Category Archives: Politics

Can next Army Chief of Pakistan get rid of anti-India lot? By Cyril Almeida in Dawn

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ULTIMATELY, they’re going to have to do it. They know it, we know it and the targets do too: decommission the favourites; defang the good ones.

Get rid of militancy.

Think of it as an arc: from Musharraf to Kayani to Raheel to the next chief, a progressive clampdown against groups that had to be taken on.

For Musharraf, it was Al Qaeda — 9/11 changed the world and the world changed how we did business.

From Kayani to Raheel, a second purge — the anti-Pakistan lot. They came after us, so we had to go after them.

And soon the next chief — confronted with the spectre of a roiling Kashmir and the long-term presence of a right-winger in Delhi causing the last line standing to go into agitated motion.

Something will have to be done before they do us in.

One, two, three — is there an arc of inevitability to it? Each successive chief having to go incrementally further than the last, not necessarily because he wanted to, but because he had to.

Lost in the warfare of the last month was an important consensus: the civilians said something needed to be done and the boys agreed — though, tellingly, the civilians resisted other actions in Punjab.

But the path to recognising that something has to be done about the anti-India lot has begun to be trodden.

It is the logic of utility, institutional self-preservation and the mechanism of jihad: if the groups exist, they occasionally have to go into action; and when they do, the outside world has a reaction.

Once, twice, thrice — from Mumbai to Pathankot to Uri, the future is being written for us.

Uri was perhaps the least significant and so the reaction the most telling. Pathankot was really the bigger deal, but it came a week after Modi’s Christmas Day Lahore surprise.

He couldn’t react as angrily because he had just pushed open the door to normalisation. So India swallowed its rage and the world kept quiet.

When Uri happened, there was no such luck. India went into a rage and the world sympathised, even before the facts were known.

On India, we don’t have the advantage we have with the Afghan-centric lot. There we can always nudge them across the border — go home to where you belong, we can tell them when the time comes.

With the anti-India lot, this is home. They’re from here and this is where the fallout will be suffered.

And so this is where they’ll have to be dealt with.

The past offers some clues about what the future could look like. With Al Qaeda there was an opening wallop followed by sustained action.

The wallop came because 9/11 was momentous. It is how history will be measured, time before 9/11 and time after.

The sustained, years-long pursuit of Al Qaeda, in Fata and the cities, came because America insisted and America had the resources to make sure we listened.

But then came the Osama anomaly — what the hell was he doing here for those long years in plain sight?

The lesson: we’re like the kid who hates homework. We’ll make a show of it in the beginning and then find reason to go slow or switch off.

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The New Western Civilzaion

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Shared by Dr. Syed Ehtisham

The New Western Civilization:

M.K. Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western Civilization said, “It would be a good idea”. 

By the 16th century AD, the West was entering the industrial age by the 16th century AD, and exported it to North America later. They would impose it on the rest of the world in the 19th and 20thcenturies. It would adversely affect all the religions. Islam, as a reaction to humiliation in the post-colonial world, would experience a revival, with traumatic results.

It was based on Mercantilism which developed into capitalism. Capital would accrue from surplus value. Expensive innovations and inventions became affordable as technology made ceaseless replication of infrastructure feasible. Empires based on agriculture had inevitably run out of their financial base and could not compete with those based on industry. They were conquered (Turkish) or imploded (Russia).

But there was a catch; greed drove to too much production. The capacity of consumers would be exhausted. The process would go through cyclical crises. Free trade would not allow central planning. 72.

Profit was the difference between the cost of production and the value of the product. Labor wages were an important component of the cost and reducing them as much as possible became the goal of the capitalists.

Markets had to be found for excess production. Terms of trade had to be imposed on less developed countries. Their indigenous industries had to be stopped from competing (for example textiles and Indigo in India). Colonization made actual control over the assets of other societies possible. This happened in Asia and Africa.

In societies in early stage of development the natives were driven off their land and confined to inhospitable areas. They were killed with guns and germs, with impunity. This happened in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.

The process of capitalism took three centuries and involved industrialization, and change of social relationship from feudal-peasant/serf to capitalist and working class.

Ideas and inventions had to meet the test of rational explanation.

Discoveries in medicine and hygiene made life longer. Inventor and the scientist became the new heroes of capitalist, the ruler. Better transportation facilitated the transport of end products to colonies and raw material from regions under control of the west.

Capitalism could not replace the solace provided by myth/religion. From early 16th century AD, en mass despair, depression and other psychiatric disorders spread like the plague. Reformers tried to offer solace. But they too were subject to the mental sickness. Martin Luther (1483-1546) suffered from bouts of depressions and uncontrollable rage. Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and John Calvin (1509-64) suffered from the same afflictions. 73.

In pre-modern age religion symbol was one with the reality it represented. Now Eucharist was just a symbol. Mass re-enacted sacrificial death of Christ and made it a present reality. Invention of printing made scripture available to the masses and they became less dependent on the clergy.

Astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) himself a religious man, saw his work in a religious light. But his findings demolished the myth that human beings occupied central place in the universe as they were shown to be living on an unremarkable planet revolving around a minor star. 74.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in England declared in his Advancement of Learning (1605), that science would put an end to human misery. Religion should be subjected to high criticism. 75. Sir Issac Newton (1642-1727) believed his discoveries proved the existence of god, the great ‘Mechanick’, who had brought the intricate machine of the universe into being. He felt that he had a mission to purge Christianity of such doctrines as Trinity. He took it literally and not, according to Karen Armstrong, a doctrine devised by Greek theologians as a myth. Gregory, Bishop of Nicaea (335-395) had explained that Father, Son and Spirit were not objective, ontological facts, but only the ‘terms that we use’ to express in which the limitations of human mind can adapt to and comprehend the ‘unnamable and unspeakable’ divine nature. 76.

The French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, another deeply religious academic was horrified by the ‘eternal silence’ of the infinite universe opened up by science, “…I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. 77.

The 18th century AD enlightenment seemed to lift the cloud of universal desperation. John Locke (1632-1704), had no doubt that God existed, though it was impossible to prove it. The German and French Enlightenment Schools saw religions as outmoded as did the British. They believed that logos alone could lead to truth.

But people believed that witches had sex with demons and flew through air to participate in orgies. The great Witch Hunts took over the 16th and 17th centuries AD. That led to the execution of thousands of men and women. 78.

Self-destructive new Christian movements emerged. Quakers quaked, trembled, yelled and howled in their meetings. Puritans tried to use religion as a vehicle to convince the working class that they should be content with their current state, because the “kingdom of Heaven was theirs”. 79

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) representing an emerging trend in the 19th AD Europe that religion was actually harmful, argued that it actually alienated people from humanity. Karl Marx (1818-83) called it the Opium of the People.

Publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1858) caused a furor exposing the struggle between science and religion. Christians felt existentially threatened by the book.

Higher Criticism of the Bible, which applied scientific methodology to the Bible, showed that many of the book’s claims were demonstrably untrue. The Pentateuch had been written not by Moses, but by many authors, much after him. King David did not compose the Psalms.

The Higher Criticism is still a thorn in the side of Christian fundamentalists, who take the Bible as the literal Word of God (and Muslim fundamentalists too. Scholars have been working on the Higher Criticism of the Koran). 80.

Secular crusaders like Thomas H. Huxley (1825-95) asserted that people must choose between mythology/religion and science and a compromise was not on cards. Truth was what was “demonstrated and demonstrable”. 81.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900 AD) announced in 1882 AD that God was dead. Modern men and women had killed it by insisting on reaching God as a wholly notional truth through critical intellect. The Madman in his “The Gay Science” asked “Is there still an above or below?  Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness? 81.

Religion, to the utter delight of the ruling establishment throughout the ages, had preached to the poor the acceptance of their lot on this earth. Without that, people went into despair. Religion co-opted science in Auschwitz, the Gulag and Bosnia. Imperialism used it to kill millions with nuclear power. Global corporations used technology to fight socialism in Afghanistan and released the hydra-head of Islamic Jihadism and were hit by 9/11. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind!

 

 

 

  1. 70. Seyyed, Hossein Nasser : “The Meaning and Role of “Philosophy” in Islam” (Paris, Maisonneuve & Larose, 1973).
  2. 71.  Demetrios J. Constantelos,  “Understanding the Greek Orthodox Church” (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press 3rd edition, 2005)
  3. 72. Hobsbawm, E.J, “ Industry and Empire,” (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.: Penguin, 1968).
  4. 73. Ehrenreich, Barbara, “Dancing in the Streets,: (New York, Henry Holt and Co, 2006);
  5. 74. Armitage, Angus,” The World of Copernicus” (New York, NY: Mentor Books, 1951).
  6. Bacon, Francis, “The Advancement of Learning,” (Adelaide:published by eBooks@Adelaide, 2013).
  7. Leo Donald Davis, “The First Seven Ecumenical Councils” (Wilmington DE: Michael Glazier Inc., 1983).
  8. Pascal, Blaise, “Pen’sees” trans A.J. Krasilshiemer, (London: Penguin Classics, 1995);
  9. 78. Witch Hunt Lois Martin, “A Brief History of Witchcraft,” (New York, Running Press. p. 5. 2010).
  10. 79. Lovelace, R.C, “Puritan Spirituality: the Search for Rightly Reformed Church” in Loius Dupre and Don E. Saliens (eds), Christian spirituality: Post Reformation and Modern, (Spring Valley New York: Crossroad Publishing Co, 1991), 313-315;
  11. 80. Maier, Gerhard, “The End of Historical-Critical Method,” (Concordia: Concordia Press, 1974); Soulen, Richard N,; Soulen, Kendall, R.; “Handbook of Biblical Criticism (#rd rev and expanded . ed),” (Loiisville, KY: West Minster John Knox Press, 2001).
  12. Huxley, T.H., “Science and Christian Tradition”, (New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1898), 125;
  13. Friedrich Nietzsche “The Gay Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181

 

 

Turkey’s Thirty-Year Coup – The New Yorker

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Shared by Dr. Nasik Elahi

This article opens a window into another Islamic movement headed by yet another
religious/political leader with a messianic message.  The gulenists are a formidable
movement that is shaping the future of Turkey and the region in yet unknown ways.
Nasik

 
 
This article opens a window into another Islamic movement headed by  yet another religious/political leader with a messianic message.     The gulenists are a formidable movement that is shaping the future ofTurkey and the region in yet unknown ways.
Nasik

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/turkeys-thirty-year-coup?mbid=nl_161011_Daily&CNDID=17878219&spMailingID=9670305&spUserID=MTMzMTc5NjY5Nzg4S0&spJobID=1020852209&spReportId=MTAyMDg1MjIwOQS2
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Arab World: Searching Reason in Ruins of Insanity

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Arab World: Searching Reason in Ruins of Insanity

Mahboob A Khawaja, PhD.

Failed International Institutions are Dehumanizing Global Mankind

Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo – the hubs of ancient cultures and civilizations are targets of man-made destructive instinct. Arab leadership political incapacity is joined by complacency and result is the worst combination of tyranny and cruelty to humanity. Is it an inevitable Divine punishment to the Arab leaders for their meddling in affairs they lack imagination and power? Western warmongering and Arab authoritarianism have destroyed what took centuries to human ingenious and intellect to build for future generations. How do you reason with monstrous acts of bombing and killing the innocent people – a ‘right man’ syndrome in its worst naked form and shape? Retrieved historic diplomacy and fake persuasive dialogue is esoteric doctrine fraught with ignorance and arrogance. The civilized world sees the deliberate massacres of people and torture and destruction of the habitats through the books, media analysis and conceits and speaks boldly of peace and security, human rights, law and justice but practice gross indifference and jargons of empty elegance and meaningless futility. Daily carnage of the civilian deaths and consequential perils of bloodbath in Aleppo, Baghdad, Damascus and elsewhere across the Arab world will put to shame what is called diplomacy and peaceful negotiations for ceasefire while the resourceful nations are competing in brutal warfare. Both America and Russia are capable to recapitulate peace, not cruelty in the Arab political theater. The Arab leaders on their own have no cohesive intellectual capacity and policy for peace and normalization. The oil exporting Arab states rely on foreign masters (USA- Britain) and in the case of Bashar al-Assad (Syria) on Russia to do the political horse trading. None have the capacity to view human life as sacred and respectable. They were divided and destroyed by the transitory prosperity of petrodollar. If America and Russia were to mock intransigence and realize the value of peace and security in the region, they could win what is unthinkable for global peace and security. Peace will not happen when insanity replaces rationality in human affairs. History is repeating itself what went wrong when powerful nations shrink intellectually to become spectators rather than active peacemakers. The failure of the League of Nations allowed Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japanese Empire to occupy the weak and poor nations and impose their logic of power paving ways for the 2nd World War. We witness the UNO in similar parables. Western military interventions and Arab authoritarianism have ruined the whole landscape of the Arab Middle East. How to reverse the anarchism of the few against many in a world determined by the powerful nations at the UN Security Council? The States occupying the nerve center of political power are not accountable for their actions to the larger segment of humanity. The failure of the global institutions ‘to protect the mankind from the scourge of wars’ is just paper-based proclamation lacking proactive imagination and force to transform it into formidable action. All wars are against the human nature. The global institutions are not responsible to the humanity which ultimately is victimized for their failure. Common masses across Europe and elsewhere suffered the dreadful consequences of the two World Wars, not the League of the Nations. Likewise, the UNO and its agencies watch the catastrophic killings and destruction happening throughout the Arabian Peninsula but do little to stop the carnage. Its reports and findings are being questioned and sometimes ridiculed by its own members of the Security Council. The Security Council produces empty jargons for time killing not commitments to peacemaking or conflict management. How strange the so called wisemen of the globe exchange claims and counter claims of ‘war crimes’ when thousands are targeted and massacred by cluster bombs in Aleppo, Baghdad, Homs and hospitals and places of warships are destroyed? They lack sense of humanity, time and history. What happened to the negotiated freedom of Palestine ending the Israeli occupation, protection of the civilians in conflict zones, rights of the refugees and displaced, and continuing Indian betrayal to the rights of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to determine their own future? At large, the aspirations and trust of humanity are betrayed and scorned by the global institutions. This state of affairs reflects complete breakdown of the global systems of governance and march towards self-annihilation. We are witnessing and living in that delusional culture of human degeneration. Animosity and wars are not outgrowth of celestial bodies but essentially man-made follies throughout the history. All human acts are subject to change and reformation. What was illegal to use barrel bombs and chemical warfare are new normal in Syria and Iraq. The resulting deaths of the civilians and destruction of the Arabian habitats are deliberate and systematic. Who will rebuild what is being destroyed as a price to enhance insanity of the few authoritarian warlords? The global political affairs need new thinking, new leadership vision and men of new ideas to restore trust and rational foresight for the future of mankind.

Post 9/11 American led “War on Terrorism” is Fueling the Arab Conflicts

Michael Meacher (“This War on Terrorism is Bogus”, The Guardian: 9/6/2003), British MP and Environment Minister in PM Tony Blair cabinet from May 1997 to June 2003 explain that the 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) written by the neo-conservatives in September 2000 before 9/11 – it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a “worldwide command and control system”. This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis.

The ‘War on Terror’ had wide range of unspecified agendas for long time to come:

  • to occupy the Arab heartland and to offer extended strategic and political supremacy to Israel in the Middle East,
  • To distract the focus from the freedom and peaceful resolution of Palestine as an independent State and defy the global support for human rights,
  • to control and manage the oil and gas resources of the Arab Middle East,
  • to inject fear and powerful hegemonic influence of the Western culture and varied civilizations,
  • to divide and rule the Arab and Muslims people from distance powerhouses,
  • to create new markets for the dollar and to block trade-business entry of China into the exclusive American Middle East market,
  • to entice ignorant Arab population with false imagery of freedom, liberty and social justice and make the mindless rulers fearful of the US-Europe influence in their future-making,
  • To dismantle the socio-economic and political infrastructures of the Arab-Muslim world, encouraging internal strife and sectarian bloodsheds and making them subservient to the US-European military and economic subjugation.
  • And lot more piles of tyranny and insanity to come

Wake Up Arab People – You are Being Destroyed by the Turmoil and Chaos of Sectarian Wars

Many across the global intellectual hubs think that like the Al-Qaeda and the ISIL is a by-product of the US-British strategy in the Arab Middle East. Its immediate role and outgrowth is a new cult of sectarian barbarism to distract political attention from the focal issue of Palestine and solidarity of the Arab people. Its secretive aim encompasses the strategy that once oil exporting Arab puppet regimes become a liability on the Western powers, they should be subjected to domestic challenge by their own rebellious groups forging affiliation to extremism and anti- authoritarianism. All of the American-led war efforts directed against ISIL appear to be fake simplicity and are aimed at maximum destruction of humans and habitats under the aegis of “War on Terrorism.”

The global political affairs are not managed by rational people with rational thinking, doing the rational practices for the best interests of global citizenry. The 1% global elite – men of king operate the international institutions – the perverted insanity lacking basic understanding of the Human Nature and of the working of the splendid Universe in which we enjoy coherent co-existence. These global leaders are devoid of moral, intellectual and spiritual values essential to deal with human affairs. President Obama and President Putin and others resourceful to making peace would not listen to voices of reason unless challenged by a cohesive global humanity with focused mind and active agenda.

Chris Hedges – author of Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (“How to Think“, Truthdig: 7/9/2012) offers a global context to perpetual animosity and dreadful notion of hatred encouraging the few warmongers to undermine the very existence of humanity of which they are an essential part:

And here is the dilemma we face as a civilization. We march collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.

To Rethink in Time and History for the Unity of Mankind to Resolve Conflicts

If time and history are a reference point, we the humankind stand at a critical juncture of our own complacency to have allowed ignorance, hatred, fear and animosity to destroy our lives, culture and existence. Those obsessed with invincible armies cannot solve the emerging political crises. America and Russia cannot be blamed for all the catastrophic happenings across the globe. They represent the States, not the living humanity. Men of new ideas possessing individual conscience have the most powerful weapon to challenge the few egoistic politicians in global chessboard. Political self-interest pursued by intrigues and hypocrisy will not produce global peace and harmony. All global leaders want to be seen as winners, not losers. Ironically, when self-interest overtakes global interest, they are a scum floating on the torrent of time. Intellectual and moral turmoils are the two shades of disingenuous politics at the global political theater. The informed global community deserves sincere commitment to peace and harmony, not slanderous blame of ‘war crimes’ against one another. Such rebuttals darken the prospects for workable alternatives and creative solutions in critical conflict management. The working of international institutions is at crossroads. Nobody can imagine any miracles out of the nothing, be it at the UNO-New York, Washington or Moscow. Often sadistic dummies oversee critical lifelines of global humanitarian affairs. We must regain control of our own potentials and powers; analyze our strength and weaknesses as united and organized people of the globe. We the people can change even if the leaders lack imagination of our hopes and priorities. Political gangstrism will expand into insane egoism to cause the downfall of the few as it happened to Hitler, Mussolini, Hosni Mubarak, George Bush, Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad in-waiting game. The earth won’t dwindle or the sky won’t fall upon us if more will go the same way as happened in recent history. All absolute political monsters understand each other. The voices of reason are loud and clear as global humanity cannot suffer the penalties of tyranny and evil-mongering. We the people of the world enjoin focused minds and imagination to articulate a new world of One Humanity, brotherhood and peaceful co-existence amongst all, free of hatred, intrigues tyranny, encroachment and animosity.

We, the people of the globe possess understanding – how to change the egoistic and embittered insanity of the few hate-mongers and warlords into equilibrium of balanced relationship between Man, Life and God- given living Universe in which we reside all.

The well wishers across the globe would like to see the Arab masses to unite against the forces of authoritarianism, sectarian killings and torture of the innocents, be it in Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Tripoli, Cairo or elsewhere. Peace will prevail as a fact of life, not a fiction on screen. In his farewell address to the people of America, President D. Eisenhower (01/17/1961), made the following proactive political, intellectual and strategic priorities known to all:

“…. Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent, I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and lingering sadness of war – as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years…… We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied, that those who denied the opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full…….. That the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution　with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author　of several publications including Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Germany, 2012), and forthcoming publication – One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Security, Peace and Conflict Resolution).