Monthly Archives: January 2021

Gulf slave society-By Bernard Freamon

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The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies.

The six city-states on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf, each formerly a sleepy, pristine fishing village, are now all glitzy and futuristic wonderlands. In each of these city-states one finds large tracts of ultramodern architecture, gleaming skyscrapers, world-class air-conditioned retail markets and malls, buzzing highways, giant, busy and efficient airports and seaports, luxury tourist attractions, game parks, children’s playgrounds, museums, gorgeous beachfront hotels and vast, opulent villas housing fabulously affluent denizens. The six city-states ­– Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Manama in Bahrain, Dammam in Saudi Arabia, Doha in Qatar, and Kuwait City in Kuwait ­– grew into these luminous metropolises beginning in the 1970s, fuelled by the discovery of oil and gas, an oligarchic accumulation of wealth, and unconditional grants of political independence from the United Kingdom, the former colonial master of the region. Thereafter, the family-run polities that took control of these city-states began to attract huge amounts of financial capital from all over the world. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, has been described as ‘the richest city in the world’, with wealth rivalling that seen in Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Like those cities, Abu Dhabi is swimming in over-the-top affluence. According to a 2007 report in Fortune magazine, Abu Dhabi’s 420,000 citizens, who ‘sit on one-tenth of the planet’s oil and have almost $1 trillion invested abroad, are worth about $17 million apiece’.

The Persian Gulf has a venerable history, stretching back to ancient times. It has always been a cosmopolitan and diverse centre of wealth and commerce. For nearly 1,000 years, Dilmun, a Bronze Age Arabian polity based in what is today Bahrain, controlled the trading routes between ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus river valley. During the Abbasid caliphate, a 500-year-long Islamic empire based in Baghdad, mercantile entities in Basra and al-Ubulla, at the head of the Gulf, dominated trade and commercial links with East Africa, Egypt, India, Southeast Asia and China. One could buy anything in this trade, including giraffes, elephants, precious pearls, silk, spices, gemstones and very expensive Chinese porcelain. Omani Arabs, who periodically controlled the maritime entrance to the Gulf at the Strait of Hormuz, were known as the ‘Bedouins of the Sea’. They came to control the trading routes with East Africa, transporting spices, precious stones and many other luxury commodities.

Slavery and slave trading formed a major part of this commercial history, particularly after the advent of Islam. Africans, Baluchis, Iranians, Indians, Bangladeshis, Southeast Asians and others from the Indian Ocean littoral were steadily and involuntarily transported into the Gulf in increasingly large numbers, for work as domestic servants, date harvesters, seamen, stone masons, pearl divers, concubines, guards, agricultural workers, labourers, and caretakers of livestock. Historians have noted that there was a great upsurge of slave trading into the region in the 18th and 19th centuries, during the heyday of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Many Persian Gulf families became very wealthy as a result of this upsurge. This is the backdrop for what turns out to be a very ugly and sad aspect of the spectacular rise of contemporary social orders in the six Gulf city-states. Each is an example, and perhaps the only examples existing in the world today, of what the sociologist Moses Finley (1912-86) called a ‘genuine slave society’.

Finley is one of the most important scholars of slavery. His book Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980) has had a profound effect on how scholars across the social sciences understand and study slavery. He argued that the slave, in contrast with the ordinary labourer, is an income-producing commodity – a species of property to be bought, sold, traded, leased, mortgaged, gifted and even destroyed, like other commodities – and this special status permitted exploitation of the slave in ways that were unique and central features of many societies. He divided these societies into two categories: those societies that could be described as ‘societies with slaves’ and those that he described as ‘genuine slave societies’, that is, those where slavery was an essential aspect of the society’s self-definition. The genuine slave society can’t function without the presence and work of its slaves. Some argue that the core definition of slavery has changed in contemporary sociological theory and practice since Finley’s time. This change recognises a phenomenon commonly described as ‘modern slavery’. I disagree. Applying Finley’s model to contemporary Persian Gulf societies, I argue that this change, indeed expansion, in the definition of slavery makes no difference in the analysis, and might make it even easier to apply the model to the Persian Gulf city-states. They are just as much genuine slave societies, using Finley’s analysis, as were the ancient societies he described.

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Can Poverty Be Eradicated

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Can Poverty Be Eradicated?

By:  Shoeb Amin

The opinions expressed in this submission are those of the author and do not reflect those of the TF and its editorial board

Recently China announced it has eradicated “extreme poverty” in its country one month ahead of its stated goal. If everything that comes out of Xi Jinping’s propaganda machine is to be believed- I usually take it with a whole can of salt – that is a miraculous achievement .

 But before we look at the veracity of China’s claim and look at how those goals were achieved we need some definitions of the word poverty. Extreme or absolute poverty is defined globally by the World Bank as an income of $1.90 per family per day. China decided it will have its own definition of extreme poverty – at 1.52/day/family  instead of the globally recognized 1.90/day/family (I told you) and declared it had eradicated extreme poverty. (See the Breitbart link below). It still is not a small achievement … but China did so by spending billions and  through forced relocation and forced labor (as reported in the LA times link below).

The  next category is “relative poverty” which the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development defines as an income less than half of the median income of all the country’s citizens. Thus the relative poverty level for India might be very different from that of Finland. The rates are in the following link. But instead of using these academic definitions I will refer to poverty, in my opinions below, to mean significant lack of the most basic necessities such as food, shelter, clothing and safety.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-rate-by-country
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/11/24/china-claims-it-has-eliminated-poverty-nationwide/
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-27/china-2020-poverty-eradication-dream

Some of the tactics China used to “eradicate its own definition of extreme poverty” would be considered human rights violations  in most other countries and cannot be applied everywhere. Since most of the world cannot adopt the Chinese formula what else can the rest of the world do? Solving any problem requires understanding the causes of the problem. Causes of poverty are complex and sometimes the causes and their effects form a vicious circle in the sense that one aggravates the other. According to UKEssaya the most common cause of poverty is hunger; if you are undernourished ,you don’t have the mental or physical energy to strive out of poverty. But hunger is also the effect of poverty so some people find themselves in a trap that they can never come out of.

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/economics/causes-and-effects-of-poverty-economics-essay.php

Christopher Sarlo of the Fraser Institute divides the the causes in 3 broad categories; “bad luck”, “bad choices” and enablement. Bad luck causes are those over which you have no control so if you are born as an untouchable in India or a Uyghur in China; or born with major physical and mental disabilities or born in a country  which is grossly mismanaged chances are you’ll end up in poverty. Personally I think being intellectually challenged  is the most common cause of poverty; it not only falls in the bad luck category (you can’t control the genes your parents give you) but also to a large extent in the bad choices category. The “bad choices” category includes dropping out of school, early child bearing, having children out of a committed relationship, drug use etc. Sarlo’s third category is “enablement” ; he believes by the govt. doling out welfare checks to the poor it actually perpetuates poverty.

Some people fall into poverty from”temporary” reasons like major natural disasters e.g. earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, war etc.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/causes-of-poverty

Now that we know all the causes of poverty can we eliminate them all and end poverty and hunger forever? I can categorically say NO, never. My view is not from pessimism, cynicism or negativism; it is just from realism that most of us do not want to accept.  Poverty has been with us since the time of the Pharaohs or even before that. It existed even before money was invented, when the rich had 100 sheep and the poor had one or none. It existed during all the great empires. It existed before capitalism and the industrial revolutions ( which some blame for poverty) came into being. Well meaning activists and philanthropists have tried for decades, if not centuries, to eradicate it and poverty still survives. I think wealth distribution, like our height and weight and other characteristics, will always vary on a bell shaped curve; there will always be folks below the 5th percentile (2 standard deviations below mean).There will always be people born with bad luck factors described above; always be people who make bad choices in life and there will always be a few – not all – people who, because of receiving their government’s financial assistance get trapped in that state or prefer to stay there. And there will always be populations living under Mugabe-like governments. You cannot make all those causes go away.

So am I saying helping the poor is a futile exercise? Not at all. Helping those who have fallen into poverty because of “temporary” causes listed above has very good results. Studies have shown that a majority of those so affected get back on their feet and get close to their previous financial state.Helping the chronically poor – certainly the ones who fall into the bad luck category – to alleviate their plight is laudable but that is different from the lofty but impossible goal of attempting to eradicate poverty and hunger. You can never make all the causes of poverty go away concurrently.  Even some Scandinavian countries, with all their high taxes and very generous socialistic policies have not been able to eradicate poverty. Refer to the second chart in the link below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty

I wish I had a more positive opinion on this subject and I certainly wish I could  be proven wrong.

How Hatred Of Islam Corrupting American Soul.

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Shared by DR. S A Ehtisham

Khaled Abou El Fadl ABC Religion and Ethics Updated 19 Jan 2017 (First posted 18 Jan 2017)

What happens when your enemy is demonized and dehumanized past the point of no return? If Allah, the Qur’an, Muhammad and Islamic history are so vile, what options are left to Muslims? Credit: JEWEL SAMAD / AFP / GettyImages

Khaled Abou El Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari’ah in the Modern Age.

A bill requiring the U.S. State Department to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a “foreign terrorist organization” is very likely to become law in the coming days.

Senator Ted Cruz, one of the sponsors of the law, stated in a press release that the Brotherhood “espouses a violent Islamist ideology with a mission of destroying the West.”

In the same press release, Cruz cited to what is known as the “civilization jihad” memorandum – a document in which he accuses American Muslim organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) of being affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Frank Gaffney, a notorious Islamophobe who is now one of Donald Trump’s key advisers, and the main author of the “civilization jihad” memorandum, had previously pioneered most of the anti-Shari’ah laws passed by many states in the United States.

Gaffney is not shy about proclaiming the United States to be a Christian nation and the Western civilization as rooted in Judaeo-Christian values that are currently under siege by global jihad and Shari’ah. A day after the U.S. election, Gaffney pronounced in a radio interview that Trump’s victory was “a blessing from God” and that declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization would become a key part of Trump’s strategy of “victory over jihad.”

Leo Hohmann, a member of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy and a contributor to the extremist Frontline Magazine, recently published a curious book entitled Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad. Hohmann outlines a strategy for responding to what he considers to be a purposeful and deliberate conspiracy orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood to defeat the West and America through stealth jihad. In his book, Hohmann states: “The Brotherhood is an extreme Islamist organization whose overarching goal is to create a global caliphate governed by Sharia.” He then calls for passing a law declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization and explains that this issue must be “fought not only on the political level but also spiritually.”

In the Muslim world, the bogeyman of the Muslim Brotherhood has been exploited by authoritarian governments to repress their citizens for more than half a century. It is but a pathetic and pitiful irony that now the very same bogeyman will be used to persecute a broad array of Muslim organizations and individuals in the United States.

Current anti-terrorism laws in the United States give virtually limitless powers to the state to monitor, arrest, detain and convict any group or individual who joins, aids, assists, or even supports a foreign terrorist organization. Thus, by designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, the Trump administration will have unfettered powers to go after any group or person that it suspects or accuses of having so much as pro-Brotherhood sympathies.

Am I overstating the case? Not a bit. The government would have to prove technical legal concepts such as “knowing” assistance as opposed to “unknowing” support of the Brotherhood, and “material support” as opposed to non-material support in order to obtain a felony conviction in a court of law. But if the conduct of the Bush administration is to be taken as any indication, the government does not have to prove a thing to anyone before it can spy on, search, temporarily seize or freeze the assets of, detain for very protracted periods of time and interrogate any one it suspects of anything.

Put simply, as long as a link or nexus is duly alleged, a foreign terrorist designation empowers the government to destroy the life of any family or organization suspected of a limitless set of behaviour and conduct before we even get to what lawyers call “a hearing on the merits.”

Do most Americans know that this is what is about to happen? Most resolutely, no. In the years that I have taught American national security law, I am always intrigued and touched by the naive surprise of my law students when they realize that in the United States, the executive branch can and does hold this level of coercive power. Do most Americans care? I guess the response to this is another question: How can one care about what one does not know or understand?

And most Americans do not know or understand a thing about Islam except what has been steadily fed to them by the obscenely well-financed Islamophobic industry that is behind the very same law at issue. One thing of which I am absolutely certain is that every American who is currently oblivious towards the entire issue of the designation of the Muslim Brotherhood will soon have a very compelling reason to care – and care a great deal – because what is at issue is not the Muslim Brotherhood, Muslims, or even Islam, but the very moral identity and character of the United States and the world in which we live.

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America And Turbulent Democracy Look For A Change

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Shared by: Bitter Truth

The Unthinkable Insurrection on America Powerhouse

Written by: Mahboob A Khawaja

America and its politics find itself at the tyranny of reason of which it appears to be unconscious either by design or by choice.  The living thought of American political harmony does not seem to exhibit an ideal scenario of democracy as acclaimed by its political proponents. The perplexities and despotic character are rooted in the making of modern democracy. American constitutional sense of liberty, freedom and justice appear tainted and dislodged by individualistic Trump’s cult and the planned mob violence against the epicenter of political governance in Washington. D.C. on January 6 -Wednesday.  It exposed an ugly and forbidden truth about the American political thought, values and plastic configuration of piety of democratic values. The gangsters upsurge denied the normal functional of the working seat of political governance to verify the results of the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden. The seditious crowd chanted “Hang Pence”  against the Vice President, “take hostage” the enemy of Trump victory, the election was “fraudulent”  and “ Trump won” the election, the encompassing chaos echoes the worst upcoming epoch in contemporary American history. In all rational observations, it was an authoritarian sponsored coup against We, the People who had systematically elected Joe Biden- President Elect in November 2020. There were silenced pleas and indifference by Republican top leadership who shared the Trump belligerent stance on the outcomes of the presidential election. Is it a wake-up call for rethinking of the American emotional outburst or an opportunity to reflect intelligently as to what went wrong on that historic day?  Rowan Wolf (https://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2021/01/06/if-you-think-that-trump-will-not-continue-to-push-a-coup-then-think-again.php: 1/06/21) highlights the following facts:  

It is critical that we take seriously the impact of the lies, propaganda, and actual coup attempt that is occurring. Trump and the GOP have colluded in creating a narrative that has left a large portion of our population believing that 1) there has been significant fraud in the vote; 2) that the Biden win is illegitimate; 3) that the actions taken by Trump and the GOP are legal, legitimate, and “saving” our democracy. The truth is the obverse of this. In fact, we have a larger portion of the people and virtually the whole of the GOP throwing democracy and the Constitution into the ditch in order to establish an oligarchy, a dictatorship. They are attempting to throw out the votes of tens of millions of people in a coup.

The mob violence and killing of five American signaled deficient security arrangements to safeguard the sanctity of the Capitol complex, members of Congress and Senate who were discharging their legal duties to address the agenda of verification of the election results. It represented lack of planning and distorted image of American official planning on security and protection of human lives.  If there were responsible and rational officials, the security plan should have met the challenge of the day but there was nothing to stabilize a trivial emerging security catastrophic emergency.  Strangely enough, few weeks, The Black Lives Matter protest was met with police brutality, rubber bullets and cordon off the Capitol premise. President Trump incited the mob for an appalling way forward to undo the congressional verification of the President Elect, Joe Biden.  Would President Trump be held accountable for his insurrection and violation of the tenets of the US Constitution?  Or would he go unpunished for the next ten days?

Responding to this formidable challenge, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House is calling for “impeachment” of President Trump and demands invocation of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution to dismiss Trump from his office. The time and opportunity for a reasoned dialogue was lost by Trump and the Republican Party leadership. The followers of Trump’s cult performed the stage the drama to appease the emperor and his complicit supporters. Cynicism about American politicians is endemic across the board.  Could the present American leadership restore a sense of political normalcy in a highly turbulent crisis that engulfed the nation to greater risk of insecurity and survival for a sustainable political future?  This author noted the following observations in “American Presidential Election and Democracy Look for Change, Moral and Intellectual Leadership.” (UncommonThought: 11/19/2020.):  To glance ahead, America and its claim to a working democracy will haunt future generations with suspicion and extended discard. Trump and his coercive puppies could not think of America as part of the global community except as conforming to their own fantasies, phobias, prejudices, policies, practices and preferences, favoring Israel and Netanyahu and nothing else for the pandemic entrenched people of America. History will tell of this time when Trump plagued the body politic with the deliberate misinterpretation of the election and outrageous futuristic hypotheses leading nowhere in a civilized society. The sudden and inexplicable democratic plunge into self-geared wickedness must be catastrophic for future generations

Did America’s War Abroad Generate the Evolution of Domestic Terrorism?

Is there a connection to America’s global warmongering and the domestic “terrorism” advanced by the Trump cult?  In every political culture there is peculiar psychology to see its own pros and nothing else. If America and its democracy will ignore the imperatives of living Time, its articulation of futuristic Time will be totally unlike its own – a contradiction covered by adroit instinct. Could America and its political leadership see the mirror and do some soul-searching? “There are the times that try men’s soul”, noted Thomas Paine in his famous “Common Sense”, the lifeline to American independence.

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