Month: March 2010

SAARC Summit 28 March, 2010 – Come the SAARC summit, the royal Bhutan police will be introducing a government approved traffic system, whereby only odd or even number vehicles will be allowed to ply in Thimphu on alternate days (see box) during the summit week.

According to the plan, only last digit odd number vehicles will be allowed to ply in Thimphu on the April 26, 28 and 30. For example BP-1A-1231.

Similarly, on alternate days, only last digit even number vehicles will be allowed to move on April 27 and 29. For example BP-1A-0122.

Movement of heavy vehicles, likes trucks and excavators, will not be allowed during the day at all irrespective of number.

The odd and even number ban will be lifted from 8 pm to 7 am, when movement of all types of vehicles, including trucks, will be allowed.

KUENSEL for more

by B. R. GOWANI

Millions of people visit internet now
including the Hindu, Muslim, Jew, and Tao

On it are conducted frauds and works
and is inhabited by the wise and jerks

Believers make up a huge market too
so there are entrepreneurs that screw

Air Sampai guides your worship through
providing at every step a proper clue

Out of 30,000 temples, Fushimi is very nice
dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice

Beneficial it can prove in many ways
to water down the devotional blaze

During pilgrimages, many people die
in stampedes, leaving families to cry

Mecca has seen believers getting killed
India’s melas with such stories are filled

Yatras and hajj should follow that path
absolutely avoiding such deadly wrath

Most will have to settle for virtual things
as the real things will go to the rich and kings

A bit of astrological or educated guess
how God, gods, and goddesses will bless

The would be prophets will receive soon
messages via internet-angels and will swoon

To mountains or caves they need not go
in comfortable houses, to the lord they’ll bow

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

by EITARO TAKEYAMA

KYOTO–The introductory instructions are simple: Bow to your computer, refrain from smoking and put your pens out of reach to remove the temptation of drawing graffiti. And get your money ready.

You are now ready to enter the new world of “air worshipping.”

A website called “Air Sampai” (air worshipping) that enables people to experience worshipping at famous shrines and temples in Kyoto without leaving their homes has gained in popularity.

The website, operated by Kansai Multimedia Service Co., based in Osaka’s Kita Ward, uses real images to give viewers the experience of walking through the sites in Kyoto. It also provides instructions on how to “show off your sophisticated manner.”

Shrines and temples cooperating in the project hope the online experience will lead to an increase in tourism and revitalize the local economy.

The verbal explanations are in Japanese, but the site features English subtitles.

The popularity of the website, which currently receives about 60,000 hits a month, is attributed mainly to its lighthearted approach to the very serious practice of worshipping.

For example, in the “trip” to Kiyomizudera temple in Higashiyama Ward, viewers are instructed to squat several times to experience the strain of climbing the stairs.

Asahi Shimbun for more

by JEFFREY BLANKFORT

If the State Department had issued travel advisory warnings to US government officials about to travel to Israel, Vice President Joe Biden would have no doubt ignored them. A better friend to Israel could not have been found in the 36 years that Biden represented Delaware in the US Senate and there was speculation that his popularity among Jewish voters and major Jewish donors was the primary reason he was added to the Democratic ticket. According to all reports, Biden’s trip was to mend fences with the Israeli officials and with the Israeli Jewish public which had become disenchanted with the Obama administration where the president’s popularity is measured in the low single digits.

Indeed, even a day after having been blind-sided by the announcement that Israel would build 1600 new and exclusively Jewish housing units in East Jerusalem, Biden was still trying. In a prepared speech, he once again bragged, this time to a Tel Aviv university audience, that he was a Zionist and that, “Throughout my career, Israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as Vice President of the United States,” a statement that should raise questions about dual loyalties and which, curiously, was omitted from all reports on his speech in the US press.

In addition, Biden repeated what he said on his arrival in Jerusalem, that, “There is no space — this is what they [the world] must know, every time progress is made, it’s made when the rest of the world knows there is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to security, none. No space. That’s the only time when progress has been made.” Biden did not offer any examples of such progress and would have had a hard time doing so.

It was not until the end of his speech, after he had thoroughly regurgitated the standard Israeli line on the threats to its existence from Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, that he felt safe to offer words of criticism for his treatment at the hands of his hosts. The words of condemnation issued the previous day, however, were patently missing. Almost apologizing for doing so, Biden told his audience:

Counterpunch for more

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

As the hijackers boarded the airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, they had a lot on their minds. And if they were following instructions, one of those things was the Quran.

In preparation for the suicide attack, their handlers had told them to meditate on two chapters of the Quran in which God tells Muslims to “cast terror into the hearts of unbelievers.”

“Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them,” Allah instructs the Prophet Muhammad (Quran, 9:5). He continues: “Prophet! Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites! … Hell shall be their home, an evil fate.”

When Osama bin Laden declared war on the West in 1996, he cited the Quran’s command to “strike off” the heads of unbelievers. More recently, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan lectured his colleagues about jihad, or “holy war,” and the Quran’s exhortation to fight unbelievers and bring them low. Hasan is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last year.

Given this violent legacy, religion historian Philip Jenkins decided to compare the brutality quotient of the Quran and the Bible.

Defense Vs. Total Annihilation

“Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible,” Jenkins says.

Jenkins is a professor at Penn State University and author of two books dealing with the issue: the recently published Jesus Wars, and Dark Passages , which has not been published but is already drawing controversy.

Violence in the Quran, he and others say, is largely a defense against attack.

National Public Radio for more

via 3 Quarks Daily

Rest of the program:
Part II
Part III
Part VI

(Submitted by Mansoor Sharif)

by BHUMITRA CHAKMA

The continued violence in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh is rooted in the state’s policy of erasing the ethnic identity of the indigenous people and usurping their land for settling Bengali-speaking populations. In this, Bangladesh has followed the same policy as Pakistan and used the army and state machinery to suppress and evict the local people from their land and livelihoods. Unless the structural roots of this violence are addressed by the Bangladesh state, the cycle of violence will not end.

Table 1: Massacres in the Chittagong Hill Tracts

Place Date Number of Dead

Mubachari 15 October 1979 Number unknown

Kaukhali-Kalampati massacre 25 March 1980 200-300

Barkal massacre 31 May 1984 110

Panchari massacre 1 May 1986 Number unknown

Matiranga massacre May 1986 70

Commillatilla/Taindong massacre 18-19 May 1986 200

Hirachar, Sarbotoli, Khagrachari, Pablakhali massacres 8-10 August 1988 over 100

Longudu massacre 4 May 1989 over 30

Malya massacre 2 February 1992 30

Logang massacre 10 April 1992 138

Naniarchar massacre 17 November 1993 100

Sources: Compiled from various sources, including The CHT Commission (1997, 2000), Life is Not Ours: Land and Human Rights in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh, The report of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission; Amnesty International (1986), Bangladesh: Unlawful Killings and Torture in the Chittagong Hill Tracts; Mohsin (1999), The Politics of Nationalism.

Economic & Political Weekly for more

by ANDREW SULLIVAN

Having forcibly evicted Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem, the new inhabitants sing songs in praise of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein. And you really think the decision to make the site of that massacre a national heritage site for Israel had nothing to do with this association? Maybe AIPAC will wake up one of these days and see the reality that less informed and educated observers cannot miss:

Sheikh Jarrah Jews praise Baruch Goldstein on Purim

No, this is not representative of all Israeli opinion, as massive Israeli demonstrations against this latest provocation reveal, and as another brilliant column by Bradley Burston demonstrates. But open your eyes. Something is happening in the soul of Israel. And it carries great foreboding for peace … for the West, and above all, for Israel.

Atlantic for more

via 3 Quarks Daily

by SHAHLA HAERI

Law of Desire

via MRZine