Monthly Archives: September 2012

The Triumph and Tragedy of Greater Israel

Posted on by
Reply

By Henry Siegman in The National Interest.|

September 6, 2012

In this article the writer suggests that the two state solution is practically dead and Palestinians will be better off by demanding equal citizenship rights and thus exposing Israel’s apartheid policies.

The author writes:

“The Middle East peace process is dead. More precisely, the two-state solution is dead; the peace process may well go on indefinitely if this Israeli government has its way.

The two-state solution did not die a natural death. It was strangulated as Jewish settlements in the West Bank were expanded and deepened by successive Israeli governments in order to prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state. The settlement project has achieved its intended irreversibility, not only because of its breadth and depth but also because of the political clout of the settlers and their supporters within Israel who have both ideological and economic stakes in the settlements’ permanence.”

“Nothing would expose more convincingly the Israeli disguise of the one-state reality now in place than a Palestinian decision to shut down the Palestinian Authority and transform their national struggle for independence and statehood into a struggle for citizenship and equal rights within the Greater Israel to which they have been consigned. Only by declaring that Palestinians will no longer be complicit with their occupiers in their own disenfranchisement will Israelis be confronted with the need to choose between a two-state arrangement and a single state that sooner or later will lose its Jewish identity.” To read the complete article click on the link below.

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-triumph-greater-israel-7438

US mosque plan draws protest on ‘threat of Islam’

Posted on by
1

This news article shared by Tahir Mahmood.

WEST BLOOMFIELD: A Christian legal group that recently defended a US pastor who publicly burned a copy of the Quran is now attacking a plan to turn a vacant US school into a mosque, saying it wants to confront the ”threat of Islam” and stop a ”stealth jihad” to turn the country into an Islamic nation. Click below for complete news article.

http://dawn.com/2012/09/07/us-mosque-plan-draws-protest-on-threat-of-islam/

‘The Sita Syndrome’ By Alia Chughtai

Posted on by
Reply

This interesting article in ‘Dawn’ is about the modern girls facing stereotyping while trying to find a right suit for marriage.The author writes in concluding paragraph;

“And modern women, for all you boys-hoping-to-be-men-one-day, can just as much take care of home, build a family and give your children and your parents more well-rounded attention because she is more aware of herself and what she can do. So, the next time you let mommy pick a girl, rather than the one you’re dating because after all, if she can date you, or be with you intimately, what does that say of her character? But more importantly, what does that say of your character as a male who will give into his “adolescent desires” and exploit a girl? But alas, she should not give into desires, because she’s a Cyborg, wearing the Sri Devi outfit from Chandni.”

To read the complete article click on the link below;

http://dawn.com/2012/09/07/the-sita-syndrome/

 

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION

Posted on by
Reply

A Conversation with Joseph Henrich

An interesting article on Human evolution in “Edge.”

JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I’ve been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it’s so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we’ve begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

I’ve also been trying to think broadly, and some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started? Lately I’ve been pursuing the idea that it may have started early: at the origins of the genus, 1.8 million years ago when Homo habilis or Homo erectus first begins to emerge in Africa. Typically, people thinking about human evolution have approached this as a two-part puzzle, as if there was a long period of genetic evolution until either 10,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago, depending on who you’re reading, and then only after that did culture matter, and often little or no consideration given to a long period of interaction between genes and culture.

Of course, the evidence available in the Paleolithic record is pretty sparse, so another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago. One theoretical reason to think that that might be an important time to emerge is that there’s theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments. If you look at the paleo-climatic record, you can see that the environment starts to fluctuate a lot starting about 900,000 years ago and going to about six or five hundred thousand years ago.

To read the complete article click on the link below:

http://edge.org/conversation/how-culture-drove-human-evolution