replaced” but will keep the job she took up in February 2009, while he confirmed that seven new directors will join Agustiawan on the Pertamina board, chosen from a list of 25 candidates, “Most of them are from internal Pertamina nominations.”

But she will still have to fight for progress against the conservative, under-qualified under-capacity male-dominated middle that holds back much of public enterprise and public administration.

Turkish Weekly for more

De­spite pop­u­lar con­cep­tions about the hor­mone tes­tos­ter­one, in wom­en, at least, the sub­stance ac­tu­ally may pro­mote fair, con­cil­ia­to­ry be­hav­ior, re­search­ers say.

But the myths about tes­tos­ter­one are so pow­er­ful that wom­en in a study started act­ing less fairly if they thought they had re­ceived a dose of it, wheth­er they had or not.

Such are the find­ings of a study ap­pear­ing in the Dec. 8 ad­vance on­line is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture.

Test­os­terone is often called the “male” hor­mone and is po­pu­lar­ly asso­ciated with aggres­sion. Wom­en have some test­os­terone also, though.

Ernst Fehr of the Un­ivers­ity of Zu­rich, Switz­er­land, and col­leagues set up a bar­gain­ing game in which fe­male par­ti­ci­pants were giv­en a pill ei­ther of tes­tos­ter­one or of a neu­tral sub­stance, called a pla­ce­bo.

Those that re­ceived tes­tos­ter­one showed a “sub­stan­ti­al in­crease in fair bar­gain­ing be­haviour,” lead­ing to better so­cial in­ter­ac­tions, the re­search­ers wrote. But wom­en who thought that they re­ceived tes­tos­ter­one, wheth­er or not they ac­tu­ally did, “be­haved much more un­fair­ly” than those who thought that they re­ceived pla­ce­bo.

So, the neg­a­tive, an­ti­so­cial con­nota­t­ion of in­creas­ing tes­tos­ter­one lev­els seems to be strong enough to in­duce neg­a­tive so­cial be­hav­iour even when the bi­o­log­i­cal re­sult is ac­tu­ally the op­po­site, the sci­en­tists re­marked.

Ev­i­dence from an­i­mal stud­ies does show that tes­tos­ter­one causes ag­gres­sion to­ward oth­er mem­bers of the spe­cies, Fehr and col­leagues wrote. Pop­u­lar wis­dom tends to as­sume hu­mans work the same way. But it has been un­clear wheth­er this is cor­rect.

Stud­ies have in­deed found that male and fe­male pris­on­ers with vi­o­lent his­to­ries have high­er sal­i­vary tes­tos­ter­one lev­els than nonvi­o­lent pris­on­ers, the re­search­ers not­ed. But this does not show that the tes­tos­ter­one ac­tu­ally caused the vi­o­lence.

A com­pet­ing idea, they ob­served, is that tes­tos­ter­one mo­ti­vates peo­ple to seek high so­cial sta­tus. De­pend­ing on the situa­t­ion, they may try to achieve that ei­ther through vi­o­lence or through fair­ness.

World Science for more

Despite the odd absurd anomaly, such as an attempt to prosecute for a depiction of a woman having sex with a cartoon tiger, the UK government’s “extreme pornography” laws have not have proved to be the threat to free expression says John Ozimek

Critics of the extreme porn law, which took effect a year ago this week, may be feeling a sense of ironic let-down on its anniversary, as legislation supposedly passed to protect the innocent from extreme sadists appears to have turned, all too rapidly, into the “Safeguarding Vulnerable Animals Act”.

A law variously promoted as a defence against perverts and condemned as a brake on free speech may have turned out to be neither, leaving the question of why the government bothered in the first place. The new law — sections 63 to 67 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2008 — makes it an offence for an individual to possess material deemed as “extreme porn”. This is defined as images that depicted “explicit realistic extreme acts” — such as necrophilia, bestiality or acts that were life-threatening or likely to cause serious harm to intimate body parts — pornographic (produced for the purposes of sexual arousal), and “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character”.

The big issue, as far as civil libertarians were concerned at the time, was that such a law extended the principle of criminalising possession of material beyond the single area where it already operated — child abuse material — and widened it out into more mainstream areas. Hitherto, government had restricted its censorship activities to clamping down on the distribution or publication of material through legislation such as the Obscene Publications Act or the Video Recordings Act.

Baroness Miller, speaking for the opposition to this proposal in the Lords, expressed concerns both that the wording of the Act was too wide and, following remarks from the minister, that it might give the police powers to go after individuals that they could not prosecute under any other means.

So far this has not happened. Shortly after the Act became law, ACPO advised police forces not to go on fishing trips: they should enforce the law where breaches came to light, but not waste time looking for offenders.

In the last year, prosecutions have been few and far between and almost without exception “add-ons”. Careful monitoring of public sources suggest a total of around 26 prosecutions for possession of extreme porn — and all but two of these prosecutions have been primarily concerned with other offences, ranging from making of indecent images to serious drug crime.

The other major trend observable is that the overwhelming majority of extreme porn charges have been brought in respect of material that depicts human/animal sexual interaction. This is probably inevitable in the light of the ACPO guidance and the careful wording within the Act. Possession of materials that depict bestiality is a prima facie offence: possession of adult material is far more nuanced, and requires convincing a jury that the degree of harm depicted is serious or life-threatening.

Whilst the above may be re-assuring, there were two worrying hints of things to come. Reports from law enforcement sources suggest that the new law is being used to clamp down on individuals involved in selling dodgy dvd’s on the street: specifically, in respect of videos depicting bestiality.

Index on Censorship for more

by FIDEL CASTRO

Two days after the catastrophe in Haiti, which destroyed that neighboring sister nation, I wrote:

“In the area of healthcare and others the Haitian people has received the cooperation of Cuba, even though this is a small and blockaded country. Approximately 400 doctors and healthcare workers are helping the Haitian people free of charge. Our doctors are working every day at 227 of the 237 communes of that country. On the other hand, no less than 400 young Haitians have been graduated as medical doctors in our country. They will now work alongside the reinforcement that traveled there yesterday to save lives in that critical situation. Thus, up to one thousand doctors and healthcare personnel can be mobilized without any special effort; and most are already there willing to cooperate with any other State that wishes to save Haitian lives and rehabilitate the injured.”

“The head of our medical brigade has informed that ‘the situation is difficult but we are already saving lives.’”

Hour after hour, day and night, the Cuban health professionals have started to work nonstop in the few facilities that were able to stand, in tents, and out in the parks or open-air spaces, since the population feared new aftershocks.

The situation was far more serious than was originally thought. Tens of thousands of injured were clamoring for help in the streets of Port-au-Prince; innumerable persons laid, dead or alive, under the rubbled clay or adobe used in the construction of the houses where the overwhelming majority of the population lived. Buildings, even the most solid, collapsed. Besides, it was necessary to look for the Haitian doctors who had graduated at the Latin American Medicine School throughout all the destroyed neighborhoods. Many of them were affected, either directly or indirectly, by the tragedy.

Some UN officials were trapped in their dormitories and tens of lives were lost, including the lives of several chiefs of MINUSTAH, a UN contingent. The fate of hundreds of other members of its staff was unknown.

Haiti’s Presidential Palace crumbled. Many public facilities, including several hospitals, were left in ruins.

The catastrophe shocked the whole world, which was able to see what was going on through the images aired by the main international TV networks. Governments from everywhere in the planet announced they would be sending rescue experts, food, medicines, equipment and other resources.

In conformity with the position publicly announced by Cuba, medical staff from different countries–namely Spain, Mexico, and Colombia, among others–worked very hard alongside our doctors at the facilities they had improvised. Organizations such as PAHO and other friendly countries like Venezuela and other nations supplied medicines and other resources. The impeccable behavior of Cuban professionals and their leaders was absolutely void of chauvinism and remained out of the limelight.

Cuba, just as it had done under similar circumstances, when Hurricane Katrina caused huge devastation in the city of New Orleans and the lives of thousands of American citizens were in danger, offered to send a full medical brigade to cooperate with the people of the United States, a country that, as is well known, has vast resources. But at that moment what was needed were trained and well-equipped doctors to save lives. Given New Orleans geographical location, more than one thousand doctors of the “Henry Reeve” contingent mobilized and readied to leave for that city at any time of the day or the night, carrying with them the necessary medicines and equipment. It never crossed our mind that the President of that nation would reject the offer and let a number of Americans that could have been saved to die. The mistake made by that government was perhaps the inability to understand that the people of Cuba do not see in the American people an enemy; it does not blame it for the aggressions our homeland has suffered.

Nor was that government capable of understanding that our country does not need to beg for favors or forgiveness of those who, for half a century now, have been trying, to no avail, to bring us to our knees.

Our country, also in the case of Haiti, immediately responded to the US authorities requests to fly over the eastern part of Cuba as well as other facilities they needed to deliver assistance, as quickly as possible, to the American and Haitian citizens who had been affected by the earthquake.

Such have been the principles characterizing the ethical behavior of our people. Together with its equanimity and firmness, these have been the ever-present features of our foreign policy. And this is known only too well by whoever have been our adversaries in the international arena.

Cuba will firmly stand by the opinion that the tragedy that has taken place in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, is a challenge to the richest and more powerful countries of the world.

Haiti is a net product of the colonial, capitalist and imperialist system imposed on the world. Haiti’s slavery and subsequent poverty were imposed from abroad. That terrible earthquake occurred after the Copenhagen Summit, where the most elemental rights of 192 UN member States were trampled upon.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, a competition has unleashed in Haiti to hastily and illegally adopt boys and girls. UNICEF has been forced to adopt preventive measures against the uprooting of many children, which will deprive their close relatives from their rights.

There are more than one hundred thousand deadly victims. A high number of citizens have lost their arms or legs, or have suffered fractures requiring rehabilitation that would enable them to work or manage their own.

Eighty per cent of the country needs to be rebuilt. Haiti requires an economy that is developed enough to meet its needs according to its productive capacity. The reconstruction of Europe or Japan, which was based on the productive capacity and the technical level of the population, was a relatively simple task as compared to the effort that needs to be made in Haiti. There, as well as in most of Africa and elsewhere in the Third World, it is indispensable to create the conditions for a sustainable development. In only forty years time, humanity will be made of more than nine billion inhabitants, and right now is faced with the challenge of a climate change that scientists accept as an inescapable reality.

In the midst of the Haitian tragedy, without anybody knowing how and why, thousands of US marines, 82nd Airborne Division troops and other military forces have occupied Haiti. Worse still is the fact that neither the United Nations Organization nor the US government have offered an explanation to the world’s public opinion about this relocation of troops.

Several governments have complained that their aircraft have not been allowed to land in order to deliver the human and technical resources that have been sent to Haiti.

Some countries, for their part, have announced they would be sending an additional number of troops and military equipment. In my view, such events will complicate and create chaos in international cooperation, which is already in itself complex. It is necessary to seriously discuss this issue. The UN should be entrusted with the leading role it deserves in these so delicate matters.

Our country is accomplishing a strictly humanitarian mission. To the extent of its possibilities, it will contribute the human and material resources at its disposal. The will of our people, who takes pride in its medical doctors and cooperation workers who provide vital services, is huge, and will rise to the occasion.

Any significant cooperation that is offered to our country will not be rejected, but its acceptance will fully depend on the importance and transcendence of the assistance that is requested from the human resources of our homeland.

It is only fair to state that, up until this moment, our modest aircrafts and the important human resources that Cuba has made available to the Haitian people have arrived at their destination without any difficulty whatsoever.

We send doctors, not soldiers!

Counterpunch

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

by MARK FEENEY AND BRYAN MARQUARD

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as “A People’s History of the United States,” inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack.

“He’s made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, said tonight. “He’s changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can’t think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect.”

Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn’s writings “simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation. He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and John Silber, former president of Boston University. Dr. Zinn, a leading critic of Silber, twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of academe.”

Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against “the BU Five” were soon dropped.

In 1997, Dr. Zinn slipped into popular culture when his writing made a cameo appearance in the film “Good Will Hunting.” The title character, played by Matt Damon, lauds “A People’s History” and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.

“Howard had a great mind and was one of the great voices in the American political life,” Ben Affleck, also a family friend growing up and Damon’s co-star in “Good Will Hunting,” said in a statement. “He taught me how valuable — how necessary — dissent was to democracy and to America itself. He taught that history was made by the everyman, not the elites. I was lucky enough to know him personally and I will carry with me what I learned from him — and try to impart it to my own children — in his memory.”

Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, “The People Speak,” which ran on the History Channel in 2009, and he narrated a 2004 biographical documentary, “Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”

“Howard had a genius for the shape of public morality and for articulating the great alternative vision of peace as more than a dream,” said James Carroll a columnist for the Globe’s opinion pages whose friendship with Dr. Zinn dates to when Carroll was a Catholic chaplain at BU. “But above all, he had a genius for the practical meaning of love. That is what drew legions of the young to him and what made the wide circle of his friends so constantly amazed and grateful.”

Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he met Roslyn Shechter.

“She was working as a secretary,” Dr. Zinn said in an interview with the Globe nearly two years ago. “We were both working in the same neighborhood, but we didn’t know each other. A mutual friend asked me to deliver something to her. She opened the door, I saw her, and that was it.”

He joined the Army Air Corps, and they courted through the mail before marrying in October 1944 while he was on his first furlough. She died in 2008.

During World War II, he served as a bombardier, was awarded the Air Medal, and attained the rank of second lieutenant.

After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman. He worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.

Boston Globe for more

(Submitted by Shahabuddin Haji)

by HARVEY WASSERMAN

Howard Zinn was above all a gentleman of unflagging grace, humility and compassion.

No American historian has left a more lasting positive legacy on our understanding of the true nature of our county, mainly because his books reflect a soul possessed of limitless depth.

Howard’s PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES will not be surpassed. As time goes on new chapters will be written in its spirit to extend its reach.

But his timeless masterpiece broke astonishing new ground both in its point of view and its comprehensive nature. The very idea of presenting the American story from the point of view of the common citizen was itself revolutionary. That he pulled it off with such apparent ease and readability borders on the miraculous. That at least a million Americans have bought and read it means that its on-going influence is immense. It is truly a history book that has and will continue to change history for the better.

But that doesn’t begin to account for Howard’s personal influence. He was a warm, unfailingly friendly compadre. He shared a beautiful partnership with his wonderful wife Roz, a brilliant, thoroughly committed social worker about whom he once said: “You and I just talk about changing the world. She actually does it.”

But Howard was no ivory tower academic. His lectures were engaging, exciting and inspirational. But they took on an added dimension because he was personally engaged, committed and effective. He chose to write books and articles in ways that could impact the world in which they were published. He showed up when he was needed, and always had a sixth sense about exactly what to say, and how.

Perhaps the most meaningful tribute to pay this amazing man is to say how he affected us directly. Here are two stories I know intimately:

In 1974, my organic commune-mate Sam Lovejoy toppled a weather tower as a protest against the coming of a nuclear power plant. When Sam needed someone to testify on how this act of civil disobedience fit into the fabric of our nation’s history, Howard did not hesitate. His testimony in that Springfield, Massachusetts courtroom (see “Lovejoy’s Nuclear War” via www.gmpfilms.com) remains a classic discourse on the sanctity of non-violent direct action and its place in our national soul. (Sam was acquitted, and we stopped that nuke!)

Three years earlier I sent Howard a rambling 300-page manuscript under the absurdly presumptuous title A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, 1860-1920. Written in a drafty communal garage in the Massachusetts hills by a long-haired 20-something graduate school dropout, the manuscript had been rejected by virtually every publisher in America, often accompanied with nasty notes to the tune of: “NEVER send us anything like this again.”

But I sent a copy to Howard, whom I had never met. He replied with a cordial note typed on a single sheet of yellow paper, which I still treasure. I showed it to Hugh Van Dusen at Harper & Row, who basically said Harper had no idea why anyone would ever read such a book, but that if Howard Zinn would write an introduction, they’d publish it (though under a more appropriate title).

He did, and they did…and my life was changed forever.

Thankfully, Hugh then had the good sense to ask Howard to write a REAL people’s history by someone—the ONLY one—who could handle the job. He did….and ALL our lives have been changed forever.

Howard labored long and hard on his masterpiece, always retaining that astonishing mixture of humor and humility that made him such a unique and irreplaceable treasure. No one ever wrote or spoke with a greater instinct for the True and Vital. His unfailing instinct for what is just and important never failed him—or us. The gentle, lilting sound of his voice put it all to unforgettable music that will resonate through the ages.

A few days ago I wrote Howard asking if he’d consider working on a film about the great Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs, whose story Howard’s books have uniquely illuminated.

Eugene V. Debs was beloved by millions of Americans who treasured not only his clarity of a shared vision for this nation, but his unshakeable honesty and unquestioned integrity.

Debs ran five times for president. He conducted his last campaign from a federal prison cell in Atlanta, where he was locked up by Woodrow Wilson. He got a million votes (that we know of). “While there is a soul in prison,” he said, unforgettably, “I am not free.”

Debs had deeply shaken Wilson with his brilliant, immeasurably powerful opposition to America’s foolish and unjust entry into World War I, and his demands for a society in which all fairly shared. In the course of his magnificent decades as our pre-eminent labor leader, Debs established a clear vision of where this nation could and should go for a just, sustainable future. Enshrined in Howard’s histories, it remains a shining beacon of what remains to be done.

Counterpunch for more

by ERIC MANN

Howard Zinn, a dear and old friend of many–including me–died today in Santa Monica at the age of 87. He died still doing work he knew needed to be done. It is so fortunate that The People Speak, the documentary Howard narrated based on his classic A People’s History of the United States, was completed and made its world premiere before Howard’s passing. That project had been in the works for almost a decade and it meant so much for Howard to be able to see another part of his vast legacy come to fruition.

I met Howard Zinn in 1967 when I was a New England Regional Organizer for Students for a Democratic Society and he was a young, charismatic professor at Boston University. I became close to him and his wife Roz, who was also a significant figure in the movement at the time. I initiated the “Anti-Military Campaign” at BU demanding an end to the ROTC program on campus and to the BU Overseas Program, through which BU embedded itself with the US military apparatus. When I came out of prison in 1971, Howard and I approached the Boston Globe with the idea of it having its first explicitly left op-ed column, which we named “Left Field Stands.” For more than a year, Howard and I alternated Fridays and wrote some of the most popular and radical op-ends to appear in a mainstream paper. We were so popular and successful that the Globe fired Howard and then me. As I say, we both lived through the experience but it was a loss to the movement.

Just last month, I had the good fortune to interview Howard on my radio show, Voices from the Frontlines (on Pacific station KPFK 90.7 FM, streaming live on the web at www.kpfk.org). I am glad that I approached the interview as a retrospective on Howard’s work and a view of his future work. We talked about Howard’s own role in history; we talked about A People’s History and The People Speak at some length.

I’ve linked below to the interview on the Strategy Centers’ website, www.thestrategycenter.org and hope that you find it helpful and moving. Note Howard’s great sense of humor and irony, his vibrant and powerful speaking voice, and his high hopes for The People Speak to reach out to an even larger audience than the incredible People’s History, with 2 million books sold so far.

Finally, as a footnote, it is commendable that so many of the most militant anti-racist whites are Jewish, as Howard (and I) are. When I was at BU, the key to my organizing was the opportunity to guest lecture at 500-person classes taught by Howard and another professor, Murray Levin. With Howard and Murray’s blessing, I spoke about Revolution and SDS 101. Levin, another faculty giant at the time, was Jewish–as were civil rights martyrs Mickey Schwerner and Andy Goodman, who were killed in 1964 with Black Mississippi native James Chaney. The historic and powerful relationship between Blacks and Jews in US Left history is an under-reported and interesting footnote to a far broader history–but one, with the passing of Howard Zinn, that is still worth noting.

(Submitted by reader)

by RAJA ABDULRAHIM

As Best Buy recently discovered, reaching out to Muslims can cause a backlash. Even those who champion the targeting of ads to the community steer corporations away from the mainstream media.

Leafing through a Best Buy flier over the holiday season, Celena Khatib spotted a small greeting near the bottom of the page: “Happy Eid al-Adha.”

The good wishes for the important religious holiday celebrated by Muslims seemed a milestone in U.S. marketing. “I finally felt that they are recognizing Muslims like we are a part of this community,” said Khatib, 31, a suburban Detroit mother of two. “We live here, we spend our money here.”

But on Best Buy’s website, people around the country posted contrasting views. “You insult all of the heros and innocent who died 911 by celebrating a holiday of the religion that said to destroy them!” wrote one. Many others said they would no longer shop at Best Buy.

The controversy underscores the continuing obstacles that retailers and other companies face in marketing to a U.S. Muslim population estimated at more than 2.3 million by the Pew Research Center.

Even an advertising-industry study three years ago that urged companies to cash in on what was then the community’s estimated $170-billion purchasing power got little traction.

Best Buy is believed to be the first major retailer to market to Muslims nationwide, and only a few are even dipping their toes into direct ethnic local advertising.

Rather than pave the way for more national advertising, the Best Buy ad seems to have reinforced the pariah status that Muslims have in mainstream marketing and to serve as an example of why “Happy Eid” won’t join “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Hanukkah” as a mainstay in holiday advertising any time soon.

“Obviously the Muslim market has some unique sets of challenges. . . . That’s not something to be glossed over,” said Rafi-uddin Shikoh, founder of DinarStandard, a consulting firm specializing in the Muslim market.

Other immigrant and minority groups have faced similar treatment from advertisers, but the U.S. Muslim community carries heavier baggage.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and with more recent incidents, such as the Ft. Hood shooting and attempted Christmas Day plane bombing, the word “Muslim” for some Americans is synonymous with terrorism. And that’s an image that corporations don’t want attached to their brand names.

A recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 35% of Americans have a negative view of Muslims and 45% believe Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence.

Even those championing marketing to Muslim consumers — like Shikoh — advise Western companies not to do what Best Buy did. Instead, in a move that seems both practical and defeatist, they recommend directing advertising in ethnic and religious media and away from the mainstream.

“At this point, I don’t know if there’s a real need for a national campaign,” Shikoh said. “They are curious to see if there is a way to tap into this market without risking their reputation or it backfiring in any way.”

Best Buy has refused to discuss its holiday advertising, though a brief statement on its website indicates it stands by its Eid greetings: “Best Buy’s customers and employees around the world represent a variety of faiths and denominations. We respect that diversity and choose to greet our customers and employees in ways that reflect their traditions.”

Other companies have recently come under some fire for marketing to groups that some considered out of the mainstream.

A Gap ad during the holiday season angered a conservative Christian group for being too inclusive by referring to Christian, Jewish, secular and pagan holidays with the line “Go Christmas, Go Hanukkah, Go Kwanzaa, Go solstice.” Gap didn’t directly address whether it had considered mentioning Eid al-Adha, which was celebrated two weeks after the ad first appeared.

Los Angeles Times for more

(Submitted by Asghar Vasanwala & a reader)

Activists in Paris call for liberty for Muslim women who wear the burka. (Yoan Valat / European Pressphoto Agency / January 26, 2010)

by DEVORAH LAUTER

Reporting from Paris – Muslim women should not be allowed to wear burkas in public institutions, including banks, post offices, schools and even on public transportation, a report by a parliamentary committee said Tuesday.

Yet the report on how to stop Muslims from wearing the full-body garment in France fell short of gathering a consensus on key questions such as whether to completely ban the burka from French streets.

How to “stop this practice is not the most simple thing to define,” the report says.

As a result, the committee reduced its recommendation to a nonbinding resolution condemning the burka as “contrary to the values of the Republic.” It also called for educational programs to reduce fundamentalism.

Andre Gerin, a member of the Communist Party and president of the committee, cautioned that the report should not “lead to a debate about religion” but instead should focus discussion on the “scandalous practices” of terrorism and extremism that “hide behind the full veil.”

Socialists on the panel worried that the burka controversy could become part of a debate over French identity and stir anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. Committee members also strongly disagreed over whether a full ban should become law; such a recommendation was left out of the report.

Nevertheless, lawmakers could be closer to drafting a bill barring the burka in selected places to assist public servants in dealing with veiled Muslims in hospitals and schools, the report said.

The report recommends denying services to anyone in a full-body veil, but it does not advocate other punishment.

A limited ban on burkas could be legally justified, said public law expert Denys de Bechillon at France’s Pau University, because it would address “a problem of security . . . in places where we need to identify people.”

However, he said, a total ban on the burka could be ruled unconstitutional or even a rights violation.

President Nicolas Sarkozy said in June that the burka was “not welcome” in France, fueling a media frenzy.

Within weeks, the controversy “took to the French like mayonnaise,” De Bechillon said. “You mix the oil and the yolk, and at one precise moment they all congeal together. . . . It’s kind of the same story with the burka. It permitted a lot of debate on identity and . . . on the fear of Islam.”

In November, the Swiss voted in a referendum to ban construction of additional minarets in their country.

Though a majority in France say they would support an anti-burka law, a significant proportion — 22% of respondents to a GN Research survey — said they were “indifferent.”

Los Angeles Times for more

(Submitted by reader)

by NADEEM F. PARACHA

What can one say about Imran Khan? A great former cricketer, a compassionate philanthropist … a sorry excuse for a politician. But his continuing forays into bad politics and tactical blunders can be excused, for he is yet to understand that politics is not a game of cricket, and that the democratic election process does not follow the selection policy he enforced as the captain of the Pakistan cricket squad.

The truth is, Khan’s penchant for picking up talented players seemed to have gone haywire when he decided to pick his early political mentors.

Coming from a highly educated, cultivated, and somewhat liberal background, Khan had slipped into reverse gear by the time he decided to enter politics in the early 1990s. In other words, instead of looking forward to becoming an integral part of a new, democratic, and General Zia-less Pakistan, Khan struck an ideological partnership with shadowy characters who were hell-bent on keeping the country stuck in the 1980s – a decade when Pakistan pulled and damaged all of its important political, economic and social muscles under the stressful weight of a myopic dictatorship and the damaging jihad that a dictatorship sponsored in Afghanistan.

By the time Khan officially entered politics sometime in late 1995, it wasn’t his pristine education at Oxford University, or a more insightful understanding of Pakistan’s political history, that was informing his political make-up. On the contrary, his ideology was weaved from the usual reactionary claptrap one expects from former ISI men, especially those who got emotionally involved in Pakistan’s counterproductive Afghan jihad project.

One such chap was General (retd.) Hamid Gul, who is squarely responsible for shaping Khan’s rather warped understanding of Pakistan’s political history and dynamics.

The next natural step for him was, of course, going further down the reactionary rabbit hole, where a world brimming with the most outlandish ideas and concepts of history, politics and society continues to thrive. This hole is the same into which a number of urban, middle-class Pakistanis have decided to fall, becoming an isolated cult of sorts with its own set of prophets that include certain music and fashion celebrities, TV personalities, cricketers, journalists, televangelists, et al.

This cult also has its own understanding of Pakistani politics, society and faith, one that is a highly animated concoction of the distorted content still present in many of the country’s history and religion text books. This world view espouses a narrative patronised by the post-Zia military and intelligence agencies that puts Pakistan at the centre of the universe around which malicious anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam forces are constantly trying to undermine the country’s political and cultural wellbeing. As such, this narrative is highly anti-democracy, and thus looks at Pakistan’s ethnic and sectarian diversity and plurality suspiciously and akin to being a danger to Pakistan’s ideological singularity premised on the belief that there is only a single, homogenous strain of faith and nationalism that thrives (or should thrive) in Pakistan.

Alas, this train of thought does not emerge from the figurative masses. It stems from the Punjab-dominated, military-bourgeois-religious elite and its many fans among the large sections of the province’s urban middle-classes. Mind you, it is the same elite that was highly pro-America during the Cold War and played a leading role to continue undermining democracy and populist political parties through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. And if the decade of the 1990s is anything to be learnt from, one can also suggest that it is this elite that becomes highly vocal and animated whenever Pakistan slips away from the clutches of a military dictatorship and plants itself back in the more democratic domain.

To put it simply, it is ironic watching and hearing men such as Khan, Gul, Munawar Hassan and Zaid Hamid spout populist lectures and speeches on corruption, sovereignty and patriotism, when the truth is that much of what these gentlemen are spouting is nothing more than a slippery version of the narrative propagated by the above-mentioned elite whose roots are not in the so-called masses, but in the smoky corridors of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and in the comfortable drawing-rooms and TV lounges of the country’s urban middle- and upper-income groups.

There is no doubt that men like Hamid, Hassan, and Gul are (in a Machiavellian manner) pretty conscious of this dichotomy and not bothered at all as long as it helps them keep a large section of the country’s urban bourgeois entertained and thrilled by long-winded myths and tall tales of “Muslim supremacy” and assorted tirades against democracy and rational politics.

But I do wonder if Khan is conscious of the fact that much of what he chants in the name of the poor people, free judiciary, national sovereignty, and Islam is largely a by-product of the nonsense generated for years by the country’s economic, military and social elite groups? However, since Khan has not been above hypocrisy and contradiction himself, blundering over and again by questioning the moral make-up of everyone from President Asif Zardari to Mian Nawaz Sharif and Altaf Hussain, only to be faced by some ugly reminders of his own not-so-moralistic past, one can assume that he too is conscious of the above-mentioned dichotomy.

What’s more, though one would have imagined that a man like him was likely to have avoided certain disturbing exhibitions of xenophobia and sheer racism that have now crept in the narratives and mind-set of men like Hamid and his bourgeois elite following, Khan blundered again by deciding to actually appear on a controversial TV show on which Hamid and his warped sidekicks make a mockery of history and politics, peddling nationalistic chauvinism as patriotism, and paranoid fiction as ‘fact.’

If Khan takes himself seriously, what on earth was he doing on a show in which it was claimed that Einstein’s equation ‘E=MC2’ meant nothing and was actually another step by the Zionists in their march towards world domination, and that Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry too was ‘planted’ by western and Israeli agencies. This is only the tip of the iceberg made from the insane yet comical absurdities that do the rounds on that show. And yet Khan, who calls his party a mainstream political organ, decided to appear on a show that operates like a millennial, end-of-the-world cult?

The more tenacity mainstream political parties in the present parliament exhibit in the face of a rabid onslaught against its character by the Taliban, the media, and assorted drawing-room cranks, the more frustrated these gentlemen get, consequently becoming more audacious and absurd in their attacks.

The same thing might have happened recently with Khan. Perhaps getting more aware of the lack of any worthwhile electoral ability of his party (even though it has now been around for a decade), he proved himself to hold the same xenophobia and racial superiority that large chunks of the urban middle-classes have started to suffer from.

During a speech in Lahore, he lashed out at President Zardari and MQM’s Altaf Hussain, using the most worn-out critical clichés that the two men usually face on TV screens. But this was not the problem. Khan wasn’t saying anything new or offensive in this respect. However, while winding up his rhetorical tirade, he got carried away and revealed the true extent of his xenophobia. While attacking MQM member and a minister in the PPP-led coalition government, Babar Ghauri, Khan sarcastically equated him with African children.

Dawn for more

(Submitted by reader)

by B. R. GOWANI

In the first week of January, a 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti. Over a 100,000 people died.

Long ago, the United States had made a pact with God that it is never going to let Haiti become independent—economically and politically. The US has succeeded— which means the God is stronger than the devil.

Pat Robertson, as usual, showed how cruel a man of God could be. He has not yet forgiven Haiti for revolting against the French colonial rule in 1804 and becoming the first republic to be led by blacks, and also the first independent country in Latin America. For this man of God, Haiti’s independence was “a pact with devil!” In other words, what he is saying is that the colored people should make a pact with God by staying under the white yoke. And this white Taliban has the CBN or Christian Broadcasting Network at his disposal.

The US army got a chance to reoccupy Haiti. By the way, this is the island where Columbus first landed in 1492 thinking that he has reached India.

The US navy has an excuse to cordon off Haiti more firmly and not letting any Haitian refugee to reach the US shores.

Time for the opportunist whites to be photographed and filmed with poor devastated colored victims. We have seen it so many times.

The US reporters could show their racism unrestrained by portraying Haitians as thugs and looters.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta had a chance to be not a doctor but a hero.

Israeli Defense Force found a place to gain some publicity and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got a chance for a little PR. He told the 200 member IDF team:

“You have raised human spirits and elevated the name of the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces.” “As many plot against us, distort and muddy our names, you have shown the real IDF.” “The Chief of Staff has told me that the other militaries were astounded by how quickly we arrived at the scene and began to work.” “Those who have seen the IDF over the years, operating under seemingly impossible situations and missions, are not surprised.” Ask the Palestinians.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by GAIL DINES

For all those women who think men are interested only in sex and not conversation or intimacy, think again. A New Jersey based company, ironically called True Companion, has come out with what it calls the “the world’s first sex robot”. This is, according to news reports, a life-size rubber doll that has all the “necessary” orifices. Why the big news? After all, this is not the first time that the porn industry has come out with a sex doll. The company Real Doll has been around since 1996 and offers “ an extensive list of options, including 10 female body types and 16 interchangeable female faces.” Offering to customize the doll to the desires of the particular consumer – color and shape of pubic hair, fingernail colors, hairstyle, ethnic features etc., — — the company boasts that “If you’ve ever dreamed of creating your ideal partner, then you have come to the right place.”

True Companion is trying to build a business on the deep insight that some men want more from their ideal partner than silent beauty. For about $8,000 True Companion offers a doll that actually talks in response to various stimuli, generating nuanced and complex sentences such as “I love holding hands with you.” Douglas Hines, the owner of True Companion, wants the customer to be able to “talk and relate to” the doll because he has come to the great realization that “Sex only goes so far – then you want to be able to talk to the person.” At last, men have discovered that for most women – and perhaps a few dolls – conversation matters! Well, it’s a start.

As ridiculous as this robot may seem to many of us, it actually makes perfect sense in a society saturated by porn, where the average age at which boys first view porn is 11 years. Boys and men are socialized by porn to see sex as lacking in connection, intimacy and emotion. Sex in porn is all about penetration; as chrisfjohn, commenting on the robot on the Huffington Post, said “the great part about porn is that you don’t have to deal with all of the emotions and drama of a relationship.” For chrisfJohn the robot is a bit too emotionally connected – he doesn’t want to “have to listen to it talk.”

For Don E Chute, on the other hand, the price is a bit steep because, he calculates, for that amount he could buy “roughly, 80, $100 hookers.” To be fair, many of the comments do see the problem with the robot-as-partner idea, but the misogyny still drips from some posts, as in the case of AZ85283, when he asks “Mothers, what the hell are you raising?”

Of course, it’s not the mothers but the pornographic culture that is raising men who are increasingly seeing women as interchangeable with sex dolls. If a doll with three orifices can stand in for a woman, then it doesn’t bode well for women who want to be seen as equal to men and deserving of full human rights. To see just how gender specific this is, can you imagine women shelling out thousands of dollars for a male doll, no matter what size his manhood, even if it did say, “can I make dinner for you”?

Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. Her latest book, Pornland: How Pornography has Hijacked Our Sexuality, will be published in July by Beacon Press.

Counterpunch

by THANGAVEL APPACHI

An Indian actress who supports the right of women to have pre-marital sex has been criticised by one of the country’s most senior judges.

Kushboo is being prosecuted in her adopted home state of Tamil Nadu for outraging public decency.

She is trying to have the proceedings against her dropped by appealing to the Supreme Court in Delhi.

But Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan was not sympathetic towards her arguments, saying they were “difficult to accept”.

Cultural taboo

“It is difficult to digest her statement,” he said. “We cannot accept her contention that she did not commit any offence.”

Kushboo, who is now also a prominent TV show host, said in a 2005 interview to a magazine that there was “nothing wrong in women having pre-marital sex, but they should follow all precautionary measures”.

She said that it was also “not fair on any educated youth to expect his wife to be a virgin”.

The remarks stirred controversy in a conservative country where pre-marital sex is still a cultural taboo.

Some Tamil nationalist political groups accused the actress of making derogatory and obscene remarks against Tamil culture.

Several cases have been filed against her across Tamil Nadu in various courts under different sections of the Indian penal code.

If found guilty, she faces imprisonment or a fine.

Feminists and human rights activists have joined the fray, arguing that the cases against her amount to harassment and are a breach of her right to free speech.

BBC for more
(Submitted by Harsh Kapoor)

by KAVITA N. RAMDAS

Fifteen years ago in Beijing, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton said firmly, “Women’s rights are human rights.” Today, after eight years of nonexistent U.S. support for women’s reproductive rights, Secretary of State Clinton is reviving women’s hopes around the globe by affirming the Obama Administration’s support for the International Conference on Population and Development Action Plan.

This historic agreement, signed by 179 nations in Cairo in 1994, outlined a visionary 20-year strategy for making family planning universally available by 2015. For the first time, a global consensus acknowledged that the empowerment and economic independence of women and education of girls were integral to meeting global population and development goals. It was the first time that an international document clearly stated that women had the right to determine their own reproduction. Principle 4 of the Action Plan states: “ensuring women’s ability to control their own fertility, is a cornerstone of population and development-related programmes.”

The founding president of the Global Fund for Women, Anne Firth Murray, noted that the Cairo declaration was the first major UN document that defined women as independent sexual beings, not merely child-bearers or mothers. In her words, “This was a revolution in women’s empowerment.”

From villages in Bangladesh to urban favelas in Brazil, women used the language of Cairo to push for concrete gains in accessing reproductive health and rights. In many ways, worldwide family planning has been a huge success: the global birth rate halved from 1950 to 2005. Many women around the world now view their right to freely and responsibly make decisions over their reproduction, free from coercion and violence, as a basic human right.

Yet, for some, the commitment to spreading freedom around the globe stops far short of ensuring women’s reproductive freedom. At a recent House foreign affairs committee hearing, Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) aggressively questioned Hillary Clinton about whether the Obama administration’s policies on reproductive health included access to abortion. Clinton responded unapologetically: “Family planning is an important part of women’s health and reproductive health includes access to abortion that I believe should be safe, legal and rare.”

We are going to need more straight talk of this nature, and walk our talk, if we want to ensure that the groundbreaking gains of Cairo are not eroded by a growing conservative and religious backlash. Despite the dedicated work of the United Nations and women’s rights advocates worldwide, more than 500,000 women still die annually from preventable childbirth-related injuries and illnesses. According to Population Action International, one in 65 women in developing countries risks dying during pregnancy or childbirth in her lifetime. Many of these are related to complications arising from unsafe abortions. In Mexico alone, up to 500,000 illegal abortions occur annually.

Secretary Clinton’s speech comes on the heels of a dismal global conversation on climate change that made it all too clear that we must find ways to effectively offset carbon emissions. Population growth and climate change will collide in ways that will put all our lives at risk, and will most grievously harm the poorest countries. In the Global Fund’s own experience, when girls and women have greater access to education—not just the three R’s: reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, but also the three C’s: courage, contraception, and choice—their improved health leads to positive community outcomes including economic growth and sustainable development. We agree with columnist Ellen Goodman: “if we can lighten the burden on the planet while widening the chances for women,” that’s our kind of offset. And, at least on the issues of women’s reproductive rights, this is proving to be our kind of State Department.

KAVITA N. RAMDAS is President & CEO of the Global Fund for Women, an NGO dedicated to advancing the rights of women.

Ms. Magazine for more

by James Febebebo

To the ordinary observer, Nigeria has a multiparty system which presupposes that there are more than one political party. Even with this presupposition, any keen observer who has carefully watched and studied the political tide as well as outcomes of previous elections, will know and understand that the supposed multi-party system is simply a sham.

When people consider the definition of democracy and relate it to what happens in Nigeria, they will certainly notice lapses and disparities. As defined by former US President, Abraham Lincoln, democracy is “government of the people, by the people and for the people” which when properly analysed produces a situation where the electorate have to vote for candidates of their choice in competitive elections, who, as elected representatives, bring home the dividends of democracy to those who chose them.

A basic feature of democracy is competitive elections where various political parties contest available elective positions in a competitive manner and produce winners cutting across various parties at the end in polls adjudged free and fair. The frequent landslide victories of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in previous elections in the country have raised some dust over Nigeria’s claimed multi-party status.

There seems to be a situation where only the ruling party exists in the ‘flesh’ while all others exist only in name, going contrary therefore to one of democracy’s key prerequisites that there should be competitive elections among different existing political parties.

Several arguments have, however, been made in favour of the ruling party by party faithful, one of which is that the party is the largest in Africa and has therefore in its midst great politicians who are qualified and capable to be elected either as governors or as president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This line of argument by supporters of the PDP falsely paints a picture that says only those in the PDP can win elections in Nigeria.

The membership of other parties in the country cannot in any way be said to be poor, as the country’s 150 million people also comprise hundreds of people who neither subscribe to the ruling party’s ideology nor want to be members of the party. This clearly explains that just as there are qualified and successful politicians in the PDP, there are as well other capable and renowned politicians who form the membership of these other parties. For a long time now the ruling party had dominated the political scene in the country and almost forced into oblivion all other parties which seemed not strong enough to face it in the polls. As a result, only the ruling party had stood to gain politically from elections in the country, as the party had claimed almost all available elective positions at the federal, state and local government levels. But the legal tussles which often follow the announcement of victorious PDP candidates are indication that other parties reject the outcome of the elections.

Daily Independent for more

by TODD MILLER

Following the modern recipe for corporate enterprise, the directors of Mexico’s increasingly powerful murder-for-hire firm, the Zetas, have begun to diversify from the company’s principal activity of providing armed enforcement for the drug-trafficking Gulf Cartel. According to U.S. and Mexican officials, the group has gone into the lucrative business of stealing and selling contraband gasoline. It steals from Mexico’s nationalized petroleum company PEMEX, and resells to Texas oil companies, including one run by a former Bush administration insider.

Were the group not known for countless brutal murders in Mexico’s endless and ever-more violent drug war, it might be considered the poster child of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), able to see a business opportunity when there is one, and to cut through trade barriers like a specialized drill cuts into a highly pressurized steel pipe carrying oil.

This is not only an example of criminals tapping savvy entrepreneurial skills to make another few million bucks, it is also an example of U.S. policy blowback: the perversely unintended result of a failed policy. On one hand the Zetas have been able to take advantage of NAFTA partly because of the “two way overland highway of contraband,” aptly described by political economist Jeff Faux, that has been greatly facilitated by the agreement, and which now includes companies that cook deals with organized crime.

The real power of the Zetas, however, that clearly sets them apart from Mexico’s other hit squads, comes from their roots. Before the founding members of the Zetas deserted an elite unit of the Mexican army, they received highly sophisticated training by U.S. Special Forces in anti-narcotic operations. This tale of oil thievery thus becomes a compelling one, especially as the U.S. public scrutinizes the ten-fold increase in “drug war” aid to Mexico under the Merida Initiative. Since 2008 Washington has pumped over a billion dollars into Mexico, with millions designated to military and police training. There will be more in store for 2010 if the funding passes later this year in Congress.

The Zetas first came to the attention of Mexico’s Attorney General’s office in 1999, after somewhere between 30 and 60 recently U.S.-trained soldiers defected from the Airmobile Special Forces Group (GAFE), an elite Mexican army unit specializing in counter-narcotics activity. GAFE units were trained in the United States by the “Snake Eaters,” the 7th Special Forces Group, famous for their role in building up and training armies in El Salvador and Honduras in the 1980s. Between 1996 and 1999 the Snake Eaters trained over 3,000 Mexican soldiers, mostly in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It didn’t take many of these soldiers long to realize that their talents could be put to much more profitable uses – running drugs, extortion, and kidnapping for ransom, for example. The 1999 GAFE defections gave birth to the Zetas, but things didn’t stop there. Between 2000 and 2005, over1,300 more of these elite soldiers defected. The GAFE desertion rate of 25% towers over any other branch of the Mexican military.

NACLA for more

Scientists at NCI have identified a novel form of cell division in lung cancer cells and reported those findings in PNAS online the week of Jan. 18, 2010. It has been known for many decades that normal tissue stem cells produce daughter cells with differing potentials for self-renewal and specialization through a process called asymmetric cell division. An immortal DNA strand hypothesis states that stem cells asymmetrically divide their DNA strands during cell division as a means to prevent DNA replication errors. While some evidence for the immortal DNA strand hypothesis exists in normal stem cells, the theory has never been proven and has never before been tested in cancer cells.

To investigate the immortal strand hypothesis in human lung cancer cells, NCI scientists performed a series of experiments termed ‘pulse-chase’ procedures. They found that a small population of laboratory lung cancer cells as well as cells in lung tumor samples asymmetrically divided their DNA strands. They also found that the frequency of asymmetric division could be modulated by changes in the cell’s microenvironment, suggesting the process may be regulated by neighboring cells as well as by other factors. The scientists then discovered that asymmetric division of DNA correlates with the lung cancer stem cell marker, CD133. The characterization of asymmetric cell division and its modulation in lung cancer cells provides insights into tumor initiation, self-renewal, and growth, as well as strategies to develop novel targets for treatment. Future work will aim to link this division to the cancer stem cell hypothesis.

National Cancer Institute

by HAMID DABASHI

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice — Martin Luther King, Jr, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 16 April 1963

The only reason the world at large should take notice of what American pundits think of the Green Movement in Iran is that their self-indulgent pontificating reveals much about the troubled world we live in and that they think they must lead. Indeed, one of the most magnificent aspects of the unfolding civil rights movement in Iran is that it acts as a catalyst to expose the bizarre banality of American foreign policy commentary and its limitations in dealing with the rest of the world. Those in American circles that are of the “bomb Iran” persuasion are lost causes just like the Ku Klux Klan. It is the equivalent of what in a different context Martin Luther King Jr called “the white moderates” that warrants more attention.

Perhaps the single most important problem with American politics, policymakers and pundits — left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican — is that they think that anything that happens anywhere in the world is about them or is their business. The imperial hubris that seems definitive of the DNA of this political culture wants either to invade and occupy other people’s homelands and tell them what to do, or else disregard people’s preoccupation with their own issues and impose, demand and exact “engagement” with them, whether they want it or not.

Take the most recent piece of nonsense published on the civil rights movement in Iran by Flynt and Hillary Leverett, “Another Iranian Revolution? Not Likely” ( The New York Times, 5 January 2010), which has absolutely nothing to do with or seriously to say about the Green Movement, and yet everything to reveal about the pathology of American politics as determined inside the self-delusional Beltway cocoon.

As early as mid-June 2009, the Leveretts defending the fraudulent election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (”Ahmadinejad won. Get over it,” Politico, 15 June 2009). That millions of Iranians had poured into their streets and put their lives on the line did not seem to bother the Leveretts. In addition to a condescending tone, in which the Leveretts partake freely when talking about a groundbreaking civil rights movement about whose origin and disposition they are categorically ignorant, the chief characteristic of their take is that they keep fabricating non-existent targets and then shooting them down. The result: what say has everything to do with the besieged and bunkered mentality inside the Beltway and absolutely nothing to do with the Green Movement. Chief example: “The Islamic Republic of Iran,” they believe, “is not about to implode. Nevertheless, the misguided idea that it may do so is becoming enshrined as conventional wisdom in Washington.”

Whoever said it was? No scholar or otherwise serious and informed observer of Iran writing in Persian or any other language and still in her or his right mind can predict — or has predicted — that the Islamic Republic will or will not fall, and even if it did, one way or another, it would have nothing to do with what “conventional wisdom in Washington” opts to enshrine or not to enshrine. If there are folks inside the Beltway who think the Islamic Republic will fall any day now, Abbas Milani will become the American ambassador to Iran, or the Iranian ambassador to the US, depending on the season of his migrations to the left or right, and Lolita will soon become required reading in Iranian high schools, well that’s their problem, and yet another sign of their dangerously delusional politics. That hallucination has nothing to do with the Green Movement, and thus the Leveretts need not have sought (in vain) to discredit a monumental social uprising of whose origin and destination they are oblivious.

Al-Ahram for more

by GITAU WARIGI

American televangelist Pat Robertson is not a wise man. This is a guy who goes before his “Christian” TV show called the 700 Club to say that Haitians are “cursed” people.

According to him, the explanation for their current calamity is that they had made “a pact with the Devil” 200 years ago. It was a terribly gross thing to say. And this from somebody who once sought to become the President of the United States.

What startled me was to hear a perfectly normal-looking, middle-class Kenyan say the same thing over lunch the other day. Evidently, there is an unfortunate incomprehension about voodoo – which is a trademark of Haiti – and what the likes of Pastor Robertson deem to be Satanic.

Missionary types who spread Christianity in Africa fell into the same confusion about tribal cults which they dismissed to be witchcraft. Voodoo is simply a cult, no different from, say, freemasonry. Only that the former is a poor man’s cult while freemasonry draws membership from elites and, therefore, is made to look more “civilised”.

The important thing is that voodoo has a cultural and psychological purpose in Haitian society which an outsider, like the missionaries of old, will be prone to totally confuse. The “scientific” explanation for Haiti’s latest disaster is straightforward enough. The poor country sits on a microplate of the earth’s crust that is tightly squeezed between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates.

Now and then, a catastrophic earthquake is bound to occur because of this pressure. The last time it happened was in 1946, but that earthquake struck the neighbouring Dominican Republic, which shares with Haiti the island called Hispaniola. Yet such rationalising makes absolutely no sense now to multitudes of shell-shocked Haitians, and for good reason.

What is more, atheists such as Richard Dawkins (he wrote the famous God Delusion) are having a field day over the Haitian catastrophe. Which God, they ask, can allow such pitiless suffering? It is a valid question. With tens of thousands dead, and millions more dislocated, humanitarian experts are estimating that it will take a generation to rebuild Haiti to where it would have been. The earthquake was a disaster comparable only to the 2004 East Asian tsunami.

The other day I chanced on the Internet a blogger going by the name Pasteur who was witheringly sarcastic of summons to attend a Sunday Mass service outside the ruins of Port-au-Prince’s cathedral. “What for? To pray to who, when my home, my family and my life have been destroyed? For me, there is no God any more,” he wrote. His pain and despair were plain.

And I quite understood why he felt that way. All over Haiti, such are the questions being asked. The irony is that Haitians have traditionally been a deeply religious people. Things have changed so much that only a handful of delirious women attended last Sunday’s Mass at the ruined Haitian cathedral. For some unfathomable reason, Haiti has been a special target of nature’s wrath in recent years.

In 2008, four savage hurricanes swept through the country in a row, causing devastation which destroyed a third of the impoverished country’s economy. Then along comes the January 12 earthquake, and you wonder . . . why do these repeated catastrophes focus their fury at the only predominantly Black nation in the Western hemisphere? And what bad luck doomed Haiti to be the poorest country there?

I can imagine, for people like Pastor Robertson, the answer lies in the Biblical tale of Noah and some curse he is supposed to have delivered upon one of his sons. There are plenty of people who have chosen to pour cold water on Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade’s dramatic plea to Haitians to abandon their God-forsaken country and return home to Mother Africa.

President Wade is even offering them land to settle. You could say the invitation was impulsive and, considering the daunting logistics of such a mass migration, it could be an impractical idea as well. Putting all that aside, President Wade’s offer is uplifting and poignant.

It is a cry of solidarity which is coming from the heart. Others like Rwanda and Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo have followed suit by offering some emergency financial support for Haiti. True, the sums are quite modest compared to what is pouring in from the rich world. Yet the offers are more heartfelt and deeply touching.

gwarigi@nation.co.ke

Sunday Nation for more

by Pervez Hoodbhoy

DARK clouds are gathering over Pakistan’s universities, portending a conflict that is likely to be long, bitter and uncertain in outcome. On one side are those who say that PhD degree holders must have, at the very minimum, undergraduate-level knowledge in the relevant discipline.

On the other side are PhD aspirants, together with their supervisors, who demand unearned degrees. They hold that passing examinations and taking courses is unnecessary and an affront to their dignity. The first volleys have already been fired. Earlier this month about 100 students, registered for the PhD degree at Quaid-i-Azam University, angrily mobbed the executive director of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) as he entered the campus. Their demand: cancel the current requirements of passing the international Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) as well as taking and passing graduate level courses. They say that producing research papers entitles them to receive the highest degree in their chosen discipline.

To his credit, the HEC officer stood his ground. He pleaded that removing essential graduation requirements would make their degrees meaningless, that they really did need to know subject basics before doing research etc. But these obvious and sensible arguments cut no ice with those who believe that PhD degrees are a birthright. Rhythmic cries of “hum nahin mantay zulm kay zabtay” (we will not tolerate tyranny!) reverberated across the campus. This leads one to wonder: for how long can the HEC withstand such pressures? What if the floodgates give way?

Some background: a tidal wave of cash hit Pakistan’s universities between 2002-2008. The 10 to 12 times budgetary increase set a new world record while the accompanying hype touched the skies. Advised by the HEC’s newly appointed chairman, Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, Gen Pervez Musharraf grandly declared that the annual production of PhD degree holders would be boosted from 150 per year to 1,500 per year. Incentive schemes encouraged teachers — often of doubtful academic merit themselves — to take on PhD students by the score. Academic quality, already low, nose-dived.

In 2006, pressed by persistent critics to include at least some minimal quality checks, the authorities finally made the right decision. They declared that a PhD candidate must ‘pass’ the international GRE undergraduate-level subject test administered by the Education Testing Service, Princeton. But the meaning of ‘pass’ was a hot potato that was not touched upon for another two years. Finally, in 2008, passing was declared as achievement of 40 percentile or better in the subject test.

Even this ludicrously low pass mark drew howls of protest. PhD students saw their degrees endangered while their supervisors saw their incomes threatened: every single registered PhD student was a cash cow worth Rs5,000 per month. The money went into the teacher’s pocket. Banded together by common interests, teachers and students lobbied to get the pass mark reduced still further. Others demanded that if testing was to be done at all, allow it to be done locally. Proponents of international testing were dubbed as ‘foreign agents’ and passionate arguments of national ghairat (honour) being at stake were thrown around.

But international tests of subject competence are simply indispensable. First, science is a global enterprise and rules for assessing competence in a particular discipline are universal. Local evaluations and testing mechanisms cannot compete in validity and quality. Second, in a society where ethical standards in the teachers’ community are no higher than among politicians or shopkeepers, the impartial and cheating-free nature of international testing is absolutely vital.

There is nothing particularly difficult about these international tests. As some readers may know, they are pitched at the bachelor’s level (i.e. 16 years of education). Chinese, Indian and Iranian students easily score in the 80-90 percentile range. American universities use them as entrance requirements, with medium-quality universities requiring results in the 70-80 range and the very good ones in the 80-95 range.

But achieving even 40 percentile has proved to be too difficult for most Pakistani PhD students even at the end of their PhD studies. This is especially alarming since they have had the advantage of three to four years of additional study. The pathetic quality of undergraduate education in Pakistan is surely responsible for this unfortunate fact. The intensity of the opposition to testing becomes understandable.

Dawn for more
(Submitted by reader)

by KANTI BAJPAI

Now that the climate talks in Copenhagen are behind us, it is time to turn once again to India’s policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan. A region-led policy, rather than a US-led policy towards Afghanistan, and the resumption of talks with Pakistan, rather than the stalling of negotiations, should be Indian policy.

New Delhi should start with five assumptions. The first is that the United States will quit Afghanistan by 2012 at the latest. When US troops leave, they will leave Afghanistan neither stable nor democratic. Second, the Taliban will remain a military and political force, supported by Pakistan or by elements within the Pakistani government. Third, India-Pakistan tensions over Afghanistan and Kashmir will continue, with both sides claiming legitimate interests in both places. Fourth, Pakistan will be a violent and turbulent place. US presence in Afghanistan will on balance exacerbate, not reduce, extremism in Pakistan which in turn will hinder India-Pakistan relations further. Fifth, terrorists will strike Indian targets again, even as New Delhi improves its counterterrorism, tempting India to hit back at Pakistan – with unpredictable consequences.

Indian policy must therefore change. New Delhi’s insistence that the US should stay in Afghanistan, that it must discipline Pakistan, that there is no such thing as good and bad Taliban, and that the resumption of talks with Pakistan must await stern action against the perpetrators of 26/11 and the dismantling of the terror apparatus is not wise policy. The US and its allies do not seem to have the will to stay in Afghanistan much beyond 2012. Washington’s ability to discipline Pakistan historically has been intermittent at best and ineffective at worst, principally because Islamabad is important to the US for a number of geopolitical reasons including, at present, military operations in Afghanistan.

New Delhi’s contention that there is no difference between elements of the Taliban is unconvincing. All our experience within India shows that there is always a more extreme and a less extreme faction of insurgents. If there was no relatively good Taliban, the hijacking of IC-814 in 1999 would have ended very differently – in tragedy for the passengers. In any case, to say there are no moderates is to suggest that there is no possibility of negotiating an end to Afghanistan’s troubles. Logically, then, the only option is to exterminate the Taliban. Postponing talks with Pakistan until terror has been more or less dismantled and full action taken on 26/11 is like waiting for Godot, in Beckett’s famous play by that name.

What is the alternative? Indian policy on Afghanistan must move towards a regional understanding that includes in the first instance Pakistan and perhaps Iran. The fundamental compact between India and Pakistan must be of a simple, robust nature: that both countries have legitimate interests in Afghanistan. India has an interest in overall stability and the protection of northern, non-Pashtun Afghans as well as various other minorities including Sikhs and Hindus. Pakistan also has an interest in the country’s stability and in the Pashtuns finding their rightful place in any future government of Afghanistan. India and Pakistan could agree therefore that India will continue to provide developmental aid and that Pakistan will have influence on political developments, the goal of both countries being to help evolve a lasting, just and inclusive political system. Iran, Russia, China and the nearby Central Asian states should be part of a conclave on Afghanistan as they are all affected by events in that troubled country and wield influence in it. A beginning towards a conclave would be for Afghanistan, India and Pakistan to meet on the future of Afghanistan.

Times of India for more

by MELVIN A. GOODMAN

Under the stewardship of neoconservative Fred Hiatt, the editorial and op-ed pages of The Washington Post have steadily moved to the right; the paper’s key writers — Charles Krauthammer, David Broder, Richard Cohen, Kathleen Parker, and others — have marched along in lockstep. They have supported the use of military force in Iraq and Afghanistan; offered apologies for the CIA crimes of torture and abuse, extraordinary renditions, and secret prisons; and criticized efforts by the Obama Administration to reverse these policies and to rely on multilateral diplomacy and arms control and disarmament to resolve outstanding problems. The key writer in Hiatt’s stable has been David Ignatius, who is this year’s winner of the WashPost/Compost Award for the most incomprehensible and fanciful op-ed of 2009.

Ignatius’ winning op-ed was written last month. He sought to justify U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan that, he says, will lead to a “sovereign Pakistan that controls all its territory”; a “future common market between Pakistan and Afghanistan that can power economic development in both countries”; and a “stable structure for Central and South Asia in the 21st century.” Ignatius believes that, just as the Mexican-American War “helped make the United States a continental nation” and the European wars of the 19th century “helped unify Germany and Italy,” the Af-Pak wars will stabilize a lawless tribal region that has been in turmoil for 150 years. There is no Afghan or Pakistani leader who genuinely believes that the current strife can lead to stabilization. Indeed, there are few Afghan and Pakistani leaders who understand all the roles being played by Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda, various tribal leaders, and the Pakistani intelligence services, which have played key clandestine roles in multiple crises that have affected Kabul, Delhi, and Islamabad. If the local actors can’t comprehend all the major factions, U.S. leaders (and commentators) are not likely to do better.

Ignatius brings an unusual ignorance to the subject of Pakistan, which he treats as a normal nation-state. In reality, Pakistan is an artificial political entity that has long been both dysfunctional and unstable. In their partition of South Asia in 1947, the British hoped to create one region (Pakistan) that would provide military facilities to Britain. To accomplish this, the British merged five key ethnic groups that had never co-existed in the same body politic historically, according to Selig Harrison, a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy. The Bengalis were the largest ethnic group, outnumbering the other four: the Punjabis, the Pashtuns, the Baluch, and the Sindhis. The Bengalis seceded in 1971, forming the independent state of Bangladesh. The Punjabis now outnumber the Pashtuns, Baluch, and Sindhis, but the three smaller groups have ancestral claims to more than 70% of Pakistani territory, ensuring continued ethnic and tribal strife.

The essential instability of the Pakistani state and the continued military conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan will make it impossible to create the network of institutions that Ignatius believes can “create a stable structure for Central and South Asia in the 21st century.” He wants unidentified American and Pakistani “statesmen” to “show the same vision and maturity” that post-World War II American and European statesmen used to create the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. These international institutions were born during WWII, however, in an effort to restore international order and prosperity at a time when the U.S. economy was booming and could finance postwar recovery and ensure currency stability. American leaders had a good understanding of the political and economic problems of Western and Central Europe; in contrast, U.S. leaders are basically ignorant about the frontier along the Afghan-Pakistani border and the tribal wastelands of Southwest Asia. The World Bank and the IMF have had their successes, but they have never been able to create positive economic development among the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world; both Afghanistan and Pakistan are key members of this unfortunate group.

Finally, Ignatius believes the U.S. buildup of troops in Afghanistan is the key to securing Pakistan’s control over its lawless tribal region. In fact, Pakistan understands that additional U.S. forces in Afghanistan will lead to increased warfare on the Afghan-Pakistan border and will ultimately drive more militants into Pakistani territory in Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier Provinces. The suicide bombing of a CIA base along the border and the wave of bombings that have swept Pakistan over the past several months, including the eastern city of Lahore, are a reaction to the increased U.S. use of unmanned drone aircraft in Pakistani territory against al Qaeda and the Taliban. U.S. efforts to bolster border security in Afghanistan may well complicate the overall security situation in Pakistan. Moreover, the Obama Administration’s announcement of a troop buildup in Afghanistan, along with a timeline for withdrawal, presumably have emboldened both al Qaeda and the Taliban.

BuzzFlash for more

by ANNE MARIE BAYLOUNY

The image of Islamist media is one of grim old men dictating extremist and male-centered religious precepts; Hizbullah’s al-Manar television, not just Islamist but also owned by a political party with a militia, has been equated with broadcasting terrorism and waging psychological operations against its enemies.[1] Yet much of al-Manar today is nothing like the picture painted of the station. Classified as terrorist by the U.S., most topics broadcast have little to do with Hizbullah, its resistance, Shi’a religious teaching, or the fight against Israel.

On Hizbullah’s al-Manar, non-veiled women dominate the airwaves on many programs. Only a small minority of programs on the television is religious. Christians regularly participate as experts and audience members, including priests and bishops, and scientific studies from the west are used as affirmative demonstrations of how Lebanese need to change. Problems are discussed in an open-ended, non-authoritative format, and a broad, multi-communal audience regularly participates. Programming promotes values often considered western, such as individual and human rights, and non-violence. Television shows tackle domestic violence by patriarchal figures and protest violence in video games. In a style echoing Oprah, civil society is urged to volunteer and help the disadvantaged, even though this affects the core of what many assert is Hizbullah’s base of legitimacy–its provision of social services.

Hizbullah has had ongoing political alliances with other sects since its entrance into the electoral field in post-civil war elections, yet in its media in recent years the organization has gone beyond politically pragmatic moves to affirm its inclusion of alternative communities and sects. The media presentation of other communities demonstrates to viewers an acceptance of diverse lifestyles and ideas, often highly Westernized, that is communicated in the sphere of popular media run by Hizbullah members.[2] This change has been taking place particularly since 2000, but was sped up in the following years. Such programming, diametrically opposed to popular and Western images of Hizbullah as a terrorist organization and its media as a propaganda outlet for violence and Shi’a exclusivism, is a result of Hizbullah’s increasing Lebanonization or nationalization. The organization is becoming more beholden to and embedded with domestic actors than was true of the organization’s founding some two decades ago, reinforcing its Lebanese character. Al-Manar is a window into these changes, for some more dramatic and perhaps convincing than the organization’s political statements and alliances. The television demonstrates Hizbullah’s desire to broaden its support and assure its future domestic legitimacy within the Lebanese multi-religious community. The extent of the television’s integration of other communities suggests that the embrace of the multi-confessional nature of the country is not fleeting. Indeed, al-Manar presents to its constituency the image that a multi-religious community is legitimate, even promoting unveiled Christians as experts in the intimate zone of family matters.

Media messages differ from political speeches and alliances, since media is not merely public but also popular, and potentially, lasting. It can reach wide segments of society communicating images of society and behavior that other forums cannot. In other words, the multiple voices and approval of differing perspectives communicated on al-Manar cannot be easily reversed.[3]

Arab Media & Society for more

by INDRA HARSAPUTRA

In a controversial move, clerics in East Java have issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from dying and straightening their hair, and from holding pre-wedding photo sessions.

The edict was endorsed by 250 leaders of Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) in Java and Madura, who convened for a problem-solving forum in Kediri, East Java.

Cleric Darul Azka said Friday that hair straightening was regarded as haram for women because it could lead to immoral acts if the intention was to improve physical appearance.

“In Islam, especially in the study of the kitab kuning [traditional yellow book], women wearing accessories or changing their hairstyle, in hope of attracting members of the opposite sex, is the same as revealing parts of the body that must not be exposed under Islamic law, or aurat, and this is forbidden,” Darul told The Jakarta Post.

The fatwa was issued as the clerics ended the bahtsul masail forum on Thursday, which was held in conjunction with the Lirboyo Islamic boarding school’s (Kediri) centennial anniversary. A similar gathering had previously forbidden Facebook.

Jakarta Post for more

by JENNIFER MOORE

“On January 28th 1995, when the cry went out that Peruvian troops had attacked the Ecuadorian border, the whole country went into motion with one heart. Now, when the Amazonian peoples cry out that multinational corporations have invaded our territory, the rest of the country is indifferent, apathetic, having declared a cold war…” – Father Juan de la Cruz, following protests in late September, written October 2009

Father Juan de la Cruz is a Salesiano priest who has worked among the Shuar indigenous people in Ecuador’s southern Amazon for the last twenty three years. Born in the area, De la Cruz accompanied the Shuar when they fought for Ecuador against Peru in a border war in the 1990s. Today, he says he “cannot remain silent” as they fight against oil and mining multinationals that would threaten the health of their natural environment and which has strained relations between the Shuar and the government of President Rafael Correa.

De la Cruz calls a recent decision by Ecuador’s Communications Commission to revoke a Shuar radio station’s frequency “a grave error” and an effort to undermine their struggle against oil and mining interests. He says the radio ‘Voice of Arutam’ is the only station in the area “where you can talk about the potential impacts of multinational companies and the plunder of our territories.”

On December 17th 2009, the National Communications Commission (CONATEL) emitted a resolution deciding to cancel the contract for the frequency belonging to the ‘Voice of Arutam’ station. Broadcasting from the town of Sucua in the southern Amazonian province of Morona Santiago where the Interprovincial Shuar Federation (FISCH) has their office, they first began broadcasting in 1972 with support from Salesiano priests and with a focus on bilingual education. The FISCH represents about 120,000 Shuar in the southern Amazon. Arutam is the name of their spiritual guide.

CONATEL based its decision on statements broadcast live during interviews with Shuar leaders in the context of mobilizations which took place late last September. According to CONATEL, remarks broadcast on Radio Arutam incited the Shuar people to violence and contravened an article in the Radio and Television Law which prohibits “the promotion of physical or psychological violence using children, women, youth or elderly people, or that provides incentive for, carries out or motivates racism, sale of sex, pornography, consumption of drugs, religious or political intolerance and other analogous acts that affect the dignity of human beings.”

Upside Down World for more

CMU Statement on the Presidential Election 2010

President Mahinda Rajapakse is seeking re-election for a second six-year term as Executive President. He has cut short his present term of office in order to do so, without having abolished the Executive Presidency, as he had pledged to do, before the end of his first term. What will be decided on January 26 next, therefore, is whether President Rajapakse is to continue to exercise the powers and enjoy the privileges of the Executive Presidency for another six years, or not. A majority of the millions of voters will exercise their voting rights either to vote for him, or for General Sarath Fonseka. Though the latter has made a pledge to abolish the Executive Presidency, President Rajapakse has evaded making any mention of his former pledge in that regard, in this election. It is not likely, in any case, that the issue of the abolition of the Executive Presidency will prove to be a crucial one for most of the voters. They will probably vote for President Rajapakse to continue in office, or for General Fonseka, in consideration of other matters that are of concern to them.

The Executive Committee of our Union, nevertheless, considers that the abolition of the Executive Presidency is of vital importance to the promotion of the basic social and economic interests, as well as the defence of the human and democratic rights and civil liberties of the masses of the people of this country. Unfortunately for them, they are caught in a trap under the present Constitution, under which their “Sovereignty” can be exercised only on January 26. The next day, they will be back to where they are now, whether President Rajapakse obtains more than fifty percent of their votes, and continues to be vested with the powers of the Executive Presidency for six more years, or General Fonseka is elected, and is vested with those powers, likewise.

President Rajapakse used his power to proclaim a State of Emergency, soon after he first took office in December 2005, and has extended it, with Parliamentary approval from month to month, up to now. The Emergency Regulations that he has made have served to suppress or repress fundamental democratic rights and civil liberties; and human rights have been violated to a greater extent under his regime than under any previous one..

He has gained and retained control of a stable majority in Parliament by appointing 109 of its Members, belonging to the Government Party, or who have crossed over to it from the Opposition, as Cabinet Ministers, non-Cabinet Ministers and Deputy Ministers, at huge public expense. They have provided him with the required Parliamentary approval for the Proclamation and monthly extension of the “State of Emergency”. They have also insured him against the possibility of his removal from office, even for flagrant violations of the Constitution, such as have been publicly pointed out by the recently retired Chief Justice, without contradiction.

Sunday Leader for more
(Submitted by reader)

by Mumia Abu Jamal

The recent near miss on Christmas Day in Detroit, has sparked a presidentially-mandated reappraisal of the failures of American intelligence which made this disaster so possible.

Essentially, more sharing across agencies, sharper analysis, and more attention to detail will fix the thing. Or will it?

Wasn’t this precisely the reason the behemoth of a mega agency, the Homeland Security Dept. was organized?  Wasn’t it supposed to coordinate the enormous work-product of the plethora of intelligence organizations, which have historically been antagonistic to one another?

Essentially, the agencies were ordered to behave differently than they have for generations.

Many administrations ago, Pres. Harry Truman wrote to a friend, complaining about the very nature of the CIA. “When I took over,” Truman wrote, “the President had no means of coordinating the intelligence from around the world.”

What arose first as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under Roosevelt, later becoming the CIA, quickly became a force that no president could control, and few could trust.  Although Truman wanted a global information service, the agency had other ideas.

“It was not intended as a ‘cloak & dagger’ outfit,” Truman wrote.  “It was intended merely as a center for keeping the president informed on what was going on in the world.”

President Truman insisted that he never wanted CIA “to act as a spy organization.” *

But, ultimately, it didn’t matter what the president wanted.  Presidents don’t run the CIA, they are run by the CIA.

After the gross intelligence failures that led to 9/11, and the intelligence screw ups that led to the Iraq War, why should it surprise  us that almost a decade later, the nation is once again on the brink of a mini 9/11?

Any agency that controls a president’s information, also controls his options.

And like Roman emperors, the illusion of the office’s power is so seductive that the agency becomes a tool to try to control and change the world.

A leader you don’t like?  Order a hit.  A government you oppose? Buy off their opponents

This is the stuff the CIA is made of.

If you doubt this, read Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007). You’ll find an agency that played its presidents like yoyos.  They committed  crimes at home and abroad; they did everything but protect the community.

For a brief moment, after 9/11, it appeared the CIA might be abolished following it’s failures.  That moment came and went.

Now, as the number of intelligence agencies has grown exponentially, as well as the sheer weight of intelligence data, it has become too much to collate, to sift, to make sense of and to act upon.

Now, new rules….until next time.

—(c) ‘10 maj

[Source: Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (N.Y.: Doubleday, 2007). ]

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Prison Radio

Gender Equality Efforts by Civil Society and Governments in 26 Countries to Be Supported

Media Inquiries:
Oisika Chakrabarti, Media Specialist, UNIFEM Headquarters, +1 212 906-6506,

New York — The new UNIFEM-managed Fund for Gender Equality announced its initial allocation of more than US$9 million to 27 initiatives in 26 countries today. The recently-established Fund, a US$68 million multilateral initiative, is designed to advance innovative programmes which focus on women’s economic and political empowerment at local and national levels. It is currently funded by the Governments of Spain and Norway.

The new grants fall into the Fund’s Catalytic Grant category — one of two types of high-impact grants aimed to accelerate efforts of dozens of initiatives on the ground. Grantees will work on efforts ranging from changing attitudes towards women’s political engagement in Sri Lanka, to boosting economic independence of HIV-positive women in Senegal, or amplifying the voices of Palestinian women refugees in Lebanon.

“This new Fund has tremendous potential to bring about concrete and sustainable changes in women’s lives. Very impressive efforts to advance women’s political and economic empowerment are underway in every corner of the world. Yet this work is critically under-funded. It is important that the Fund supports both governments and civil society organizations — and very significantly, partnerships between them as well,” said Inés Alberdi, UNIFEM Executive Director.

The grantees represent broad regional and thematic diversity. Their initiatives range from supporting women in the informal sector in Cameroon, Egypt and the Philippines to increasing greater political participation by women in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Morocco and in the Pacific Islands. Initiatives also focus on indigenous women and those in high-risk groups, such as women affected by HIV and AIDS. The grants further cover efforts to assist women farmers facing food insecurity and climate change and those who are systematically denied inheritance and property rights such as women in Afghanistan.

“In Egypt, currently female domestic workers are explicitly excluded by law, from any protection and dropped-out of civil society agenda. The UNIFEM grant is a unique opportunity to bring this underlying women’s rights issue into the light. The project Al Shehab Foundation is implementing will not merely empower domestic workers on grass-roots level but will further advocate towards legislative protection for domestic workers on national level,” said Abdo Abu El Ella of the Al-Shehab Institution for Comprehensive Development, a grantee from Egypt.

The Fund received 1,240 applications submitted through an online database in Arabic, English, French, Russian and Spanish, out of which 543 were for the Catalytic Category. Ranging from US$100,000 to US$500,000, 27 catalytic grants were selected — 89 percent led by civil society organizations and 11 percent by government agencies — by a technical committee of regional experts. The second category of Implementation Grants will be announced in June 2010 and will focus on the implementation of already-ratified national laws or policies. They will range from US$2 million to US$5 million, disbursed over two to four years.

United Nations Development Fund for Women

by HILMAR SCHMUNDT

For the first time, scientists have been able to analyze the atmosphere of a distant planet. The success could prove a milestone on the road toward finding life beyond our solar system.

Its atmosphere is stiflingly hot, with temperatures generally hovering around 800 degrees Celsius (1,470 degrees Fahrenheit) — in the shade. The air is filled with billowing clouds of highly toxic gas.

Anyone setting foot on this faraway planet would die a speedy death. Nevertheless, the recently launched study of HR 8799 c is a breakthrough in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Astronomers unveiled a groundbreaking achievement in the field of metrology last week. By measuring the spectrum of light coming from HR 8799 c, they have managed to determine the chemical composition of its atmosphere. “For the first time, we have directly obtained the spectrum of a planet outside our solar system,” says study co-author Wolfgang Brandner of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.

Nowadays, the discovery of planets outside our solar system has become practically routine. In recent years, scientists have discovered more than 400 of these so-called exoplanets. But in most cases, their existence could only be proven indirectly, for example, by virtue of the fact that they cause a slight weakening in the light emitted by a much brighter star.

Mechanical Ballet

Only with the help of the world’s most advanced observatory, and the European-run “Very Large Telescope” (VLT), did it become possible to directly capture the weak light coming from a planet and analyzing it using spectroscopy. The massive telescope is located on a 2,600-meter (8,528-foot) peak in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Der Spiegel for more

File picture of Sanskriti Bachao Manch activists beating up Rishi Ajaydas, author of book ‘Vivah Ek Naitik Balatkar’ in Bhopal. Photo/A. M. Faruqui/Hindu

by MAHIM PRATAP SINGH

The overarching presence of the Hindu “cultural” right in Madhya Pradesh has come to the forefront again, this time seemingly at the behest of none other than Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan.

“Culture cops” belonging to the Sanskriti Bachao Manch–an affiliate of the Bajarang Dal and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, which are the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ideological collaborators–have gone on a rampage in the State capital threatening local shopkeepers against displaying innerwear outside their shops and tearing down hoardings and advertisements of condoms and women’s innerwear.

Civil society members and intellectuals have spoken against the current phase of moral policing going on in the State capital. Renowned documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan and film and theatre actor Piyush Mishra, among others, have criticized the ruling BJP government for patronizing such regressive elements.

“Sexual repression is the cornerstone of any fascist apparatus and not just of Hindutva,” said Patwardhan, in Indore for the annual cultural fest of the Indian Institute of Management. “Be it Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, all of them had strong elements of sexual censorship, mainly of female sexuality, in order to exercise state power on bodies,” he said.

Mr. Patwardhan, maker of several documentaries portraying the rise of Hindutva in national politics like ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Father, Son and the Holy War’ and ‘Ram kay Naam’ among others, emphasized on Hindutva’s collective ideological repression being a reason for such moral policing.

Earlier this week, Mr. Chauhan sparked off the moral police’s outrage when he asked the municipal corporation to remove the “obscene and vulgar” hoarding of a local spa in front of a girls’ college, portraying a bareback woman.

“We are happy that the Chief Minister himself has taken the lead in the fight against this moral pollution,” said Chandra Shekhar Tiwari of the Sanskriti Bachao Manch. “We have given an ultimatum of seven days to all shopkeepers to remove all the innerwear hanging outside their shops or we will set these on fire,” he said.

Hindu for more
((Submitted by Harsh Kapoor)

A combustible mixture of race, religion and politics

The delicate political balance between Malaysia’s ethnic and religious groups has been rocked by a series of attacks against churches, blamed on Muslim fanatics. They began after the High Court ruled on December 31st that a Catholic weekly, the Herald, could use the term “Allah” in its Malay-language edition.

This overturned an existing ban and offended some Muslims, who claim that “Allah” is exclusive to Islam, even though the word means “God” in Malay, and is used by other faiths in, for example, Indonesia. The supposed fear is that Christians are plotting to convert Malays, who make up some 60% of the population and, under the constitution, must also be Muslims. So sensitive is the issue that on January 6th, after an appeal by the government and with the consent of the Catholic church, the High Court suspended its own ruling.

By then, tempers had flared. Several Islamic groups planned to stage protests against the ruling on January 8th. Hours earlier, arsonists descended on three churches in Kuala Lumpur. By January 14th nine churches, a convent and a Sikh temple across the country had been hit. The prime minister, Najib Razak, condemned the attacks, offered compensation, and stepped up security around churches. Prominent Muslims spoke out against the violence. In fact, many Muslims were unperturbed by the High Court ruling. The Islamic Party of Malaysia, or PAS, part of the main opposition coalition, argues that people of the “Abrahamic” faiths may indeed use the word “Allah”.

Some analysts saw the attacks as evidence less of a broader lurch towards extremism than of the fragility of Mr Najib’s own standing. Since an election in March 2008, when the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition suffered its worst-ever performance, competing groups have been jostling for influence. His United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the main party in the coalition, is keen to be seen as the defender of Malay-Muslim identity. Opposition parties are meanwhile arraying themselves as beacons of moderation.

They accuse Mr Najib of pandering to UMNO’s far right. Last year the government dithered before prosecuting a group of Muslims who had offended Hindus by using a cow’s severed head to demonstrate against the building of a temple. And on January 7th Mr Najib said the government could do nothing to stop the planned demonstrations—though the government has had few qualms about squelching past protests. The extremists may have taken Mr Najib’s demurral as a green light.

Economist for more
(Submitted by reader)

Fifty Indonesian police officers have received special commendations from the National Police Headquarters for killing the Papuan independence leader, Kelly Kwalik, last month.

The Indonesian police shot Kelly Kwalik in the thigh on December 16, 2009, and he died shortly after. The exact circumstances of his death remain unclear.

The Indonesian military and police have a long history of extra-judicial killings, arrest and torture of those suspected of supporting West Papua’s independence movement.

Despite having been involved in rebel activities with the Free Papua Movement (OPM) in the past, Kwalik had for many years renounced violence and had committed to seeking independence by peaceful means. Only weeks before his death he met with senior Indonesian security officials, at their request. Many Papuans suspect that he may have been lured into a trap by the promise of another such meeting.

Police have defended his killing by claiming that Kwalik was involved in the 2002 ambush of a convoy of buses that killed three teachers near the huge US-owned Grasberg copper and gold mine. They also said they believed he was behind a number of attacks in the mine area last year which had left eight people dead. However, the police at the time of both the 2002 and more recent killings had rejected the suggestion of OPM involvement.

Survival is calling on the government of Indonesia to investigate the circumstances of Kwalik’s death fully and to ensure that those members of the security forces who commit acts of violence against the Papuan people are brought to justice.

Survival

by LANGSTON HUGHES

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

Poets for more

The ruling issued Thursday by the United States Supreme Court lifting long-standing restrictions on corporate financing of elections represents a far-reaching attack on democratic rights. The 5-4 decision ensures that the American political system will be dominated even more directly and completely by the financial elite.

The ruling is a naked assertion of the interests of the American financial elite. It lays bare the reality of class rule beneath the threadbare trappings of democracy in America.

The decision in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which overturns more than 100 years of legal precedent, strengthens the grip of big business over the political process. It gives legal sanction to the buying of politicians and offices at every level of government to do the bidding of the rich.

The ruling cloaks this attack on democratic rights as a defense of freedom of speech. Its basic premise—that corporations are entitled to the same rights of speech and political advocacy as individuals—is patently absurd. It makes a mockery of the democratic and Enlightenment principles that animated the revolutionaries who led the American War for Independence and drafted the Constitution. Jefferson, for one, counted the influence of finance on politics as “more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”

The ruling is the outcome of decades of political reaction, the ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a narrow elite, and increasing attacks on the social conditions of the people.

It culminates years of anti-democratic decisions by the Supreme Court. For the past three decades, the high court has whittled away at civil liberties and the ability of citizens to seek redress in cases of corporate criminality. In recent years it has upheld and expanded the ability of the executive branch to wage war, invade citizens’ private lives, and arrest and incarcerate without trial those the president declares to be enemies. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled against the rights of third-parties, especially left-wing parties, to ballot access.

Barely ten years ago, the same institution, in another politically-driven 5-4 ruling, halted the counting of votes in Florida in order to sanction the theft of the 2000 presidential election and install in power the Republican candidate George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote.

The Democratic Party is complicit in the attacks on democratic rights, from its abject acceptance of the Supreme Court’s installation of Bush, to its support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to its cowardly refusal to mount a filibuster to block the confirmation of Bush nominees Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.

It was Roberts who played the critical role in seizing on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—a narrow lawsuit challenging the applicability of the McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign advertising to a particular anti-Hillary Clinton documentary—and using it to undo all restraints on the corporate financing of politics.

This in a country where corporate money already manipulates elections, bribes politicians and largely dictates government policy. As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his dissent, “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

World Socialist Web Site for more

by PRAFUL BIDWAI

In communist veteran Jyoti Basu’s death, India has lost its most illustrious politician and the last leader who embodied a personal link between the many phases of Indian politics since the early 1940s.

Basu was not just a major Left leader in a country with the world’s biggest Communist party outside China. He participated in numerous processes which shaped politics, including trade union and peasant movements, radicalisation of the intelligentsia, contestations between social-group identities, and crystallisation of the party system.

Unlike other distinguished communist leaders — S A Dange, E M S Namboodiripad, P C Joshi, B T Ranadive, Gangadhar Adhikari, P Sundarayya and A K Gopalan — Basu was neither a theoretician nor a mass leader. Nor was he an organisation man such as Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the last general secretary of the Communist Party (Marxist), or Pramode Dasgupta, who built and controlled the CPM party machine in West Bengal. Basu chose to concentrate on his greatest strengths — electoral politics, administration and governance.

Basu was a party pragmatist with a managerial style. He worked on the public side of the CPM and built successful election-oriented social coalitions. He was chief minister of West Bengal — a state with 80 million people — continuously for 23 years. This is a world record. Basu could have stayed on as chief minister beyond 2000 if he wanted to.

Basu was a maverick in many ways. When the undivided Communist Party split in 1964, he was the only individual from a group of privileged European-educated young communists who went with the CPM. All others, including Adhikari, Indrajeet Gupta, Hiren Mukherjee and Nikhil Chakravartty, stayed with the CPI, as did most party intellectuals.

More significantly, Basu unquestioningly accepted the CPM’s organisational hegemony. He was an unbending party loyalist, who believed in orthodox forms of discipline and “democratic centralism” — based on concentric circles of authority within the party, and the norm that party members must unquestioningly follow a decision taken after internal debate.

In 1996, Basu famously became “the best prime minister India never had.” The United Front unanimously offered the position to him. But the CPM central committee rejected the offer. The decision was driven by a narrow control-based consideration: with its 51 MPs, the Left wouldn’t be able to dominate the Front. But the Left would have gained much advantage, including prestige and mainstream acceptance, with Basu as prime minister. This would probably have delayed or prevented the BJP’s rise to national power in 1998. Ironically, those in the CPM who opposed Basu’s candidature the most later backed Mayawati as prime minister!

Basu was a pragmatist par excellence. On any issue, he would choose the most practical and least radical of the options made available by the CPM. This would satisfy both privileged industrialists — whom his party has been wooing for investment — and poor people, among whom it had its roots. In land reform in West Bengal, the Left avoided a radical transfer of ownership to the tiller and the landless — unlike in Kerala in the 1950s. Its Operation Barga registered tenants and gave them a 75-percent harvest share and tenure security.

In his first term as chief minister, Jyoti Basu said: “Let [the] capitalists understand us. We shall also try to understand their point of view.” No wonder he developed a close rapport with several industrial magnates, including Dhirubhai Ambani, Ratan Tata and R P Goenka. He favoured multinational takeovers of some of Bengal’s sick industrial units and wanted the West Bengal Electronics Development Corporation to form a joint venture with Philips.

Basu’s upper-class, upper-caste Bhadralok identity endeared him greatly to Bengal’s elite. But Basu’s politics largely excluded Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs — and even Muslims, who form one-fourth of the state’s population — from governance and political representation. In this respect, and in social development indicators, West Bengal lags behind many other states. The rate of decline in its rural poverty has halved since 1994.

Worse, according to the National Sample Survey, “the percentage of rural households not getting enough food every day in some months of the year” is highest in West Bengal (10.6 per cent), worse than in Orissa (4.8). West Bengal has more than 900,600 school dropouts in the 6-14 age group, higher than Bihar’s nearly 700,000. Of India’s 24 districts which have more than 50,000 out-of-school children, nine are in West Bengal.

The official Human Development Report (2004) admits that spending on and access to health services have stagnated. Some indicators — immunisation, antenatal care, women’s nutrition, and doctors and hospital beds per 100,000 people — are below the national average. West Bengal has not opened a single new primary-health centre in a decade. West Bengal has the lowest rate of generating work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act — 14 person-days per poor family. The national average is 43. (The promise was 100.)

India’s worst recent food riots have occurred in West Bengal — especially in poor districts like Purulia, Bankura and Birbhum — when starving people raided the storehouses of dishonest ration-shop owners, all CPM members. Purulia is one of India’s poorest districts — with 78 percent of its population below the poverty line. More than two-fifths of West Bengal’s poor don’t have ration cards, which entitle them to subsidised food. Meanwhile, some of the gains of Operation Barga are eroding. Seventeen percent of registered tenants have lost their land and another 27 percent are in insecure possession.

Clearly, the Left Front has failed the poor in numerous ways during its 32 years in power. The rationale of the CPM’s tenure in office has eroded. Basu bears a good share of responsibility for this.

Basu, then, is akin to Yasser Arafat, the tallest leader of the movement for an independent Palestinian state, who died in 2004. Arafat put Palestine on the world agenda — a great historic contribution — but signed the Oslo Peace Accords under Western pressure. These imposed a hideously unjust settlement on his people. Arafat’s once-secular and -progressive Fatah has lost its credibility. The Islamicist Hamas won a plurality in a free and fair election. The CPM might similarly lose West Bengal to the Trinamool Congress.

The News for more

by MANDY VAN DEVEN

Anyone who has ever sat through the frequent and painstakingly choreographed musical numbers in a Bollywood film can tell you that dance is an integral part of Indian culture. From Bhangra in the Punjab province to Kathakali in Kerala, each part of the country has its own distinctive combination of body movement, facial expressions, and hand positions which form the regional style. But nowadays in urban India, dance is not simply used as a form of cultural expression. Women of means are being seduced by a type of dance that is a little more, shall we say, exotic.

Lessons for striptease, burlesque, lap dancing, and pole dancing are the newest class offerings at local fitness centers and dance studios in cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. Housewives, college students, magazine editors, and professional businesswomen have found a common way to explore their dormant sexuality and burn calories by swaying away the stress of living in a demanding modern society. These women juggle the same roles as their Western counterparts—wife, mother, professional—and the contemporary affluent Indian woman finds a space of her own to relax, have fun, and get in touch with her inner diva while taking lessons in exotic dance.

When asked about the appeal of these erotic moves, Sneha Krishnan, editor and co-founder of the feminist webzine Sa, says, “I think one big reason is Bollywood. Sexy dances have become, increasingly, the symbols of liberation in Bollywood cinema, and as always, Indian women are following.” The bikini is the newest fashion sensation appearing in Hindi cinema, and if you pair exposed flesh with certain sensual choreography, you can see the “adult” appeal.

The influence and increasing prevalence of American pop culture also plays a part. Every Café Coffee Day, the Indian version of Starbucks, plays a constant rotation of MTV videos that glamorize the openly sexed up moves of pop starlets like Britney Spears, Katy Perry and the Pussycat Dolls. The Dolls themselves were a burlesque troupe before entering the mainstream, and their music is used in the classes to inspire the student’s inner vixen to come forth and be a “hot freak” like the quintet. Fulfilling the simultaneous desires to craft thin yet curvaceous bodies and claim a sex appeal of their own, exotic dance classes help women shed pounds and inhibitions, see their bodies as beautiful, and demand a right to their own sexuality.
http://globeistan.com/wp-admin/post-new.php
“These classes have become popular with young Indians in particular because they are seeking out innovative ways to stay in shape, and they give them a confidence that comes with doing something different and unique,” says journalism student Hamsini Ravi.

Aparnaa Venkatesh agrees, “A lot of women attend these classes because they want to express their sense of freedom and identity, or perhaps because of the thrill factor of doing something that doesn’t toe the line of conventionality.” This brand of freedom, however, still has some constraints.

Women’s International Perspectives for more

by NINA G. JEBLONSKI

Recent findings lay bare the origins of human hairlessness—and hint that naked skin was a key factor in the emergence of other human traits

Key Concepts

* Humans are the only primate species that has mostly naked skin.
* Loss of fur was an adaptation to changing environmental conditions that forced our ancestors to travel longer distances for food and water.
* Analyses of fossils and genes hint at when this transformation occurred.
* The evolution of hairlessness helped to set the stage for the emergence of large brains and symbolic thought.
Among primates, humans are unique in having nearly naked skin. Every other member of our extended family has a dense covering of fur—from the short, black pelage of the howler monkey to the flowing copper coat of the orangutan—as do most other mammals. Yes, we humans have hair on our heads and elsewhere, but compared with our relatives, even the hairiest person is basically bare.

Scientific American for more

Military still ‘calling the shots’ in political and judicial process, report reveals

Pakistan’s powerful military has actively worked to undermine efforts by the elected government
to improve human rights in the country, according to a new report. It also tried to destabilise the elected government, and force out President Asif Ali Zardari.

In a damning critique of the military establishment, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the armed forces
had opposed efforts to end its intervention in the political and judicial process. It had also resisted attempts to locate some of the scores of people who were “disappeared” in the restive province of Baluchistan during the years of General Pervez Musharraf’s rule. “The Pakistani military continues to subvert the political and judicial systems in Pakistan,” said Ali Dayan Hasan of HRW.

“After eight years of disastrous military rule and in spite of the election of a civilian government, the army appears determined to continue calling the shots in order to ensure that it can continue to perpetrate abuses with impunity,” he said.

Independent for more

(Submitted by Abdul Hamid Bashani Khan)

by VINAY LAL

On 1 November 1755, a massive earthquake struck the city of Lisbon. It is thought to have been 9.0 on the Richter scale: whatever the precise measurement, its magnitude may be judged by the fact that the earthquake nearly leveled Lisbon, and caused widespread damage elsewhere in Portugal, and even in Spain and Morocco. Together with the tsunami that came in its wake, the earthquake, by modern estimates, is thought to have wiped out about a fifth or sixth of Lisbon’s population of 200,000. According to some sources, nearly every church of any consequence in Lisbon was destroyed. That, in a country intensely Catholic, was alone calculated to leave an ineradicable impression on its inhabitants.

Though the destruction was extraordinarily widespread, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 has entered the annals of history for reasons other than as an illustration of nature’s furious unpredictability. The earthquake would provoke a wide-ranging discussion among many of the greatest minds of the day; indeed, even into the twentieth century, the Lisbon earthquake would be summoned to point to both the inscrutability of God’s ways and the uses of seismology. One of the regnant ideas of those days had been best adumbrated by the philosopher Leibniz, who adhered to the view that whatever happens happens for the best, or, in slightly more elegant language, God’s ways could be justified to men if one recognized that one lived in the best of all worlds. Among the most eminent men of the day who felt the tremors of the quake in Paris was Voltaire. In his novel Candide (1759), the eponymous hero, who at first vividly subscribes to the view that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”, in time comes to reject this optimism. The Lisbon earthquake is enough to cure him of this theodicy, just as it sufficed to make Voltaire reject the optimism of Leibniz.

One of the other supreme figures of the age who attempted to make some sense of the earthquake was Immanuel Kant, whose interest in this would be captured by Walter Benjamin in a radio talk prepared for school-children 150 years later: “No one was more fascinated by these remarkable events than the great German philosopher Kant . . . At the time of the earthquake he was a young man of twenty-four, who had never left his hometown of Konigsberg – and who would never do so in the future. But he eagerly collected all the reports of the earthquake that he could find, and the slim book that he wrote about it probably represents the beginning of scientific geography in Germany. And certainly the beginnings of seismology.” In the typical fashion of the day, Kant’s slim volume bore the longish title, History and Natural Description of the most Remarkable Incidents of the Earthquake that Shook a Large Part of the Earth at the End of the Year 1755.

Kant’s avid interest in the earthquake was not confined to a scientific assessment of the natural circumstances that had led to the calamity. “Whatever is, is right”, Alexander Pope had famously declared in his Essay on Man (1733), and his affirmation of Leibniz’s theodicy had many supporters who rather agreed with Leibniz’s reasoning that though the presence of evil could not be denied, evil itself existed for the sake of a greater good. As Rousseau and Voltaire, whose repudiation of theodicy in Candide was prefigured in his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” (1756), tangled over the ‘meaning’ of the earthquake, Kant would step into the debate later with a distinct philosophical articulation of the idea of the sublime. When the imagination reaches its limits, Kant argued, pain is experienced; but this pain may be compensated for with the pleasure produced by the mind. The “beautiful” was not to be equated with the “sublime”: if the former belongs to the realm of “Understanding”, the latter belongs to “Reason”. A sublime event was not to be comprehended through the understanding, indeed the enormity of the sublime – “we call that sublime which is absolutely great”, he wrote in the Critique of Judgment – passed all understanding and demonstrated the inadequacy of one’s imagination. And, yet, the supersensible powers, through which one comprehends an event as whole, and which inform both nature and thought, bring one to a realization of the sublime.

When we consider the philosophical level of public discourse that the Lisbon earthquake could engender, the depths to which public discourse has sunk in our times becomes all the more transparent. Pat Robertson has been known over the years for his outrageous announcements, and one should not be utterly surprised that he should, on the present occasion of the earthquake that has devastated Haiti, have displayed the same dim-wittedness and callousness for which he has nearly an unsurpassed reputation (barring, perhaps, only the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck). As he put it in a televangelical broadcast, “something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and the people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor.” America deplored Haiti’s independence in 1804, refusing to recognize the country until 1862, and it appears that even today there are some Americans such as Robertson who evidently believe that some people are born to serve others. Colonialism, we know, continues to have its defenders; but Robertson’s remarks disguise many more profound anxieties, none as acute as the fact that the only genuine revolution, gone astray for reasons that I shall attempt to comprehend in subsequent blogs, in the Western hemisphere took place in Haiti rather than in what would become the US.

Insanely stupid as Robertson’s remarks are, they nonetheless point the way to a debate that cannot be resolved under the sign of secularism. In a very different time, equally removed from the energetic debates of the Enlightenment and the mental vacuity of a Robertson, Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore would have a lively public exchange over the equally devastating Bihar Earthquake of 1934. Gandhi described the earthquake as God’s chastisement of upper-caste Hindus for their oppression of Harijans; Tagore, revered almost as much as the Mahatma, expressed shock that Gandhi would adhere to a view which was openly dismissive of scientific reasoning and likely to encourage the Indian masses in their superstitious thinking. The intricacies of that exchange aside, Gandhi was firmly persuaded that communication with the masses could not succeed in the language of secularism – even if he was, in his own fashion, resolutely wedded to the idea that the Indian state perforce had to be secular, scrupulously fair to the adherents of all religions. Moreover, the secular imagination cannot, Gandhi would have argued, countenance the idea that natural events may have their counterpart in the life of the soul. Perhaps, in howsoever unpleasant a way, Robertson’s remarks suggest that we do not live only under the sign of secularism.

Lal Salaam for more

by JAYATI GHOSH

Without policy efforts to deal specifically with issues such as reduced incomes and unemployment, the global economic crisis will be far from over.

FOR most economic commentators, 2010 begins on an optimistic note. Just a year ago, there was much gloom about the world economy. The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression had broken out in full fury; asset markets in the United States, Europe and then most developing and emerging markets had crashed and were exhibiting extreme volatility; world trade collapsed; volatile capital flows made things much worse even for developing countries, which had been fiscally and externally “disciplined”, as they were affected by a crisis that was not of their creation.

Compared with that bleak scenario, the current situation seems to be a sea change. Developing countries (particularly those in Asia) were the first to come out of the crisis; indeed, many of them had experienced a deceleration of still positive growth rather than negative growth. The U.S., the United Kingdom and the Euro Area have all been recently declared to be out of recession, as income has recovered, especially from the second quarter of 2009. Stock markets are upbeat once again, and lending has resumed to some developing countries (though not all). There is renewed optimism that the world economy will grow again in 2010 with especially rapid recovery in the developing world.

Much of this is related to the apparently uncoordinated but nonetheless synchronised recovery packages that were introduced in the wake of the crisis. Across the world, governments – even the ones like Germany which openly disdain the so-called Keynesian policies – responded not only with huge bailouts of troubled financial institutions but also with large fiscal stimulus packages that were effective in staving off depression, at least in the short term.

Is the optimism warranted? Is the global economy out of the woods and can we now proceed with business as usual after this somewhat unfortunate blip? This seems to be the response of most commentators, not only in India but everywhere.

Unfortunately, such a conclusion would be premature at best, and in all probability absolutely wrong. Certainly output growth in the world economy is recovering after the extreme lows a year ago. But there are two sets of reasons for this not to continue. On a more structural level, the basic imbalances that caused the most recent crisis of international capitalism have still not been resolved: the imbalance between finance and the real economy; the macroeconomic imbalances between major players in the international economy; and the ecological imbalance that will necessarily become a constraint on future growth because of not only climate change but also other environmental problems and the demand for energy.

These structural features are in turn reflected in a number of more conjunctural issues that characterise the current situation. These imply that the only complete reliable prediction for the immediate future is uncertainty and continued volatility.

First, the problems in finance remain just below the surface. They have not been adequately addressed or dealt with, and are therefore likely to strike again quite soon. This is partly because the underlying problem of stagnating real estate markets continues to fester in the U.S. and in other major countries, and will sooner or later once again become a problem for financial institutions that are implicated in them. The near-default of Dubai World was just one example of the problems that continue to fester in the real estate sector. Meanwhile, sovereign debt issues have emerged as the next new thing to worry about for financial markets, and as the examples of Greece and Ireland indicate, these concerns are no longer confined to developing countries in the global periphery.

But financial problems may even have increased because the crisis response has been faulty. Enormous financial bailouts may have saved the economies from collapse but they created disincentives for “efficient” behaviour in financial markets in the form of moral hazard that is greater than ever before. Banks that were “too big to fail” have become “too bigger to fail”, and incentives are still skewed towards excessive and unsustainable risk-taking. Appropriate regulation to control the incentives and activities of various financial players – banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, index traders and so on – has still not been enacted.
Food and oil prices

So the problems in finance are far from over, and are likely to return with even greater ferocity in the foreseeable future. Second, this has direct implications for some global markets for food and fuel that directly affect people’s lives. It is now an open secret that the huge price volatility in food and oil prices, which has created so much havoc, especially in the developing world, was significantly related to the involvement of financial players in such markets. This was particularly so because futures contracts allowed the emergence of “index investors” who simply betted on changing prices and thus drove up prices far beyond any real changes in demand and supply.

Such forces are on the prowl once again, and there has been no regulation of commodity futures markets. As the economic recovery gains ground, it is more than likely that commodity prices will once again rise, overshooting any real demand-supply imbalances. Many people in developing countries are still reeling under the impact of rising food prices, and if their global prices rise once again, the effect on real incomes, hunger and undernutrition is likely to be devastating.

Frontline for more

by ADOLPH REED JR.

Antiracism is a favorite concept on the American left these days. Of course, all good sorts want to be against racism, but what does the word mean exactly?

The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s only because contemporary antiracist This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South. The 1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed against specific targets, like employment discrimination in defense production. Black Power era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly focused on combating specific inequalities and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of voting rights and specific programs of redistribution.

Clarity lost

Whether or not one considers those goals correct or appropriate, they were clear and strategic in a way that “antiracism” simply is not. Sure, those earlier struggles relied on a discourse of racial justice, but their targets were concrete and strategic. It is only in a period of political demobilization that the historical specificities of those struggles have become smoothed out of sight in a romantic idealism that homogenizes them into timeless abstractions like “the black liberation movement”—an entity that, like Brigadoon, sporadically appears and returns impelled by its own logic.

Ironically, as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance.” (No doubt this shift was partly aided by political imperatives associated with the Cold War and domestic anticommunism.) Beryl Satter’s recent book on the racialized political economy of “contract buying” in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, is a good illustration of how these processes worked; Robert Self’s book on Oakland since the 1930s, American Babylon, is another. Both make abundantly clear the role of the real estate industry in creating and recreating housing segregation and ghettoization.

Tasty bunny

All too often, “racism” is the subject of sentences that imply intentional activity or is characterized as an autonomous “force.” In this kind of formulation, “racism,” a conceptual abstraction, is imagined as a material entity. Abstractions can be useful, but they shouldn’t be given independent life.

Left business Observer for more

by BRIAN MCCARTAN

Bangkok, Thailand (Mizzima) – Chinese vice-president Xi Jinping’s visit to Burma over the weekend reaffirmed ties and resulted in the granting of exclusive rights to build and operate a controversial oil pipeline. The Chinese leader was also given assurances that stability would be maintained on the border. However, relations between Beijing and Naypyidaw have not always been so cordial over the past year.

The visit to Burma was part of a four nation tour that also included Cambodia, South Korea and Japan. The significance of Xi’s role in the weekend visit was seen by analysts as diplomatically introducing the probably future Chinese president to Burma’s leaders. It may also have been a show of support for the generals after several months of strained relations between the two countries.

Xi Jinping is widely believed to be the frontrunner to succeed current president Hu Jintao in 2012. Xi is currently the highest ranking member of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of China and ranked sixth in the Politburo’s Standing Committee. Although Xi was not selected as vice-chairman of the important Central Military Commission in September, he is still believed to be in a strong position.

The most significant outcome of the meeting was Xi’s overseeing the signing of an agreement granting exclusive rights to the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) to build and operate a crude oil pipeline. The 2,000 kilometer pipeline will extend from Burma’s western coast across much of the length of the country to China’s southwest Yunnan province and on to Chongqing. The pipeline operation will be run by CNPC-controlled South-East Asia Crude Oil Pipeline Ltd. which also received tax concessions and customs clearance rights to bring in construction materials as part of the deal.

Construction of the pipeline began in November and when completed is expected to carry an initial 12 million tons of crude oil a year. A crude oil port on the island of Kyaukpyu in Burma’s western Arakan State has been under construction by CNPC since in October. The port and the oil pipeline are part of an effort by China to avoid having to send tankers through the easily blocked Malacca Straits. In addition, a gas pipeline is planned to be built by CNPC to carry natural gas from the offshore Shwe gas field. The gas pipeline will pump 12 billion cubic units of gas per year to China when it comes online in 2012.

Burmese officials gave assurances to Xi that the junta would maintain security along the 771 kilometers of the pipeline that run through Burma. This is a contentious issue among human rights organizations which allege that the military’s efforts to secure the area will result in large-scale human rights abuses. Groups like environmental and human rights watchdog Earth Rights International say similar operations in the 1990’s to secure the route of the Yadana gas pipeline to Thailand caused widespread human rights violations.

Burma has become an increasing important source of natural resources for China, especially oil and gas. Beijing also sees Burma as essential to plans to develop its landlocked southwestern Yunnan province. To this end, China is actively promoting the construction of road networks and port facilities to make the transportation of goods through Burma for export.

Mizzima

To:  The Cabinet and Parliament of Lebanon

Secondary only to ending the siege of Gaza and achieving Statehood, the enactment of the basic civil right to work and to own a home for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Refugees living in squalor in Lebanon is perhaps the most critical and immediately achievable goal of the Palestinian resistance and the ideals enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Friends of Palestine and supporters of basic civil rights, wherever they live, can help this happen without violence or martyrs by signing and distributing the Online Petition and by twinning with a Palestinian Refugee in Lebanon.”
The Palestine Civil Rights Campaign-Lebanon and the Sabra Shatila Foundation Beirut, Lebanon-Washington DC

“We the undersigned from many countries, mindful of the urgent need for equal human rights for our Palestinian Refugee sisters and brothers in Lebanon in their Civil, Political, Social and Economic dimensions, herewith signify our solidarity with Lebanon as this great country nobly corrects six decades of injustices by enacting civil rights legislation for her guests from Palestine.
Affixing my name to this petition expresses my wish to personally “twin” in solidarity with one of Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees as they and their Lebanese hosts continue to work and prepare for their Return.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Click here to sign

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

by ERIC BENSON AND JUSTIN NOBEL

Launch at Cape Canaveral on July 24, 1950. © NASA.

While the aerospace community waits for February when President Obama will announce the 2011 budget, effectively setting NASA’s direction for the near future, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin agitates for a manned mission to Mars.

On a Saturday last August just outside the nation’s capital, Dr. Robert Zubrin saw his ambitions come crashing back to Earth—or, more accurately, back to the moon. Chris McKay, a NASA astrobiologist, had just delivered a speech to the Mars Society in which he proposed a human space exploration program based around a permanent lunar base. A trip to Mars, he said, should be delayed for several decades as humanity learns to live on our closest celestial body. “I grew up with Star Trek—the original series,” McKay said, “and the slogan was ‘to boldly go.’ Going is easy… we need to boldly stay.”

As soon as McKay finished, a dozen livid conference-goers—most wearing “Mars or Bust” pins—stormed the two audience microphones at the front of the hall. First in line was Zubrin, the Mars Society’s founder and president.

“The reason we didn’t stay on the moon is because there was nothing worth staying for!” howled Zubrin, whose unkempt comb-over, baggy eyelids, and impatient bark give the impression that he rarely gets more than three hours of sleep. “The prospect for agriculture on Mars is vastly superior. After we learn to live on Mars, we can use that as practice for living on the moon!”

“It’s about colonies,” cried a squat, shaggy man, “followed by the terraform mission.”

“I think one of the biggest flaws we have is to look at Mars and think there is no deadline,” said a mustached dandy in a felt beret. “There is a deadline. We have to do this before our environment goes belly up.”

“Why don’t we leave the moon to the Japs?” proposed a debonair European.

A few hours later, Zubrin ducked out of an eight-person panel on Space Art to hold an impromptu crisis-management meeting in the aftermath of McKay’s presentation.

“If Kennedy in ’61 had said we need to be on the moon by 2000, we never would have made it,” he said in an emphatic whisper to two followers, pitching his eyebrows at sharp angles for dramatic effect. Zubrin has intense, deep-set eyes that narrow into slits when he smiles (rarely) or gets excited (constantly). “On the moon, you find out if the Aristoteles crater is this old or that old, big fucking deal. The real question is, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’”

Guernica for more

by ORGANIZACION FRATERNAL NEGRA HONDURENA

Translated by Ramor Ryan

Honduran Black Fraternal Organization Denounces Attack Against their Radio Station

In the early morning hours of Wednesday January 6, the Garifuna community radio Faluma Bimetu (“Sweet Coconut”) based in Triunfo de la Cruz was burnt down by unknown armed individuals who proceeded to loot the station’s radio equipment. This is not the first time the radio has been attacked and its equipment stolen.

In 2002 unknown people stole the transmitter and other key tools for radio transmission. The Garifuna people have been exposed to a slow process of assimilation into the dominant culture through the mass media – monopolies that are in the hands of figures who are well known throughout the country as manipulators of information.

Lacking control of our own Garifuna media has led to an acceleration of loss of our culture, a process that has become increasingly painful. Most of the communities with access to television are confronted by a permanent alienation through consumerism, acculturation, alienation (soccer, fashion, soap operas, cartoons and violence) and media terrorism. We have also seen a decline in the use of our own indigenous language, which has become, lamentably, a second language.

Transmission of Radio Faluma Bimetu began in 1997, promoted by the Land Defense Committee of Triunfo de la Cruz (CODETT), in order to strengthen Garifuna culture and defend the ancestral territory of the community.

Triunfo de la Cruz, like other Tela Bay Garifuna communities, has become a conflict zone since the intervention of businessmen, politicians and foreign investors attempting to seize community land for the construction of mega-tourism projects.

This systematic usurpation at the hands of outsiders has led the community – conducted by CODETT and the Community Board — to file a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
(IACHR), who accepted the case on 14th March 2006, registered under No. 125-48. For the powerful ruling elite of Honduras, the staunch defense taken by the community of Triunfo de la Cruz of their ancestral territory, is a serious challenge to their economic interests.

Honduras is renowned for the high level of poverty for the majority of its inhabitants ruled by a minority that holds the country under a feudal regime. The use of mass media by the local feudal lords has been an effective tool for control and manipulation.

As in the rest of Latin America, the media monopolies have served to replicate the distortion of information and thus perpetuate domination. The community radios of the Garifuna have been growing strong over the past decade, setting a precedent among our people. And the primary goal is the protection of our culture – which is closely linked to Mother Earth.

Up to the present moment, we have installed four community radios and in the not too distant future we envision extending the network throughout the entire Garifuna nation. The overarching goal: to strengthen and enrichen our culture, to defend our ancestral territory and at the same time, to build early warning systems to deal with climate change, earthquakes, and diseases.

The attack against Radio Faluma Bimetu can be simply reduced to the fact that it enrages the power elite that we, the Garifuna, have been in a process of cultural resistance that has lasted 212 years. And, specifically, that we have broken chains by actively participating in the resistance against the destruction of democracy in our country, a crime (the June 28th Coup) committed by the Honduran oligarchy last year – with the support of the troglodyte right wing of the United States.

Covering Activism and Politics in Latin America for more

by DAVID CRONIN

BRUSSELS, Jan 22, 2010 (IPS) – The number of asylum-seekers and other migrants expelled from the European Union in joint operations between its governments has grown three times in as many years, IPS has learned.

At least 1,570 individuals were removed from the EU’s territory in 31 flights coordinated by the bloc’s external borders agency Frontex between Jan. 1 and Dec. 15 last year. This represented a tripling in joint expulsions – involving authorities from two or more EU states – since 2007. Some 428 migrants were flown out in such operations that year, with the figure rising to over 800 in 2008.

The data – unpublished until now – indicates that Frontex has rapidly stepped up the pace of its activities in the four-and-a-half years since it was founded. And the involvement of the Warsaw-based agency in expelling people who have been denied permission to remain in the EU looks set to increase further.

When the EU’s presidents and prime ministers met in Brussels in late October, they approved a plan to expand the work of Frontex. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has been asked to come forward with proposals early this year to beef up the agency’s powers. The plan foresees that the agency will finance a greater number of chartered flights for expulsions and cooperate more closely with countries from which migrants trying to enter Europe originate.

Organisations working with asylum-seekers are perturbed that Frontex is acquiring greater resources and responsibility without being required to demonstrate that fundamental human rights are safeguarded during its activities.

A recent report by Human Rights Watch drew attention to how Frontex has helped the Italian authorities expel migrants to Libya, without giving them an opportunity to apply for asylum.

In June last year, Frontex coordinated Operation Nautilus, in which a boat carrying an estimated 75 migrants was intercepted off the Italian coast. Using a German Puma helicopter, the operation was the first of its kind in which Frontex succeeded in forcing migrants from the central Mediterranean Sea back to Libya.

Titled ‘Pushed Back, Pushed Around’, the Human Rights Watch report stated that Frontex was unable to give guarantees that Libya had allowed the migrants to apply for asylum. All individuals are entitled to seek asylum from persecution in a country other than their own under the United Nations’ 61- year-old Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Bill Frelick, a campaigner on asylum issues with Human Rights Watch, said he was concerned that Frontex is being given a bigger role in expulsions and that its future operations will needed to be carefully scrutinised.

Bjarte Vandvik, director of the European Council for Refugees and Exile, a group defending the rights of asylum-seekers, said that whenever an individual is removed from the EU, the principle of “non-refoulement” must be respected. A key tenet of international refugee law, non-refoulement means that nobody should be sent to a country where he or she will be at risk of persecution.

Inter Press Service for more

On March 7, 1906, US troops under the command of Major General Leonard Wood massacred as many as 1,000 Filipino Muslims, known as Moros, who were taking refuge at Bud Dajo, a volcanic crater on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines. Above, US soldiers pose for the camera in the aftermath of the massacre. (Photo from The National Archive)

An Iraqi under US custody at the infamous Abu Gharaib. Photo/Wired

Is the United States after Muslims?

Anyone looking at the above pictures cannot resist reaching that conclusion that the US is hell bent on humiliating, killing, and destroying Muslims. Some will see the US war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and northwest areas of Pakistan as an extension of the Christian Crusades or Holy Wars.
But that is not the case. The US is basically an imperial power and so it after any government or country which refuses to part with its resources. Horrific pictures of US covert and overt wars against Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, and dozens of other countries would confirm that assertion. Some religious nuts like George Bush or other right wingers use religious terminology but fundamentally it is the corporations who call the shots. Thus the US does not discriminate between Muslims or Christians, or between Africans or Latin Americans or Asians when it goes to war. Like religious fanatics, they strongly believe that they have some God given right to impose their interpretation of democracy on the entire world.

Manifest Destiny

Every imperial power, which colonizes directly or indirectly, has to produce some reasoning to justify its stealing of another country’s natural and/or other resources, and grabbing of territories. Various arguments were put forth by the leaders and writers in the United States to defend its territorial aggression and/or annexation of other countries. Then in 1839, journalist John O’ Sullivan came up with the idea of manifest destiny. Six years later, in an article entitled Annexation, he justified annexing the Mexican state:

“Texas is now ours. … the sweep of our eagle’s wing already includes within its circuit the wide extent of her fair and fertile land. She is no longer to us a mere geographical space–a certain combination of coast, plain, mountain, valley, forest and stream. She is no longer to us a mere country on the map. She comes within the dear and sacred designation of Our Country …”

He then invoked the divinity:

“[It is] our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

The phrase is not in fashion for some time now, the spirit, however, inhabits the corridors of power in the US. And Obama’s foreign policy echoes the continuation when he put forth his doctrine:

“As President, I will pursue a tough, smart and principled national security strategy — one that recognizes that we have interests not just in Baghdad, but in Kandahar and Karachi, in Tokyo and London, in Beijing and Berlin.” “I will focus this strategy on five goals essential to making America safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”

Stated goals are usually unachievable and are meant to calm down or fool various segments of society. It is the unstated goals which are to be pursued and are mostly carried on successfully.

How can Obama end the war against Iraq responsibly when the US is building a huge 104 acres embassy cum base in Baghdad?

Taliban have been around since the 1980s and have tasted power in Afghanistan between 1994 and 2001, whereas Al-Qaeda is around since the late 1980s. They do not have a majority support but have sympathy from a substantial minority and have access to money and weapons and are well entrenched in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. So it seems it is beyond obama’s power to finish them.

As far as the nuclear weapons are concerned, the “terrorists” are not in possession of any of them. About “rogue states”, Iran does not have nuclear weapons and Pakistan which does have is an ally.

For true energy security, the first step needed to be taken is to say good bye to the Middle East. And that is not possible because Middle East is the second home to the United States.

This is not the Twentieth Century; the world has changed. China, India, Russia, Brazil, the European Union are the other powers with their own agendas and interests and are not going to toe the US line. And so the alliance would not be easy to build.

Obama lost a historical opportunity by not concentrating on ending the wars and creating a secure homeland for the Palestinians.

What Obama should have done?

Obama should have disowned what he had said during the campaign and should have instead halted the drone attacks on Pakistan and concentrated on an exit strategy from Afghanistan. This could have earned him support and sympathy from Afghans and Pakistanis in particular and the world in general.

The right wing in the US and his critics would have been upset and would have labeled his campaign statements as political rhetoric. That would have been fine rather than what has happened. He has gotten himself do deep in the war on terror mess that none of his spin masters would be able to save him.

It is no exaggeration to state that one year ago, President Barack Hussein Obama was seen as the greatest hope for a substantial number of people in the United States and for a majority of people worldwide. These people hoped that it will be a different and a better world. Alas! Such is not the case. The only difference his election made was to disappear George Bush. If the world is not any worse than it was during his predecessor’s reign, it is not any better either.

He has not done much on the home front. But that will not hurt him much, and will be taken care of by his PR section and the sympathetic section in the dominant media. It is the foreign front which is going to drag him and his Nobel Peace Prize down the drain of history.
Long before Obama assumed the US presidency, the Al-Qaeda and Taliban bombings and atrocities had become known the world over. Anyone familiar with their philosophy knew well that their ultimate goal is to gain power. (They are equally fanatics as the US establishment and would go to any extent.)

On the other hand, the Taliban/Al-Qaeda axis could only gain power through ruthless tactics because their philosophy has no attraction for most of the Pakistanis—who are more close to South Asia than to West Asia. This would have created repulsion among the people in the region and would have prompted early response from the people and the government and would thus have put a dent in their support.

Andrew J. Bacevich’s observation about the Moros and the Afghans and Iraqis demands our attention:

“Above all, however, the results of the campaign to pacify the Moros suggest that pacifying Afghans or Iraqis or others in the Muslim world today will require extraordinary persistence. The Moros never did submit. A full century after Leonard Wood confidently predicted that ‘one clean-cut lesson’ would bring the Moros to heel, their resistance to outside rule continues: The present-day Moro Islamic Liberation Front, classified by the Bush administration as an Al Qaeda affiliate, carries on the fight for Moro independence.

“For advocates of today’s ‘long war,’ eager to confer on Muslims everywhere the blessings of freedom and democracy, while reserving the honor of the US military, the sheer doggedness of Moro resistance ought to give pause.”

Positive Outcome

One positive thing that has come out of Obama’s winning the presidency is that the colored people, excepting the die-hards, who had supported him with a feeling of color affinity, would come out of the fantasy land that a colored person belonging to the higher echelon of society would implement programs beneficial to them.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by CHRIS MCGREAL

The US president has pledged to improve the lives of the country’s one million Native Americans. But he faces an enormous challenge. Chris McGreal reports from Pine Ridge Indian reservation

Indian country begins where the prairie of Custer county gives way to the formidable rock spires marking out South Dakota’s Badlands. The road runs straight until the indistinguishable clapboard homesteads fade from view and the path climbs into a landscape sharpened by an eternity of wind and water.

The first marker that this may be a part of the United States, but is also apart from it, comes as the road descends to the plains of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Here an abandoned mobile home, daubed with the name of a Sioux rebel who led the tribe’s last armed showdown with the US authorities nearly 40 years ago, stands as a monument to defiance and despair.

The reservation’s own station struggles through on the radio: the tribe’s president, Theresa Two Bulls, is on air lamenting the death of a schoolboy, Joshua Kills Enemy, who hanged himself the day before. His funeral will be the second of the week, coming days after a 14-year-old girl took her own life in the same way. They are not the first.

Two Bulls wonders how it can be that the Oglala Sioux tribe’s children are killing themselves. “We must hug our children, we must tell them we love them. A lot of these youth don’t get a hug a day. They’re never told that they’re loved. We need to start being parents and grandparents to them,” she says.

Two days later, Two Bulls declared a “suicide state of emergency” in response to the deaths and a spate of attempts by others to kill themselves, such as Delia Big Boy, who was 15 when she put a rope around her neck. “It had a lot to do with my parents and alcohol abuse and what they say to you. The things they say make you think they don’t love you,” says the high school student, now 17.

“I hear the same thing from my friends. There’s hopelessness on the reservation. There’s no sense of belonging, of a future. There’s alcoholism. The parents drink. A lot of the children drink.”

Two Bulls sees the children’s deaths as a symptom of a wider crisis that has gripped generations of Oglala Sioux. More than 100 people, mostly adults, attempted suicide or took their own lives on Pine Ridge Reservation last year.

“This is about how defeated our people feel,” Two Bulls tells me later. “People across the US don’t realise we could be identified as the Third World, our living conditions. People think we’re living high off the hog on welfare and casinos. I’ve asked them — US congressional people, US secretaries of these departments who deal with us — to come out to our reservation, see first-hand how we live, why we live that way. Find out why our children are killing themselves. Learn who we are.”

Mail & Guardian for more

Zia Mohiuddin reads Saadat Hasan Manto’s immortal classic Toba Tek Singh, a short story based on the absurdity of partitioning India and creating a new country of Pakistan in the name of religion. Both countries have gone to wars and have tried their best to make traveling between two countries as difficult as possible. Even after over six decades, the rulers in both countries do not want the wounds of 1947 to heal. The peoples’ suffering still continues and Pakistan is hanging in uncertainty. Click here to read an English translation. Ed.

(Submitted by reader)

by PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ (from Counterpunch)

A note from Counterpunch editors: This week the trial of one of the most wanted women in the war on terrorism begins in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. The defendant, Aafia Siddiqui, is a 37-year-old, MIT-educated neuroscientist and suspected Al Qaeda operative. Siddiqui lived in the U.S. for ten years before mysteriously vanishaing from her hometown in Karachi in 2003, along with her three children, two of whom are American born. By some accounts she is Al Qaeda royalty, having allegedly married Ammar al Baluchi, who is the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and one of the five accused 9/11 plotters expected to face trial in the same courthouse as Siddiqui herself. But human rights groups say Siddiqui is no extremist and have long suspected foul play in her disappearance. They believe she was detained and illegally interrogated by Pakistani intelligence at the behest of the U.S. The issue of U.S. complicity in “enforced disappearances” has received little media attention, but the practice begun under Bush has continued apace in the Obama administration. Overseas intelligence gathering is increasingly outsourced to amenable foreign regimes who act as interrogators on our behalf, detaining and torturing the “truth” out of sources who often don’t have much to offer. The practice is a blatant violation of human rights and in the worst instances nothing less than torture by proxy.

Opening statements in Siddiqui’s trial begin Jan. 19. We have reprinted here an investigation into her case, “The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes its Enemies Disappear,” by freelance journalist Petra Bartosiewicz. The article first appeared in the November 2009 issue of Harper’s magazine. A PDF version is also available at www.harpers.org.

When I first read the U.S. government’s complaint against Aafia Siddiqui, who is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn detention center on charges of attempting to murder a group of U.S. Army officers and FBI agents in Afghanistan, the case it described was so impossibly convoluted—and yet so absurdly incriminating—that I simply assumed she was innocent. According to the complaint, on the evening of July 17, 2008, several local policemen discovered Siddiqui and a young boy loitering about a public square in Ghazni. She was carrying instructions for creating “weapons involving biological material,” descriptions of U.S. “military assets,” and numerous unnamed “chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars.” Siddiqui, an MIT-trained neuroscientist who lived in the United States for eleven years, had vanished from her hometown in Pakistan in 2003, along with all three of her children, two of whom were U.S. citizens. The complaint does not address where she was those five years or why she suddenly decided to emerge into a public square outside Pakistan and far from the United States, nor does it address why she would do so in the company of her American son. Various reports had her married to a high-level Al Qaeda operative, running diamonds out of Liberia for Osama bin Laden, and abetting the entry of terrorists into the United States. But those reports were countered by rumors that Siddiqui actually had spent the previous five years in the maw of the U.S. intelligence system—that she was a ghost prisoner, kidnapped by Pakistani spies, held in secret detention at a U.S. military prison, interrogated until she could provide no further intelligence, then spat back into the world in the manner most likely to render her story implausible. These dueling narratives of terrorist intrigue and imperial overreach were only further confounded when Siddiqui finally appeared before a judge in a Manhattan courtroom on August 5. Now, two weeks after her capture, she was bandaged and doubled over in a wheelchair, barely able to speak, because—somehow—she had been shot in the stomach by one of the very soldiers she stands accused of attempting to murder.

It is clear that the CIA and the FBI believed Aafia Siddiqui to be a potential source of intelligence and, as such, a prized commodity in the global war on terror. Every other aspect of the Siddiqui case, though, is shrouded in rumor and denial, with the result that we do not know, and may never know, whether her detention has made the United States any safer. Even the particulars of the arrest itself, which took place before a crowd of witnesses near Ghazni’s main mosque, are in dispute. According to the complaint, Siddiqui was detained not because she was wanted by the FBI but simply because she was loitering in a “suspicious” manner; she did not speak the local language and she was not escorted by an adult male. What drove her to risk such conspicuous behavior has not been revealed. When I later hired a local reporter in Afghanistan to re-interview several witnesses, the arresting officer, Abdul Ghani, said Siddiqui had been carrying “a box with some sort of chemicals,” but a shopkeeper named Farhad said the police had found only “a lot of papers.” Hekmat Ullah, who happened to be passing by at the time of her arrest, said Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got close to her”—a detail that is not mentioned in the complaint. A man named Mirwais, who had come to the mosque that day to pray, said he saw police handcuff Siddiqui, but Massoud Nabizada, the owner of a local pharmacy, said the police had no handcuffs, “so they used her scarf to tie her hands.” What everyone appears to agree on is this: an unknown person called the police to warn that a possible suicide bomber was loitering outside a mosque; the police arrested Siddiqui and her son; and, Afghan sovereignty notwithstanding, they then dispatched the suspicious materials, whatever they were, to the nearest U.S. military base.

The events of the following day are also subject to dispute. According to the complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents, and two military interpreters came to question Siddiqui at Ghazni’s police headquarters. The team was shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. “None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” No explanation is offered as to why no one thought to look behind it. The group sat down to talk and, in another odd lapse of vigilance, “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui, like a villain in a stage play, reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, then fell unconscious.

The authorities in Afghanistan describe a different series of events. The governor of Ghazni Province, Usman Usmani, told my local reporter that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: the U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui, the Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”

Siddiqui’s own version of the shooting is less complicated. As she explained it to a delegation of Pakistani senators who came to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest, she never touched anyone’s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, “She is loose,” and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”

Siddiqui’s trial is scheduled for this November. The charges against her stem solely from the shooting incident itself, not from any alleged act of terrorism. The prosecutors provide no explanation for how a scientist, mother, and wife came to be charged as a dangerous felon. Nor do they account for her missing years, or her two other children, who still are missing. What is known is that the United States wanted her in 2003, and it wanted her again in 2008, and now no one can explain why.

Counterpunch for more

by Shirley Pate

Yesterday, I watched news of rescue efforts in Port-au-Prince. Elite rescue teams, such as the one from Fairfax County, VA, were focusing primarily on the Montana Hotel and the headquarters of the UN “peacekeeping” force, MINUSTAH. Anyone who knows Haiti knows that the Montana Hotel is the most lavish lodging your can find in Port-au-Prince and is frequented by wealthy business people, foreign dignitaries, and served as the initial headquarters of the MINUSTAH force. Meanwhile, in the neighborhoods most heavily hit by the earthquake, Haitians, equipped with nothing more than their bare hands, dug frantically to save their families and neighbors.

The Canada Haitian Action Network is circulating an aid worker’s account that tells of this class/race disparity in responding to the injured. The aid worker says rescue teams are refusing to go into popular neighborhoods because they fear “violence.” Breathlessly, the media rotate stories of poor, injured Haitians with warnings of violent Haitian masses on the verge of a nationwide riot.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s foil to counter Michael Moore about his indictment of the US health care system in his film Sicko (Moore kicked his ass), reported two nights ago that a tent clinic in downtown Port-au-Prince was abandoned by all medical staff because of a “rumor” of impending violence. Gupta showed the CNN audience cot after cot of injured Haitians with no medical staff in sight. CNN would probably get an Emmy award if Gupta would quit playing journalist and used his time there being the doctor he was trained to be. This is not a place or time where ANY medical professional on the ground in Haiti should do anything other than treating the injured.

Those who have observed that US aid is slow getting to Haiti, such as the Navy’s USS Comfort which is leaving Baltimore, Md., only TODAY, should understand that the US is concentrating on getting military boots on the ground first. By the end of the weekend, the US will have 10,000 military troops in Haiti. Once this is done, it will be “safe” for aid workers to tend to the injured in the popular neighborhoods. As time goes on, pay attention to the back story, and you will see that the placement of these soldiers has more to do with stemming a political tsunami than helping the people.

MRZine for more

by BRUCE A. DIXON

Tavis Smiley announced on January 6 that he was ending SOBU, the annual State of the Black Union. For ten years, SOBU drew black academics, civic, political, labor, religious and business leaders together each February for a day-long discussion of the current status and future hopes of African America. Each year thousands attended in person and millions more watched the event live on C-SPAN. SOBU had grown so large and popular that it spawned secondary events for the live attendees, along with book and lecture tours.

Tavis’s cancellation announcement, a brief video on his tavistalks.com web site is long on folksy introductions, self-congratulation, thank-yous, and goodbyes. The reasons he offers for ending the annual event are brief and unconvincing. Ten years ago, he offers, “…there was only one syndicated black radio show… there was only one black TV network… we didn’t have an African American president… (and) we no longer have to wait for one day a year in February to discuss issues that matter to us…” on TV.

Tavis is talking nonsense here. The so-called black TV and radio operations feel no obligation to field news operations because they don’t view African Americans as a polity with opinions worth informing, sharing or airing.
To these station owners, black or otherwise, African Americans are just another marketing target to be sliced, diced, age and income stratified and delivered up to corporate sponsors. A master marketer himself, Tavis knows this better than anybody.

As a marketing contraption SOBU was a runaway success. Corporate sponsors like Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Exxon-Mobil and McDonalds got their logos and corporate messaging, and even some of their spokespeople in front of millions of black eyeballs. C-SPAN, which the cable TV monopolists offer as a pitiful substitute for the thousands of public, educational, governmental and local news channels they ought to be funding with the trillions they make of public subsidies, public resources and the use of the public rights of way, got to pose as a kind of “public service.” Of course SOBU manufactured and magnified the celebrity status and earning power of Tavis Smiley. SOBU spawned a number of spinoff ventures, sold millions of books and videos, and made household names in black America of people like Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson.

But the State of the Black Union did things for millions of ordinary African Americans too, people with an urgent hunger to hear some of their unique experiences taken into account, their longings for peace abroad and economic justice at home validated, and more. Millions of ordinary African Americans privately question why jobs can’t be created in their communities even in good economic times, and why the only model of urban economic development is moving poor people out and richer ones in. They know at close hand the devastating effects of our society’s policy of racially selective policing, prosecution and mass incarceration, and marvel at why no discussion including their viewpoint on such matters can be found in the mass media, including the so-called black media.

Flawed as it was, and layered with right wing prosperity-gospel preachers, black corporate hacks and “black conservatives” who owe their careers to white corporate largesse, SOBU put forward religious, labor, academic and civic leaders who, for several minutes at a time could speak on these matters. If they were skillful enough, some could flip the entire panel discussion into explorations of these topics.

For one Saturday a year then, SOBU was eagerly awaited and watched by millions because it tried to reflect the very real black internal conversation, which simply could not be heard anyplace else on TV. To a significant degree, it ws a hit because it reflected and validated the ordinary wisdom and experience of black America. For ten years SOBUwas a win-win situation for everybody. But that’s over now. There’s a new sheriff in town. Like Tavis said, ten years ago we didn’t have a black president. That’s what’s different, and that’s why SOBU is being called off.

Black Agenda Report for more

Attacked by critics from the left and right, the president can regain his popularity by imitating an illustrious predecessor

by Michael Crowley

When Barack Obama arrives in Boston this afternoon, he will be confronting a possible tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. This Tuesday, Massachusetts will hold a special election to fill the Senate seat that belonged to Senator Edward M Kennedy before he succumbed to cancer last August. Massachusetts is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, but the party’s heir apparent, attorney general Martha Coakley, appears at best tied with her little-known Republican challenger, state Senator Scott Brown.

A Coakley loss would be a nightmare for Democrats, not only for its symbolism, but because it would imperil the passage at long last of Obama’s signature healthcare reform bill. (Democrats have precisely enough votes now to pass the bill in the Senate and cannot afford to lose a single “yea”.) Hence the potential tragedy: the death of healthcare champion Ted Kennedy could conceivably lead to the historic measure’s bizarre demise. “If Scott Brown wins, it’ll kill the healthcare bill,” the Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank declared on Friday.

Some of the blame lies with Coakley: she was slow to campaign in earnest, for instance, and recently scoffed at the notion of shaking voters’ hands outside Boston’s Fenway Park “in the cold”. But her woes also have to do with the deeper forces bedevilling Barack Obama as he completes his first year in office. Like Obama, Coakley finds herself caught between conservative anger and liberal disillusionment. Conservatives are energised by the notion that Obama is trying to impose “socialised medicine” and Brown is touting his candidacy as a chance to stop healthcare in its tracks. Liberals, meanwhile, are upset that the health bill isn’t bolder and that Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan (which Coakley opposes).

As a result, it appears possible that a strong Republican turnout and a weak Democratic one will combine to hand Coakley – and, by extension, Obama himself – a reeling blow. Which is why Obama is making today’s last-ditch campaign stop in Boston.

Even if a healthcare debacle is averted, Obama won’t be in the clear. The national political currents that have shaped the Massachusetts showdown are sure to carry on well into 2010. Take the right wing: after healthcare, Obama’s upcoming agenda items seem sure to further inflame such populist-conservative passions. Next up could be a bill to address global warming, something the right denies is even a problem. There’s also been talk of a new push to reform the country’s immigration laws, a move that could grant amnesty to some illegal immigrants – political nitroglycerine on the nativist right.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin enjoys the bestselling non-fiction book in America and will soon be peddling her views on the airwaves via Fox News, where she recently signed a contract to become a commentator. And a recent poll found that a plurality of voters would vote for a candidate running under the banner of the loosely organised and occasionally fanatical “Tea Party” movement before supporting either a Republican or a Democrat.

But Obama can’t simply take shelter under his party’s left wing. There is no room for him at that inn. The healthcare bill’s passage will come with outraged cries that Obama sold out his core supporters. Liberals like the former Democratic party chairman Howard Dean have argued that a health bill with no public option provision which forces private insurers to compete with the government is worse than no bill at all. Other prominent liberals, including the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, are upset that Obama hasn’t forced Congress to inject more stimulus dollars into the economy; others complain he has yet to make good on his pledge to allow gays to serve openly in the military, and to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp once and for all.

As for Obama’s surge of 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, the powerful Democratic Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey speaks for many a liberal when he calls it “a fool’s errand”. It’s a stunning turn of events for a president who many progressives believed was their saviour and would usher in a new era of bold liberal activism.

At the moment, this grip appears treacherous indeed for Obama. The latest polling from Gallup shows him with a meagre 49% approval rating, with 45% of Americans disapproving of his performance, down from a 66-27 split in early May. But the middle can be a good place to be and Obama may yet escape the dreaded left-right pincer.

Consider the example of Bill Clinton. Two years into his presidency, Clinton appeared ruined. Republicans stampeded in the 1994 midterm elections to capture the House and Senate, leaving Clinton to argue for his own relevance. But Clinton understood that the Republicans had benefited from a public perception that he had lurched to the left on healthcare and gays in the military. Clinton began his comeback by forcefully taking on unsympathetic Republican rivals such as Newt Gingrich. But he also “triangulated”, to use the word made famous by his adviser, Dick Morris, against his party’s left wing. Clinton balanced the federal budget, signed a welfare reform bill and even famously declared in his 1995 State of the Union speech that “the era of big government is over”.

Guardian for more

by KATHARINE DANIELS

For me and my colleagues, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s new book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is exhilarating. Already in its 17th printing, Half the Sky pulls no punches in detailing the major abuses women suffer worldwide. Through personal stories, told by the women living them, sex trafficking, forced prostitution, honor killings, mass rape, and maternal mortality become shockingly real. Critics believe Half the Sky will ignite the global women’s movement as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did the environmental movement in the 1960s. So do I. This remarkable book moves the conversation from women’s issues to human rights; shows change is possible one woman at a time; and, most importantly, inspires hope.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with this Pulitzer Prize-winning couple. Speaking with them I felt great possibility for change in areas that before seemed unrelentingly dark and difficult – ending the incessant violence against women, emancipating the 100 million women enslaved in sex trafficking operations worldwide, and silencing the bell that rings with the death of a woman in childbirth once every minute of every day.

What becomes clear in reading Half the Sky is the opportunity the emancipation of women provides. Despite the oftentimes devastating read, the authors ask us to bear in mind what they refer to as a central truth: Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity. Neither Kristof nor WuDunn are shy about their vision for the book, “We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts.”

Although Kristof and WuDunn are confident the atrocities committed against women and girls worldwide will one day be behind us, the pathway there must include both women and men. “If this is a cause that is backed only by women,” Kristof warns, “it has lost already. It is immediately marginalized.” According to Kristof, success will require a broad coalition to resolve an issue that he notes is no more a woman’s issue than the holocaust was a Jewish issue, or civil rights were a black issue. “When 100 million women are discriminated against to death, that’s not just a woman’s issue…both for intrinsic moral reasons and also for practical reasons…it’s essential that men get on board.”

“It really is a partnership,” WuDunn adds. “It’s not women standing up for their rights. It’s really men and women standing up for just human rights.” She further elaborates that what’s needed is a realistic approach “that really focuses on outcomes, not on outrage.”

While traditional feminists, who have cared about these issues for decades, make up the older audiences on their speaking tours, it was encouraging to learn that the younger audiences include many more men. Young men who, according to Kristof, “don’t see this as a women’s issue or a soft issue” but instead “intuitively think that if women and girls are kidnapped and locked up in brothels or die in vast numbers in childbirth – that’s just wrong.”

Kristof and WuDunn’s challenge is to engage partners worldwide in a movement to stop abuses that for most of us are far removed from our daily lives. They use the abolition of slavery in Great Britain in 1807 as what they call “a singular, shining example of a people who accepted a substantial, sustained sacrifice of blood and treasure to improve the lives of fellow human beings living far away.” For its moral commitment to ending slavery, the British sacrificed the equivalent of more than $14 trillion USD today.

Women’s International Perspective for more

by MARIAH BLAKE

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Views like these are relatively common in East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Up until the 1950s, textbooks painted American history as a steady string of triumphs, but the upheavals of the 1960s shook up old hierarchies, and beginning in the latter part of the decade, textbook publishers scrambled to rewrite their books to make more space for women and minorities. They also began delving more deeply into thorny issues, like slavery and American interventionism. As they did, a new image of America began to take shape that was not only more varied, but also far gloomier than the old one. Author Frances FitzGerald has called this chain of events “the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place.”

This shift spurred a fierce backlash from social conservatives, and some began hunting for ways to fight back. In the 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler, a homemaker and an oil-company clerk, discovered that Texas had a little-known citizen-review process that allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content. From their kitchen table in the tiny town of Hawkins, the couple launched a crusade to purge textbooks of what they saw as a liberal, secular, pro-evolution bias. When textbook adoptions rolled around, the Gablers would descend on school board meetings with long lists of proposed changes—at one point their aggregate “scroll of shame” was fifty-four feet long. They also began stirring up other social conservatives, and eventually came to wield breathtaking influence. By the 1980s, the board was demanding that publishers make hundreds of the Gablers’ changes each cycle. These ranged from rewriting entire passages to simple fixes, such as pulling the New Deal from a timeline of significant historical events (the Gablers thought it smacked of socialism) and describing the Reagan administration’s 1983 military intervention in Grenada as a “rescue” rather than an “invasion.”

To avoid tangling with the Gablers and other citizen activists, many publishers started self-censoring or allowing the couple to weigh in on textbooks in advance. In 1984, the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way analyzed new biology textbooks presented for adoption in Texas and found that, even before the school board weighed in, three made no mention of evolution. At least two of them were later adopted in other states. This was not unusual: while publishers occasionally produced Texas editions, in most cases changes made to accommodate the state appeared in textbooks around the country—a fact that remains true to this day.

Washington Monthly for more

George Manuel on Parliament Hill. Photo: George Manuel Institute

Don’t let Harper play hockey with human rights

by Arthur Manuel

COLDSTREAM, BC—We have reached a very critical time in our struggle for our land and human rights as Indigenous Peoples. The Canadian government knows this and has been doing everything in their power to trick us into extinguishing our Aboriginal Title through negotiations under their policies—including their Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. Canada’s courts have been the alternative to negotiations, and there we have had measured success. But the establishment Indigenous organizations, like the Assembly of First Nations, have been stuck with what the government is dictating to them.

As Indigenous Peoples we need to think about what to do now. In early August 2009, Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl sent a strong message to the British Columbia Treaty Commission (BCTC) Common Table, a group of First Nations from different BCTC negotiating tables who came together to raise concerns regarding consistent obstacles they all faced in negotiating land claims agreements in BC. He said that the federal government will not change the existing Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies.

The federal government has ignored all objections from groups who do not negotiate and groups who are inactive in their negotiations. Now they have stated clearly to those actively negotiating that they will not review their land and self-government policies.

It is important for Indigenous Peoples who have not signed treaties surrendering their Title to realize that we are all under the federal Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. We must realize that any land claims and self-government agreement will be determined by these policies. Right now, this will mean that the best deal Indigenous Peoples can get is the Nisga’a, Tsawwassen or Maa-nulth Final Agreements. This requires the extinguishment of Aboriginal Title, according to what the government has put on the table under the Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. Indigenous Peoples will have to give up their tax-exemption, take their land in fee simple, and agree to be under provincial control.

There needs to be a fundamental change in Canada’s Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. These policies need to address the direct link between Aboriginal Title and our human rights as Indigenous Peoples. Canada must abandon their existing policy of extinguishment and assimilation and adopt a plan of recognition and co-existence. This dramatic change must be forced on the federal government by direct action from Indigenous
Peoples and our supporters. We get a lot of support for taking direct action. We just need faith and courage to stand up for our rights.

The 1980 Constitution Express, an international grassroots campaign that involved sending a train with hundreds of Indigenous protesters from the west coast to Ottawa, secured section 35(1) in the Canadian Constitution 1982. We need similar collective action to get Aboriginal Title recognized.

A lot has changed since the 1980s.

The Delgamuukw case judicially recognized Aboriginal Title in 1997. The World Trade Organization and the North America Free Trade Agreement recognized that Canada’s policy not to recognize Aboriginal Title was a subsidy to Canada’s resource industries. The British Columbia government now has to report Aboriginal Title as a contingent liability in their annual balance sheet. And the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples despite the fact that Canada voted against the Declaration.

Our real problem is that the federal and provincial governments do not want to recognize Aboriginal Title because it ousts their jurisdiction over our Aboriginal Title territory. They want to continue to mutually and exclusively make all decisions regarding our land. Everything comes from the natural wealth of our land. We need to unite, not around our weakest positions in negotiations, but around the strongest defenders of our land. In British Columbia, participating under the BCTC over the last 16 years has had dismal results: it has produced only the Tsawwassen and Maa-nulth Final Agreements, plus the rebuked Common Table Report and the rejected BC Recognition and Reconciliation Act.

Dominion for more

The controversy in Malaysia shows the arrogance and ignorance that often underlie fanaticism. But it is also heartening to discover the strength of Malaysia’s public sphere.

by C. M. Naim

The foundational creed for all Muslims is: “There is no god save Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet”—with the Arabic word Rasul indicating Muhammad’s status. Rasul literally translates as “someone who was sent,” but in common usage in Arabic—and in Islamicate languages such as Urdu and Persian—it means a prophet or apostle. According to the Qur’an, Jesus too is a Rasul of Allah’s Rasul, as are in fact all the prophets of the Old Testament. However, in Islam, Jesus is not God’s Son; though immaculately conceived, he is described only as the son of Maryam or Mary. A useful summation of what the Qur’an tells Muslims about Jesus is found in 4:156–8, where the Jews are chided—“[156] … because they denied and spoke dreadful calumnies of Mary; [157] And for saying: ‘We killed the Christ, Jesus, son of Mary, who was an apostle of God;’ but they neither killed nor crucified him, though it so appeared to them. Those who disagree in the matter are only lost in doubt. They have no knowledge about it other than conjecture, for surely they did not kill him, [158] But God took him to Himself, and God is all-mighty and all-wise.” (Ahmed Ali, Al-Qur’an, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984, pp. 93-4.) Christianity, obviously, is six centuries and few decades older than Islam, and every reader of the Qur’an knows that its earliest verses directly and repeatedly, though not exclusively, addressed the Christians of Mecca, reminding them Allah and His Rasul, Jesus, while pointing out their “errors” in belief about the latter.

In other words, Allah was the Arabic word that the people of Mecca—Christians, Jews, and so-called Pagans—were quite familiar with and understood it to represent a singular Supreme Being in Arabic, their shared language. The word, no doubt, had an earlier history, but that is not of concern here. Of importance is the simple fact that a fairly large body of Arabic speaking Christians had been using the word “Allah” for at least a few centuries before the advent of Islam. And that for any Muslim to make a monopolistic claim on the word in the name of Islam would be an act of abysmal ignorance and absolute arrogance. To my limited knowledge, no Muslim, had ever made such a claim in the past.

But these are bad times, reminding us of the words that Yeats made memorable some ninety years ago: “… everywhere // The ceremony of innocence is drowned;// The best lack all conviction, while the worst // Are full of passionate intensity.” And so we have the situation in Malaysia, where some Muslims recently attacked and vandalized nine churches because they did not wish some Malaysian Christians to use “Allah” to refer to their own God.

I have above used the word “some” twice advisedly. According to an Associated Press report of January 9, “Only the Malay-language prayers for indigenous tribes people in the remote states of Sabah and Sarawak use ‘Allah,’ as they have for decades.” And the Catholic weekly, Herald, uses the word only in its Bahasa Malaysia edition. It had been doing so since 1995, but it was not until 2006 that it was warned by the government to stop. And it is only some Malaysian Muslims who, individually or collectively, have been involved in the recent arson and vandalism. (The most recent being an attack on the offices of the lawyer for the Catholic Church.) The many reports in the New York Times barely hinted at that “some-ness.” I had to go online and find some English language Malaysian blogs and newspapers to discover that while the problem was more extensive there was also greater dissent and resistance to the ban among Malaysian Muslims than was reported in the American press, and that any number of prominent academics and journalists had severely criticized the attacks, while bringing to light the issue’s fuller history within the context of Malaysia’s somewhat unique federal political system.

Apparently, there was a local ban and a fatwa to that effect in 1986 in the state of Selangor, which was made into a state law in 1988, and eventually became established in March 2009 as a fully gazetted law in all the constituent states of Malaysia—though not without challenge and opposition from various religious and secular organizations. The ban, in fact, concerned four words, the other three being “Kaabah,” “Solat,” and “Baitullah.” The enacted law prohibited Non-Muslims from using those four words with reference to any occasion or activity that was not Islamic.

It may be recalled that not too long ago there was in Malaysia another brouhaha. A fatwa was issued and nationally confirmed making Yoga a “non-Islamic” practice that Malaysian Muslims were told not to engage in. Earlier there were other controversies—over beauty pageants and also whether it was right for Malaysian Muslims to greet their non-Muslim compatriots on the latter’s religious occasions. I should note that the mufti of Selangor disapproved of the pageants and Yoga but allowed offering greetings to non-Muslims. Indonesia, incidentally, did not prohibit Yoga to its much larger Muslim majority population.

Outlook for more

by NADEEM F. PARACHA

Pakistanis love emailing and text messaging quotes from hadiths and assorted religious paraphernalia. I usually ignore such messages because in my mind I imagine a holy punter who is convinced that each email or SMS of his is getting him that much closer to booking a cosy place in heaven. The truth is that this (albeit irritating) activity is actually better than a holy bum blowing himself up in public to find that same place in Paradise.

However, last Monday, as I again received my share of emails and SMSes quoting hadith and citing all that sophomoric stuff about ‘scientific proofs in the Qu’ran,’ I decided to answer one particular SMS; one I was receiving for the umpteenth time.

This is how it went: Munafiq ki Nishaanian (signs of the hypocrite) – Jhoot bolna (telling lies); Wa’da khilafi karna (breaking promises); Khiyanat karma (stealing); Gaali dayna (swearing).

So I replied: Sir/Madman, thank you for your SMS. But I think you forgot one more sign of being a munafiq, i.e. khaali khuli kay SMS karna (sending aimless SMSes).

Right away the sender SMSed his/her reply: SMS technology wasn’t invented when the hadith were compiled. So you can’t say SMSing is a sign of being a munafiq.

Dawn for more

by Togzhan Kassenova

During the rainy, windy early morning of August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear explosion–code-named “First Lightning”–at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in eastern Kazakhstan. Witnesses remember feeling the ground tremble and seeing the sky turn red–and how that red sky was quickly dominated by a peculiar mushroom-shaped cloud. The Soviet military and scientific personnel conducting the test knew that the rain and wind would make the local population more susceptible to radioactive fallout. But at the time, authorities disregarded the consequences for the sake of military and political goals. Throughout the next 40 years, such a trade-off would become all too familiar to those living at and around the test site. In all, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk (340 underground and 116 aboveground), starting with that first one in August 1949 and ending with the final test on October 19, 1989. In 1991, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev officially closed the site and ordered that medical help and compensation be provided to those suffering from illness due to testing.

During the first decades of testing, the Soviet military built a secret research and administrative center 60 kilometers away from the testing grounds–a new town that the outside world would come to know only as Semipalatinsk-21. Given its secret mission, Semipalatinsk-21 was never identified on any official maps. As such, it was surrounded by barbed wire, and the flow of people in and out of the town was strictly controlled. Later, the town would be renamed Kurchatov, after the man who helped the Soviet Union obtain the bomb. The largest civilian town, Semipalatinsk, was located 160 kilometers away; while a few rural settlements were scattered nearby the site.

Although it has been 20 years since the last nuclear weapon was exploded in Kazakhstan, its people still have vivid memories of the Soviet testing era–memories that they kindly shared with me during a three-week trip I took there in July. Take, for instance, Gulsum Kakimzhanova, the head of the nongovernmental organization Iris, which is based in Semipalatinsk and helps those affected by the testing find the proper medical and social care. (During one project, Iris arranged breast cancer screenings for more than 18,000 women who live in areas close to the former test site.) Kakimzhanova herself was born in 1952 at a railway settlement not far from Semipalatinsk. The effects of the tests were everywhere. “One morning when I was a small girl, my father awoke to find all of his hair had fallen off onto his pillow overnight,” she told me. “Only many years later, when I began working on health issues as a trained biologist, did I realize that my father’s hair loss was likely caused by radiation exposure while he labored outside as a railway worker near the test site.”

Natalya Zhdanova, who lived in Kurchatov from 1968 to 2000, remembers that announcements about the tests were broadcast on the local radio stations, along with movie show times and weather forecasts. As a member of a military family whose relatives were involved in the testing, she never worried about how the tests might impact her or her family’s health. In fact, it was apparent when I spoke with her that she viewed the military presence in Semipalatinsk patriotically: “People were not afraid of radiation–maybe because nobody was suffering from leukemia or other diseases. Our fathers and husbands worked in this field, and they never had any health problems, apart from the great responsibility that came with the task. And everyone always followed safety procedures.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for more

by George Okojie

Lagos — Strong indications emerged yesterday that the government of India plans to invest a whooping sum of $1.5 trillion on infrastructural development in Nigeria and other parts of Africa in the next 10 years.

India’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Anand Sharma, who made the revelation at an exhibition and India-West Africa Business Forum in Lagos, pointed out that bilateral trade between Nigeria and India has for several years been in excess of $10 billion in favour of Nigeria.

He remarked that five out of the 12 fastest growing economies in the world are domiciled in Africa; a continent which he said is richly endowed with natural resources.

Commending the conveners of the forum, the President of ECOWAS Commission, Dr. Mohammed Ibn Chambers, noted that the event could not have come at a better time, when most nations are emerging from economic failures arising from the global economic recession.

According to him, the 15 countries in the West African sub-region with a combined population of well over 280million people, Africa remains a major economy that must be taken seriously, noting that the continent is blessed with skilled manpower, favourable climate that can be harnessed as an alternative to power and good forest reserves suitable for the pharmaceutical industry.

All Africa for more