The leaked UN report cannot be put back in the bottle. Kagame, who labels all critics “genocidaires” or apologists for genocide, is exposed as “the greatest mass killer on the face of the earth, today,” as described by Edward S. Herman, co-author of The Politics of Genocide. Kagame’s mentors and funders in the U.S. government, who aided and abetted his genocide in Congo, must be held equally accountable – if not more so, since United States corporations derive the greatest benefit from Congo’s blood minerals, and the U.S. military gains the most advantage from Rwandan and Ugandan services as mercenaries at America’s beck and call in Africa.

Black Agenda Report for more

Link TV & Part II

US payrolls fell by 54,000 and the official unemployment rate rose to 9.6 percent in August from 9.5 percent the previous month, according to the monthly employment report released Friday by the Labor Department.

The net job loss in August marked the third straight month in which the US economy shed jobs. The private sector added a mere 67,000 new jobs during the month, about half the total needed just to keep pace with the normal growth of the labor force. It is estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 new jobs have to be generated every month to recoup the 8.4 million jobs lost since the recession that began in December 2007 and significantly reduce the unemployment rate.

World Socialist Web Site for more

About 70 percent of Selco’s customers live in remote areas that, unlike Bylakuppe and Doddhosur, have no electricity at all. Without power, they depend on candles and kerosene lamps for lighting. About 400 million Indians lack reliable electricity, living in a world apart from the bright offices and air-conditioned shopping malls of India’s cities.

A two-light Selco home system typically costs 8,500 to 11,000 rupees, or $180 to $235 — no small sum when 60 percent of the company’s customers earn 3,500 to 4,000 rupees a month. But Selco works with a variety of local rural banks to help 85 percent of its customers get financing. The on-time repayment rate for its solar loans is 90 percent, said Harish Hande, its co-founder and managing director.

The New York Times for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar. His comment: “A fascinating read as to the possibilities with applications in Bangladesh too.”

The magnitude of the disaster which has befallen the hapless people of Pakistan requires all people of South Asia to do what they can to minimize the effect of this tragedy. Come together and donate generously!

No words can do justice to the heart-rending images from NWFP, Punjab, and now Sindh that document the disaster which have befallen the hapless people of Pakistan. After being subject to suicide bombings by crazed Islamists, drone attacks by stealth U.S. aircraft and the manifest shortcomings of their government, it seems that Nature too has decided to wreak vengeance by simply drowning them in unprecedented floods. While much of the flood is due to much higher than average monsoon rainfall, which, in turn, could be one of the early warning signs of climate change, the massive environmental degradation caused by years of excessive logging and failure to de-silt rivers and canals have undoubtedly contributed to this calamity. This disaster has led so far to well over a thousand deaths, rendered millions homeless, and destroyed much of the agricultural economy and infrastructure of the country. It is widely acknowledged that the effects of this disaster will be long-lasting and profound affecting many of the basic conditions of life in Pakistan. Whether these events bring people together and unite them in a common purpose or deepen the fissures in the existing society, as some commentators fear, remains to be seen.

INSAF Bulletin for more

(Thanks to Feroz Mehdi)

It’s not that I have been just laying around. I have been spending my time trying to promote my film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time which came out at the end of April. I’ve been appearing on many media interviews but major media outlets still seem uninterested in the multi-trillion dollar crimes of Wall Street. They prefer to react to celebrity droppings and whatever contrived hot-button issue on the right-wing agenda like the Mosque that may never be built at Ground Zero. Thank goodness for outlets like Democracy Now, Grit TV, The Real News Network, Free Speech TV and Link TV. Many alternative media outlets have been very kind.

Z Net for more

DATE: SEPTEMBER 6, 2010
VENUE: PRESS CLUB OF INDIA
TIME: 5PM
CONTACT: PRIYANKA JAISWAL
TEL: 9654942495

Synopsis:

This play is a journey of a man in search of his profession. And each of the profession that he chooses is tinged with violence till he decides to become professionless. Juxtaposed wit that man’s journey is that of another giant. Frontier Gandhi. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born into a wealthy family of Utmanzai, Hasht-nagar, in 1890 and his only trust with education was one year at college in Aligarh. From a family steeped in feudal tradition of large land holding, he e shocked his family by wanting to become a peace-worker. He was the second and last son of Bahram Khan (the Mashar Khan-great Khan or the Khan of Khans).

Under Islamic law, alcohol and certain meats are forbidden with pork especially taboo so Akhter was shocked to learn some of the products she used contained alcohol and even pig placenta.

So she devised her own make-up line, Samina Pure Make-up, launched from her home in Birmingham in June this year after two years of testing which now boasts to be Britain’s first company to sell halal-certified cosmetics.

Garavi Gujarat for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Maputo — After two days of rioting over price rises, Maputo was mostly calm on Friday, but a few minor disturbances occurred in some outlying neighbourhoods.

All Africa for more

Angelic it always makes you feel
When delivering a critical spiel
The rule is: When it’s the other folks
Just use harsh words and don’t coax
Another thing you need to know
The country should be a foe

Iran’s tactic to control and scare
Women, is to stone and use snare
One demoted from stoning to death
Is now counting in jail her breath
Sakineh is accused by the bulls holy
Who treat powerless and weak as lowly

Now enters the First Lady of France
With the useful human rights lance
How can they assign you to this abyss?
“Every part of me refuses to accept this”
No dispute with her regarding this affair
But about French wrongs, does she care?

What does she think of her spouse
Who with Roma behaved like a louse?
Does she feel the immigrants’ pain
Whose neighborhoods are a police reign?
When would she see the ills in France
And stop feigning this virtuous prance?

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

Watch also BBC and France 24

God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
…
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

China Daily for more

(Thanks to Arpan Patel)

A maternal ancestor to all living humans called mitochondrial Eve likely lived about 200,000 years ago, at roughly the same time anatomically modern humans are believed to have emerged, a new review study confirms.

The results are based on analyses of mitochondrial DNA. Found in the energy-producing centers of cells, mitochondrial DNA is only passed down the maternal line, and can be traced back to one woman.

However, this doesn’t mean she was the first modern woman, rather it indicates that only her descendants survive to the present day.

Live Science for more

(Thanks to reader)

The celebrated Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan is a man of many ambitions. He was a favorite of Indira Gandhi and then patronized Mulayam Singh Yadav of Samajwadi Party. Lately he agreed to promote himself by working for Narendra Modi, the Gujarat Chief Minister who masterminded the massacre of Muslims in 2002. A victim of that tragedy appeals to him to be true to the legacy of his secular father, an eminent poet, and desist from serving Modi.

The celebrated Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan is a man of many ambitions. He was a favorite of Indira Gandhi and then patronized Mulayam Singh Yadav of Samajwadi Party. Lately he agreed to promote himself by working for Narendra Modi, the Gujarat Chief Minister who masterminded the massacre of Muslims in 2002. A victim of that tragedy appeals to him to be true to the legacy of his secular father, an eminent poet, and desist from serving Modi. Read more….

Main hoon unkey saath, rakhte jo seedhi apni reedh… (I am with those who keep their spine straight)

From Madhushala by Harivansh Rai Bachchan

Dear Amitabh,

I remember the day in 1982, when the news of your serious injury on the sets of Coolie broke. It said you may not survive. The country was shocked. Millions cried. Special prayers for your good health and long life were offered in temples, mosques, churches and gurdwaras. I joined the prayers for your health and long life.

The writings of your father, the late Shri Harivansh Rai Bachchan, had a great influence on me. From early childhood, I have read his poetry and prose that combined Kabir, Keats, Tagore, Omar Khayyam and Shakespeare into artful construction of ideas with deep reflections.

INSAF Bulletin for more

(Thanks to Feroz Mehdi)

Iceland is set to give a private army contractor the green light in what critics are calling the most ambitious move by a corporation to perform tasks once reserved for national militaries.
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Few countries have suffered worse from the global crisis than Iceland, an island of 320,000 in the northern extremes of the Atlantic Ocean that was once hailed – due to its commitment to sophisticated, albeit highly risky financial services – as one of the wealthiest and most developed nations in the world. Those halcyon days are over.

RT for more

There is no law in any state in the U.S. restricting condom possession, but if you’re a sex worker, you might have reason to believe there is a legal limit. Law enforcement officers in New York City, Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Bay Area routinely confiscate condoms from suspected suspected sex workers, sometimes filing them as evidence of prostitution. Almost everyone interviewed for a recent Sex Workers Project survey, Baskin says, “mentioned a certain number of condoms over which they
felt more concerned about increased harassment.” Cyndee Clay, executive director of D.C.-based Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive, says, “It’s a common enough practice that everyone knows about it.”

Ms. for more

Life saving relief efforts for Pakistan’s tens of millions of flood victims could be crippled if its government is forced to send abroad a shocking 30% of its annual budget revenues to foreign creditors on debt incurred by previous dictatorships.

Earlier this year, we persuaded creditor governments to drop Haiti’s debt after it was devastated by an earthquake — and now we could do the same for Pakistan.

We need to act fast — right now international financial institutions and donor countries are assessing how to assist Pakistan. Sign this urgent petition to end this stifling debt and send this on to friends, and it will be delivered directly at the highest level to the the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Petition to the IMF and all Pakistan’s creditors:

In the wake of Pakistan’s devastating floods, we call on you to immediately declare a two year moratorium with no interest on all of Pakistan’s debt payments, as a first step to fully cancelling its unjust debt. We also urge you to ensure aid is given in the form of grants not loans.

Please sign the Petition now!

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 31, 2010 (IPS) – Among its unstable and conflict-ridden neighbours, Rwanda stands out. It has been pegged as a model of development and one of Africa’s success stories: Since the 1990’s, when a civil war ravaged the country, average incomes have doubled, its people have become healthier and less hungry and it has the highest proportion of women parliamentarians worldwide. Yet, maintaining this stability is a government accused of muzzling its opponents and committing human rights abuses.

For the last 16 years, Rwandans have lived under the shadow of the infamous 1994 genocide that eliminated one-tenth of its population in a mere 100 days. During that period, 800,000 ethnic Tutsi along with some peaceful Hutu were systematically murdered at the hands of a violent Hutu regime until Tutsi forces led by current Rwandan president Paul Kagame was able to wrest control.

Inter Press Services for more

Link

The entire feminine discourse has been reduced to a grand celebration of infidelity and contemporary Hindi women writers are like prostitutes because they dare to promote female sexuality in their works.

So says Vibhuti Narain Rai, a vice chancellor at the Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University in recently published articles in the Naya Gyanodov Journal and in the Indian Express.

The Naya Gyanoday is a journal of the Jnanpith Trust, which confers the most prestigious Jnanpith awards. Sri Rai is also a member of the panel that chooses the prestigious Jnanpith awards. In this interview, Mr. Rai criticised that women writers of today are competing to prove themselves to become ‘sabse badi chhinal’ and one can find the references of ‘kitne bistaron men kitani baar’ in their work. ‘Naya Gyanoday’ means ‘New Realisation of Knowledge.’

Mr. Rai, and also somehow Mr. Ravindra Kalia, the editor of the journal, prove that for them, their ‘new realisation’ is that repression of female sexuality is more acceptable for men to become themselves more sexually promiscuous. This modern-day double standard may have rather practical roots in their minds where they can use such ‘vulgar’ words to represent their reprehensible behavior. The honourable VC Rai acts in the way the fundamentalists often act. Readers can certainly mark how the socio-political fundamentalist groups often act to save their great cultures.

Recently, the TV channel Zee Chhatisgarh broadcast some undemocratic nuisance acts of the Dharm Sena, a state-based fundamentalist group. Members of the group forcefully tried to stop the celebration of Friends’ day in Raipur, the Capital of Chhatisgarh. The volunteers not only physically threatened the girls, but used vulgar language that could not even be broadcast by the TV channel when airing the report.

How can the decorum of culture be saved when fundamentalist groups and even a VC of a central university can’t control their vulgar language?

I forwarded a message on Facebook to my intellectual male and female friends separately regarding the culpable comments of vice chancellor Rai. I found it strange that all the female intellectuals and writers responded with their remonstrations but that none the male intellectuals and writers, responded — for or against; except C.P. Aboobacker, the poet, critic and editor of Malayalam literature. Instead, the other males seemed to avoid the matter entirely, possibly thinking silence to be the best policy in this circumstance. But why?

What Feminism Is And Is Not

Feminism, to me, has often been misunderstood as a bunch of stereotyped hysterical man-hating fanatics who seek power and control rather than true equality. But to me, ‘feminism’ is not just a movement for the liberation of women, but rather a broad social movement striving for the equality of each individual worldwide. Feminism should emphasise the importance of such values as cooperation, tolerance, nurturance, and the freedom for each person to achieve her or his full potential.

I think feminism should not act in opposition to men as individuals. To me, feminism is against oppressive and outdated social structures which forces both men and women into positions which are false and antagonistic. Thus, everyone has an important role to play in the feminist movement. It seems ironic that feminism has been characterized as anti-male, when in fact, it seeks to liberate men from the macho stereotypic roles men often have to endure such as the need to suppress feelings, act aggressively, and be deprived of contact with children. I think we should emphasize our femininity rather to impose the so-called stereotyped feministic attitude of the second wave.

What Prostitution Is and Is Not

The honourable vice chancellor has uttered the word ‘prostitute’ for the Hindi women writers. Once, a poetess of Oriya litearture also asked me why I am promoting the idea of sexual rights for women. She asked me whether I wanted to promote prostitution in society or not. These are, I think, very superficial ideas that the VC or the poetess possess.

For instance, has a prostitute ever enjoyed sex any day from her profession? Is there any meaning of sexual rights for her or is she possessed so?

Prostitution is a product of ‘patriarchy’ and patriarchal culture rests on the principle that the unique duty of women is to satisfy men sexually in marriage or by prostitution. A woman as a wife is regarded with honour while a woman as a prostitute is kept away from society while her customers are not. Never does a prostitute do this by ‘choice’ or even by ‘taste.’ The beneficiaries of prostitution are not the prostitutes but the pimps, dealers, customers, and all those who view sexuality as a mechanical act, deprived of reciprocity and any responsibility making those who receive the services of prostitutes agents of patriarchy.

As the original dictum of demanding sexual rights for women aims with ending sexual slavery, how can Hindi women writers be called prostitutes?

In 1998, the United Nations Organization (UNO) has declared the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is known as ‘The Rome Statute’. In its Article 7(2)(c), sexual slavery is defined by the situations where persons are forced into domestic servitude, marriage, or any other forced labour involving sexual activity, as well as the trafficking of persons, in particular women and children. So, human trafficking for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation is a major cause of contemporary sexual slavery.

To demand sexual rights and to support sexual slavery are opposite to each other. The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), in 1994 defined the sexual right for women as the right of women to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.

In Conclusion

Seemingly unaware of this definition, our intellectuals and those in responsible positions are acting like fundamentalist social pundits.

But I am always optimistic. In our considered opinions, it is necessary that esteemed readers are made aware of all the implications of even any rudimentary assimilation on the part of our impressionable young people of the novel ideas from the West, including some with innocuous labels such as ‘freedom’ and ‘equality.’ This is because we must know in which direction we are applying our minds, to what purpose, and towards what end. If whatever we think and do is believed to be correct without verification, does it necessarily enable mankind to continue progressing? What do you think?

Dr. Sahoo’s blog is Sense & Sensuality

Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Charles Donald Albury died within months of each other. The former lived to the ripe old age of 93, and passed away in January this year; the latter died in May last year, at the age of 88. I was reminded of Yamaguchi this month, as the bells tolled, as they do every August 6th and 9th, in remembrance of the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and when, poring through my files, the obituary of Albury came to my notice, I knew at once that their stories had to be told together. There is no other way to tell their stories, even if their lives, and obituaries, have never been linked together.

Yamaguchi and Albury never knew each other; neither was known very much to the outside world, even if their names are, or will be, indelibly sketched in history books in unlikely ways. They ought to have known each other, all the more so since Charles Albury was dispatched to kill not Tsutomu Yamaguchi but the likes of him. We cannot characterize Yamaguchi’s killing as a targeted assassination; some will even balk at calling it a killing, considering that Yamaguchi survived the attempt to eliminate him by close to sixty-five years and, more poignantly, outlived Albury. Indeed, Albury would never have known of Yamaguchi’s existence when he was sent on his mission, and I doubt very much that he knew of him at all before he died. If Albury did know of Yamaguchi, he seems never to have betrayed that knowledge or acted upon it in any way.

No bookie could have placed bets on Yamaguchi’s chances of survival and walked away with a booty. After hearing Yamaguchi’s story, one might be a thorough non-believer and still believe in miracles. And, then, as if Yamaguchi’s life doesn’t already stand forth as eloquent testimony to the cliched observation that ‘fact is stranger than fiction’, one is even more surprised to find the lives of Yamaguchi and Albury linked in the strangest ways. Even the gifts of a supreme artist are likely to be inadequate to describe their association.

Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old engineer at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when, in the summer of 1945, his boss sent him to Hiroshima on a business trip. His work wound up in early August and he was preparing to leave the city on August 7th, but before he could do so the bomber Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima and flattened the city, killing 80,000 people. Yamaguchi survived the bombing: he was a little less than two miles away from ‘ground zero’ when the bomb exploded, and he escaped with ruptured eardrums, burns on his upper torso, and utter incomprehension at what had transpired. High up in the sky, Charles Albury, a first lieutenant in the United States Air Force, was in the support plane behind Enola Gay: as Colonel Paul Tibbets released the bomb, Albury dropped the instruments designed to measure the magnitude of the blast and the levels of radioactivity.

From an altitude of over 30,000 feet, Albury would not have noticed the Japanese engineer. Yamaguchi could not have appeared as anything more than an ant from that immense height; at any rate, it is reasonable to suppose that the training of those charged with an extraordinary indeed unprecedented mission would have stressed on the necessity of shelving aside the slightest sentiment about feeling something for the hated enemy. Albury did, however, have the presence of mind to notice that he was a witness to a spectacular sight: as he told Time magazine a few years ago, he dropped his instruments and “then this bright light hit us and the top of that mushroom cloud was the most terrifying but also the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Every color in the rainbow seemed to be coming out of it.” Robert Oppenheimer made a similar observation when the bomb was first tested in New Mexico: a more scholarly man than Albury, with some inclination for such esoteric things as the Sanskrit classics, he noted that he was reminded of verses from the Bhagavad Gita when he saw the stupendous explosion – the splendor of which, akin to the “radiance of a thousand suns” bursting into the sky “at once”, turned his mind towards Vishnu. “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”, says Krishna (the incarnation of Vishnu) to Arjuna. There is no reason to suppose that Yamaguchi, or any of the other victims of the atomic bombings, experienced anything resembling the beauty of a thousand suns or the most dazzling rainbows.

Unlike other survivors of the first atomic bombing, Yamaguchi had no reason to stay on in Hiroshima; he didn’t have to hunt for survivors among family or friends. So Yamaguchi headed home – to Nagasaki. On the morning of the 9th, still nursing his wounds, Yamaguchi nevertheless reported to work. When his boss sought an explanation for his dressings and unseemly appearance, Yamaguchi began to describe the explosion and insisted that a single bomb had wiped out Hiroshima and much of its population. You must be mad and gravely disoriented, said his boss: a single bomb cannot cause such havoc and destruction. At that precise moment, Charles Albury, co-pilot of the mission over Nagasaki, dropped the second atomic bomb, nicknamed ‘Fat Man’, over the city that had in the 19th century been Japan’s gateway to the West. Eighty thousand people would perish from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, half of them instantly. Yamaguchi would become, one might say, thrice born; he survived the blast. “I could have died on either of those days”, he told a Japanese newspaper only months before he died in January 2010. “Everything that follows is a bonus.” A new word, hibakusha, the explosion-affected people, was coined in Japanese to describe the survivors of either atomic bombing; and yet another phrase describes the “twice-bombed” survivors, known in Japanese as nijyuu hibakusha. Yamaguchi was the only officially acknowledged nijyuu hibakusha, otherwise believed to number around 165. I don’t believe that there is a vocabulary in any language that can describe what Yamaguchi might have gone through.

Yamaguchi’s wife died from kidney and liver cancer in 2008. His daughter describes her mother as having been “soaked in black rain” from the bomb. Her brother, born in February 1945, was exposed to radiation, and would fall a victim to cancer at the age of 59. Yamaguchi himself struggled with various illnesses but held on to life with tenacity and philosophical composure, displaying an equanimity that might explain the energy he displayed, at the age of over 90, in finishing 88 drawings of the images of the Buddha, representing the same number of temples – or stations – encountered on a religious pilgrimage around Shikoku. Later in life, after his son passed away, Yamaguchi became an ardent critic of the nuclear race, and he denounced the obscenity of possession of nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, his mission accomplished, Charles Albury returned to the US, became a pilot with Eastern Airlines, and settled down in Florida. He would say, when questioned, that he felt no remorse: the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had, he argued, saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Japanese and American, lives that would have been needlessly sacrificed had the US commenced a land invasion. We need not be detained by the fact that this argument is now largely discredited, certainly keenly contested; nor need we ask why a second bomb had to dropped at all, when the Japanese high command had been thrown into utter confusion after the destruction of Hiroshima. In 1982, while being interviewed for the Miami Herald, Albury stated that he opposed war but would drop the bomb again if the US were under attack. We know what such ‘opposition’ to war means. “My husband was a hero”, Albury’s wife of 65 years told the Miami Herald after his death, adding: “He saved one million people . . . He sure did do a lot of praying.” Since Charles Albury felt no reason to be contrite, one wonders why he prayed; and, if he prayed, whether he prayed that he might become a better Christian, or that the souls of the Japanese might be saved. Still, since prayer is a reclusive matter, a form of communication between the worshipper and the Divine, one should allow Charles Albury the privacy of his religious beliefs and practices.

The Americans vanquished the Japanese. So goes the story. However, pondering over the twisted tale of Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Charles Albury, I believe one can never be certain who is the vanquisher and who the vanquished. All too often the vanquished have given birth to the vanquisher. There are many possible readings, but when one places the stories of Yamaguchi and Albury in juxtaposition, it is quite transparent who represents the nobler conception of human dignity. The ontology of the vanquished, as the life of Yamaguchi shows, always has room for the vanquisher; the same cannot be said for the vanquisher. In this respect, at least, we might say that the vanquisher is always a lesser person than the vanquished. I would like to believe that Yamaguchi crossed over to the other side with an ample awareness of this fundamental truth.

Vinay Lal’s blog is Lal Salaam

I wrote about how life has to evolve within constraints–constraints of physics, development, and history. One of the examples I used was the laryngeal nerve in giraffes. It travels down the giraffe’s neck, takes a U turn, and then heads back up again. It seems ridiculous, but makes sense if you think about how it was laid down in fish without necks…

Link

Discover for more

Miners in Potosí, Bolivia set off sticks of dynamite as cold winter winds zipped through the city, passing street barricades, protests, hunger strikers and an occupied electrical plant. These actions took place place from late July to mid-August against the perceived neglect of the Evo Morales administration toward the impoverished Potosí region.

This showdown in Bolivia is similar to conflicts across Latin America between the promises of left-leaning governments, the needs of the people and the finite resources of Pachamama (Mother Earth).

Upside Down World for more

KHAN BANI SAAD, Iraq — A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children’s hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets.

Washington Post for more

(Thanks to reader)

How could a bunch of “lone wolf” researchers be considered dangerous to the United States? The official explanation given is that we confuse those who hear or read what we have to say, undermining the national unity and trust in government which is necessary to wage war. That is as good an excuse as any to explain why the American people have not rallied around this war of terror. The national unity that politicians whine about was achieved only once in the beginning of this war, before the politicians and the corporations revealed the war for what it has always been–a war to control oil and gas.

There Are No Sun Glasses for more

(Thanks to Ingrid B. Mork)

In elite circles, Mr. Dasti is reviled as a thug, a small-time hustler with a fake college degree who represents the worst of Pakistan today. But here, he is hailed as a hero, living proof that in Pakistan, a poor man can get a seat at the rich men’s table.

The New York Times for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Talk of the global economic recovery fizzling doesn’t faze Cho Byung-cheol, president of a small South Korean technology company that has already set up a branch in China and plans one soon in the United States.

The company, which designs and makes semiconductor-based high-speed data storage and processing equipment, is planning to boost its South Korean workforce of nearly 60 by half, says Cho, who founded Seoul-based Taejin Infotech Co. in 1996. Sales, which totaled only 8.4 billion won ($7 million) last year, could swell fourfold this year and reach 100 billion won next year, he predicts.

Yahoo for more

(Thanks to reader)

Link

Things which don’t go away. Things the American government and media don’t let go of.
And neither do I.

Iraq

“They’re leaving as heroes. I want them to walk home with pride in their hearts,” declared Col. John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in Iraq. ¹

It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes of an American, enough to make him choke up.

Enough to make him forget.

But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured … the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up … an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight the American invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia … a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

No matter … drum roll, please … Stand tall American GI hero! And don’t even think of ever apologizing. Iraq is forced by the United States to continue paying reparations for its own invasion of Kuwait in 1990. How much will the American heroes pay the people of Iraq?

“Unhappy the land that has no heroes …
No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes.”
– Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo

“What we need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war; something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved to be incompatible.”
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Perhaps the groundwork for that heroism already exists … February 15, 2003, a month before the US invasion of Iraq, probably the largest protest in human history, between six and ten million protesters took to the streets of some 800 cities in nearly sixty countries across the globe.

Iraq. Love it or leave it.

PanAm 103

The British government recently warned Libya against celebrating the one-year anniversary of Scotland’s release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan who’s the only person ever convicted of the 1988 blowing up of PanAm flight 103 over Scotland, which took the lives of 270 largely Americans and British. Britain’s Foreign Office has declared: “On this anniversary we understand the continuing anguish that al-Megrahi’s release has caused his victims both in the U.K. and the U.S. He was convicted for the worst act of terrorism in British history. Any celebration of al-Megrahi’s release would be tasteless, offensive and deeply insensitive to the victims’ families.”

John Brennan, President Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser, stated that the United States has “expressed our strong conviction” to Scottish officials that Megrahi should not remain free. Brennan criticized what he termed the “unfortunate and inappropriate and wrong decision” to allow Megrahi’s return to Libya on compassionate grounds on Aug. 20, 2009 because he had cancer and was not expected to live more than about three months. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement saying that the United States “continues to categorically disagree” with Scotland’s decision to release Megrahi a year ago. “As we have expressed repeatedly to Scottish authorities, we maintain that Megrahi should serve out the entirety of his sentence in prison in Scotland.” ² The US Senate has called for an investigation and family members of the crash victims have demanded that Megrahi’s medical records be released. The Libyan’s failure to die as promised has upset many people.

But how many of our wonderful leaders are upset that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi spent eight years in prison despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that he had anything to do with the bombing of flight 103? The Scottish court that convicted him knew he was innocent. To understand that just read their 2001 “Opinion of the Court”, or read my analysis of it at killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm.

As to the British government being so upset about Libya celebrating Megrahi’s release — keeping in mind that it strongly appears that UK oil deals with Libya played more of a role in his release than his medical condition did — we should remember that in July 1988 an American Navy ship in the Persian Gulf, the Vincennes, shot down an Iranian passenger plane, taking the lives of 290 people; i.e., more than died from flight 103. And while the Iranian people mourned their lost loved ones, the United States celebrated by handing out medals and ribbons to the captain and crew of the Vincennes. ³ The shootdown had another consequence: It inspired Iran to take revenge, which it did in December of that year, financing the operation to blow up PanAm 103 (carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –- General Command).

Why do they hate us?

Passions are flying all over the place concerning the proposed building of an Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks from 9/11 Ground Zero in New York. Even people who are not particularly anti-Muslim think it would be in bad taste, offensive. But implicit in all the hostility is the idea that what happened on that fateful day in 2001 was a religious act, fanatic Muslims acting as Muslims attacking infidels. However — even if one accepts the official government version of 19 Muslims hijacking four airliners — the question remains: Why did they choose the targets they chose? If they wanted to kill lots of American infidels why not fly the planes into the stands of packed football or baseball stadiums in the midwest or the south? Certainly a lot less protected than the Pentagon or the financial center of downtown Manhattan. Why did they choose symbols of US military might and imperialism? Because it was not a religious act, it was a political act. It was revenge for decades of American political and military abuse in the Middle East. ⁴ It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to continuous hateful policies of Washington, there were countless acts of terrorism against American diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations; nothing to do with religion.

Somehow, American leaders have to learn that their country is not exempt from history, that their actions have consequences.

Afghanistan

In their need to defend the US occupation of Afghanistan, many Americans have cited the severe oppression of women in that desperate land and would have you believe that the United States is the last great hope of those poor ladies. However, in the 1980s the United States played an indispensable role in the overthrow of a secular and relatively progressive Afghan government, one which endeavored to grant women much more freedom than they’ll ever have under the current government, more perhaps than ever again. Here are some excerpts from a 1986 US Army manual on Afghanistan discussing the policies of this government concerning women: “provisions of complete freedom of choice of marriage partner, and fixation of the minimum age at marriage at 16 for women and 18 for men”; “abolished forced marriages”; “bring [women] out of seclusion, and initiate social programs”; “extensive literacy programs, especially for women”; “putting girls and boys in the same classroom”; “concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics”. ⁵

The overthrow of this government paved the way for the coming to power of an Islamic fundamentalist regime, followed by the awful Taliban. And why did the United States in its infinite wisdom choose to do such a thing? Mainly because the Afghan government was allied with the Soviet Union and Washington wanted to draw the Russians into a hopeless military quagmire — “We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War”, said Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser. ⁶

The women of Afghanistan will never know how the campaign to raise them to the status of full human beings would have turned out, but this, some might argue, is but a small price to pay for a marvelous Cold War victory.

Cuba

Why does the mainstream media routinely refer to Cuba as a dictatorship? Why is it not uncommon even for people on the left to do the same? I think that many of the latter do so in the belief that to say otherwise runs the risk of not being taken seriously, largely a vestige of the Cold War when Communists all over the world were ridiculed for following Moscow’s party line. But what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship? No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is, if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money — secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba — would own or control most of the media worth owning or controlling?

Is it “free elections” that Cuba lacks? They regularly have elections at municipal, regional and national levels. Money plays virtually no role in these elections; neither does party politics, including the Communist Party, since candidates run as individuals.⁷ Again, what is the standard by which Cuban elections are to be judged? Most Americans, if they gave it any thought, might find it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic election, without great concentrations of corporate money, would look like, or how it would operate. Would Ralph Nader finally be able to get on all 50 state ballots, take part in national television debates, and be able to match the two monopoly parties in media advertising? If that were the case, I think he’d probably win; and that’s why it’s not the case. Or perhaps what Cuba lacks is our marvelous “electoral college” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. If we really think this system is a good example of democracy why don’t we use it for local and state elections as well?

Is Cuba a dictatorship because it arrests dissidents? Thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. Many have been beaten by police and mistreated while incarcerated. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. (This is documented by Cuba in a 1999 suit against the United States detailing $181.1 billion in compensation for victims: the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding or disabling of 2,099 others. The Cuban suit has been in the hands of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the United Nations since 2001, a committee made up of all 15 members of the Security Council, which of course includes the United States, and which may account for the inaction on the matter.)

Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government agents. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known members of that organization? In recent years the United States has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents. While others may call Cuba’s security policies dictatorship, I call it self-defense.⁸

The terrorist list

As casually and as routinely as calling Cuba a dictatorship, the mainstream media drops the line into news stories that “Hezbollah [or Hamas, or FARC, etc.] is considered a terrorist group by the United States”, stated as matter-of-factly as saying that Hezbollah is located in Lebanon. Inclusion on the list limits an organization in various ways, such as its ability to raise funds and travel internationally. And inclusion is scarcely more than a political decision made by the US government. Who is put on or left off the State Department’s terrorist list bears a strong relation to how supportive of US or Israeli policies the group is. The list, for example, never includes any of the anti-Castro Cuban groups or individuals in Florida although those people have carried out literally hundreds of terrorist acts over the past few decades, in Latin America, in the US, and in Europe. As you read this, the two men responsible for blowing up a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, are walking around free in the Florida sunshine. Imagine that Osama bin Laden was walking freely around the Streets of an Afghan or Pakistan city taking part in political demonstrations as Posada does in Florida. Venezuela asked the United States to extradite Posada five years ago and is still waiting.

Bosch and Posada are but two of hundreds of Latin-American terrorists who’ve been given haven in the United States over the years. ⁹ Various administrations, both Democrat and Republican, have also provided close support of terrorists in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, including those with known connections to al Qaeda. Yet, in the grand offices of the State Department sit learned men who list Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”, along with Syria, Sudan and Iran. ¹⁰ That’s the complete list.

Meanwhile, the five Cubans sent to Miami to monitor the anti-Castro terrorists are in their 12th year in US prisons. The Cuban government made the very foolish error of turning over to the FBI the evidence of terrorist activities gathered by the five Cubans. Instead of arresting the terrorists, the FBI arrested the five Cubans (sic).

Steroids

“Hall of Shamer: Clemens Indicted” — page one headline in large type about fabled baseball pitcher Roger Clemens charged with lying to Congress about his use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. ¹¹ Of all the things that athletes put into their bodies to improve their health, fitness and performance, why are steroids singled out? Doesn’t taking vitamin and mineral supplements give an athlete an advantage over athletes who don’t take them? Should these supplements be banned from sport competition? Vitamin and mineral supplements are not necessarily any more “natural” than steroids, which in fact are very important in our body chemistry; among the steroids are the male and female sex hormones. Moreover, why not punish those who follow a “healthy diet” because of the advantage this may give them?

Notes

1. Washington Post, August 19, 2010 ^?
2. Associated Press, August 21, 2010 ^?
3. Newsweek, July 13, 1992 ^?
4. See chapter one of Blum’s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower^?
5. US Department of the Army, Afghanistan, A Country Study (1986), pp.121, 128, 130, 223, 232 ^?
6. See Brzezinski’s Wikipedia entry ^?
7. See Anti-Empire Report of September 25, 2006, 3rd item, for more information about the Cuban election process ^?
8. For a detailed discussion of Cuba’s alleged political prisoners see article ‘Cuba and the Number of “Political Prisoners”‘, Huffington Post, August 24th 2010 ^?
9. Rogue State, Chapter 9 ^?
10. See State Department: www.state.gov/s/ct/c14151.htm ^?
11. The Examiner (Washington, DC), August 20, 2010 ^?

–

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.

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Thirty years ago, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails in the United States. Today, the number of prisoners in the United States exceeds 2,000,000. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32 per cent, or 1 in three. Black boys are five times as likely as white boys to go to jail. Former prisoners are permanently relocated on society’s margins, these days some 5 million of them, denied the right to vote in most states. Professor Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow argues convincingly that we have a purposeful system of mass incarceration, with blacks as the prime victims.

Counterpunch for more

Are Muslim immigrants a drag on German prosperity? A new book by provocateur Thilo Sarrazin, a board member of the German central bank, argues that they are. His over-the-top comments have triggered yet another debate on immigration in the country.
…
In the interview, which appeared in the cultural magazine Lettre International, he also said that “a large number of Arabs and Turks in (Berlin) … have no productive function other than in the fruit and vegetable trade.” In the same interview, he claimed that the Turks were “conquering Germany … through a higher birthrate.”

Spiegel Online for more

The jackboot of the rich world is quite effective. At the end of 2008, these were the percentages of refugees in the total population: in Canada – 0.23 per cent, the US – 0.06 per cent, Britain – 0.05 per cent, and Australia – 0.05 per cent. Hardly the resource-devouring, culture-swamping flood that the rightwing press shouts about. In total, if all nations where the per capita income is over $10,000 are put together, they host a mere 9 per cent of the world’s refugees. Countries like Brazil and Ecuador make a much better fist of dealing with refugees – settling their claims promptly and not denying them the right to work to support themselves.

New Internationalist for more

From 1960-1980, income per person — the most basic measure that economists have of economic progress — in Brazil grew by about 123 percent. From 1980 to 2000, it grew by less than 4 percent, and since 2000 it has grown by about 24 percent. It would difficult to exaggerate the importance of this economic “regime change.” Of course, economic growth is not everything, but in a developing country it is a prerequisite for most of the social progress that most people would like to see.

Monthly Review Zine for more

Check Out My Leggings from Indelible Dance on Vimeo.

via 3 Quarks Daily

A senior astronomer with the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, Dr Seth Shostak, has reported in an article published online that perhaps we should be seeking alien “life forms” that are thinking machines instead of concentrating the search on biological life forms.

Physorg for more

When India generously offered $5 million to Pakistan, cyberspace and media pundits exploded with negative comments. From Pakistan came comments like: “Too little too late” and “Pakistan should not accept because of the bloodbath in Kashmir”. From India came: “The PM should withdraw the offer if Pakistan doesn’t immediately accept it”, and “India should not offer aid to Pakistan because they sponsor terrorism”.

It is to the credit of both governments that they did not succumb to this pressure.

Meanwhile, Indians at home and abroad, as well as others, are increasingly stepping up on a private level to help out with flood relief efforts in Pakistan.

Aman ki Asha for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

The foreign minister, Dipu Moni, has said the government is ready to offer nationality to thousands of Urdu-speaking people mostly languishing in refugee camps as ‘stranded Pakistanis’ since Bangladesh’s emergence in 1971.

New Age for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

But in Peshawar, considered the gateway to Afghanistan, traders in the busy bylanes of its bustling markets continued to put up signboards stating ‘Indian dress material available’. Shopkeepers here say without the signboards, not many buyers walk in. Because of the ban, Indian textiles reached Pakistan’s markets through the tedious route of first being exported to Afghanistan and then smuggled into Pakistan on horseback.

South Asian Media Net for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

“The film captures many `firsts-on-film’, including Dalits being forced to dismount from their cycles and remove their shoes when in the upper caste part of the village. It exposes the continuation of caste practices and untouchability in Sikhism, Christianity and Islam, among the Communists in Kerala, and within some of India’s most revered academic and professional institutions,” said Stalin.

The Hindu for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

In the early 1980s, diamonds were discovered in the reserve. Soon after, government ministers went into the reserve to tell the Bushmen living there that they would have to leave because of the diamond finds.

In three big clearances, in 1997, 2002 and 2005, virtually all the Bushmen were forced out. Their homes were dismantled, their school and health post were closed, their water supply was destroyed and the people were threatened and trucked away.

They now live in resettlement camps outside the reserve. Rarely able to hunt, and arrested and beaten when they do, they are dependent on government handouts. They are now gripped by alcoholism, boredom, depression, and illnesses such as TB and HIV/AIDS.

Survival for more

Washington, D.C., August 11, 2010 – Documents posted by the National Security Archive on the 40th anniversary of the death of U.S. advisor Dan Mitrione in Uruguay show the Nixon administration recommended a “threat to kill [detained insurgent] Sendic and other key [leftist insurgent] MLN prisoners if Mitrione is killed.” The secret cable from U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers, made public here for the first time, instructed U.S. Ambassador Charles Adair: “If this has not been considered, you should raise it with the Government of Uruguay at once.”

The National Security Archive for more

A reminder of the backdrop against which NAFTA was implemented is crucial for understanding the broader implications for both Mexico and the United States. The globalization campaign, of which NAFTA is one stage, had been met with popular protest and mass resistance all over the world. Popular movements against the corporatist crusade to globalize the doctrines of “laissez-faire” began in the global South, eventually penetrating the affluent core of the global economy and climaxing (as of yet) in mass protests against the pillars of the global economic order in Seattle. Similarly, NAFTA was implemented in spite of general public opposition. Typically, dissent and thoughtful criticism of the expected consequences of NAFTA were silenced in the United States, with rare but revealing exceptions. As President Salinas toured the U.S. explaining why NAFTA would set Mexico on a path toward first-world status, an analysis by the Office of Technology Assessment, a research bureau of Congress, concluded that NAFTA would likely harm the majority of the North American population. Negotiations moved forward with this well in mind. In the New York Times, hardly hostile to state and corporate power, Tim Golden reported, “Economists predict that several million Mexicans will probably lose their jobs in the first five years after the accord takes effect.”

ALAI for more

(Here is Part I)

One of the most notable elements in the public discourse on the proposed Islamic Center in lower Manhattan, which is conceived as a multistory building of which the mosque will constitute one part, is the extraordinary and troublesome ease with which it came to be characterized as the “Ground Zero Mosque”. The association of ‘mosque’ with ‘ground zero’ informs all arguments emanating from those who have voiced their opposition to this project, just as it becomes the pretext for rendering this ‘Ground Zero’ as “hallowed” ground. Some supporters of the project, and even those who might profess indifference to the entire controversy, have observed quite rightly that the Islamic center and mosque is in fact two city blocks away from ‘Ground Zero’. But such an argument presupposes that opponents of the proposed Islamic Center are interested in, and willing to be persuaded by, facts. If one were interested in facts, one could point to many more that are pertinent to this discussion: at least two churches – St. Paul’s Chapel, which dates to 1766, and the Church of St. Peter, in what is described as “New York’s oldest parish” — exist in closer proximity to ‘Ground Zero’ than the proposed mosque. The supposition that adherents of Islam wish to claim ‘Ground Zero’ solely for their own faith is nothing short of preposterous. But none of this is very germane, since such controversies are never at all about ‘facts’.

If the numerical table begins with zero, let us likewise also commence with ‘ground zero’ and the implications of rendering this as ‘hallowed ground’. The term ‘ground zero’ is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “that part of the ground situated immediately under an exploding bomb, esp. an atomic one.” The OED has traced the first occurrence of the phrase to an article appearing in the New York Times on 7 July 1946 (p. E10), wherein it was stated, apropos of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, that “the intense heat of the blast started fires as far as 3,500 feet from ground zero”; as a further illustration of how the phrase has been deployed, it points to the September 1955 of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: “There was no noticeable contamination even at ground zero at Hiroshima.” We can see that the OED’s stress on “esp[ecially] an atomic” bomb, to describe the impact on the ground situated directly underneath an exploding bomb, is not misplaced. Now, within hours of the attack upon the Twin Towers, the phrase ‘ground zero’ began to be used by American reporters: the intent, it is reasonable to infer, was to suggest that that the destruction of the World Trade Center (and a portion of the Pentagon) was America’s Hiroshima (and Nagasaki).

It is precisely this sleight of hand, this tacit attempt to draw a parallelism between the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the one hand, and the terrorist attacks upon some of the most iconic structures of the American landscape, that must be decisively repudiated – and, at the same time, affirmed for very different reasons than those which are summoned by those who speak of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’. The parallelism is gravely suspect, and not merely for the reason, if at all that is a reason, considering that the loss of one innocent life is too excessive a loss, that the 3,000 odd victims of the September 11 bombings are a much smaller number than the more than 200,000 dead from the atomic bombings: more importantly, unlike the attacks of the September 11 suicide bombers, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were authorized by the President of the United States. The wanton destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of state; the same cannot be said of the September 11 attacks. If, further, we are to identify the suicide bombers of September 11 as Muslims, as everyone has so effortlessly done so, even if it might be with the implicit encouragement of the terrorists themselves, should we not also identify Truman and the members of his war cabinet as Christians? And, so, let us concede that the attacks of September 11 also call to mind the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: if the atomic bombs forever altered warfare, ushering in an altogether different register of the mind at war and bringing forth a new conception of terror, we might well say that the September 11 attacks have similarly necessitated a radical rethinking of the conditions under which war might be waged. Let those who seek to sanctify ‘Ground Zero’ also understand that the terrorism of the atomic bombings is the underpinning of all modern forms of terror.

Even as the controversy over the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ continues, many Americans have begun to describe ‘Ground Zero’, where the Twin Towers stood and then collapsed, as “hallowed ground”. Obama himself sanctified this usage when, in the White House iftar dinner last week, he declared: “I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.” Some Americans, at least, will at once recognize the hallowed provenance of “hallowed”, as it calls to mind the address, “short, short, short” (in the author’s words), delivered by Lincoln at the battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on 19 November 1863. The north and the south were in the grip of “a great civil war”, proclaimed Lincoln, “testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” Let us leave aside, so that we can get to the notion of “hallowed ground”, the obvious temptation to probe whether some American commentators are not convinced that the United States today is similarly faced with a test of endurance: if the likes of the grunting troglodytes on the right are to be believed, America’s future is jeopardized both by enemies from within (so-called liberals and leftists, whatever these anodyne terms mean in the US) and from without (Muslims). Here is what Lincoln was moved to say: “We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Thus, to render Ground Zero as “hallowed ground” is at once to lay claim to the legacy of Lincoln, the most hallowed figure in American history, and to render the space of Ground Zero as ‘sacred’. Lincoln significantly abjures the idea that the ground can be rendered hallow: “But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground.” It is human sacrifice that consecrates a ground as sacred, and what is sacred is a form of being rather than a form of becoming. For the present purposes, though, it suffices to note that the opponents of the proposed Islamic Center are firmly attached to the idea that ‘Ground Zero’ is sacred space and that the construction of the mosque would desacralize this space. If it is sacred, then it is sacred for a religion, or – as is the case with some religious sites or cities, such as Jerusalem — sacred for several (but not all) religions. Yet, what makes ‘Ground Zero’ sui generis as a sacred site, if at all it is sacred in the same way that Gettysburg is hallowed ground, is that the adherents of perhaps all the faiths — and certainly Muslims — were present in the Twin Towers, and we know as well that more Muslims have paid for those bombings than the practitioners of any other faith. Those who would deny Muslims an Islamic Center on ‘Ground Zero’, on the grounds that it is sacred space, have thus arrived at a conception of the sacred that has no room for the Muslim at all. That opens further the doors of the Islamophobia that has already crept upon the United States.

Vinay lal’s blog is Lal Salaam

It is about remembering – is there a political dimension to remembering?

In Thailand, yes. Because of the manufacturing of memory. Or rather the things you are not allowed to remember. “Primitive Project” was set in Nabua in Northeast Thailand. It is a village that was occupied by communist insurgents and also by the government. So it was at the centre of a conflict.

… without wanting to be?

Exactly. The people were forced become communists. If they got stopped by the police and asked whether they had seen any communists and they said no, they would be beaten up. And if they said yes, I am a communist, they would be killed immediately. So they had no choice but to go into the jungle and become communists. This started in the ’60s and went on until the early ’80s. And no one wants to remember it today.

Sight and Sign for more

CyberKnife and other noninvasive radiosurgery systems are producing ever more accurate energy beams, raising the possibility of extending the use of potentially lethal radiation to fight Parkinson’s, epilepsy and other afflictions

Targeted beams of high-intensity radiation can shrink early-stage tumors with limited collateral damage to surrounding healthy tissue. The addition of robotics and image guidance systems in recent years has made these stereotactic, or directed beam, radiosurgery systems an even more versatile weapon against cancer, attacking not only brain tumors (for which they were originally designed) but also other diseases virtually anywhere in the body.

Scientific American for more

“A bulldozer demolishes a Roma camp in Villeneuve d’Ascq, near Lille, as part of the French government’s immigration strategy.” PHOTO/Luc Moleux/Reuters/Guardian

Some 150 years after the French Revolution, Chairman Mao was asked what he thought of that watershed moment in modern history. Mao is reported to have said, ‘It’s too early to tell’! Mao has been credited with many things, but his sardonic wit has been underestimated. What might he have had in mind? That a revolution devours its own children is something about which Mao would have known a thing or two. Could it be that the promise of the French Revolution had never been fulfilled? Whatever liberties the revolution brought to France, it diminished neither the appetite for colonies among the French nor their bloodthirstiness in suppressing the aspirations for freedom among others. Toussaint Louverture and the Haitians were among the first to be brought to the brutal awareness that ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ were intended to enrich the lives of not all humans but only those who pompously declared themselves custodians of civilization.

The French are at it again: when they are not purifying their language, or congratulating themselves for their supposed refinements – from wines and perfumes to lingerie and fashions — they are busy engaging in ethnic cleansing. Their attention has now turned to the Roma. Well might it be said that they scarcely have a monopoly on this exercise, what with Americans flying repeated sorties over the last few decades over Cambodia, Vietnam, Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to mention only some of the darker nations which have experienced the terror of American bombing, but of course no country has such fanciful ideas about its own ‘civilization’ as do the French. The French have never been short of overweening pride: the law of February 23 2005, before it was repealed by President Jacques Chirac in early 2006, stipulated that ‘school courses should recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in north Africa.’ Even as the French National Assembly was pushing through this odious piece of legislation, the heavy hand of the state was coming down upon young men of North African origin who are largely viewed as inassimilable to French society.

On Thursday last week, the government of Nicolas Sarkozy expelled 700 Roma – or, in more common parlance, gypsies — from France, and many more expulsions are anticipated in coming weeks. The French police are dismantling what they describe as ‘illegal camps’ and deporting the Roma to Romania and Bulgaria. Some in the French government are describing themselves as surprised by the attention being given to the present round of expulsions, since they claim to have carried out 10,000 such expulsions last year without any publicity. Another predictable argument being furnished in favor of the expulsions is that the Roma are prone to theft and criminal activity, and public safety demands the removal of those who have overstayed their welcome. We might quibble about the word ‘welcome’, since even a modicum of familiarity with the history of the Roma suggests that they have never been welcomed in most parts of Europe. (The Roma, in varying numbers, have been expelled, quite recently, from Italy, Sweden, and Denmark.) Indeed, it is commonly forgotten that Hitler directed a ferocious campaign of extermination against the Roma as much as he did against Jews. But France has struck upon another ingenious method to ward off criticism: in the official version, the departures of the Roma are ‘voluntary’ and the resettlement sum of US $385 that has been given to each Roma is a testimony to the goodwill of the French. This piece of deception serves two purposes: first, it seeks to insulate the French against a legal challenge from human rights activists and, in particular, the European Court of Human Rights. Secondly, since international law specifically prohibits targeting an entire group on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual preferences, and so on, France can present the departing Roma as animated by individual choice.

We need not waste time in asking if the French are racist. They are. Their history of barbaric conduct, whether in Indochina or Algeria, provides unimpeachable evidence of their sentiments. The question now raised by their expulsion of the Roma is a different one: just what is it about the Roma, small in numbers and living at the extreme margins of society, that arouses the anxieties of the French and others in Western Europe? Supposing it were true that the Roma are prone to criminal activity, as is commonly argued even if it is far from established, it is also clear that they largely stand charged of insolent behavior, petty theft, and conduct that fills ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ people with uneasiness. The Roma seem menacing; that, apparently, is their real crime. We notice how, in the dominant discourse about the Roma, they are always spoken of as a collectivity, so that every Roma stands implicated in criminal activity, something like the ‘criminal tribes’ invented by the British in colonial India. Supposing, again, that they were criminals, their petty crimes pale in comparison to the monstrous atrocities committed by the French in their colonies. So what is it about the Roma that disturbs the placid waters of French self-enchantment?

The history of the modern world has been shaped around the nation-state, and many historians, among them Eugen Weber in his famous Peasants into Frenchmen, have chronicled the bloody process of nation making. People have to be cajoled into constituting themselves as subjects of the nation-state, and the national anthem and the national flag exist to remind those with wavering loyalties that the nation-state is a stern taskmaster. Above all, however, the nation-state is marked by boundaries, generally well-defined and occasionally contested, and the map is enlisted to turn these boundaries into stone. Once the nation-state comes into place, it views its boundaries as sacrosanct and worthy of the highest approbation. The most characteristic feature of the Roma, of course, is the fact their entire mode of living is in defiance of the logic of the nation-state. The Roma represent a time when, in their (from the standpoint of modernity) state of unfreedom, the ancestors of those Europeans who today inhabit the various nations-state of Europe could wander around relatively unhindered. Modernity’s own preferred narrative about itself is to think of modern times as uniquely characterized by extreme mobility, but such mobility is, in fact, highly restricted and bears little relationship to the nomadic sensibility of the Roma. There is, thus, in the activities of the Roma a mix of anxiety and envy that Europeans experience: envy because the Roma, forsaking the protocols of the nation-state and modern bourgeois living, embody an admirable spirit of freedom and lack of self-restraint; and anxiety because their transgressions generate acute uncertainty, a fear that the boundaries placed between the self and the other will collapse. If Europe is not to become even duller than it is, living on its museums, heritage sites, and the various affects of ‘the refined life’, it would do well to learn to live with the Roma.

Vinay Lal’s blog is Lal Salaam

THERE IS perhaps no other political-military elite in the world whose aspirations for great-power regional status, whose desire to overextend and outmatch itself with meager resources, so outstrips reality as that of Pakistan. If it did not have such dire consequences for 170 million Pakistanis and nearly 2 billion people living in South Asia, this magical thinking would be amusing.

This is a country that sadly appears on every failing-state list and still wants to increase its arsenal from around 60 atomic weapons to well over 100 by buying two new nuclear reactors from China. This is a country isolated and friendless in its own region, facing unprecedented homegrown terrorism from extremists its army once trained, yet it pursues a “forward policy” in Afghanistan to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul as soon as the Americans leave.

For a state whose economy is on the skids and dependent on the IMF for massive bailouts, whose elite refuse to pay taxes, whose army drains an estimated 20 percent of the country’s annual budget, Pakistan continues to insist that peace with India is impossible for decades to come. For a country that was founded as a modern democracy for Muslims and non-Muslims alike and claims to be the bastion of moderate Islam, it has the worst discriminatory laws against minorities in the Muslim world and is being ripped apart through sectarian and extremist violence by radical groups who want to establish a new Islamic emirate in South Asia.

The National Interest for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Link

“Ms Ariyawathie (left) was deeply traumatised, doctors said.” “Doctors say this X-ray shows nails embedded in the housemaid’s hand.”

Doctors have removed 13 nails and five needles from a Sri Lankan housemaid who said her employer in Saudi Arabia hammered them into her body.

LP Ariyawathie, 49, told staff at Kamburupitiya Hospital her employer inflicted the injuries as a punishment.

BBC for more

(Thanks to Salim Amersi)

Grit TV

Last week, business and technology journal Fast Company reported that a U.S. company named Global Rainmakers Inc. is embarking on a grand techno-fascist project in Leon, Mexico, where it will roll out iris-scanning technology to create what it calls “the most secure city in the world.”

When the million-plus residents of Leon go to the bank, get on a bus or walk into a medical clinic, their eyes will be scanned by machines that can handle up to 50 people per minute in motion, automatically entering the information into a central database monitored by the police.

Calgary Herald for more

via 3 Quarks Daily

The legislation extends to all newly hired workers a 90-day “trial period” during which they can be sacked for no reason and without recourse. The measure was imposed in March last year for workplaces with fewer than 20 workers but will now cover every worksite in the country. According to Labour Department figures, 22 percent of workers recruited under the initial phase had been dismissed within the 90-day period. Extending the provision means it can apply to more than 400,000 workers who start new jobs every year.

World Socialist Web Site for more

Despite the hurdles, the next generation is expected to see even more women thrive in the work force. Several South Asian countries, including India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, have achieved gender parity at the primary school level, according to the World Bank. In Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, gender parity has reached the secondary school level. In India, women make up more than 40 percent of the students at engineering colleges, the steppingstones to stable, middle-class jobs, according to the Indian government. In the mid-1980s, no more than 8 percent of engineering college students in India were women.

South Asian Media Net for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

The New York Times for more

In the year 2008 of Our Lord
When I entered the presidential race
12% people alleged that I’m a Muslim

And in March 2009
The people who believed I’m Muslim
remained almost the same, that is, 11%

But by then had faded from people’s memory
Reverend Jeremiah Wright
Perhaps Allah willed it so

When it was August 2010
The number alleging this fallacy had risen
To an impressive 18%

In 2011, the rumors went bullish
As the numbers shot high
And attained about 50%

Now it is 1433 of the year of the Hijra*
The polls finally declared me a Muslim
A whopping 67% believes in my non-Christian-ness

Forced conversions do happen, I know
But this is the first poll-conversion
Not Muslims, but Christians, have made me a Muslim!

I should have accepted the Godly verdict
Issued back in 2010 by that Religious-seeds analyst from
Godsanto Corporation

My Party disqualified me
From contesting the second term
Because my Muslim-ness was a liability

Republicans refused to accept me in their party
And I couldn’t dare run as an independent
Because many of my contributors shunned me

Unfortunately, the year 1433 (AH) is also the year 2012 (CE)
Neither has the time stopped nor the world ended
But for me it was the Day of Judgment

I was left with only two choices:
Move to a Muslim country or join CI
I joined Cordoba Initiative as an Imam

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

*Muslim calendar is a lunar calendar and originated with the migration or hijrah of Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE.

Former Prime Minister Michel Rocard did not mince words about Sarkozy’s recent proposals to strip foreign-born French nationals of their citizenship if convicted of threatening the life of a police officer, practicing polygamy, or female “circumcision.” “One has not seen such measures since the Vichy regime or since the Nazis,” Rocard declared. Equating Sarkozy with Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime is, of course, an exaggeration, but Rocard’s concerns are shared by many French – and not only intellectuals and pundits.
…
To stigmatize immigrants, Muslims in particular, or to destroy the camps in which Roma live, is a much easier task, even if it reveals the truly opportunistic and amoral nature of both Sarkozy and those who surround him.

Project Syndicate for more

Foreign religions grew rapidly in the 1st-century A.D. Roman Empire, including worship of Jesus Christ, the Egyptian goddess Isis, and an eastern sun god, Mithras

Greco-Roman religious scholar Luther Martin says that Mithraism remained de-centralized throughout the Empire. Its contemporary, Christianity, got its central administration from St. Paul, who derived it from Judaism. Both it and Mithraism “were…pretty much locally controlled affairs,” he says, though Christian communities did “come together as a coherent institution…after Constantine.”

In later years, Christian commentators recognized similarities between Mithraic and Christian rites and were quick to condemn them. In Chapter 70 of Dialogue with Trypho, the 2nd-century Christian author Justin Martyr writes that Mithras’s worship in a cave and his “rock birth”–a frequent depiction of the god, emerging from a stone–is taken from Daniel 2:34 and Isaiah 33. The Mithraists “have no understanding” of these Scriptures, says Justin.

Archaeology for more

Time’s poll dealt with Islam more broadly:

Twenty-eight percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly one-third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President — a slightly higher percentage than the 24% who mistakenly believe the current occupant of the Oval Office is himself a Muslim. In all, just 47% of respondents believe Obama is a Christian; 24% declined to respond to the question or said they were unsure, and 5% believe he is neither Christian nor Muslim.

The New York Times for more

On August 24 in New York City, around 6 p.m., a driver named Ahmed H. Sharif picked up a fare at East 24th Street and Second Avenue. The passenger was 21-year-old Michael Enright, who asked the cabbie a question that has now been heard around the world: “Are you a Muslim?” When the driver said yes, the passenger first greeted him in Arabic and then said, “Consider this a checkpoint.” Enright pulled out a knife and, in the words of an assistant district attorney, slashed the cabbie’s “neck open halfway across his throat.” Sharif managed to lock his attacker in the car, but he soon escaped. Enright was later arrested; both he and his victim were taken to the same hospital.

Later, Sharif released a statement via the New York Taxi Workers Alliance: “I feel very sad. I have been here more than 25 years. I have been driving a taxi more than 15 years. All my four kids were born here. I never feel this hopeless and insecure before,” said Mr. Sharif. “Right now, the public sentiment is very serious (because of the Ground Zero Mosque debate). All drivers should be more careful.”

Vanity Fair for more

Police say they struck a deal equivalent to more than $250,000 (£159,000) for the 20-year-old man.

Albino body parts are prized in parts of Africa, with witchdoctors claiming they have special powers. The Tanzanian government has promised to take action.

BBC for more

Dear Friends, Hope all’s well. Please join The Los Angeles Taxi Workers Alliance – LATWA on Saturday August 28th at 6 PM in a celebration of courage, resistance and resilience. Please share this widely and lets send a loud message to the corrupt and exploitative taxicab companies and their sleazy lobbyists who have engaged in self dealing for too long all under the City’s watch that No More Business As Usual. Please help us make this a huge success. Hope to see everyone there.

YOU ARE INVITED TO A FUNDRAISER TO CELEBRATE MILESTONES
LOS ANGELES TAXI WORKERS ALLIANCE
SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 2010
6 P.M. to 9 P.M.
ST. MARY’S ETHIOPIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
5707 SHENANDOAH AVE.
LOS ANGELES, CA. 90056
RSVP to Sentayehu Silassie: 323.376.9703 or
silassie@att.net
Tickets @ $25 driver rate
$40 non-driver rate
Please make checks payable to:
LATWA
5208 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90019

(Thanks to Asad Zaidi)

Link

(Thanks to Mansoor Sharif)

Duo prepare to launch £41,000 rocket that will eventually fly one of them 100km high

The Soviet Union gave the world cosmonauts, America followed with astronauts and China eventually added its own Sinonauts. If all goes to plan on a floating platform in the Baltic sea during the next three weeks, a 63cm-wide rocket hand-built by two self-employed engineers will herald the unlikely arrival of a new breed of space pioneers – the Danonauts.

The Independent for more

“The Tanzanian government has promised action to protect albinos.” PHOTO/AFP/The Post Online

For those of us born with albinism in East Africa, and for the many fathers and mothers of children with albinism, the last three years have been a never-ending nightmare.

As though the card that nature dealt us was not hard enough to deal with, we now have to live in fear of people who believe that killing us and using our limbs for witchcraft will bring them great wealth.

We have to battle skin cancer because we do not have melanin, yet most of us cannot get adequate education, and even if we do, getting employment is a major challenge. So we end up working in the sun, as farmers or hawkers, and die before our 30th birthday.

We have to deal with a society that is largely silent about our plight, and media that refuse to find a way of referring to us in ways that can bring to the fore our humanity, rather than our genetic condition.

All Africa for more

NEW DELHI — The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to become Bangladesh.

The American feminist Susan Brownmiller, quoting all three sets of statistics in her 1975 book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” compared the rapes of Bangladesh with the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers at Nanjing in 1937-38.

The New York Times for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Nearly all the fundamental questions that might animate anyone interested in what I would call ‘the question of America’ seem implicated in the swirling controversy that has arisen over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in lower Manhattan. As much as any other place in the world, the history of the United States is inextricably interwoven with the narratives of immigrant groups. Muslims are, for the most part, among the more recent of the immigrants who have made their way to the United States, furnishing the latest challenge to those who insist that America remains the ultimate haven of religious freedom. Are the Muslims as welcome in the US as the adherents of any other religion? If so, what arouses the passions of those Americans who, to put it mildly, feel resentful about the proposed installation of an Islamic center and mosque at what is called ‘Ground Zero’? If not, does that tell us something about the limitations of religious freedom in the US and expose the grand lie that the freedom of religious belief and practice is the most venerable of all the freedoms, real or imagined, to which America is said to give unrivalled expression?

There are other prior questions: are immigrants from Indonesia, the Gulf states, North Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and many other parts of the world which are predominantly Islamic to be viewed first as Muslims and then as being immigrants from those countries? If, as is apparently the case, the answer is in the affirmative, is that because (say) Indonesian or Pakistani Muslims themselves insist that their principal identity is as Muslims, or is it because in the United States, as in most of the West, it is fondly imagined that religion is the fundamental and most irreducible part of an identity in what is characterized as the Muslim world? Was it not the ‘Muslim world’ that Obama addressed last year, and can one imagine a Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist leader addressing the ‘Christian world’? Why is it even that the ‘Muslim world’ comes so effortlessly to the tongue of most people, including those we suppose are intelligent and even leaders of free societies, but that the phrase ‘Christian world’ would strike the same people, even when they are observant Christians, as awkward?

The unseemly controversy over the mosque has brought many other considerations to the fore. No one who has been keeping abreast of events in recent months, never mind the last nine years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 brought down the Twin Towers, could have failed to notice the rising tide of Islamophobia. Considering how little intelligence has been displayed by some previous occupants of the White House, such as his grey eminence George W. Bush, one should expect almost nothing of the likes of the Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee, who came up with this inexcusably stupid formulation: “You could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion or it is a nationality, way of life or cult, whatever you want to call it.” One of the highest-ranking retired officers in the American armed forces has openly stated that practitioners of Islam are not entitled to the protections accorded to the adherents of other faiths in the Bill of Rights. And so might one continue in this vein, but all this gives rise to the glaring question: is the US in the grip of Islamophobia? Some will suggest that Muslims have replaced communists: it is not difficult to fathom the argument, certainly, that the gargantuan military-industrial complex is constantly in need of new enemies. But there are other, more interesting, complexities to this Islamophobia. The remarks now so cavalierly bandied about as characterizations of Islam would not be tolerated if they had been made apropos the practitioners of another faith. One is tempted to say that the abuse of Islam is the new and fashionable anti-Semitism of America.

Let us consider also another distinct oddity in the present debate. Among the ‘national’ organizations that have expressed their strong displeasure at the proposed construction of the Islamic Center and mosque is the Anti-Defamation League. So just what is it that rankles Abraham Foxman and the League about this mosque? Unless Jews, or more precisely Zionists, have some proprietary interest in this matter, why should their opinion matter so much or at all – their opinion, that is, as Jews rather than as human beings who may, like any one else, feel invested in this subject — and why should they even presume to suppose that their have more of a vested interest in this mosque than Hindus, Buddhists, or Sikhs, all of whom are represented in not insignificant numbers in contemporary America? At a demonstration last month against another proposed mosque in Nashville, Tennessee, protestors appeared waving American and Israeli flags. All such evocations of jingoism are nauseous, but should we not be mystified at the presence of demonstrators carrying Israeli flags? Should we suppose that this signifies that America is fundamentally a country built on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and are Israeli flags meant to put Muslims on notice that any assertion of Muslim identity, even if this is taking place in a country purportedly built on the edifice of individual liberties and religious freedom, will be taken to be an affront not only to the US but to Israel as well?

That the word ‘Muslim’ itself signifies acute discomfort in the United States is also signaled by what, to people with a modicum of intelligence, must appear as the rather comical and persistent confusion about whether Barack Obama is a Muslim or not. According to one poll conducted last week, almost a third of all Americans now believe that the American President is a Muslim. The word ‘now’ is underscored since the figure increased from 18% only a short while ago: Obama’s apparent defense of the right of Muslims to build a mosque ­at Ground Zero has fostered the impression that he belongs to the Muslim faith. If other words – at Ground Zero, for instance — in my own discourse have to be underscored, it is only a sign of the fact that nothing in this discourse is as it seems. Far from being a Muslim, Obama, according to a White House press release, is a practicing Christian who consults daily with spiritual advisors. We can marvel at a more apt moment about Obama’s intense religiosity and pray that he does not turn into another Tony Blair, the once boyish-looking Prime Minister turned into an evangelist. I suspect that the degree to which Obama has now become a fervent and emboldened Christian has some proportional relationship to the degree to which he is imagined to be a Muslim by a good number of Americans.

There are, then, many elements of the discourse surrounding the proposed and inaptly named ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ that need to be parsed in substantial detail; and I shall do the same in subsequent posts over the next few days. In the meantime, however, the larger meaning of this controversy should not be obscured. The ‘debate’ – a rather dignified word to describe some of the squabbles in front of the ‘hallowed’ ground, not to mention the rantings of the right that have filled the airwaves – implicates many of the central questions in American history since the ascendancy of the European colonists. Just what is signfied by the ‘American way of life’? Why does every dispute become an occasion to affirm, for those on either side of the divide, an American exceptionalism? Is American exceptionalism itself the pretext for permitting Zionism a special place in American politics, a place that exempts it from the critiques that one might direct at other ideologies? Why, and in what respects, is religion so critical to the American imagination, and does the United States truly know how to live with religious and cultural difference? Is the United States at heart a Judaeo-Christian civilization, and, if so, what does it portend for the more recent wave of immigrants? Is American-style multiculturalism the only template for contemplating diversity and pluralism? Can American Islam assist in shaping the future of Islam worldwide? What role if any might Muslims in the United States play in the arguments that seem to inform most contemporary discussions about Islam? As we begin to unravel these questions, much will be revealed about the meaning of ‘America’ – a meaning in which, for better or worse, every nation is heavily invested, considering the nonpareil symbolism that American presents to the human imagination.

Vinay Lal’s blog is Lal Salaam

Stewart showed clips from his show last week, in which he mocked Fox News for playing a dangerous game of association based on speculation, and wherein Fox continued to mention a nameless man with ties to Imam Rauf through the “Kingdom Foundation.” It turns out the man they are referring to but never name is Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the biggest shareholders of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Huffington Post for more and to WATCH VIDEO

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Avaaz.org’s Ricken Patel on BBC World’s HARDtalk from lee-sean on Vimeo.

MUMBAI – Webster, Oxford and other dictionary merchants are yet to define “mango diplomacy”, but when that day dawns the origins of the term would be sub-continental, with Pakistan and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh featuring as its pioneers.

Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani sent Manmohan a gift of five crates of mangoes on August 20, marking perhaps the most significant fruit delivery in South Asia. Relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbors had plunged so low that the Pakistani government took over a week to decide whether or not to accept from India US$5 million of urgently needed aid, despite over 20 million of its people struggling for survival in one of most devastating floods in recent times.

Asia Times for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

Buddha Air 23 August, 2010 – When one of Nepal’s private airlines, Buddha air touches down at Paro airport today, the country’s 29 year old commercial aviation industry will be welcoming its first foreign airline that will operate commercial air services to Bhutan.

Kuensel for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

Just a few weeks of over­eat­ing may af­fect your weight and fat stor­age years lat­er—even if you lost the weight you in­i­tially added, sci­en­tists are re­port­ing.

A study pub­lished in the re­search jour­nal Nu­tri­tion & Me­tab­o­lism found that a four-week ep­i­sode of in­creased en­er­gy in­take and de­creased ex­er­cise can cause high­er weight and fat mass more than two years lat­er.

World Science for more

For those pondering the decline of American hegemony and rise of East Asia, recent events in Japan offer food for thought. In August 2009 the centre-left Democratic Party of Japan won a landslide election victory with a swing of over 11 per cent against the Liberal Democratic Party which had ruled almost continuously since 1955. Hatoyama Yukio, the new Prime Minister, had set out a new course for the country. ‘As a result of the failure of the Iraq war and the financial crisis, the era of us-led globalization is coming to an end’, he argued. ‘We are moving towards an era of multipolarity’:

The recent economic crisis resulted from a way of thinking based on the idea that American-style free-market economics represents a universal and ideal economic order, and that all countries should modify the traditions and regulations governing their economies in line with global (or rather American) standards. But globalization has progressed without any regard for non-economic values, or for environmental issues or problems of resource restriction.

The financial crisis, Hatoyama continued, ‘has also raised doubts about the permanence of the dollar as the key global currency’. In this context, Japan ‘must not forget our identity as a nation located in Asia’:

I believe that the East Asian region, which is showing increasing vitality, must be recognized as Japan’s basic sphere of being . . . We should aspire to move toward regional currency integration as a natural extension of the rapid economic growth . . . We must spare no effort to build the permanent security frameworks essential to underpinning currency integration. [1]

New Left Review for more

The piece begins by telling readers that: “THIS YEAR, for the first time since 1983, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than it receives from payroll taxes — $41 billion. This development is not an emergency, but it is a warning sign (emphasis in original).” It certainly is a warning sign. The falloff in Social Security tax revenue is a warning that the economy is seriously depressed due to the collapse of the housing bubble. Double digit unemployment leads to all sorts of problems, including the strains that it places on pension funds like Social Security.

CEPR for more

You Tube

via TED

“Delusions of Gender” [by Dr. Cordelia Fine] takes on that tricky question, Why exactly are men from Mars and women from Venus?, and eviscerates both the neuroscientists who claim to have found the answers and the popularizers who take their findings and run with them.
…
Sometimes all it takes is their own words, as in this example from Dr. Brizendine’s 2007 book “The Female Brain”: “Maneuvering like an F-15, Sarah’s female brain is a high-performance emotion machine — geared to tracking, moment by moment, the nonverbal signals of the innermost feelings of others.” Is Sarah some kind of psychic? Dr. Fine clarifies: “She is simply a woman who enjoys the extraordinary gift of mind reading that, apparently, is bestowed on all owners of a female brain.”

The New York Times for more

DHAKA: A Bangladesh court has ruled that people cannot be forced to wear skull caps, veils or other religious clothing in workplaces, schools and colleges.

The ruling came after reports that a college in the north had forced students to wear veils.

The high court also ruled that women cannot be prevented from taking part in sports or cultural activities.

South Asian Media Net for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

In NLR 64, July–August 2010

Gavan McCormack: practical lessons in world hegemony, as Japan’s attempt to strike an independent course and shift a US base from Okinawa is cut down by the Obama Administration.

Adolfo Gilly recalls his life as a roving agitator and writer, traversing 20th-century Latin American and European revolutionary movements.

Sabry Hafez surveys the slums of Cairo, and their homology in a striking new genre of narrative fiction.

Mark Elvin compares attitudes to the natural world in classical Chinese and European poetry.

Slavoj Zizek on the Eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis and the possibilities for an internationalist response.

Peter Nolan and Jin Zhang assess the comparative weight of China’s largest firms and Western multinationals.

Fredric Jameson considers the aesthetics of the new globalised Wagnerian Regieoper.

Book Reviews

Jacob Collins on Regis Debray, Le moment fraternite. Can radical bonds of fraternity be forged in an atomized world?

Gregor McLennan on Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers and Reason, Faith, and Revolution. Jesus and Lacan join forces in an ethics of revolutionary goodness.

Michael Hardt on Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres and Le courage de la verite. Final meditations on militant life.

Amnesty International has launched a campaign to revoke the Northern Territory intervention that discriminates against Indigenous communities, as the Australian government tries to justify its continuation to the United Nations (UN).

On August 5, Amnesty said: “Over three years, the Northern Territory Emergency Response has taken away many rights from Aboriginal communities.”

Green Left for more

As we know, Pakistan-flood has its 20 million victims. This disaster is unprecedented. When we see TV images we find that Government relief is in utter chaos and feel 63 years in independence how the Pakistani state has failed in providing the basic needs of its citizens. When you see similar floods in China, Chinese Government’s and its people’s response is in stark contrast.

Pakistan’s 20 million people need your help for surviving. They need food and water right now. You can send it free from anywhere in world, through PIA, the Pakistani Air line. Please click following video link regarding how to pack food and water. Please call PIA. Feeding the hungry is a great humanitarian deed.

Link

For over three decades, all the mass movements witnessed in Pakistan have revolved around individuals. The most classic example is of the Pakistan National Alliance’s (PNA) movement against Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Pakistani politics was clearly divided into two camps: pro-Bhutto and anti-Bhutto. The PNA was a bizarre alliance that included right-wing Mullahs, communists from the National Awami Party (NAP) and liberals such as Asghar Khan. The only issue that united them was their hatred for Bhutto, and since there was little emphasis on a positive alternative, they only managed to pave way for the military takeover by General Zia. And we know how well that turned out to be!

The News for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar; his comments: ” Thank Goodness the cheesy Zardari jokes and the venom have begun to subside. Children you can relax now, the class will begin…….”)

Painting by Betool Fekaiki.

Postscript. I have not used that word in ages…

A postscript — there is a script and there is a post script, another script that comes after the main script…

What I retain is the word – script.

I have affinities with this word – script. Maybe because deep down I believe we are all living out a script…a personal script, a collective script…and I don’t understand how come no one has ever paid attention to the script…

An Arab Woman Blues for more

Hamdani was later praised by President George W. Bush as a hero and mentioned by name in the USA Patriot Act. But that was not how he was portrayed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In October, his parents went to Mecca to pray for their son. While they were away, the New York Post and other media outlets portrayed Hamdani as a possible terrorist on the run. “MISSING—OR HIDING? MYSTERY OF THE NYPD CADET FROM PAKISTAN” screamed the Post headline. The sensational article noted that someone fitting Hamdani’s description had been seen near the Midtown Tunnel a full month after 9/11. His family was interrogated. Hamdani’s Internet use and politics were investigated.

Truth Dig for more

via Z Net

It is now 10 days since the Turkish government American journalist Jake Hess for “terrorist links.” The 25 year old Hess, who works for Inter Press Services (IPS) and whose writings have appeared at antiwar.com, is still being held without charges and the Turkish Interior Ministry has still not approved his deportation.

Anti War for more

Africa is a step closer to setting up its own space agency, with the approval of a planned feasibility study by the 53 member states of the African Union earlier this month.

The African Space Agency, as it would be known, would be intended to help ensure the continent becomes an important player in the global space programme.

Science and Development Network for more

Young B.C. sex offenders were subjected to controversial testing with a genital measuring device for more than two decades, despite regular concerns from within government.

Government officials, clinicians and researchers within the B.C. Children and Family Development Ministry were often at odds over the continued testing with a genital sensor device designed to measure arousal rates.

CBC for more

Looking at the devastation caused by the floods, it seems that God may have joined the CIA or RAW. The torrential rainfall, which brought the worst floods in the last 80 years in the territory today called Pakistan, must be the work of a god who seems to have defected to the other side.

This idea is probably as ridiculous as similar suggestions about the flood being man-made and probably the work of India, Afghanistan or the CIA who want to take control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding the fact that the worth of nuclear weapons for security against the threat we face is overrated, such theories basically demonstrate part of the larger farce which seems to be playing out in this country after the natural disaster.

Let Us Build Pakistan for more

Link

Vinay Lal’s blog is Lal Salaam

Link

“A Dialogue with Edward Said” March 5, 2003
Midnights Children Festival Events
Moderated by Akeel Bilgrami

JUMP TO:
(0:00) Intro of Segment and Akeel Bilgrami, moderator.
(2:29) Trajectory of Salman Rushdie’s writing
(11:47) What was the impact of “Midnight’s Children” on writers in the middle east?
(15:18) Does “Midnight’s Children” accurately capture the legacy of colonial rule in India?
(17:30) Were the hopes of ex-colonized people ever really redeemed with the coming of independence?
(21:04) Rushdie’s book “Shame” emphasizes tremendous corruption among leaders in the context of being colonized, who true does that ring for you?
(26:14) The importance in Rushdie’s work of having a genuine understanding of history
(29:41) Forcastings and interplay between “Satanic Verses” and “Midnight’s Children”
(32:37) Rushdie seems to be saying that there is something tyrannical about fundamentalist Islam that must be fought, even with a war if necessary.
(37:28) Yet most muslims aren’t like that. Still they find it difficult to openly and strongly criticize the fundamentalists in their midst even then they oppose them. How can these people gain the confidence to do that? Don’t Rushdie’s stances make this more difficult?
(45:39) How should we think and live with hope in the face of such gross and powerful mis-representation in the world politically?
(52:39) Audience Questions: What are your views and Rushdie’s views about how Kashmir ought to be handled going forward?
(54:30) Please elaborate on Richard Perle’s advisement of Netanyahu about new policies in 1996.
(1:02:11) What influence have Rushdie’s writings had on people in places where colonialism is further in the past?
(1:07:30) Has any of Rushdie’s work been translated into any of the Indian languages or Arabic?
(1:09:18) Does the fact that Rushdie has a somewhat distanced relationship form experiencing the kind of multiculturalism that he’s advocating
make it easier for him to take that position?
(1:13:13) Rushdie’s view that Islam has been captured by the worst elements of dogmatism and fanaticism.
(1:19:56) How would you say that Rushdie continues the tradition set forth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez of magical realism and national allegory?
(1:22:26) What do you see as the further of Islam in the west in the post 9/11 and how can muslims proliferate a progressive division of Islam that respects human rights and a culture of democracy in the muslim world?

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

One of the first things my mother did was recognize the talents of a teacher who grew to become one of our closest family friends. Aisha Abdullah is a tall, African American convert to Islam with a heavy southern drawl. Her stoicism and imposing calm got her appointed as headmistress in a Manarat school in Jeddah, where she ran a tight ship.

Dilettantes threatened her career and played the race card like it was going out of fashion. But she would have none of it. She wasn’t chosen for her political savvy or ability to pander to a brash set of royals. But Mrs. Aisha, as many still refer to her even after all these years, could and did face down and discipline scores of spoilt children.

Manarat sought to demolish ideas of wealth, class, race and nationality in an egalitarian project which mixed expatriates from Africa, Asia and Europe with Saudi nationals, with classes in both English and Arabic. Schools across Saudi Arabia, from Al-Khobar to Jeddah, were built from the ground up with white-washed walls and cool marble floors. The daughters of laborers were taught alongside royals irrespective of race, class and wealth.

The Daily Star for more

Four hundred and ninetytwo Tamil men, women, and children, including some pregnant women have arrived in Vancouver, BC, after several months on the sea aboard the modified cargo ship, Sun Sea. They are being held in custody while the Immigration and Refugee Board hears their claims for refugee status.

Processing of claims for refugee status should be a routine matter, performed according to international law governing refugees and currently established law and practice in Canada. But the arrival of Tamil refugees on the Sun Sea has been surrounded by fear-mongering and racism by the Government of Canada through its spokesman, Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews. The Government of Canada has chosen to frame the arrival of these unfortunate people to our shores in desperate quest of safety as “terrorist” and “criminal”, the two words most likely to resonate with a public fed daily on fear from these sources. The refugees being Tamil are assumed to be terrorists, and the people who enabled them to come are assumed criminals, “people smugglers,” who have profited enormously from this trade. Adding more fuel to the fear and hate he has generated, Minister Toews has cast this as a “test case,” since he sees hordes of refugees waiting to invade our shores depending on the outcome of these hearings. The responsibility of the Immigration and Refugee Board to act in a manner that is according to the law, fair, and humane is made heavier by the smog of fear and racism produced by the Government of Canada.

The blindness of the Government of Canada to the conditions in Sri Lanka that have driven the Tamil refugees to embark on the Sun Sea merely adds to its deplorable record in recognizing the suffering of people under oppressive regimes except when it suits its interest to do so.

For twenty five years Sri Lanka had been in the grip of a civil war that produced one of the largest populations of internally displaced people in the world and sent many thousands abroad in search of refuge. These conditions did not disappear magically with the military victory of the Sri Lankan Government over the LTTE in May, 2009, when, denying the appeals of the UN and the international community for restraint the Government bombed civilian populations and launched rocket attacks on hospitals and denied access to relief agencies and journalists. Sri Lankan journalists daring to report on the situation were driven into exile or murdered. More than 7.000 innocent civilians died; at least 13000 were seriously injured; around 12,000 people “disappeared”; and 300,000 people became internally displaced. Many of the displaced are still in camps, unable to return to their destroyed homes; many of the combatants are still incarcerated and subjected to torture.

South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) condemns the Government of Canada’s hypocritical use of the discourse of human rights and its current racist fear-mongering against Tamil refugees. We demand fair and humane treatment for the refugees who have come on the Sun Sea and all people who seek Canada as a refuge to rebuild their lives following the cynical and brutal abuse of human rights by their governments and/or the devastation of war.

We endorse the actions of support for the refugees noted below and urge people to attend the demonstration and sign the petition:

Demonstration: “CANADA: STOP JAILING AND DEPORTING REFUGEES, LET THEM STAY!SUPPORT THE TAMIL MIGRANTS! SAY NO TO RACISM”

Vancouver, Unceded Coast Salish Territories
Saturday August 21 @ 3:30 pm
Gather at Vancouver Art Gallery, Robson Side

Sign the PETITION

SANSAD

“The most important reason was because he was reaching out to us and asking what are your needs, what are your concerns,” said Zakir A. Khan, a local real estate agent who has taken on the role of Mr. Sepulveda’s liaison to Bangladeshis. “People are saying he is respecting us, he is valuing us.”

For months, Mr. Khan pointed out, Mr. Sepulveda’s campaign trucks have rolled through the neighborhood blaring slogans in English, Spanish and Bengali.

“This was the first time we’re hearing our language on the loudspeakers,” he said. “It was very exciting.”

The New York Times for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami has finalised its new name to face changed situation if the party is banned and to continue its politics under a new banner, according to the sources.

The sources further said the new name of the party will be ‘Bangladesh Socialist Party’ or ‘Justice Party’ and the party will continue its politics by taking a new name from the two names.

The government and the Election Commission (EC) are thinking to impose ban on the country’s religion based politics as the Supreme Court’s in line with recent verdict on the fifth amendment of the constitution.

The New Nation for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Although counselling was introduced into the education system in 1996, its effectiveness was limited. Counsellors were expected to play a dual rolel with the additional responsibility as subject teachers. The concept failed. “There were complaints from all sides that the counselling program wasn’t going well,” said Sonam Jamtsho.

With emotional problems, drug and alcohol abuse, and violence among Bhutanese youth increasing, a need for a dedicated counselling program was finally acknowledged. The royal civil service commission (RCSC) approved an education ministry proposal to recruit full time counsellors last year.

Kuensel Online for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

“Protesters again rallied in Midland Beach today against the sale of an empty convent to a Muslim group that would turn it into a mosque.” PHOTO/Hilton Flores/Advance/Staten Island

How can we claim this as our country
when we know it’s yours?
the milky people from Europe
stole it from the Native Indians
built it with slave labor,
enriched it with colored labor and resources
so that one day you can claim it as yours
and show this banner to all

Nobody bothered you
within your territory,

but you allowed not
others to manage themselves
you stretched yourself out so much and now
the entire planet has your claw marks all over
now: everything is yours
and so are we
­­as Arundhati Roy said we are all
“subject[s]” of the US Empire

Time for Muslim leaders to reflect

The decision by the Muslims leaders to build an Islamic Center and a mosque in the vicinity of the destroyed twin towers of the World Trade Center has led to an unprecedented outrage by the families of the 9/11 victims and very many others, including a section of the US society whose bigotry has not been a secret. The former group’s feelings can be understood. Interestingly though, some Democrats and others have also joined the prevalent anti-mosque sentiments. The motive of the bigots is entirely different. The likes of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have a twofold purpose: To further their own cause in the 2012 presidential election and, secondly, to help Republicans in the Congressional elections this November.

Also worthy to note is that even though they are both hard core Republicans but, if either of them wins the presidential election, s/he would tone down the rhetoric and would be seen hosting an Iftar party for the rich Muslims with an eye on their pockets.

By joining the chorus, the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith has angered some people who were aware of its hypocrisy but were afraid to criticize. Fareed Zakaria (a Muslim), host of CNN’s GPS (Global Public Square) and the editor of the Newsweek’s international edition returned the award he was presented by the League in 2005. (Why did he accept it at all?) The league is a very strong part of the Israeli Lobby in the US.*

Fanatic Jews are famous for passionately opposing use of the word “holocaust” for any tragedy; they believe it should only be used for the Nazi genocide of the Jews. However, in opposing the Cordoba Initiative, the League’s National Director Abe Foxman compared the 9/11 victims indirectly to the Holocaust victims when he said:

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he­ said. Referring ­­­to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

Many Muslims have expressed their displeasure at this project. However, the Muslims promoting this project are trying hard to get financing for the Cordoba Initiative project which is almost non-existent.

This is also the time for the moderate Muslim leaders in the US (and other Western countries) to reflect on some of the criticisms coming forth from the opponents of the mosque, and to also ponder over the religious rot piling up in Muslim countries. Newt Gingrich is a hypocrite and an opportunist but the reasoning behind his statement cannot be dismissed.

“There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”

“People in New York protest the proposed construction of a mosque near the World Trade Center site Sunday, June 6, 2010.” PHOTO/AP/SWOAN PARKER/Haaretz

A look at the Muslim countries reveal a very ugly picture: Someone is stoned for adultery; someone is murdered for blasphemy; someone is killed for marrying outside the religion; someone is threatened for saying something about Islam, Quran, or Muhammad; someone is beaten up for producing a work of art critical of Islam; and on and on.

Saudi Arabia is the worst perpetrator of them all. After the US, it is Saudi Arabia which has done the most harm to other Muslim countries by exporting Wahhabism (puritan Islam) and extending financial and other help to promote regressive policies. It is also famous for beheading people in its public square.

Muslims have the right to build the cultural center and mosque at 51 Park Place. But that is not the only place available in that big city. Besides, the feelings of the victims must be considered too. However, it would be better not to waste energy and money on the Cordoba Initiative; instead what they should do is to join hands with other liberal and influential Muslims (like Journalist/feminist Asra Nomani) within and without the Western world as they are in a position to influence changes. This is a great opportunity in implementing meaningful changes in the Muslim countries.

They should issue a manifesto that includes the following:

Muslims wanting to leave the Islamic fold should be free to do so.
Muslim women should be permitted to marry non-Muslims.
Stoning, hanging, beheading, and such barbarian practices should be totally banned.
Ban burqa and eliminate gradually the head coverings through education and awareness.
Stop harassment of couples.
Total separation of state and religion.
Total equality of women and men.
Equal rights for people of all religions, agnostics, and atheists.
Non-Muslims should be allowed to run for the post of president/prime minister.

The Saudi Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina should be put under the control of an international committee of Muslims and should be declared outside the Saudi jurisdiction. This could drastically cut down Saudi rulers’ influence. These would be a start to a more modernized approach to Islam.

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

*See Noam Chomsky, “Necessary Illusions.”

The monsoons, generally a welcome balm from the sun-scorched heat, has wrecked havoc in its wake this time, as you may all have heard by now. Though the death toll is not as high as other natural disasters the world has recently encountered, the devastation is far greater than any of us has as yet grasped. According to the UN it is one of the biggest emergencies the planet is currently facing, and considering the number and scale of disasters looming around the globe, the imagination has yet to grasp the magnitude of this. Even for us here in Pakistan–those of us not directly effected by the floods–it’s hard to imagine. And being inundated with one calamity after another, both man-made and natural, its hard to rouse ourselves to face this as yet not fully fathomed, and unprecedented new disaster. But its in the aftermath of the floods, whose effects are only now being seen and felt, that will allow the imagination, most unfortunately, to grasp this new crisis. And hopefully propel us to to act to counter as much of its effects as we possibly can.

People are organising their own relief efforts, or giving to reputable NGO’s, as the government too is mistrusted with aid money. That too hampers the intent to help.

My family has organised a small scale relief effort in our village in Charsadda–one of the areas in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa hardest hit by the floods. So far we have been able to gather enough funds to feed as many as possible with cooked meals through out the month of Ramzan. We continue to raise funds and hope to provide basic essentials, as well as water sanitising tablets, medicines for diarrhea and cholera, portable stoves and cooking utensils, and clothing.

If you would like to contribute to this fund you can do so via money gram or western union, or contact me with your suggestions for other means at safoora.arbab@yahoo.com.

Here’s a website Tonic that lists other organisations providing help.

Not listed on that website is Avaaz

Imran Khan has also started a relief effort, and I believe you can donate via paypal through his website Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf

There are of course many relief efforts underway, try to help wherever and however much you can before we actually do fully fathom, and directly see, the magnitude of this new calamity that has hit the earth.

PS. If you think it appropriate, please forward this appeal. Thanks.

On 8 May 2008, employees of the Chechen Ministry of Foreign Relations, National Policy, and Press and Information performed a rite of sacrifice commemorating Akhmat-Khadzhi Kadyrov, the pro-Russian president of the Chechen Republic who had been assassinated four years previously, on 9 May 2004, during a ceremony devoted to the victory of the allied forces in WWII. Bulls were slaughtered and meat was given to an orphanage in Grozny. Before reading out the mawlid (in Chechnya, a collective prayer) to pay respects to the assassinated president, the vice-mufti <2> of Chechnya, Magomed Khatanaev, remarked:

If anyone were to have told us some twenty to thirty years ago that one day it would be possible to offer praise to the Prophet Muhammad and carry out a rite of sacrifice in the government offices, he would have been considered insane. Praise be to God that today we can openly utter the name of the Almighty and our Prophet, perform namaz, <3> and observe the rules of the Holy Quran. Minister [of External Relations, National Policy, Press and Information] Shamsail Saraliev’s proposal that such a rite should be performed here [at the Ministry] proves that he and his subordinates are pious and generous people honouring the memory of the noble sons of Chechnya, such as Akhmat-Khadzhi Kadyrov. (Grozny Inform, 8 May 2008)

Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford for more

Susana Villarán on campaign trail. PHOTO/La Republica/IPS

LIMA, Aug 18, 2010 (IPS) – The campaign for the October municipal elections in Peru has brought new hope to the badly weakened left, in the form of Susana Villarán, who has shot up from the “other candidates” category to third in the polls in the race for the mayor’s office in Lima.

Inter Press Services for more

Irtiqa for more

via 3 Quarks Daily

It is not my intention here to hold brief for Prof Gana but I must confess that I am at a total loss on what parameter comrade Jega utilized to arrive at his assessment of Prof. Gana’s antecedent and credibility. In any case, it is my humble opinion that if most of our leaders from the North are as honest, brilliant and dedicated to duty as Prof. Jerry Gana, the effort and achievements of our late hero, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, would not have been in vain. It is a fact that those moving around today and appropriating to themselves to be the leaders of the North are the same persons that supervised the economic and infrastructural degradation of the North. Comrade Mahmud Jega’s main complaint in the write-up under consideration is that Prof. Jerry Gana organized a “Phoney” Northern political summit. But it beats ones imagination to label a conference that was organized and attended by Chief Solomon Lar, Alhaji Shehu Malami, the Governor of Kaduna State, Chief Bernabas Gemade, Prince Abubakar Audu, Senator Bala Mohammed, Senator Isiah Balat, Engr. Mohammed Abba Gana, Dr. Hassan Adamu and many others as phoney.

Daily Trust for more

Japan’s growing assertiveness in East Asia had established it as a regional power and brought it to conflict with the Great Powers for influence in China, including the UK, Germany, France, Russia, and another new power in the Pacific, the United States. In the Taft-Katsura agreement, concluded only weeks before the annexation, the US agreed to recognize Japanese mastery over Korea in turn for Tokyo’s recognition of US control over the Philippines.

World Socialist Web Site for more

Let me be perfectly clear, Mr. Perfectly Unclear President: You cannot take such a stand on a matter of first principle and then take it back the next morning when, lo and behold, Harry Reid goes craven and the Republicans attack. What is so frightening about Fox News?

The New York Times for more

Most experts are still cautioning against tying any specific event directly to emissions of greenhouse gases. But scientists at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva say there’s no doubt that higher Atlantic Ocean temperatures contributed to the disaster begun late last month.

Scientific American for more

Wöhr Multiparker 730

(Thanks to Mansoor Sharif; his comment: “How come the high tech US has no such system whereas the less advanced Hungary has it?”

All of these examples of public theft mean that America’s demise is real and becoming more and more obvious by the day. It is no longer a subject of conjecture among a small group of well informed people. When the state of Hawaii reduces the number of days students will attend public school and Utah proposes eliminating the 12th grade altogether, the destruction of our society is plain for all to see.

The American empire has reached its military apex, with troops stationed in more than 100 countries, and two wars of occupation which have lasted for more than eight years. The height of brute force brings with it the nadir of support for human needs. The two conditions go hand in hand. It is impossible to sustain military spending which exceeds that of every other country on earth combined, without also stealing from the public.

Black Agenda Report for more

Link

Kartick is Patrick Sebag, born in Tel Aviv to Moroccan parents, a music producer, and keyboard player. Gotam is is Yoyam Agam, a “sound designer” also originally from Israel but now living in Chennai, India where he co-founded EarthSync, a production house that aims to nurture folk, native and tribal music. Travelling together through Singapore, they were both upgraded to business class on an overbooked airplane (the good news), but sentenced to a three day wait in the business class lounge until visas and passports were straightened out (the bad news). They passed the time on their laptops and wireless, assembling soundscapes, creating the genesis of Business Class Refugees.

Tikkun Daily for more

Returns on Australian compulsory superannuation savings, a scheme sold to workers as a substitute for the old-age pension, have barely surpassed the rate of inflation over the last 14 years, according to official figures compiled by the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). These figures are proof that the superannuation system, which Labor and the trade unions proclaim as their “proudest achievement”, is one of the greatest swindles in Australian history.

According to the ABC’s compilation of figures released annually by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the average annual return on superannuation investments between 1997 and 2009 was just 3 percent, as compared to an inflation rate across the same period of 2.8 percent. Taken over past decade, superannuation funds have returned less than the inflation rate—meaning that workers would have been better off simply putting their money in the bank.

World Socialist Web Site for more

In the United States just 13.6% of infants are exclusively breastfed to six months, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s 2009 Breastfeeding Report Card. Rates are higher in many developing countries – 38% overall – but increased urbanization and Westernization is undoing what was once common and appropriate infant-feeding behaviors, says Labbok. Working Bangladeshi mothers, for example, rarely bring their infants to work with them and often introduce complementary foods as early as the second month. In Nigeria, where women once carried babies to market, increased urbanization has meant a shift to non-baby-friendly jobs. Even in countries with official maternity leave policies, working mothers in the informal sectors are denied the benefits of legislation.

Women’s International Perspective for more

Capitalising on its success with the Dhaka Radisson, the [Bangladesh Army Welfare Trust or] AWT is now building another five-star hotel in the port city of Chittagong.

A leading hotelier who did not wish to be identified told the BBC that the use of cheaper military-land amid sky-rocketing land prices in Dhaka has given the army a clear commercial advantage against other players.

In addition to a recently-built fast-food shop aimed at the affluent middle class in Dhaka, the army’s other big business these days is the Trust Bank. Set up under civilian rule, it has now grown into a fully-fledged commercial bank with about 40 branches nationwide.

BBC for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

KABUL (Afghanistan) – TALEBAN militants in northern Afghanistan stoned a young couple to death for adultery, which a rights group said was the first confirmed use of the punishment here since the hardline Islamist regime was ousted in 2001.

The Taleban-ordered killing comes at a time when international rights groups have raised worries that attempts to negotiate with the Taleban to bring peace to Afghanistan could mean a step backward for human rights in the country. When the Islamist extremists ruled Afghanistan, women were not allowed to leave their houses without a male guardian, and public killings for violations of their harsh interpretation of the Quran were common.

Straits Times for more

“For those who cannot read Urdu, the article claims the Air Blue plane was hijacked by Blackwater commandos, who wanted to ram it into our holy bomb factory in Kahuta [Pakistan], but the pilot (who, by all accounts, was a very pious Muslim, so the writer thinks he knew his duty) crashed it into the hills, saving our sacred bomb from the Hinjews [Hindu-Jews] of Blackwater…”

Nawa-E-Waqt

Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

The abscesses — pus-filled infections surrounded by swollen, inflamed tissue under the areola — can develop a month to seven years after a nipple is pierced. They recur frequently, are difficult to treat and often require surgery.

Though individual cases have been reported, the new study, published in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, is the first to document the risk associated with nipple piercings, said the lead author, Dr. Vinod Gollapalli, a breast surgeon at the University of Iowa.

The New York Times for more

The garments industry of Bangladesh has been the key export division and a main source of foreign exchange for the last 25 years. According to the latest World Trade Organisation report, prepared on the basis of export data in 2007, Bangladesh ranks fourth in the world of clothing exports and has grabbed three percent market share. According to Faruque Hassan, Vice President of Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), the latest position of Bangladesh might be third in terms of value and volume. “Apparel exports of the competing countries have increased in some markets but decreased in some others, while Bangladesh’s growth was steady in all markets,” he says.

The Star for more

PHOTO/New Yorker

One year after the murder of Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, her killers remain undiscovered by an investigation lacking in rigour and impartiality

Ms Estemirova, the leading researcher of human rights centre “Memorial” in Chechnya, was abducted by unidentified men in the Chechen capital Grozny, and her body dumped in neighbouring Ingushetia on 15 July last year. Her murder was condemned across the world.

The Independent for more

Reuters

As if Pakistan’s:
Chaotic birth
Confused childhood
1971 partition
Corrupt politicians
Rampant illiteracy
Perpetual poverty
Sectarian massacres
Drone attacks
Taleban violence
Minority miseries
Women’s inequality
and on

and on
Weren’t enough …

But now Nature strikes
In all its fury
As Monsoon overflows the Indus
not just a part
but the full length of it …

Rains are hammering
Floods are submerging
People are drowning
Diseases are invading
Problems are mounting
Needs are increasing
Donors are shirking

The prevailing beliefs

Pakistanis are “terrorists”
Terrorists can’t be victims
If not victims
Then why provide aid?

Can Nature be so cruel?
Yes, it can be …
It is …
It has neither sensing ability
Nor reasoning capability
Else,
It would surely have postponed this
For some other time
And would not have struck
The crushing blows to

People already on ground and prostrate

Sindhu, became
Hindu, became
Indus, became
Insane

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

Making an association between the flood and the war on terror distracts from the humanitarian disaster.

Certainly, the threat of terrorism has permeated discussion of the flood. Several comment pieces, ostensibly urging people to give generously, do so on the grounds that donating will somehow prevent a suicide attack in Britain.

Anatol Lieven writes in the Times (behind paywall):

Aid to Pakistan is clearly a vital British security interest…

If Pakistan collapses or parts of its army are driven to mutiny, the threat from that terrorism would increase by orders of magnitude.

Ahmed Rashid concurs in the Telegraph:

Unless major aid is forthcoming immediately and international diplomatic effort is applied to improving Pakistan’s relations with India, social and ethnic tensions will rise and there will be food riots. Large parts of the country that are now cut off will be taken over by the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated extremist groups, and governance will collapse.

New Statesman for more

Through these decades I have found that the AFL-CIO foreign policy leadership has been operating in our name, but behind our backs, doing damage to workers in the so-called developing countries. Further, about 90 percent of their operations abroad have been funded by the U.S. government, with no mandate from or reporting to AFL-CIO union affiliates and members. Thus, the activities of AFL-CIO foreign policy leaders have been sabotaging the very principles of international labor solidarity that they and we have proclaimed. I see this as undermining the democracy, transparency, and accountability so necessary to strengthen our unions here at home. We should no longer accept such unprincipled lack of accountability.

Monthly Review Zine for more

News Click

The book ‘Exterminism and Cold War’ edited by E.P. Thompson and others is still worth reading twenty-five years after this book was written to oppose the whole scale investment in weapons to kill millions. Like Bertrand Russell, Thompson had argued that nuclear weapons were so destructive that their use had become irrational for all mankind, regardless of class interest. ‘Exterminism is not a “class issue”: it is a human issue.’ The task, therefore, was not to organise the class struggle so as to eliminate the system which gives rise to war, but to win over all sectors of society, top to bottom, to an ‘alternative logic.’

This mandate of conceiving of a society beyond capitalism is now even more urgent in the midst of this major capitalist depression. In 1998, there was an ‘Atomic Audit’ in the USA that spelt out how the USA had spent over US$5.5 trillion between 1940 and 1998 in the development of nuclear weapons.

Pambazuka News for more

How does it work? Well, as you visit a website that is using the technology, you get tagged with an anonymous cookie that tracks which products you show an interest in. When you leave the website, the re-targeting company finds out when you emerge on one of its partner publishers (where it places ads) and then delivers a unique personalized banner based on your browsing history. They can also target consumers with the items from a shopping cart that’s been abandoned.

Criteo also combines behavioral data with a recommendation algorithm (similar to Amazon’s) to re-target the consumer with the potential purchases they were interested in and other items that other people who have browsed or purchased those items have been interested in.

Wired for more

Fourteen hard-of-hearing and 11 visually impaired study participants were recruited at meetings of Pentecostal Christian groups in Mozambican villages and towns.

They were tested with a handheld audiometer or vision charts, depending on their impairment, before and after they took part in a prayer session.

“There was a highly significant improvement in hearing across 18 ears of 11 subjects” and “significant visual improvements,” says the study, which will be published next month in the peer-reviewed Southern Medical Journal.

Two of the hard-of-hearing study participants were able to hear sounds 50 decibels lower after the prayer session and three of the visually impaired subjects saw their vision improve from 20/400 or worse to 20/80 or better.

Yahoo Canada for more

(Thanks to reader)

We run a charitable trust, Roshan Safar (Shining Journey) in Dahod, Gujarat. We provide for education, food, and various other needs of poor folks in Dahod and its nearby areas. We also run computer, sewing, Mehndi, art & craft classes at out center.

Every year we celebrate Indian Independence Day and Republic Day at our Trust office, Fatambu Center, when we invite local leaders, students, and neighbors for attending this function. Here are pictures taken on 15th August, 2010.

Fatambu Center is my ancestral home that I have given for charitable activities.

Is it surprising that Israel, an alien state planted by brute force, has failed to win legitimacy even 60 years after it proclaimed its existence?

“WHAT is to become of the people of this country [Palestine] assuming the Turk to be expelled, and the inhabitants not to have been exterminated by the War? There are over half a million of these, Syrian Arabs – a mixed community with Arab, Hebrew, Canaanite, Greek, Egyptian and possibly Crusader blood. They and their forefathers have occupied the country for the best part of 1,500 years. They own the soil, which belongs either to individual landowners or to village communities. They profess the Mohammedan faith. They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants, or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter.”

Curzon wrote these prophetic words in a memorandum on “The Future of Palestine” on October 26, 1917, a week before his Cabinet colleague, the Foreign Secretary ArthurBalfour, issued the infamous declaration in a letter to Lord Rothschild on November 2, 1917. Curzon’s memo is hard to come by. It is not printed in the official series, Documents on British Foreign Policy, but was reproduced in 1939 in the then Prime Minister Lloyd George’s Memoirs of the Peace Conference. Fortunately it is reproduced in Palestine Documents(page 61), an excellent compilation by India’s outstanding scholar on the subject, Zafarul-Islam Khan. It is neglected because the publishers (Pharos, New Delhi 110 025) are not as well known.

Frontline for more

“WHO is preparing to assist up to 140,000 people in case there is any cholera, but the government has not notified us of any confirmed case,” Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on Monday.

“Up to 3.5 million children are at high risk of deadly water-borne diseases including diarrhoea-related, such as watery diarrhoea and dysentery,” he said, estimating the total number at risk from such diseases to be around six million.

Al-Jazeera for more

A Colombian indigenous leader has been shot dead outside his family home in the Colombian city of Riohacha, in the northern province of la Guajira.

Luis Alfredo Socarrás Pimienta of the Wayúu tribe was allegedly shot by a paramilitary hitman who then fled the scene. Following the murder, leaflets were distributed listing the killers’ next targets, which include the names of up to twelve Wayúu people.

Socarrás Pimienta had led several demonstrations over the past year in protest against abuses of the Wayúu’s rights. His death follows the murders of ten indigenous people in la Guajira this year alone.

Upside Down World for more

Fahd Bahady

“Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist. This cartoon was published in his blog on 8 August 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.”

via Monthly Review Zine

“We’re museum pieces,” she said.

The definition has varied over time, but under the Indian Constitution the term Anglo-Indian means an Indian citizen whose paternal line can be traced to Europe. Both of Mrs. Martyr’s grandfathers were Scots.

Like most Anglo-Indian women of her generation, she has lived all her life in India and has never been to Britain. But she converses only in English. At school, she said, she learned a little Latin and French and enough “kitchen Bengali” to speak to servants.

Before 1947, when the British left India, Anglo-Indians — also known at the time as half-castes, blacky-whites and eight annas (there were 16 annas in a rupee, the official currency of India) — formed a distinct community of 300,000 to 500,000 people. Most were employed in the railroads and other government services, and many lived in railroad towns built for them by the British, where their distinctive culture, neither Indian nor British, flourished.

The New York Times for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Under the terms of this MoU Maldivian students in the construction industry will receive training.

They will recieve training at the Institute of Construction Training and Development (ICTAD) affiliated to the Construction, Engineering Services, Housing and Common Amenities Ministry of Sri Lanka.

Minister Weerawansa said the Republic of Maldives is a longstanding friend and neighbour of Sri Lanka.

Daily News for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

It’s a common story: The hottest technologies on the market are often upstaged by the next big thing. As new advancements are made, products that once changed our lives are left in the dust and swapped for the new, the shiny and the updated. Here are 11 devices – some you’d expect and some you might not – that are still roaming the streets but facing rapid extinction.

DVD players

iPods

Yahoo Canada for more

(Thanks to reader)

Michio Kaku on Stephen Hawking

But on the other hand, I could see obvious signs that his illness has progressed. Years ago, when his symptoms became progressively worse, he would mumble his words, and graduate students would tediously try to translate them. Later, when he lost his voice, he used his finger to control an electronic synthesizer to communicate with the rest of the world. Now, he has lost control of even his fingers. Now, he uses blinking and facial movements to communicate, which requires an extraordinary feat of patience. It was sad seeing this great physicist being pushed around by his nurse, who also had to constantly hold his head so that it did not slump.

It is truly a testament to the human spirit to see someone like him constantly moving forward, in spite of an illness which would have defeated most mortals!

Big Think

(Thanks to Saleem Amersi)

Writing of another U.S. invasion—the Philippines in 1898—Bruce Cumings, an Asia historian at the University of Chicago, made an observation that applies all too aptly to Afghanistan today: “When a sailor sees that his heading is disastrous he changes course, but imperial armies sink their boots in quicksand and keep marching, if only in a circle, while the politicians plum the phrase book of American ideals.”

In These Times for more

The head of a prominent Russian dairy said Thursday that he would fire employees who have abortions or refuse to be married in Russian Orthodox Church ceremonies.

Critics said the rules set out by the president of Russkoye Moloko, Vasily Boiko-Veliky, violated the Constitution and labor laws.

While the Russian Orthodox Church criticized the rules, they are likely to add to concerns among liberals and minority faiths about the growing influence of the dominant church.

“We have about 6,000 employees, most of whom are Orthodox, and I expect them to be faithful and to repent,” Boiko-Veliky said.

The Moscow Times for more

From the early days of film making (dare I say, since its inception?), theorists have speculated about the dreamlike nature of the cinematic experience and movies have perpetually tried to bring dreams alive on screen. Inception couples innovative art-house sensibilities with blockbuster thrill tactics to take on the dream genre with ingenuity and intelligence. Like Inception, these next ten films deftly negotiate the world of dreams with real life to earn the distinction of being one of the top ten dream movies of all time.
10. Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990)

Kurosawa based this series of visually stunning vignettes on dreams he had throughout his life. It’s no Yojimbo or Throne of Blood, but Dreams is yet another triumph in the career of one of the mediums greatest craftsmen.

Film Jabber for more

(Thanks to reader)

SOUTH SUDAN, Aug 13, 2010 (IPS) – When Timothy was forced into the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) at age 11, the first thing they did was beat him. Then they took him to a military base where his tasks were to carry other soldiers’ bags, wash their clothes,

Inter Press Services for more

“What is the definition of an educated person today? Does that definition include some basic knowledge about the Islamic world or not? If it doesn’t, perhaps that needs to be corrected,” stated His Highness the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the world’s Shia Ismaili Muslims, to National Public Radio. In our forever-globalizing world, the content of our education system must reflect the local, regional, national and international societies in which we will ultimately find ourselves. The system must also prepare us with the knowledge and background to avert crises of understanding each other’s history, culture, and religion, cementing our social structures as one grounded in intelligent discourse and voluntary engagement, rather than superficial knowledge and willful ignorance. The latter, we cannot deny, has proven disastrous.

Huffington Post for more

(Thanks to reader)

To prepare food for a large celebration, the Mulla knocked on his neighbor’s door to borrow a large cooking pot. The neighbor reluctantly let go of her prized pot, and the next day the Mulla returned with two pots: the large one and a smaller one.

“Where did the small one come from?” asked the housewife.

“Oh, Madam, your pot gave birth to this one,” replied the Mulla. “Didn’t you know your pot was pregnant?”

“I suspected as much,” the housewife quickly replied, and she thanked him profusely for taking care of her pot’s pregnancy.

A few months later the Mulla knocked on her door again, wanting to borrow the large pot. This time the housewife readily acceded. But in the next few days there was no return visit from the Mulla, so she went to his house to demand the pot.

“I’m so sorry, Madam,” said the Mullah, “but your pot was pregnant again and died in childbirth.”

“That’s ridiculous,” retorted the housewife. “How can a pot possibly be pregnant?”

“Ah, but you believed it the first time,” declared the Mulla.

Yes for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday said his government will review all laws that ‘militate against’ Pakistan’s minority communities, weeks after gunmen shot dead two Christians accused of blasphemy outside a court in Punjab Province.

Besides creating a five per cent quota for minorities in government jobs and reserving four for them in the Senate or upper house of parliament, the government has “decided to review all laws that militate against minorities and the vulnerable sections of society,” Zardari said in a message on the occasion of Pakistan’s Minorities Day.

Rediff News for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

“Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s first leader, in the doorway of his study in Karachi in September, 1947, just weeks after the new country was formed.” PHOTO/Bettmann/Corbis/The New York Times

This August marks the beginning of the 64th year of the independence of India and the birth of Pakistan. Jawaharlal Nehru’s love for India and Lord Mountbatten’s criminal negligence created the permanent problem of Kashmir that remains unresolved.

Many wish Britain had opted for an abortion of Pakistan. Also if Kashmir’s Maharaja Hari Singh was a Muslim or if the majority there were Hindus, the situation would be different. If M. K. Gandhi had avoided the Hindu terminology in his politics and if M. A. Jinnah was more flexible, and if Cyril Radcliff had taken a few years, not few weeks, to draw the borders, current problems would not exist.

One can wish for a different history to no avail. It is not only that these things happened, but that after sixty three years, these mistakes keep on yielding misery with no hope in sight for the majority of the people in the region.

Kashmir is burning and so is Pakistan.

India’s vast land and its huge US-style propaganda media allow it to ignore and mask the fire of discontent in the Northeast. All woes become “acceptable” under the umbrella of the “largest democracy.”

During the last few years, a new term the “Indian Century” has begun circulating that has implications of terror given its precedent, the “American Century” (as if that was not enough punishment for the world!)

India

India may have illusions of its century but times have changed and it will not be as easy now for any one power to dominate and hold all the strings.

The factors that enabled the United States to rule the world were: Land mass: it has a vast area endowed with natural resources. Geography: it is flanked on east and west by two oceans and has a subdued neighbor to the north and a weak Latin America to the South who is no match in violence to the US. The folly of European leaders contributed also. (The two world wars not only destroyed the European imperial hegemony and its economy, but also gave a huge boost to the US economy through manufacturing of arms and ammunition and other goods, and allowed women to gain some equality by joining the work force as men headed to the European front.) Besides, the resources and the labor of the colored world, outside the Soviet sphere, were at its disposal, which were and are being exploited to the maximum. India is not that lucky.*

Moreover, in the same vicinity there are two other giants: China and Russia. It can conceivably be “the Chinese Century” or “Chinese/Indian Century”. Or, Russia may finally put its house in order to become an economic power house and claim that title exclusively or in some combination.

Also, let us not forget Brazil, the world’s eighth largest economy or the European Union who may be valid contenders too. Or perhaps, this may be no one’s century. There may be several super powers or several regional powers.

Although culturally, there seems no doubt that the Indian (or South Asian) influence is felt globally, militarily, India lags behind both China and Russia. Another strike against India is its glaring poverty; not all the burqas in the world are sufficient to hide it. Besides, the Indian government is not keen on veiling it anyway; otherwise it would have done something to eliminate the poverty.

The recent study conducted by the Oxford University is well timed to leave a bad taste in the mouth of the Indian establishment when they are dreaming to play the tune of Indian greatness on its Independence Day this Sunday. According to the study, 55% of the Indians, that is, 645 million of the 1.1 billion people live in the state of poverty. This in a country which now boasts having some of the richest men in the world!

The poverty level in 8 Indian states—Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal—is higher than that of the twenty-six poorest African nations.

The capitalist rekha has been drawn; the divide between the poor and the wealthy is sharply visible and continues to be maintained. Any kind of criticism of inhumane capitalist ventures, such as hosting of the Commonwealth Games is not tolerated, even by a former diplomat and minister.

The poor are more helpless than ever just as the rich have become bolder in flaunting their wealth. This is nothing to be proud of, nor does it in any manner show the greatness of India’s democracy. One thing the government does for the poor is that periodically a new national anthem video starring millionaire celebrities is released in cinema houses and TV channels everywhere to create the patriotic intoxicant effect.

Pakistan

Pakistan at independence was not in good shape because the areas it inherited were not developed. Also, the Indian arrogance and the annexation of the Muslim majority state of Jammu and Kashmir with India created insecurity in a much smaller Pakistan.

But the later developments, mostly destructive and divisive, such as the creation of Bangladesh and the introduction of religion into politics are entirely Pakistan’s own making. Stating it in simple English: Pakistan self-fucked itself with the Islamic crescent, the Pakistan military’s gun, and the US eagle.

Today it is difficult to predict with certainty any aspect of Pakistan’s future.

In 2006, a retired US Lieutenant Colonel had suggested a redrawing of the Middle East (including Pakistan—which actually is part of South Asia). In 2005, the United States CIA and the National Intelligence Council predicted a Yugoslav-like fate” for Pakistan and declared that it would be a “failed state” by 2015. Now, the US Ambassador to India, Robert Blackwell, wants to divide Afghanistan, along the ethnic line, into North Afghanistan with Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks; and South Afghanistan with Pashtun majority. If this happens, then the elements who would like to see a union between the Afghan Pashtuns and the Pashtuns from the newly named Pakistani province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (formerly North-West Frontier Province) will be strengthened.

It is worth noting that all these US people and agencies are very influential. They are also part of the establishment which has the required force to turn these ideas into reality. The North and South Korea reality is just one example.

Kashmir

A logical division of the Sub-continent would have made Kashmir a part of Pakistan because of its Muslim majority. This did not happen, and it was a grave injustice. But today we can no longer apply that 1947 logic, as taking the current state of mess in Pakistan, it would be reasonable to assume that any addition to Pakistan’s territory is not only going to create more problems but would make the lives of the newly joined Kashmiris a living hell; and would provide militants easy access to new disgruntled recruits. Mind you, it is not that Kashmiris are enjoying fruits of paradise under the Indian rule, or to be more accurate, under the Indian Army’s boots.

On the other hand, let’s say both Pakistan and India agree to grant independence to Kashmir (that is Pakistan controlled portion and the Indian controlled part become one independent country) what is the guarantee that both India and Pakistan would not be looking for “strategic depth”? Remember Afghanistan?

Solution

The Kashmir problem needs to be addressed first. An amicable solution, acceptable to the people of Kashmir, and the Indian and the Pakistani establishments, is not as difficult as developing nuclear weapons.

However, what is needed is the willingness on part of the leaders to resolve this issue; unfortunately absent. The process has now become a ritual: hopes are built prior to and during the meetings of both countries’ leaders; after the meetings someone from either side will say something which puts them back to square one or worse. The main beneficiary of these meeting-dramas is the media who get to show films and photos of leaders visiting historic places, and in some cases their ancestral places, and getting the public glued to TV sets.

If the Kashmir problem is resolved and off the table during bilateral talks, then both countries will be able to concentrate on trade and other issues. This will subsequently boost SAARC (South Asian Association of Regional Countries) to unleash its real potential as a unifying and developing force. Also, if Afghanistan is invited to join SAARC, it’ll be good for the whole region as this would diminish competition between Pakistan and India to influence that country.

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

*Presently, India, China, South Korea and others have started buying land for agricultural purpose in Africa and this has made many Africans unhappy and is bound to create new tensions in Africa during this century.

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on this land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.
‘Time,’ they had briefed him in London, ‘is short. It’s too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.
The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we’ve arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.’

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

Outlook India

*A poem on Cyril Radcliffe who drew the lines.

On Thursday, the Russian government placed a ban on all grain exports, in response to widespread crop failures caused by a severe drought. The measure will be in place from August 15 to December 1. Local authorities in each of the country’s 28 growing regions have declared states of emergency.

News of the export ban, along with fears that other countries experiencing extreme weather conditions could enact similar measures and the actions of speculators, sent world wheat prices skyrocketing. The cost of a bushel of wheat rose to $8.25 on Friday, the largest weekly gain in 50 years, according to the news agency Bloomberg. Experts are predicting it could soon reach $10 a bushel, a high not seen since March 2008.

World Socialist Web Site for more

No scandal has rocked the Indian media more in recent decades than that of paid news. Most of all when it emerged during the last Lok Sabha and subsequent Maharashtra polls that hundreds of crores of rupees had been spent to buy “news” in large dailies and television channels. Major parties and candidates overshot poll spending limits many times over on this one expense alone. It was and remains a nauseating form of corruption. As Vice-President Hamid Ansari so succinctly put it, paid news not only undoes the basis of a fair and balanced press, it undermines the democratic electoral process in a profound way.

The Hindu for more

Things on the ground, however, did not change much after the banning – most of the banned groups restructured themselves and continued to operate under new names. The Sipah-e-Sahaba became the Millat-e-Islamia Pakistan; the Jaish-e-Muhammad now called itself al-Furqan; the Khuddamul Islam and the Tehreek-e-Jafria became the Islami Tehreek Pakistan; and, most well-known of all, the Lashkar-e-Toiba began to operate under the ‘humanitarian’ veil of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. These organisations began to establish roots in Waziristan and other tribal areas, making their tribal hosts believe that they were a ‘good force’. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leadership seized the opportunity with both hands and used the Punjabi Taliban as a springboard to expand its activities into the non-tribal regions of Pakistan. The support they have became evident when in March 2008, a bearded tribesman handed the late TTP chief, Baitullah Mehsud, a bundle of around 500,000 Pakistani rupees, which he distributed among lieutenants within five minutes in front of two journalists. When asked where he got the money from, Mehsud replied: ‘It makes no difference who gives money to us. What matters is that we get the money which we need for our operations.’

Himal for more

The father of a victim of the rape trade has sent a moving appeal to Avaaz:

“My daughter Oxana was a beautiful, wonderful girl, gifted in languages. She left our home when she was 20 to take her dream job as a translator in Europe. We were so happy for her. 3 weeks later the police told us she died falling from a 5th story window, trying to escape men who fooled her with the job and forced her into a sex club. I died when she died. Now I live only to stop this from happening to other girls. Please, help me.”

A powerful new treaty is our best weapon against the global rape trade in women and girls. If Russia signs it, it will put a major dent in this horror – let’s get 1 million voices to appeal to Russian PM Putin to sign the treaty and help protect girls like Oxana:

To Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev:
We urge you to take strong action to protect Russia’s women and girls from the rape trade by signing the Council of Europe Convention Against Trafficking in Human Beings. Working together with other countries, Russia can play a key role in ending this horrific trade forever.

Sign the Petition

“It’s the kind of film where you’re laughing and wondering, ‘Should I be laughing?’” said Anusha Rizvi, who wrote “Peepli Live,” her first feature film, and co-directed it with her historian husband, Mahmood Farooqui. She was speaking by Skype from New Delhi, the Indian capital, where she lives and has built her career as an independent documentary filmmaker and former television producer at NDTV, India’s preeminent news channel.

Befitting Rizvi’s journalistic background, “Peepli Live” was inspired by real-life contemporary events: the economic shakeup of India’s agrarian society and a horrifying wave of suicides by poor Indian farmers. According to government statistics cited in the film, 182,000 farmers took their own lives between 1997 and 2007. Additionally, between 1991 and 2001, 8 million Indians quit farming altogether.

Los Angeles Times for more

Youth Prime Minister Hassan Javed Khan, who lost his life in the tragic incident of Airblue plane crash in Margallah Hills on Wednesday, had so many plans to make the last four-day session of the Youth Parliament Pakistan (YPP) 2009-10 a memorable event. Unfortunately, the last session became memorable but because of the death of Javed and his six other colleagues.
…
They protested against the marking of the coffin of one of their colleague Prem Chand as ‘Kafir [or infidel].’ “It was shocking. He could have been marked as Hindu or non-Muslim, but using the word ‘Kafir’ is the worst example of intolerance,” said MYP Muneeb Afzal.

The News for more

(After a coup in 1958, General Ayub Khan made himself president. The following letter,if read without knowing the writer’s identity or the year it was written in, may seem like a recent complain from some Pakistani general. This relation-game has been going on for more than five decades without benefiting the people of Pakistan in any manner On the contrary, it has hurt them when these US supported generals are imposed on them. Ed.)

…

8. Forgive me for being frank, but I would be failing in my duty if I did not tell you that our people are completely frustrated. They think they have been given an enormous amount of work unnecessarily and that they have been let down. They are in a mood not to accept an American word however solemnly given. This is sad in that it does not augur well for our future good relationship which was one of the things I had been hoping to develop.

9. What the political repercussions be when this news gets known, and after all you cannot conceal facts indefinitely in a Democracy, I do not know. But one thing I do know that this government will come under tremendous pressure and fire from within and without.

Hope you are in very good health.

Read the full letter.

Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

In 2008, Micheal G. Wessels, professor of clinical population and family health at Columbia University, published an article on psychosocial support. “Psychosocial support,” he said, “ought to occur at the same time one applies the most immediate life-saving measures.”

While mental disorders continue to carry a fair degree of stigma in many countries, psychosocial support – as part of the battery of help humanitarian assistance organizations offer – is gaining more awareness.

Toward Freedom for more

Spicy food flavoured with hot chilli peppers contains a natural chemical ingredient that may lower blood pressure, according to a study on a strain of laboratory rats with hypertension.
…
He added that eating hot, spicy food may not be necessary to gain the benefits of chillis because similar compounds are present in sweet peppers. There is, for instance, a mild Japanese pepper, which contains a compound called capsinoid that is closely related to capsaicin. “Limited studies show that these capsinoids produce effects similar to capsaicin. I believe that some people can adopt this sweet pepper,” Dr Zhu said.

The Independent for more

Reviewed: El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, by John Ross (New York: Nation Books), 512 pages.

In El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, long-time journalist and author John Ross summons the magic of Mexico’s history, making it shine through the political blood and city smog. This monstrous work is spiced with humor, murder mysteries, gossip, and haunting detail.

By focusing on El Monstruo – Mexico City – Ross tells an epic history of the region, from the Aztec Empire through the Mexican Revolution, to the 2006 presidential elections and the city’s struggle with swine flu.

Toward Freedom for more

Female immigrants face all the issues that confront male immigrants, including low wages, ethnic hatred and hazardous working conditions. Women are, however, also confronted by additional conditions because of their gender. Here are some examples:

Women e News for more

(reported by JULIEN ALRIC & NATHALIE TOURRET)

Japanese workers are notoriously reluctant to take time off work after the birth of a child. But the law in Japan is changing and now fathers who have taken time off during the first eight weeks of their child’s birth can take leave for a second time: a revolutionary move in a country where people find it hard to take time off, even for a holiday. These new laws are seen as essential for the future of a country that has a rapidly ageing population.

France 24

Every day, the conservative newspaper Attajdid prints a new fatwa. Fatwas are nothing more than religious proclamations. Nevertheless, they irritate liberal Muslims because, in their eyes, each fatwa is more absurd than the last. For instance, the Wahhabist mufti Al-Maghraoui claimed, in a different publication, that 9-year-old girls are allowed to marry, because “some girls of nine are better in bed than women of 20 and over”. Fatwas often contradict one another and there are also foreign fatwas, which find their way into Morocco via the internet and Arabic TV channels.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide for more

As for the temporary, partial court injunction issued by federal judge Susan Bolton, which prevented four key sections of the SB-1070 law from going into effect, [Maricopa County Sheriff Joe] Arpaio responded by saying: “It doesn’t matter what the ruling is by the federal judge. We’re going to do it anyway.”

There is a strong sentiment in Arizona’s immigrant and Latino communities that even if Bolton had ruled for a full injunction, the battle for human rights and justice for immigrants would be far from over. Tucson resident Lynda Cruz put it succinctly: “The problem is not just 1070, but the fact that such legislation was able to be passed in the first place . . . We have been living SB-1070 even before they drafted it.” But while Arpaio’s customary bravado underscores the vigilante attitude running rampant in Arizona, what he doesn’t say is that he’s authorized to do his immigration sweeps not under Arizona state legislation, but federal law.

North American Congress on Latin America for more

Achuthanandan told the press conference that the PFI and its allies are plotting to make Kerala a “Muslim-dominated” state within 20 years. “For achieving that goal, the outfit,” said Achuthanandan, “is pumping money to attract youth and giv[ing] them weapons.
…
The answer is supplied by the Telegraph based on the information fed it by CPM leaders in West Bengal. Under conditions where Kerala’s CPM-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government has lost support from the state’s Muslim and Christian communities, who respectively represent 25 and 23 percent of the state’s population, the CPM believes that the best bet to staving off defeat in next year’s state election is by “wooing the majority (i.e. the Hindu) community.”

World Socialist Web Site for more

Interestingly, atheists reacted differently; when they were unconsciously primed with God-related ideas, their ACC increased its activity. The researchers suggest that for religious people, thinking about God may provide a way of ordering the world and explaining apparently random events and thus reduce their feelings of distress. In contrast, for atheists, thoughts of God may contradict the meaning systems they embrace and thus cause them more distress.

Physorg for more

KATHMANDU: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s special envoy to Nepal Shyam Saran Thursday assured the Maoist leadership that India was not interfering in formation of next government in the Himalayan nation.

South Asian Media Net for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

America has a stake in religious tolerance, and the Anti-Defamation League and Simon Wiesenthal Center are unfairly lumping all Muslims with the fanatics of Al Qaeda.

This page has supported construction of the center, whose name, Cordoba House, is taken from the Spanish city that stood for interfaith tolerance in the Middle Ages and whose stated mission is “promoting positive interaction between the Muslim world and the West.” ADL leader Abraham H. Foxman and Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Wiesenthal Center, however, argue that building an Islamic center so close to ground zero would be insensitive to the victims of violence committed in the name of Islam. “If after World War II, the German government had created a German cultural center across the street from Auschwitz, it would have been vehemently opposed by families of victims because it would be too much to bear,” Wiesenthal told The Times. But the examples are not parallel. The Nazi government of Germany carried out the Holocaust. The 9/11 attacks were committed by religious fanatics with a political agenda; not all Muslims were complicit, nor should they be held responsible as a group for the atrocities.

Los Angeles Times for more

(Thanks to Asghar Vasanwala)

Fraser Valley Peace Council (FVPC) is presenting two events in joint collaboration with South Asian Network of Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) and South Asian Film Education Society (SAFES).

Discovery of Independence: South Asia at 63, a talk by Dr. Hassan Gardezi , 2 – 5 p.m., on August 14, in Newton Library Hall, 13795-70th Avenue, Surrey, B.C.

Screening of ‘THE SKY BELOW’, a Best Film Debut Award winner
documentary on the Partition of India and Pakistan by Sarah Singh, 2 – 5 p.m., August 15, at Surrey Campus (SUR 2600), Simon Fraser University, 13450 102 Avenue, Surrey, B.C. Sarah Singh will introduce the film and conduct a discussion with the audience.

More info from Chin Banerjee 604-421-6752 or Shahzad Nazir Khan 604-613-0735

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

Review: Petrus Tegeke presents a detailed account of the position of women in West Papua

A poster which has been hanging in my office for many years carries the slogan, ‘West Papua, An Issue Whose Time Has Come’. I received it from a friend not long after East Timor became independent in 2002. Since then, the struggle of the Papuan people has gained greater attention around the world, their grinding poverty in a land of plenty and their anger at becoming part of Indonesia following a blatantly fraudulent Act of ‘Free Choice’ in 1969.

Unable to visit Papua, which is closed to foreign journalists and human rights activists, I have relied on books and pleas for help on the internet to follow events. Occasionally I have met with Papuan men and women activists who have fled their homeland in fear of their lives. But I was able to learn very little about the conditions of Papuan women until I was sent a copy of this book.

Inside Indonesia for more

The reason you have involuntary unemployment in any economy is because wealth can be held also in the form of money. Imagine a world in which wealth could be held exclusively in the form of capital goods. Then of course there would never be involuntary unemployment. Whatever output is produced at full employment will be partly consumed, corresponding to which there will be demand for that output, and whatever is not consumed . . . would also take the form exclusively of capital goods, and as a result there would never be a problem of aggregate demand. Likewise, even if all wealth were held in the form not of capital goods but of claims on capital goods, even then, as neoclassical economics would argue, there would never be a problem of aggregate demand, and what is called Say’s Law — supply creates its own demand — would always hold. The reason why you have a problem of involuntary unemployment therefore is because a part of the wealth is thought to be held by people in the form of money rather than in the form of either capital goods or claims on capital goods. Both Marx and Keynes said this.

Monthly Review for more

At one end of the scale, barely one out of two taxpayers is liable for income tax. Individuals over the age of sixty-five and earning less than 9,080 euros a year and those aged sixty-five or under and earning less than 8,310 euros a year are exempt from income tax.

At the other end of the scale, 562 thousand taxpayers with a personal wealth of more than 79,000 euros have so far sent off a wealth tax declaration, compared with 539 thousand by the same date last year. France’s rich list is growing and what’s more, the rich are getting richer. The sum total of wealth tax has gone up to 3.29 billion euros this year. compared to the 3.13 billion paid in July 2009.

L’Humanite for more

Outstanding historian of the modern world with a trenchantly clear-sighted take on international politics

In his guise as a political and historical essayist, he was a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies and bullying cliques, from communist apologists to the Israel lobby, from “liberal hawks” to progressive educationists. And his political writings have proved not only perceptive but often prophetic.

He was born in the Jewish East End of London. Judt’s grandparents had all been Yiddish speakers from eastern Europe; his father had reached Britain by way of Belgium, and worked as a hairdresser among other occupations. Young Tony went to Hebrew school, learned some Yiddish, and was conscious of English “antisemitism at a low, polite cultural level”. For all that he would one day be denounced as an enemy of Israel, he retained a deep absorption with his heritage. “You don’t have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century,” Judt wrote, “but it helps.” It helped him.

Guardian for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Most critics of our present condition start with institutions. They look at parliaments, senates, presidents, elections and lobbies and point to the ways in which these have degraded or abused the trust and authority placed in them. Any reform, they conclude, must begin here. We need new laws, different electoral regimes, restrictions on lobbying and political funding; we need to give more (or less) authority to the executive branch and we need to find ways to make elected and unelected officials responsive and answerable to their constituencies and paymasters: us.

All true. But such changes have been in the air for decades. It should by now be clear that the reason they have not happened, or do not work, is because they are imagined, designed and implemented by the very people responsible for the dilemma. There is little point in asking the US Senate to reform its lobbying arrangements: as Upton Sinclair famously observed a century ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” For much the same reasons, the parliaments of most European countries—now regarded with sentiments ranging from boredom to contempt—are ill-placed to find within themselves the means to become relevant once again.

Open Democracy for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Link

During the six centuries of its storied existence, there was nothing else quite like Nalanda University. Probably the first-ever large educational establishment, the college – in what is now eastern India – even counted the Buddha among its visitors and alumni. At its height, it had 10,000 students, 2,000 staff and strove for both understanding and academic excellence. Today, this much-celebrated centre of Buddhist learning is in ruins.

After a period during which the influence and importance of Buddhism in India declined, the university was sacked in 1193 by a Turkic general, apparently incensed that its library may not have contained a copy of the Koran. The fire is said to have burned and smouldered for several months.

The Independent for more

(Thanks to reader)

A number of Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) officers who applied to be retired so as to take part in active politics want President Museveni to intervene in a matter in which they allege that senior ruling party figures have influenced the army leadership to block their retirement.

Sunday Monitor for more

In Canada, economic injustice is also mounting, specifically in Québec where the earning gap between the wealthy and the rest is at a 30-year high according to a recent study by Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-economiques. Major street protests in Montreal challenged a highly unpopular healthcare tax introduced in the past budget, a tax which undermines the principles of public healthcare while amounting to a $200-per-year flat tax by 2012 for all citizens. Essentially, someone earning $15,000 a year will pay the same in health tax as someone making $300,000 per year, “a fundamentally unequal and unjust social equation,” according to Québec Solidaire.

In Canada, cutbacks aimed at key public institutions in a time of economic crisis are widespread, while in Ottawa the Conservative government aims to cut corporate tax rates to 15 per cent by 2012. Canada will then have the lowest tax rate for corporations in G7 major economies – reducing annual government revenues by $14 billion as our society is forced to walk a financial tightrope.

Alternatives International for more

(Thanks to Feroz Mehdi)

This is not the first time that a British leader has gone to the subcontinent and returned with a bloodied nose. Indeed, there is a history of British politicians blundering into controversy on their visits to the region, leaving Whitehall to pick up the pieces. Remember January 2009, when David Miliband, the then Foreign Secretary, found himself thrust into the centre of an ill-tempered row over his tactless remarks on Kashmir and the Mumbai terror attacks? Or 1997 when Robin Cook, the newly-appointed Foreign Secretary, nearly ended up wrecking the Queen’s visit to India by infuriating Delhi with an offer to mediate on Kashmir prompting I.K. Gujral, India’s Prime Minister at the time, to tell him to mind his own business dismissing Britain as “a third-rate power”? More recently, Gordon Brown was involved in a very public spat with Islamabad when on a visit to Afghanistan in the dying days of his premiership he said that two-thirds of all terror plots foiled by British intelligence agencies were hatched in Pakistan.

The Hindu for more

If there’s a certain smell or sound that instantly brings back traumatic memories, it could be because those memories are stored—at least in part—in brain regions associated with the input of your senses, according to a study this week in Science.

Discover for more

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So does one calculate the arithmetic of defeat. But “defeat” does not mean the war is over. Indeed, the moment when it becomes obvious that victory is no longer an option can be the most dangerous time in a conflict’s history. The losers may double down, as the French and the United States did in Vietnam. They may lash out in a frenzy of destruction, as the United States did in Laos and Cambodia. Or they may poison the well for generations to come by dividing people on the basis of ethnicity, religion and tribe, as the British did when their empire began to disintegrate.
…
The most radical of these schemes is being floated by the former U.S. ambassador to India, Robert Blackwell, a neoconservative mainstay and currently a lobbyist for India. Blackwell proposes partitioning Afghanistan into two countries: an independent, Pashtun-dominated south, and a northern and western section where Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras make up the majority. According to the scheme , “Pashtunistan” would be kept in line by armed drones and 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. Special Forces.

Foreign Policy in Focus for more

The results confirm the widespread use of sexual violence against civilians – including males – since war broke out in the area in the mid-1990s. Nearly 40 percent of women and more than 23 percent of men surveyed reported having suffered sexual assault, mostly rape.

This study was the first to ask survivors about the gender of their attacker – 41 percent of female and 10 percent of male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence said the perpetrator was a woman.

IRIN for more

Howard’s story is not entirely unique — and experiences like hers are driving the government’s investigation into the efficacy and recruiting practices of for-profit colleges.

This week, a Government Accountability Office report detailed how for-profit recruiters often promise potential students unobtainable jobs and high salaries, and tell them to lie to procure more federal financial aid.

Huffington Post for more

“I left them all small — my daughter wasn’t even one month old. In videos — that’s how I’ve seen them grow up.”

“Since 2007 a group of young people from Tetlanohcan, Mexico have been working with filmmakers and theatre professionals from England and the USA, creating videos about their lives and their community. This video is one of them.” For more information, visit The Institute for Social and Cultural Practice and Research in Mexico

via Monthly Review

American weapons not yet used in combat are always tested in Israel’s wars (nowadays also in Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) In the war against Lebanon, cluster bombs, phospherous bombs and perhaps the vacuum bomb were used although the enemy was patently weak. Small wonder that the powerful American arms industry lobbies as vehemently for Israel as the no less powerful Jewish lobby does. Add to this the Israeli mindset. Army boss General Eitan justified the war on Lebanon by saying: “Since I have built and excellent war apparatus, I must make use of it.” Sharon said that since the last war was in 1973, a whole generation of Israeli soldiers had no experience of battle and needed to be given it.

Mainstream for more

My fundamental objection to the Games is the distortion it has introduced in national priorities and our sense of social justice, that privileges a “spectacular Games”, as the Prime Minister has assured the nation, over a spectacular reduction in child malnutrition—running at 47 per cent of children under five. Is it fair that thousands of the poorest families entering the national Capital—migrant workers fleeing desperate poverty in the rural hinterland—should suffer their shanty town on the right bank of the Yamuna being destroyed overnight in the environmental interests of protecting the unimpeded flow of the sewer we call Delhi’s principal river while promoting the Akshardham temple and now the Commonwealth Games Village on the left bank of the same river, ironically almost exactly opposite the demolished slum of Yamuna Pushta? In Gandhi’s India, does anything go in the name of God and Mammon?

Mainstream for more

(Thanks to Mukul Dube)

Now, three prestigious Pakistani universities have started outsourcing evaluation of dissertations on Urdu literature to Indian experts. The exercise underpins the unusual ways in which the two countries —often tethering on the edge of war — continue to connect. India is where Pakistan’s official
language — Urdu — was born and many of its men of letters had migrated to Pakistan after the Partition, such as Saadat Hassan Manto.

The Karachi University, Qaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, and the Alama Iqbal National Open University, Karachi, have tied up with Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu-e-Hind (Organisation for Progress of Urdu in India), a 110-year-old Delhi-based institution, to have it examine, guide and assess Pakistani students pursuing M.Phils and PhDs.

Hindustan Times for more

(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)

Sponges are an ancient group, with fossils dating back at least 650 million years. They are thought to have been the first group of animals to branch from all the others. Therefore, genes shared by sponges and other animals must have been present in the common ancestor of all metazoans. This ancestor would have evolved mechanisms to coordinate cell division, growth, specialization, adhesion and death; this suggests that early sponges already had a developmental set of tools similar to those in metazoans today, said Putnam, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Biology News Net for more

Two major newspapers have seriously mauled a letter to the editor I wrote earlier this week. It was drastic rewriting which came nowhere near “editing for length and clarity”; and, worse, not just the newspapers’ own words but their ideas too were attributed to me.

The first one: Asian Age, 4 August 2010

Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s statement that the “Centre was behaving as if Gujarat was not a part of India but an enemy nation” is sad. His aim, of course, is to win over his voters by telling them that they have been insulted and by implying that he alone can defend them. This time Mr Modi is tossing up the bogey of an insult to Gujarat’s judiciary. Is he thinking that the Centre doesn’t want an end to the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case? Mr Modi’s imagination is too far fetched.

The second one: Telegraph, 6 August 2010:

Narendra Modi’s attack on the government at the Centre was a tirade that has now become usual by his standards. The chief minister has established the practice of using the ‘people of Gujarat’ to justify his actions. His aim, no doubt, is to win voters by telling them that they have been ‘insulted’ and that he is the only one who can defend them. This time, he has conjured up the bogey of an insult to Gujarat’s judiciary.

Modi claims that the Centre treats Gujarat like an outsider and an enemy. Assuming that this is true, why should he be surprised when, by laying stress on Hindutva, he has gone against the grain of the secular Indian State? He has claimed a separate and distinct identity for his state. At the same time, he has clung to the political power conferred on him by the Indian polity. It is this power that enables him to commit atrocities and still escape unscathed.

My original can be seen at Globeistan. It is not perfect and it is not brief: but the ideas and words are mine.

Friends say that I should write more books than I have so far written. Perhaps I should get these ghost writers who masquerade as editors to write the damn things for me. As raw material to devastate, I shall give them a 900-word essay on the water buffalo which will, inter alia, contain a fair account of their antics.

As far back as the 1930s, for example, the United States maintained and updated plans for the invasion of Canada — and the Canadian military made plans to pre-empt the invasion.
…
The United States could “win” by dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons on Iran’s military bases, nuclear facilities and industrial centers and killing 5 to 10 million people, but short of that, nothing works.

The Japan Times for more

There was. There was a last straw. But it’s very important to emphasize that it was the sum total of a lot of things. There were some last straws that had to do with papal pronouncements, the pope going to Africa and declaring that condoms were not a good idea and would not help in the AIDS epidemic; the pope standing up in Portugal and saying that one of the most insidious evils faced by the world today is same-sex marriage. You know, we live in a world where genocide and human slavery are realities, and the pope chose to focus on same-sex marriage. That was a moment of, “What in the world am I doing connected to this religion?” But the real last straw, the very last straw, was the bishop of Phoenix, Ariz., Thomas Olmsted, coming out and publicly condemning a nun named Sister Margaret McBride for authorizing a life-saving abortion for a dying mother in a Phoenix hospital. What he said in essence was that she had excommunicated herself by authorizing the abortion, and I could write a book on why I think that was a ruthless and immoral decision.

Los Angeles Times for more

(Thanks to reader)

The Kenyan state was born in violence, and has been sustained by violence. Its function has been the plunder of the people and their resources. The ambition of the Proposed Draft is to turn the state towards the service of the people and the moulding of a common identity and loyalties, transcending both corruption and ethnicity. It is to be sustained by its legitimacy, not coercion.

One urgent prerequisite for achieving this objective is the end of impunity, for which an independent, committed and competent judiciary is essential. Another is the implementation of reforms of political parties, which, as in legislation now, current leaders and their followers have steadfastly violated. Most of all, we need to move away from politics as the preserve of millionaires to the birthright of all wananchi.

Pambazuka for more

Link

In Tennessee, groups carrying American and Israeli flags recently protested the development of a new mosque in Nashville. And this weekend, the state’s Lieutenant Governor said “You could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion or is it a nationality, way of life or cult, whatever you want to call it.”

When segments of other Abrahamic faith communities would like to see the marginalization of Muslim Americans, then we’re faced with our real problem in defeating Al-Qaeda, in preserving our pluralism, and in preserving our freedoms.

Huffington Post for more

(Thanks to Omar Hoda)

When the male phallus releases fluid
And penetrates the female egg:
Life is created

But when the British Phallus gushes liquid
And penetrates the marine life
Life is destroyed

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

Link

He said that a number of doctors had assured him that they would “paralyse hospitals across the province”. He said that the doctors had assured him that when they could “force the UAE government to release Dr Ayaz, our own government will not be able to sustain such protests for more than a week”.

The Express Tribune for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar. His comments: “The extent of craziness & Depravity. Doctors in Pakistan forgetting their solemn Hippocratic oaths to provide medical help to anyone regardless of their affiliations, origin and orientations.”

Research In Motion, the Canadian maker of the BlackBerry, faces a growing backlash from many governments as communications over the smartphone cannot be monitored.
…
As concern spreads like wildfire in the Middle East and parts of Asia over security issues with the popular BlackBerry smartphones, Turkey announced it is also reviewing the devices due to “security concerns.” On the global front, Saudi Arabia suspended BlackBerry messaging services on Friday, while India, Indonesia, Lebanon and Algeria were reportedly mulling similar moves.

Hurriyet for more

Orgasm Inc. Official Trailer from Astrea Media on Vimeo.

And now that you’ve seen facts

We, the pharmaceutical giants,
Are the few who
have power to change
Bodies, minds, habits, consumption

We create and/or distribute data
For others to spread the word
When Oprah says:
43% of the women suffer from FSD*
As many or more women feel they’re ill
and in need of our drugs

Our simple motto is an extension
Of the Utilitarian Philosophy

“The greatest good[s]
For the greatest number of people”
And the greatest wealth
For the diminutive number of people

We’re the miracle masters

We ignite desires
where none exists
and we routinely convert
desire into volcano

Our record speaks for us
The pills we introduced
Turned silken flesh
Into wooden poles

But the pitiable wooden poles
Are very insecure
And scared of the external world
They’re all looking for secure shelter

Now we’re on another mission:
To Be the creator and provider
We want to instill that
Welcoming instinct in the subjects
Whether the subjects
Want it or not

Because as creators
We know what’s best for them
And as providers
We know how to satisfy that need

Mr. Viagra alone can’t achieve much
he needs an equally passionate mate
So now we’re seeking approval for Ms. Alista
Or Ms. Intrinsa or Ms. Flibanserin
Or any other Ms. for him

Often times, lovers face a social wall
We’re facing the FDA wall
But we shall overcome this evil wall
Cause our money can drill through any wall

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

* Female Sexual Dysfunction.

Link

For power point slide show click Canvas Prison

(Thanks to Shahabuddin Haji)

Link

Into this Orwellian world, enter ‘Teflon Tony’ Blair, set to collect the latest in a glittering array of Awards for services to humanity. His contribution to the betterment of humankind has included enjoining the US, in the Afghanistan invasion and between 1997 and 2003, in the silent cull of an average of 6,000 Iraqi children a month, instructing Britain’s UN officials to veto everything from vaccines to ventolin, insulin to incubators and intubators, paper to pencils, female hygiene appliances, to aids for children at the schools for the blind and deaf.

New Internationalist for more

Unemployment in Spain has risen for the 12th quarter in a row to reach 20.09 per cent or 4.6 million people.

The Spanish economy moved out of recession at the start of the year, but the weak growth failed to put people back in work.

Economists believe that country will slip back into recession in the second half of the year as people loose faith in the banking sector and austerity measures kick in as Spain wrestles with its massive public debt.

Euro News for more

Link

This year, 2010, marks the bicentenary of Chile – that long, narrow, isolated strip of South America, stretching from the driest desert in the world to the glaciers of Antarctica. This year, 2010, is also the twentieth anniversary of democratic government in Chile, after 17 years of military rule under Augusto Pinochet. Despite the continuing struggle to come to terms with human rights violations during the dictatorship, economic and social reforms have brought Chile into the twenty-first century as a prosperous and stable nation. Another shift: Chile has a brand-new government and president, Sebastian Pinera, who is the first elected right-wing leader in 50 years. The ouster of the long-ruling centre-left Concertacion party, despite the enormous personal popularity of outgoing president Michele Bachelet, has sparked fresh debate about the country’s direction and future.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to read & listen

Meri qismat meiN Gham gar itna tha dil bhi ya-rab! kaee diye hote

When so much anguish was my fate, Oh Allah! You should have given me multiple hearts (to bear them)

Juz nam nahiN surat-e-aalam mujhe manzoor juz veham nahiN hasti-e-ashiya mere aage

World to me is just in name     Being of things to me is only an illusion.

Kya voh Nimrod ki khudaee thi? Bandagi meiN mera bhala na hua!

Was there Nimrod (False God) in his place (Of Allah), my prayers were never answered

On the one hand, Chinese liberals employ the rhetoric of individual rights, parliamentary democracy and free market capitalism in opposition to the state, yet find themselves in open support of the CCP’s drive to “liberalise” and push forward market reforms. By contrast, the Chinese “New Left” is left defending many aspects of the pre-1978 Maoist system and the last vestiges of state control over the economy while opposing state-driven market policies. With but a few exceptions, what remains is either tacit or explicit support for the CCP on both sides of the political spectrum. This rather bizarre phenomenon is related to the peculiar nature of the contemporary Chinese state. Thus, a clear understanding of the nature of the state is indispensable if the Chinese “left” is to have any hope of moving away from both its authoritarian past and its current capitalist trajectory.

LINKS for more

Shirley Sherrod, an official at the United States Department of Agriculture, was the latest intended victim of Andrew Breitbart, the right wing agent provocateur responsible for the assassination and ultimate demise of ACORN. Like ACORN, Sherrod was victimized by a Democratic administration which revels in its willingness to assist the right in throwing its own people under the proverbial bus. It is tragic but obvious that if John McCain and Sarah Palin were governing the country, Shirley Sherrod, ACORN and the rest of the Democratic party base could hardly be worse off than they are under the Obama administration.

Shirley Sherrod escaped outright character assassination only because a white Georgia farmer and his wife came to her defense and told the story of how she saved their family farm in 1986 when she worked for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund.

Black Agenda Report for more

In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama published an opinion piece in the Chicago Tribune entitled “Why I oppose CAFTA.” In his article, released on the same date as the Senate vote on the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (“DR-CAFTA”), Obama explained that he would not vote for the bill and voiced his opinion that DR-CAFTA “…does little to address enforcement of basic environmental standards in the Central American countries and the Dominican Republic.”1 Despite well-founded fears about the consequences of DR-CAFTA among its critics, President George W. Bush and his administration lobbied heavily for the passage of the bill, which was signed into law on August 2, 2005. El Salvador became the first of the Central American nations to implement DR-CAFTA after the treaty took effect in the country on March 1, 2006.

Council on Hemispheric Affairs for more

Link

The Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, Kerala, convened a press meet in Kozhikode on 21st May 2010 and Arif Ali, the state Ameer made the following statements. “Jamaat-e-Islami has enormous obligation to Abul ala Maududi, as he is the founder of the organisation. At the same time, the organisation is founded neither on his writings nor on his vision. Instead it is founded on Quran and the Hadiths. We wanted to make this clear since a long time and now we are doing it”. Arif Ali’s remarks are of paramount significance as it is for the first time that an office bearer of Jamaat-e-Islami, that too a state Ameer, openly stated that the organisation is not founded on the principles of Abul ala Maududi, its founder and hitherto guiding spirit. By asserting that the organisation is based on Quran and Hadith, and not on the ideas of Maududi, the Ameer was trying to erase the fundamental difference between Jamaat-e-Islami and other Muslim organisations. Later, though other leaders of the organisation tried to clarify that his remarks were misunderstood by the media and indeed Maududi is an important figure for them, the writing on the wall was clear. For the organisation, the founder and his ideology had become a liability, an unsettling ideological baggage that needed to be abandoned or at least covered up properly. The Jamaat-e-Islami had formally decided to do something that its founder would have despised, namely, field its own candidates and enter the political fray in the forthcoming panchayat elections in Kerala. The press meet was convened to make official this decisive moment in the history of Jamaat-e-Islami in Kerala.

The South Asian for more

(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)

Take the nearby war in Afghanistan and borders that are not exactly watertight, take poor living conditions, a precarious economy, governments that are somewhat kleptomaniac and grab everything (oil and methane gas) giving nothing in exchange, and take the absence of a constitutional state. Then take a religion such as Islam, which was severely repressed in the days of the Soviet Union. The mix of all these ingredients – identity, frustration, poverty and anger – could be explosive and result in extremism, facilitating the penetration of “Talibanism.” To tell the truth it seems that this has already happened. For some time now analysts have been reporting that the Afghan winds have started to blow over Central Asia’s former Soviet Republics, where Islamic radicalism, characterised by elements of armed struggle, is no longer just a phantom, but something that is tangible and real, especially in Kirghizstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In the first of these three countries the Hizb ut-Tahrir (Liberation Party), a group banned by local authorities, inspired to a philosophy involving the reintroduction of shari ‘a, has allegedly – according to recent news reports– abandoned the objective of pursuing its objective in a peaceful manner and has embraced the military option.

Reset Doc for more

Some dreams feel so revelatory—if only returning to sleep would take us back there. It turns out, however, that our ability to shape our dreams is better than mere chance. In the blockbuster movie Inception, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his compatriots use drugs and psychological profiles to trigger specific dreams in people. Although the heavy sedation and level of detail incited are far-fetched, dream control isn’t entirely a Hollywood fantasy.

Techniques to control, or at least influence, our dreams have been shown to work in sleep experiments. We can strategize to dream about a particular subject, solve a problem or end a recurring nightmare. With practice we can also increase our chances of having a lucid dream, the sort of “dream within a dream” that Inception’s characters regularly slip into.

Scientific American for more

“When the Pigford case was brought about, it was because black farmers were losing about 1,000 acres of farmland a day,” Gary Grant, president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association in North Carolina, told IPS. “The majority of the folks went out of business because of the discriminatory and racist actions of the agents of the USDA.”

The USDA engaged in “not giving access to loans, not giving access to programmes, not giving access to emergency loans, not giving loans in the full amount needed, slowing the process.”

“The stories never got told – USDA agent’s offices with nooses hanging on the wall, neckties with the Confederate flag on it, all kinds of subtleties of ‘boy, don’t forget where you are’,” Grant said. “Not one of them has been fired, not one of them has been demoted.”

Inter Press Services for more

(The Bible and the Gun, Part V, by Basil Davidson)

Basil Davidson has died in England aged 95.

Why should that concern me as an African?

Well, soon after my country Ghana gained its independence in 1957, thoughts that we had never been exposed to, in our missionary and government schools, began to sneak into our consciousness.

For instance, one black American historian/artist called Earl Sweeting, arrived in Accra and tried to interest us in a series of colourful post-cards he had drawn that carried such ‘provocative’ titles as ‘Africans teaching the Greeks mathematics’; ‘Africans teaching the Greeks medicine’; and ‘Africans teaching the Greeks philosophy.’

As editor of the monthly magazine, Drum, I was approached not by Sweeting himself but by his wife, a thin, husky-voiced African-American lady, to run an article on Sweeting’s work. I was quite keen to do it, but unfortunately, Sweeting said he had left the books that would support his claims in the US. As a hard-boiled journalist, this sounded like a self-serving excuse, and I stalled the lady by saying that it wasn’t possible for me to do anything until I could verify his statements independently.

Pambazuka for more

To mark the sad death of Basil Davidson, a long-time member of the IRR and member of Race & Class Editorial Committee, we reproduce below the editorial in the 1994 special issue of the journal.

‘When Race & Class was breech-birthed from Race, in the palace revolution that overthrew the empire loyalists who ran the Institute of Race Relations twenty years ago, its features were still undefined and its future unformed. All that those of us who were engaged in the hard graft of bringing out the journal knew was that if, as our first editorial stated, we wanted to think in order to do and not think in order to think, then we had to get rid of the arid scholarship of an editorial board that for long had set the tone and tenor of Race. What we did not know then was how much more tenacious academics were in holding on to the privilege of privatising and rarifying knowledge than were the capitalists in holding on to power. Some of them even insisted that the appointment of the editor who in the reconstructed Institute was to be elected by the staff must remain in their gift. In desperation, we sacked the lot (as the blank inside cover of the April ‘74 number would testify) and looked beyond academia to see who could help us harness learning to liberation. And our eyes fell on Basil Davidson and Thomas Hodgkin and Malcolm Caldwell and Ken Jordaan and, later. Eqbal Ahmad and Orlando Letelier.

Institute of Race Relations for more

“You are known for pushing the envelope, openly discussing female sexuality in your stories and novels in a way that hadn’t been done before . Isn’t that risky?”

This was the last question of Linda Lowen, the well-known feminist media person of America, to me in her interview for “The New York Times” owned portal About.Com

In India most of the female writers either quit writing or make them more adjustable to male dominated values, after their marriage? You find shyness in their voice while relating the truth and exposing their innerself?Even their weaknesses or love relations are also not expressed clearly in fear of social scandal of their character? A typical womanish shyness prevents them to write their actual feelings towards sex and love?This is not only due to any restriction imposed by their family, but many times we find that an idea of being a good girl pursues them to hide their own feelings and experience.

Red Room for more

After being told she needed to prove the Jewishness of her maternal lineage for four generations, Hillary Rubin is questioning her decision to move to Israel.

Hillary Rubin felt she was living out her ancestors’ dream when she decided to move to Israel in 2006. Now she says she is being forced to leave the country to fulfill her own dream – getting married.

“Zionism runs in my family,” the Detroit native says, adding that her grandfather’s uncle was Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow.

HAARETZ for more

According to a new Oxford University study, 55 percent of India’s population of 1.1 billion, or 645 million people, are living in poverty. Using a newly-developed index, the study found that about one-third of the world’s poor live in India.
…
As measured by the new index, half of the world’s poor are in South Asia (51 percent or 844 million people) and one quarter in Africa (28 per cent or 458 million). While poverty in Africa is often highlighted, the Oxford research found that there was more acute poverty in India than many African countries combined. Poverty in eight Indian states—Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal—exceeded that of the 26 poorest African countries.

World Socialist Web Site for more

via Counter Currents

(Thanks to Mukul Dube)

Mani Shankar Aiyar, a veteran Congress politician who has held various Cabinet positions in previous decades, and is presently a sitting Member of Parliament, has said the unsayable, indeed the unthinkable. Aiyar is characterized in yesterday’s Times of India as an “outspoken and somewhat maverick” politician on account of his outburst against the Commonwealth Games, though the consideration that his intellectual perspicacity, unusual for a politician of any party, may be one reason why he is a maverick seems not to have occurred to the Times’ writer. Aiyar has now gone on record with the view that the failure of the Commonwealth Games, scheduled to be held in Delhi this October, is – taking a leaf from Shakespeare — a consummation devoutly to be wished for. ‘I am delighted in a way’, said Aiyar recently, ‘because rains are causing difficulties for the Commonwealth Games. Basically, I will be very unhappy if the Games are successful because then they will start bringing Asian Games, Olympic Games and all these.’

It is not often that a senior politician, one moreover who has served as the Sports Minister and harbored close ties to the Nehru clan, would go on record hoping that the Commonwealth Games become a resounding failure. In some countries, such an observation would be tantamount to political suicide, and I would not be surprised that had some official in China made a similar comment before the onset of the Beijing Olympics, he or she would have been roasted alive on burning coals. One might say that Aiyar is no longer eyeing a cabinet seat, or, if one had a more expansive view of the matter, Aiyar’s comment may be taken as a testimony to the ‘live and let live’ mentality that, after all the fistfights, scuffles, abuses, and occasionally violence that mark the relationships between Indian politicians, still characterizes the world of Indian politics. To be sure, Aiyar’s remarks did not go down well with Suresh Kalmadi, the chairperson of the organizing committee, or Sheila Dikshit, the Chief Minister of Delhi. Aiyar’s remarks, Kalmadi charged, are ‘anti-national’ and ‘irresponsible’. To be called an anti-national these days in India is to invite comparison with Maoists, terrorists, or young insurgents in Kashmir, and if Kalmadi had any of these comparisons in mind, his own rebuke of Aiyar strikes one as bordering on the ‘irresponsible’. (This is not at all to say that Maoists or Kashmiri insurgents are anti-national, but the overwhelming middle-class propensity to think so must be kept in mind in assessing Kalmadi’s remarks.)

Let us, however, leave aside for the moment the redoubtable Aiyar and the dull Kalmadi. We can turn our attention more profitably to this elephant in the room called ‘Commonwealth Games’. Obscure as they are, the most monumental non-event planned in India in decades, the Commonwealth Games are giving Indian officials, who have a monstrously mistaken idea of the importance of these games, sleepless nights. Mrs. Dikshit, an intelligent, highly experienced, and shrewd politician, has more reason than anyone else to feel troubled and restless. Unlike Mani Shankar Aiyar, she would feel exceedingly unhappy, I should say wretched, if the Games failed. With just a little over two months left before the commencement of the Games, Delhi, which is supposed to showcase India to the rest of the world – assuming, as we shall see, that the ‘rest of the world’ is at all interested in this sporting event – appears woefully unprepared to host the games. Most of the stadiums have not yet been completed, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, which was inaugurated earlier this week, has already sprung a leak. Connaught Place, once viewed as the pride of the city, has the appearance of a war zone, and nearly the entire city has been dug up by the MCD, CWPD, NDMC, and other government agencies. [Yes, India is a country of acronyms, as I have observed before on this blog -- here, at any rate, are the translations, respectively: Municipal Corporation of Delhi; Central Works Public Department; New Delhi Municipal Corporation.] Delhi has three World Heritage sites, which are expected to receive many more visitors during the Games, and none has the basic facilities mandated as a condition for continued listing.

Let us, however, suppose that the city’s officials pull off a miracle and everything is patched together just in time for the opening ceremony. Whether out of respect for the ‘Father of the Nation’, whose birth anniversary is celebrated on October 2nd, a national holiday in India, or owing simply to the calendar set by the international secretariat, the Commonwealth Games are scheduled to open on October 3rd. (We can add Gandhi’s name to the list of those who would have been unhappy, not, in this case, either by the success or the failure of the Games, but by the very idea of the Games. So, in our inventory, we already have three forms of unhappiness.) The most expensive tickets to the opening ceremony, which the organizers hope will instill incalculable pride in the inhabitants of Delhi, cost an astounding Rs 50,000 [see http://www.cwgdelhi2010.org/] — an amount that would be nearly equivalent to the annual earnings in Delhi of many a maid, night watchman at a factory, and unskilled worker. Mr Aiyar claims, justifiably so, that the astronomical amount, something in the neighbourhood of Rs 30,000 crores [1 crore = 10 million], spent on preparing India or rather Delhi for the Games would have been better spent on enhancing sports facilities in Indian towns and villages and giving training to tens of thousands of school-children. Others have argued, just as plausibly, that many of the huge stadiums are likely to lie idle once the Commonwealth Games are over, and that the Games have drained the country’s resources.

There is no gainsaying the merit of these arguments, and Indian critics might make a yet stronger case by pointing to the Athens Olympics, which, by some estimates, put Greece on the course of economic disaster. The city of Montreal was paying for its Olympics three decades after the fact. Nevertheless, the folly of holding the Commonwealth Games runs much deeper than is commonly imagined, though this can only be gauged by considering the immense psychological, cultural, and political investment India has made in the Games. The Indian state and its mandarins are labouring under the impression that the Commonwealth Games will bring India before the world stage and enhance the prestige of the country, something – though admittedly on a smaller stage – like what the World Cup has allegedly done for South Africa or what the Chinese thought that the Beijing Olympics did for the People’s Republic of China, but this is a wholly erroneous view. The idea of the Commonwealth is obsolete, and has never meant anything more to people in India, Ghana, Nigeria, and other former British colonies than the prospect of studying in Britain on a Commonwealth Scholarship. To the rest of the world, the Commonwealth is about as hot a topic of conversation as Lapland. The Americans don’t have the foggiest idea about the Commonwealth, but this will not suffice as a demonstration of the sheer irrelevancy of the Commonwealth (and its Games) since the Americans are in any case colossally ignorant about much of the world. The point here is that no one else in the world much cares about the Commonwealth either. The Indian government is claiming that it expects to receive something like an additional 40,000 overseas visitors, but if the foreign tourists had their wits about them, they might understand why those among Delhi’s citizens who can afford it plan to flee the city during the Games. The city will be lucky if it gets any foreign tourists beyond the norm.

India has aspirations to be a world power, or at least a country of considerable consequence for its neighbors in south, southeast and west Asia, and it views the Commonwealth Games as a platform to stake its claim to be taken seriously as an emerging power. However, the Commonwealth Games are not merely a poor cousin of the Olympics, but rather a sure sign of the continuing irrelevance of India in the larger arena of world affairs. In this respect, how the Commonwealth Games turn out is quite immaterial, though Mani Shankar Aiyar is doubtless right that a successful Games, whatever that might mean, will be construed by the Indian state as a sign to move on to something bigger. The Commonwealth Games is, in the last analysis, a rather trifling and tiresome affair – and it should be treated as such.

Vinay Lal’s blog is Lal Salaam