Alternatives International

Merkel's Wall Of Hypocrisy

Vacy Vlazna — 2014-12-01T08:40:08Z

"The Berlin Wall, this symbol of state abuse cast in concrete, took millions of people to the limits of what is tolerable, and all too many beyond it.”

On the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered a speech of sublime hypocrisy when juxtaposed beside the illegal Apartheid/Annexation Wall and beside the blockade ‘wall' of Gaza constructed by Israel, in which she once vowed, "Germany will never abandon Israel but will remain a true friend and partner.”

Merkel rhapsodised: "The fall of the Berlin Wall showed us that dreams can come true - and that nothing has to stay the way it is, no matter how high the hurdles might seem to be".

The fact is Germany's partnership with Israel is one of the major hurdles that block Palestinians' right to self-determination under international law. In 2012, Germany abstained ( actually if its not a ‘Yes' it's a ‘No' ) to accord Palestine Non-Member Observer State status in the UN, voted against Palestine's membership to UNESCO and buttressed the brazen lie that Israel's war crime, Operation Protective Edge, was an act of self-defense.

The Palestinian parents in Gaza mourning the deaths of 506 innocent children were not living the hackneyed dreams about which Merkel waxed lyrical.

To add to her hypocrisy, a mere month after the horror of Israel's war crimes on blockaded Gaza and the destruction of the homes of half a million families in Gaza who are struggling with the consequent trauma, the grief and survival with winter approaching, Merkel's government donated a shameful and paltry $63 million at the donors conference in Cairo. Then, six days later, hands Israel an obscene $382 million discount on a missile boat (no doubt the kind that can continue killing little Palestinian boys playing football on Gaza beaches).

There was no stopping the Chancellor's banal posturing,

"We can change things for the better - that is the message of the fall of the Berlin Wall."..for the people in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and in many, many other regions of the world where liberty and human rights are threatened or being trampled”.

Glaringly omitted was Palestine, the longest trampling of human rights and freedom in modern political history by Israel and western governments. Mentioning Ukraine, Syria and Iraq was a free plug for US imperial ventures.

Merkel goose-steps in time to America's war drums and interests vis-à-vis support for sanctions against Iran and arming Saudi Arabia. She lacks the nationalistic pride of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder who, in line with the majority of Germans, opposed the unsanctioned and unjustified US military intervention in Iraq, opting instead for a peaceful solution.

Angela Merkel is hailed by Forbes as the world's most powerful woman, and yet, she submissively lets Israel perpetually pull on the Holocaust ring through Germany's nose and suck billions of reparation euros from the German economy while Israel simultaneously shifts its own reparation dues to the Palestinians onto Germany and compliant international donors.

Merkel penitentially made reference to November 9th‘s shared anniversary with ‘Kristallnacht,' the 1938 Nazi pogrom against Jews and synagogues, which she condemned as a ‘day of shame and disgrace'.

In September, she publicly condemned antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment, "Anyone who hits someone wearing a skullcap is hitting us all. Anyone who damages a Jewish gravestone is disgracing our culture. Anyone who attacks a synagogue is attacking the foundations of our free society."

But, during the past weeks and present days, no such condemnation was heard from the German government over the demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem for Jewish settlement expansion, over the Israeli desecration of the al Aqsa mosque, the closing of it to Palestinian worshipers and over the inflammatory calls to replace it with the third temple.

If Merkel genuinely felt ‘the responsibility of German history' she would ensure Germany never again participates in state terror and therefore would not have revoked the safeguards restricting arms exports to areas of conflict and to dictatorships.

Germany supplies Israel with nuclear capable Dolphin-class submarines, anti-armour weapons systems made by German Dynamit Nobel Defense (became a subsidiary of Israel's RAFAEL in 2004) which also combined with Israel's Corner Shot to create the CSP in 3 versions: a pistol, assault rifle and grenade/ teargas launcher that fire around corners.

Apropos, the ‘Iron Frau' is responsible for supplying the German-made weapons that help enforce Israel's Nazi-like policies against Palestinians such as Lebensraum( land expansion), human experimentation ( Gaza and her people are a laboratory of testing Israeli weapons), deportation and ethnic cleansing (under Plan Dalet, forced expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians was executed in 1948), racial policies of Aryan superiority (apartheid and the right of Jews only to the land of Palestine), institutionalised terror, night raids and wholesale imprisonment ( in 2013 Israeli soldiers kidnapped 3874, including 931 children, the figures are far higher in 2014) , looting and destruction of Jewish property (Electronic Intifada reported “The Israeli army confiscated nearly $3.5 million worth of property and cash from Palestinians during its recent three-weeks long military incursion into the West Bank, under the pretense of searching for three Israeli teens who went missing on 12 June and whose bodies were found 30 June.”), Nazi Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour prohibiting marriages between gentiles and Jews (With very few exceptions, Israeli civil law does not permit marriages between Jews and non-Jews within the state of Israel.), and the establishment of ghettos (the West Bank and Gaza are virtual ghettos sealed off by checkpoints),

In the ghettos the Jews are to receive only as much food as the rest of the population can spare, but not more than is required for their bare subsistence. The same applies to the allocation of other essential goods.

It was revealed that “the dietary needs for the population of Gaza are chillingly calculated” or as Israeli bureaucrat, Dov Weisglass put it, "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."

In February 2014, a photo went viral of Merkel with a Hitler moustache shadow cast by Netanyahu. Although met with amusement, the photo evokes a karmic warning that the shadow of Zionism has Nazi resonances.

Objection to comparing Israeli and Nazi policies is usually made on the grounds that no atrocity can surpass the horrendous extermination of 6 million Jews over 6 years, but how do you measure the accumulative trauma and suffering of all Palestinians suspended in a 67 year transit between birth and ethnic cleansing?

Today, there are more than 11.6 million native Palestinians, more than half of whom have been dispersed worldwide by Israel, which denies their legal right of return. The almost 6 million within Palestine, every single day, ostensibly suffer war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel, which enjoys carte blanche impunity to violate international law granted by Germany and Israel's other powerful backers.

The partition of Germany into military occupation zones by the WWII victors was, ultimately, an ideological war between between the US and Russia and an act of collective punishment on the German people. Despite Angela Merkel living her first 35 years on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall, which was under oppressive Soviet control, her far right-wing heart is devoid of empathy for Palestinians struggling to survive under oppressive Israeli control.

In that dark light, Merkel's mastery of pedestrian rhetoric shines: "It was a victory of freedom over bondage and it's a message of faith for today's, and future, generations that can tear down the walls - the walls of dictatorship, violence, ideology and hostility."

You can be sure Frau Merkel wasn't referring to the iron wall policy of Zionist dictatorships that began with Ben Gurion, or to the Zionist violence in the Nakba, or Zionist apartheid and Eretz Israel ideology and definitely not to Israeli hostility that two months ago bombed to smithereens the bondaged inmates of the concentration camp that is Gaza.

Sooner than later, these zionist walls will fall. There is a new generation of Germans not cowered by the burden of antisemitism blackmail, who took to the streets protesting the war on Gaza, who dare to speak out defying Merkel's clamp on their freedom of speech, who advance BDS and Palestinian rights.

And there has always been and always will be generations of Palestinians whose spirits are armed with dignity and sumud.

On November 8, in an grand gesture of resistance and defiance, young Palestinian activists armed with hammers, demolished a section of the Apartheid/Annexation Wall in East Jerusalem “to mark the 25th Anniversary of the fall of Berlin's Wall, and that “as the Berlin Wall fell, the Annexation wall in Palestinian will fall, along with the occupation”.

Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

Source: http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/news/175-merkel-s-wall-of-hypocrisy

Why Does Malala Yusufzai's Nobel Bother So Many On The Left?

Pervez Hoodbhoy — 2014-12-01T08:38:14Z

Arundhati Roy's charm and lucidity have iconized her in the world of left-wing politics. But, asked by Laura Flanders what she made of the 2014 Nobel Prize, she appeared to beswallowing a live frog:

“Well, look, it is a difficult thing to talk about because Malala is a brave girl and I think she has even recently started speaking out against the US invasions and bombings…but she's only a kid you know and she cannot be faulted for what she did….the great game is going on…they pick out people [for the Nobel Prize].”

For one who has championed people's causes everywhere so wonderfully well, these shallow, patronizing remarks were disappointing.

Farzana Versey, Mumbai based left-wing author and activist, was still less generous last year. Describing Malala as “a cocooned marionette” hoisted upon the well-meaning but unwary,Versey lashed out at her for, among other things, raising the problem of child labour at her speech at the United Nations: “it did not strike her that she is now even more a victim of it, albeit in the sanitized environs of an acceptable intellectual striptease.”

But hang on a bit! This “kid” and “cocooned marionette” did not achieve world-wide admiration for opposing US-led wars or child labour or for a thousand and one other such good-and-great things. The bullet that smashed through her skull came because she opposed the Pakistani Taliban's edict that all education for girls must end forever in the Swat valley after 15 September 2009, and her vigorous campaign for every girl child's right to education.

It is perfectly clear why Malala has had to be damned to eternity by her left-wing critics: she has been photographed in the company of men judged to be villains: Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Ban Ki Moon, Richard Holbrooke, and others. It is also obvious that she could not have won the Nobel peace prize—which is always an intensely political affair—but for support from the highest quarters in the western world. Consequently many on the left have easily dismissed her condemnation of drone strikes in Pakistan, as well as the $50,000 from her Nobel Prize money which she gave for rebuilding Gaza schools, as thin ploys aimed at image building.

Unsurprisingly leftist critiques of Malala's Nobel have been eagerly seized upon by right-wingers in Pakistan, helping seal the narrative for many of my countrymen and women. For cultural and religious reasons, as much as for political ones, they have already come to loathe the West even more than arch-enemy India. In the weeks after she was shot, several students at my university told me they see Malala Yousafzai as Malala ‘Dramazai', an ‘Illuminati Psy Op', and a willing tool of the West who is out to badmouth Pakistan and make it appear unreasonably dangerous. Many doubted that she had been shot at all—the Taliban know how to kill.

Pakistan's officialdom also harbours a hidden, but deep, hostility to her. Although the government officially acclaimed the Prize, a resolution to honour Malala was unsuccessfully moved last week by the opposition in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's provincial assembly. Instead the KPK assembly passed another resolution to press the US government to free the “daughter of Pakistan”, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a convicted Al-Qaida affiliate who is now serving out her 86-year sentence atFort Worth, Texas. Mainstream Urdu newspapers describe Malala as a poster girl of the West, and a Trojan horse for introducing secularism in Pakistan.

I have no expectations from the millions of my conspiracy obsessed fellow Pakistanis. But have Malala's left-wing detractors—including those who I have long respected for their outspokenness in opposing multiple forms of oppression and imperialist wars—ever really bothered to know why she was shot?

In the following, I have translated and condensed a 9-page pamphlet entitled Aqeedon ka Tasadum explaining why Malala had to be killed. Written in Urdu and signed by the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, it was circulated shortly after the shooting:

Preamble: This is a war of two faiths, Islam versus kufr (unbelief). On the one side there is true education and modesty; on the other is nudity, music, dancing, and disgraceful gyrations. On the one side there is respect for the veil; on the other are those females who appear on TV and give interviews to men who are not relatives. In fact they dare to mock the Taliban and mujahideen who seek to prevent nudity, lewdness, and Westernization. So here is why this so-called Malala, a pawn of Western interests and secular forces, had to be brought to justice:

First, is Malala a child? No! She was born on 18 July 1998, which makes her 15 years and 4 months old. She had crossed puberty and shown the signs. Thus she had to be treated as an adult woman responsible for her deeds.
Second, is the killing of women allowed in Islam? Yes! After the conquest of Mecca, the Holy Prophet (PBUH) had personally ordered several women to be killed, including by stoning to death. Hazrat Ali too had declared as correct and justified the strangling of a Jewish woman who had verbally abused the Holy Prophet (PBUH).

Third, what does Pakhtun culture say? Although some media commentators claim that killing girls is against our culture, this is nonsense. If a boy and girl are even suspected of doing something together, it is common to kill both.
Fourth, was Malala guilty? Yes! This so-called innocent “child” actually wrote a diary under the false name of Gul Makai, and daily criticized us in it. She called Obama her ideal, and preferred the secular education of Lord Macaulay to Islamic education.

Fifth, was Malala unarmed? No! She was armed with the pen, a weapon sharper than the sword, with which she daily defamed Islam and Muslims. She portrayed the Taliban as beastly savages. This is why we rightly punished her.

Conclusion: By focusing on Malala this filthy (Pakistani) media shows it is prostituted to the Americans. It says no words of protest against the strip-searching and incarceration of the daughter of Islam (Dr Aafia Siddiqui). It makes a false hero out of one who deserved what she got.

A puzzle: why does such savage bestiality often find no, or only cursory, reference in today's left-wing discourses? Boko Haram's sex captives, ISIL's beheadings, Taliban suicide attacks against civilians, and scores of atrocities by multiple Islamic groups should appal and disgust all those who believe in human equality, decency, and freedom. The Left is most certainly built upon these strong moral foundations, so why the near silence?

The explanation has two parts. First, a portion of the Left has a wholly negative view of western agendas, uncritically rejecting everything as self-serving and hypocritical. Second, many progressives today do not wish to leave a comfort zone where all global problems can be safely blamed on to the West. Having two baddies—America and Islamism—threatens to muddy up the waters. They would prefer to keep life simple.

But shouldn't one be a little cleverer, more discerning? It is doubtlessly true that the pursuit by the United States of its strategic and economic interests fed and fuelled the rise of violent Islamism through its multiple wars and interventions, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US continues to be the principal protector and ally of Saudi Arabia—which has long funded jihadists across the globe. It stokes anger through its unconditional support for aggressive Israeli expansionism. In such situations it is right and proper to condemn the US and fight back.

At the same time, one must recognize that western culture and politics have changed in important ways. This is not because of the Obamas, Bushes, or Blairs but owes instead to a protracted, centuries-long struggle by the working class and activists. No longer can any western country afford to be seen as a merciless colonizer, or to freely militarily ravage and economically plunder as in past centuries. Constraints on their still callous corporate and political elites have steadily grown. Therefore western agendas and interests can sometimes be intelligently leveraged for furthering what is important for peoples everywhere: education, peace, female emancipation, freedom of thought and action, labour rights, and all that the Left holds important. Malala has played this game with the West well, giving us hope that in these bleak times there are still some among us who have their heads screwed on right.

A young Pakistani progressive, Ghausia Rashid Salam, departs from common opinion by paying her this tribute:

“We should be honoured that Malala emerged from our country, because we know better than any white man, better than any South Asian, what Pakistan is, and what life here is like. We know, better than anyone else in the world, how resilient you have to be to emerge from a life under the Taliban and not give up fighting for your rights, or the rights of others. We should be happy that the Western world can see for itself the brutal conditions we, and other parts of the world, live in, because the more fortunate parts of the world need to check their damned privilege and start making genuine efforts to bring change.”

It is surely time for one-track leftists to learn that we live in a multiple-tracked world, to recognize that there can be more than one baddie, and to resist from simplifying at the cost of accuracy. Else they do grievous wrong to all.

Pervez Hoodbhoy teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad. This article first appeared ontelesur

Source: http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Why-Does-Malala-Yusufzais-Nobel-Bother-So-Many-On-The-Left-/292542

Why The Right To Dissent Is Indispensable: Romila Thapar Speaks Out

Praful Bidwai — 2014-12-01T08:36:03Z

When Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani famously said of the media during the Emergency that “when asked to bend, they crawled”, he received widespread praise from the intelligentsia and even from people opposed to the BJP's ideology—because he spoke the truth about the loss of independence and professional integrity on the part of the Fourth Estate and other institutions.

Today, not just the media, but leaders from the fields of education, culture, healthcare and law, are crawling before the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh without even being asked to bend. They include University Grants Commission chairman Ved Prakash, Delhi University vice-chancellor Dinesh Singh, AIIMS director MC Misra, additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta, serving and former bureaucrats, and cardiac surgeons Naresh Trehan and KK Aggarwal, and dancer Sonal Mansingh.

These were among the 60 luminaries who met RSS sarasanghachalak Mohan Bhagwat over lunch in Delhi at the Punjab, Delhi and Haryana Chamber of Commerce and Industry on October 12 at the invitation of RSS Delhi prant chief. Although many of them said they attended the lunch “only to listen”, it's amply clear from media reports that some were ingratiating themselves to the unelected head of an organisation which spawned the party in power—an act unworthy of their official positions or duties, as well as democratic propriety.

Curiously, there has been a thundering silence in the media and political parties on this—in contrast to the furore raised by the attendance of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research director-general RA Mashelkar at the RSS's platinum jubilee celebrations at Agra in 2000.

This is happening when the RSS, BJP and their affiliates are trying to radically reorganise government programmes and have held two long, structured meetings with ministers. They demand changes in educational curricula along Hindutva lines, including purging textbooks of secularist “misrepresentations”. Parveen Sinclair, the upright director of the National Council for Educational Research and Training, has been forced to resign.

Delhi University's Sanskrit department has begun a campaign demanding that history textbooks show that the Aryans were indigenous to India, and not migrants, as held by most historians—although these Sanskritists have no expertise in history, and although ancient Indian history covers much more than the “Vedic Age” and “Aryan Culture”.

Articles are appearing in the mainstream media celebrating a fiction called “Vedic mathematics”, based not on an ancient text, but a 1965 book by Bharati Krishna Tirtha, which fails to provide evidence that the sutras (formulas/algorithms) he cites are found in any of the Vedas. (For refutation of these claims by scientist CK Raju, see http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/nothing-vedic-in-vedic-maths/article6373689.ece)

Meanwhile, calls for banning and burning books that advance non-Hindutva (although not Marxist) views have become strident. Their proponents have been emboldened by Dinanath Batra's successful intimidation of publishers to pulp scholarly books. Fanatics are rampaging through colleges, bookshops, theatres, art galleries and cinema-halls, baying for punishment to dissidents. Everything from political belief, cultural identity, and personal morality is being targeted in hysterical campaigns demanding conformity; dissenters are branded “un-Indian”.

Intolerance for the right to differ and dissent is now palpable in all regions and strata of Indian society. Worse, it's now backed by the ruling party and state. This is not to exonerate other parties, including the Congress, caste-based regional outfits, or even the Left, which too don't fully respect the right to dissent and practise censorship in varying degrees.

However, they are not as instinctively, viscerally, and viciously anti-dissent as the BJP/Sangh Parivar, which regards dissent as “betrayal”, and wants to put it down by the harshest means. This is in keeping with the profoundly undemocratic culture of the RSS, which long ago decided to dispense with the “cumbersome clap-trap of internal democracy” and opted for Ek-Chalak-Anuvartitva (unquestioningly following a single leader, or the Fuehrer Principle).

Yet, the right to differ, dissent, and express dissenting views is at the core not just of democracy—without which it would be impoverished to a majoritarian system, and even a despotic-authoritarian one—but of all knowledge production itself. Without the right to dissent, there can be no progress in the sciences, whether natural or social, and no generation of new knowledge and its dissemination in society through education, dialogue and public debate. Dissent is vital to a healthy public sphere.

This is one of the themes that Professor Romila Thapar, one of India's greatest historians and internationally respected scholars, emphasised in her Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture on October 26 in Delhi. This was the third lecture in the series: the other two were delivered by economist-philosopher Amartya Sen and eminent British historian Eric J Hobsbawm.

The theme of questioning authority and received wisdom couldn't have been more appropriate for the memorial lecture. Chakravartty was a doyen among India's post-Independence journalists, who edited the weekly Mainstream. He had strong Left-wing convictions and was for long a member of the Communist Party of India. Yet, he sharply criticised the Emergency—which the CPI then backed—and paid a price, by having to shut down the publication temporarily.

Thapar's lecture was a tour de force covering many epochs and continents. It was at once a rigorous, scholarly analysis of the evolution of critical intellectual traditions over more than 2,000 years, and a passionate appeal to reason, scepticism and the spirit of questioning authority while searching for the truth. This spirit is now under ferocious attack.

Thapar traced the relationship between dissidence and science from Socrates and Galileo in the West to the Buddha and Charvaka schools in India, and showed that certain principles and precepts, as well as methods of science, were common to all civilisations, from Athens and Arabia, to India and China. In our part of the world, we had the Buddha questioning theism and espousing agnosticism, and many materialist schools of thought which questioned karma, afterlife and the immortality of the atman (soul), and spurned various Vedic rituals, including animal sacrifice.

If Aryabhatta hadn't opposed the royal astrologers of his time, he wouldn't have been able to show —a thousand years before Galileo—that the earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around. The key to this lay in the primacy he gave to logic and rationality, as distinct from faith and religious dogma. The method was to postulate a hypothesis linking observed phenomena to their possible causes, and test it through experiments; the results would be tested against future observations and refined till a scientific theory or law was established that could predict future phenomena too.

Through her panoramic survey Professor Thapar showed the continuity of rational thinking and logical explanation across different countries and periods, which was invariably opposed by religious bigots. Buddhist ideas were described in Brahminical orthodoxy as “delusional”, and a whole range of different schools like Shramanas (Buddhists and Jains), Charvakas, Ajivikas, atheists, materialists and rationalists, were all lumped into “one category—nastikas”, because they questioned the Vedas as “divinely revealed” and rejected caste practices.

Thapar says this reminds her of “the Hindutvavadis of today for whom anyone and everyone who does not support them, are Marxists!”

Numerous streams of thought coexisted in ancient and medieval India. Some “questioned beliefs and practices upheld by religious authorities and by those who governed”. Among them were women, such as “Andal, Akka Mahadevi and Mira, flouting caste norms, who were listened to attentively by people at large…” Amir Khusrau is best known as a poet and composer, but he also studied astronomy; his sun-centric universe “distanced him from orthodox Islam”.

Later came modern liberal social reformers like Ram Mohun Roy, Phule, Shahu Maharaj, Periyar, Syed Ahmed Khan and Ambedkar. Indian society has been undergoing major changes, which need “insightful ways of understanding” so that social and economic conditions can be related to culture, politics and other phenomena. Public intellectuals, said Thapar, are needed to explore these connections and “to articulate the traditions of rational thought in our intellectual heritage.”

As Thapar reminded us, there are “many specialists in various professions, but many among them are unconcerned with the world beyond their own specialisation.” These professionals are not identical with public intellectuals. “There are many more academics for instance, than existed before. But it seems that most prefer not to confront authority even if it debars the path of free thought.”

Public intellectuals must take positions independent of those in power, must be autonomous and be seen as such, and question debatable ideas, irrespective of who propagates them. In addition to possessing an acknowledged professional status, the public intellectual must have a concern for “what constitute the rights of citizens” and particularly “issues of social justice”; and must be ready “to raise these matters as public policy”.

Thapar ended with an analysis of why public intellectuals are in decline in India and what they can do to become more assertive and effective. She didn't speak a day too soon.

(A recording of her talk is available for non-commercial use at http://sacw.net/article9874.html)

Mexico's Undead Rise Up

Charlotte María Sáenz — 2014-12-01T08:32:55Z

With 43 disappeared student teachers presumed dead, Mexican popular resistance is creating new alternatives to the militarized narco-state.

“Alive they were taken, and alive we want them back!”

That's become the rallying cry for the 43 student teachers abducted by municipal police and handed over to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang last September in Iguala, Mexico. None have been seen since.

It remained the rallying cry even after federal officials announced that the missing students had most likely been executed and burnt to ashes.

Since then, Argentine forensic experts have concluded that burned remains found in Iguala do not belong to the missing young men—and so the 43 remain undead. The findings speak to a growing skepticism about the Mexican government's competence—not only to deliver justice, but also to carry on an investigation with any kind of legitimacy or credibility.

It has become ever clearer that the state is in fact deeply implicated in the violence it claims to oppose. The student teachers were originally attacked by municipal police—allegedly at the orders of Iguala's mayor and his wife, who were at a function with a local general when the attack took place. Although the exact details of who ordered the attack are not yet clear, the handing over of the student teachers to a violent drug gang betrays a thorough merger of the police force, local officials, and organized crime.

This growing realization has ignited rage all over Mexico, with social media campaigns flaring up alongside massive street protests. Peaceful marches happen almost daily in Mexico City, while elsewhere there are starker signs of unrest. Some demonstrators even set fire to government buildings in the Guerrero state capital.

Meanwhile, the government has carried on an increasingly clumsy investigation, first purporting to have found the students in nearby mass graves—as The Nation reports, plenty of mass graves have turned up, but none has yet been proven to contain the missing teachers—and then claiming to have extracted confessions from the alleged killers.

In a November press conference, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam showcased detailed video testimonies from three alleged hit men who claimed to have burned the 43 at a nearby garbage dump. Parents of the missing went to inspect the alleged site and found evidence lacking. Many doubted that a fire of such magnitude—the supposed killers claimed that they had spent 14 hours burning the bodies—could have happened due to the rain of that night.

When Argentine forensic specialists disproved Karam's narrative, the federal government pledged to “redouble efforts” to find the students. Now President Enrique Peña Nieto is hinting at a conspiracy against his government. It's hard to escape the conclusion that Mexican officials want this issue put to rest as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, the mounting number of mass graves investigators are turning up serves as a reminder that this kind of violence has been going on for years. Police round up, detain, beat, arrest, and shoot at student activists routinely, as when state police shot and killed two Ayotzinapa students during a protest action on the highway in 2011. As with over 90 percent of such crimes in Mexico, no one has been punished. These kinds of killings and disappearances have a long and sordid history as a practice of state violence in Mexico—and particularly in Guerrero—since the so-called Dirty War of the 1970s.

The many discrepancies in Karam's press conference are feeding into a growing popular refusal to trust the government's ability to investigate the disappearances independently.

In response to a reporter's question about whether the parents of the missing believed him, Karam quipped that the parents are people who “make decisions together.” The question was not so much about whether the parents, as individuals, believed or disbelieved Karam's evidence—although they have since visited the alleged crime scene and reaffirmed their skepticism.

Instead, ordinary Mexicans are increasingly employing their collective intelligence in making sense of the events and refusing to accept the state's evidence on the grounds that the state itself is compromised. And just as importantly, they're condemning the government's silence about its own complicity in the probable execution of their sons.

In their increasing rejection of the Mexican narco-state's legitimacy, the parents of the missing 43 are signaling their membership in what anthropologist Guillermo Bonfíl Batalla famously termed México Profundo—that is, the grassroots culture of indigenous Mesoamerican communities and the urban poor, which stands in stark contrast to the “Imaginary Mexico” of the elites. Recalling the Zapatista movement, the rumblings from below in the wake of the mass abduction in Guerrero are merging with older modes of indigenous resistance to give new life to Mexico's deep tradition of popular struggle.

Bolstered by social media, this new life is expressing itself in a number of colorful ways. Defying the government's theater of death, artists from all over the world are creating a “Mosaic of Life” by illustrating the faces and names of the disappeared. Mexican Twitter users have embraced the hashtag #YaMeCansé—“I am tired”—to appropriate Karam's complaint of exhaustion after an hour of responding to questions as an expression of their own rage and resilience.

Gradually, a movement calling itself “43 x 43”—representing the exponential impact of the 43 disappeared—is rising up to greet the undead, along with the more than 100,000 others killed or disappeared since the start of this drug war in 2006 under former President Felipe Calderón. This refusal of the dead to remain dead made for a particularly poignant Dia de Muertos celebration earlier this month.

This form of resistance recalls what happened last May in the autonomous Zapatista municipality of el Caracol de la Realidad in the state of Chiapas, where a teacher known as Galeano was murdered by paramilitary forces. At the pre-dawn ceremony held there in Galeano's honor on May 25, putative Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos announced that he, Marcos, would cease to exist. After Marcos disappeared into the night, the assembled then heard a disembodied voice address them: “Good dawn, compañeras and compañeros. My name is Galeano, Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano. Does anybody else respond to this name?”

In response, hundreds of voices affirmed, “Yes, we are all Galeano!” And so Galeano came back to life collectively, in all of those assembled.

And now 43 disappeared student teachers have multiplied into thousands demanding justice from the state and greater autonomy for local communities, which are already building alternative healthcare, education, justice, and governmental systems. A general strike is scheduled for the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution on November 20th.

In Mexico's unraveling, there is an opportunity for the rest of the world to witness—and support—the emergence of more direct and collective forms of democracy. As the now “deceased” Marcos said: “They wanted to bury us, but they didn't know we were seeds.”

Charlotte María Sáenz is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. She teaches Global Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. A longer version of this piece originally appeared at Other Worlds.

This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus, TheNation.com, and NACLA.

Source: http://fpif.org/mexicos-undead-rise/

US Journalist Blumenthal Sees Similarity in Islamic State And Israel

Emran Feroz — 2014-12-01T08:29:51Z

STUTTGART: When Gaza was attacked during the summer, Angela Merkel promised to “stand by the side of Israel.” The German chancellor has done much more than offer verbal support for Israel's crimes. Under her leadership, the Berlin government has been equipping Israel with submarines that reportedly carry nuclear weapons.

Some German politicians have tried to muzzle debate about Israel by denouncing its critics as “anti-Semites.” The American journalist Max Blumenthal — author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel — faced such a smear on a recent speaking tour in Germany.

A number of elected politicians alleged that a scheduled talk by Blumenthal and his colleague David Sheen in a Berlin theater would serve “to promote anti-Semitic prejudice.” This was deeply ironic: both Blumenthal and Sheen are themselves Jewish. The politicians denouncing them failed to produce any evidence that they are hostile towards fellow Jews.

Blumenthal spoke to Emran Feroz in Stuttgart.

Emran Feroz: You recently witnessed the destruction caused by Israel in Gaza. What scenes had the most effect on you?

Max Blumenthal: Emergency operations had to be performed in dentist chairs, while the bodies of dead children had to be laid in ice boxes, which were originally designed for ice cream. Those were probably the most shocking testimonies I heard.

EF: Not long after your trip to Gaza, you started using the hashtag #JSIL (Jewish State of Israel in the Levant) on Twitter. Making this kind of comparison between the group Islamic State and Israel is taboo in Germany. Why did you dare to do this?

MB: It is strange that you equate, in Germany, IS with Hamas or describe the entire Palestinian national movement as “heirs of the Nazis,” while there is such an outrage regarding my comparison. It was not a direct one-to-one comparison, but I wanted to point out the hypocrisy behind supporting one religiously exclusive state that forces minorities out of its territory while attacking another.

EF: But by using this hashtag, you must be suggesting that Israel and IS are somehow similar.

MB: Sure, they are. The “Jewish state” has no internationally recognized borders. The same relates to the “Islamic State.”

Both constructs have emerged after the original indigenous population were partly expelled and ethnically cleansed. In the case of Israel it was the Palestinian indigenous population; in the case of the IS [they] are the Christians, Yazidis or Shiite Muslims. Both “countries” rely on a religious exclusivity in the Levant. And both think they represent all Muslims and Jews worldwide and thereby help inspire Islamophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments.

Both the Jewish state and the Islamic State recruit confused young men from around the world as foreign fighters to engage in atrocities. When Israel's defenders failed to address the comparisons on their merits, they simply attempted to hijack the #JSIL hashtag by declaring it stands for the “Jewish State of Israel Lives.”

EF: IS fighters behead their victims and then spread the videos of the beheadings through YouTube and social media. Do Israeli soldiers also make such videos?

MB: During the last attack on Gaza, the Israeli army killed civilians via drones and Jewish Israeli citizens celebrated the killings on Facebook. Some Israeli citizens gathered on a hill in the border town of Sderot and celebrated the bombing of the military with chips and beer. I find that this is not less macabre and disgusting.

EF: How present is religious extremism inside the Israeli military?

MB: It is very present. A major figure of the last military operation in the Gaza Strip was commander Ofer Winter, who was celebrated as a national hero. Prior to the mission Winter said to his troops, that the Palestinians had sinned against God and therefore all must be punished.

So he declared a literal “holy war” against the Palestinian people. This is not the only way Winter has expressed the religious extremism that is rising in Israeli society. In one instance, an Israeli singer wanted to perform in front of [Winter's] soldiers. He refused [permission] to do so and said that a woman is not allowed to do that.

EF: Many women are part of the Israeli army. This is celebrated in what are effectively promotional campaigns for Israel. How can there be misogyny in the Israeli military if it has many female members?

MB: What is not mentioned is the fact that it is more likely that these women are assaulted by their male counterparts in the army than by Palestinians. I think that only imperialist feminists argue that women can be emancipated in an army like the Israeli one.

Good examples of this type of feminism are political figures like Samantha Power or Angela Merkel or Tzipi Livni because their peculiar brand of feminism goes hand in hand with the imperialistic interests of the western powers who are so invested in majority Muslim countries, where the population is portrayed as culturally backwards and in need of “liberation.”

EF: During the last attack on Gaza, the family of Ibrahim Kilani — who are German citizens — were killed. His son Ramsis, who lives in Germany, said that up to today nobody has apologized to him. The German government has not called him a single time. How can you explain this behavior?

MB: The behavior of the German government shows not only the lack of interest in the rights of the Palestinians, but also the very lives of them. The life of these people is practically non-existent in Germany. They are the new “un-people.”

The German foreign minister issued condolences for the families of those German citizens killed on an airliner over eastern Ukraine, possibly by Russian separatists. But they've said nothing to the Kilani family.

The negation of Palestinian lives has been German policy since the days of Konrad Adenauer [chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963]. In those days Israel had no problem to negotiate on Holocaust reparations with the head of the chancellery, Hans Globke, who was a known Nazi in the Third Reich. This cash flow from Germany went directly to the Israeli occupation machine that has made the Palestinians indirect victims of the Holocaust.

The current bloodshed is a result of this policy and every German should ask himself: how does this policy honor the Holocaust?

EF: Your willingness to make such statements probably explains why some German politicians do not want to see you here in Germany. What happened to you exactly?

MB: Some politicians, such as Volker Beck, a parliamentarian from Germany's Green Party, had launched a campaign to silence us — me and the journalist David Sheen. The reason for this is the fact that they do not want to know of another version of Judaism and they certainly do not want to hear about the facts on the ground.

Their attitude actually promotes anti-Semitism. It is simply anti-Semitic to equate Zionism with Judaism and to limit Jewish identity to the narrow confines of Israeli nationalism. For a gentile politician to do it is beyond disgusting.

EF: The Gaza Strip remains destroyed. And, according to some media outlets, a third intifada is going to happen in the occupied West Bank. Is this really the case or is it just scaremongering?

MB: Last year the al-Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem] was stormed “only” eight times by Israeli soldiers. This year this happened 76 times. Radical religious elements have announced that they want to demolish the mosque to build a Jewish temple. If this happens, the situation will take on global implications that will be approach the apocalyptic.

The whole conflict is taking on a religious dimension, which is devastating for all involved, and, as I said, will promote radicalization around the globe. I think the third intifada actually is at the door.

However, I believe that this word — intifada — does not adequately describe the situation. It is not effective enough to describe what is actually going on. At that time — in the case of the first and second intifadas — this term was appropriate.

Now with so many Palestinian political leaders in prison or dead and such a complex matrix of control imposed on them, a nationwide revolt cannot take place. What we are seeing is creative resistance with limited means occurring on a national level but at sporadic moments.

And it will continue and intensify as long as the status quo is in place. It is that deadly status quo that German foreign policy protects and promotes.

(ELECTRONIC INTIFADA. Emran Feroz is a Germany-based freelance journalist, blogger and activist. He is also the founder of Drone Memorial, a website listing victims of drone attacks. )

"NATO: Danger to World Peace"

Immanuel Wallerstein — 2014-12-01T08:26:19Z

The official mythology is that between 1945 (or 1946) and 1989 (or 1991), the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) confronted each other continuously - politically, militarily, and above all ideologically. This was called the "cold war." If it was a war, the word to underline is "cold" since the two powers never engaged in any direct military action against each other throughout the entire period.

There were however several institutional reflections of this cold war, in each of which it was the United States, and not the USSR, that took the first step. In 1949, the three western countries occupying Germany combined their zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as a state. The Soviet Union responded by restyling its zone as the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

In 1949, NATO was established by twelve nations. On May 5, 1955, the three western powers officially ended their occupation of the FRG, recognizing it as an independent state. Four days later, the FRG was admitted to membership in NATO. In response to this, the USSR established the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) and included the GDR as one of its members.

The treaty establishing NATO was supposed to apply only within Europe. One reason was that the western European countries still had colonies outside of Europe and did not wish to allow any agency to have the authority to interfere directly in their political decisions concerning these colonies. The moments of seemingly tense confrontation between the two sides - the Berlin blockade, the Cuban missile crisis - all ended with a status quo ante outcome. The most important invocation of the treaties to engage in military action was that of the USSR to act within its own zone against developments they deemed dangerous to the USSR - Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981. The United States intervened politically under similar circumstances, such as the potential entry of the Italian Communist Party into the Italian government.

This brief account points to the real objective of the cold war. The cold war was not meant to transform the political realities of the other side (except in some moment very far into the future). The cold war was a mechanism for each side to keep its satellites under control, while maintaining the de facto agreement of the two powers for their long-term partition of the globe into two spheres, one-third to the USSR and two-thirds to the United States. Priority was given by each side to the guarantee on the non-utilization of military force (especially nuclear weapons) against each other. This came to be known as the guarantee against "mutually assured destruction."

The collapse of the USSR in two stages - the withdrawal from eastern Europe in 1989 and the formal dissolution of the USSR in 1991 - should have meant in theory the end of any function for NATO. Indeed, it is well known that, when President Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR agreed to the incorporation of the GDR into the FRG, he was given the promise that there would be no inclusion of the WTO states into NATO. This promise was violated. Instead, NATO took on a new role entirely.

After 1991, NATO bestowed on itself a role of world policeman for whatever it considered appropriate political solutions to world problems. The first major effort of this type occurred in the Kosovo/Serbia conflict, in which the U.S. government threw its weight behind the establishment of a Kosovo state and a change in regime in Serbia. This was followed by other such efforts - in Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taliban, in Iraq in 2003 to change regime in Baghdad, in 2014 to fight the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, and in 2013-2014 to support so-called pro-Western forces in Ukraine.

In point of fact, using NATO itself turned out to be difficult for the U.S. For one thing, there were various kinds of reluctances of NATO member states about the actions undertaken. For another thing, when NATO was formally involved, as in Kosovo, the U.S. military felt constrained by the slow political decision-making about military action.

So, why then the expansion of NATO instead of its dissolution? This had once again to do with intra-European politics, and the desire of the U.S. to control its presumed allies. It was in the Bush regime that the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld talked of an "old" and a "new" Europe. By old Europe, he was referring especially to the French and German reluctance to agree with U.S. strategies. He saw the western European countries as moving away from their ties to the United States. His perception was in fact correct. In response, the U.S. hoped to clip the wings of the western Europeans by introducing eastern European states into NATO, which the U.S. considered more reliable allies.

The conflict over Ukraine illuminates the danger of NATO. The U.S. has sought to create new military structures, obviously aimed at Russia, under the guise that these were meant to counter a hypothetical Iranian threat. As the Ukrainian conflict played on, the language of the cold war was revived. The U.S. uses NATO to press western European countries to agree with anti-Russian actions. And within the U.S., President Barack Obama is under heavy pressure to move "forcefully" against the Russian so-called threat to the Ukraine. This combines with the large hostility in the U.S. Congress to any accord with the Iranians over nuclear development.

The forces in the United States and in western Europe who are seeking to avoid military folly risk being overtaken by what can only be called a war party. NATO and what it symbolizes today represents a severe danger because it represents the claim of western countries to interfere everywhere in the name of western interpretations of geopolitical realities. This can only lead to further, highly dangerous, conflict. Renouncing NATO as a structure would be a first step towards sanity and the world's survival.

Poetics of a Nation: Remembering Nehru

Shiv Visvanathan — 2014-12-01T08:23:54Z

Jawaharlal Nehru cannot be seen merely as an object of history, a fragment of policy. He was a dream, a hope, a claim to innocence, an aesthetic, which gave to modernity a touch of elegance

This week, India will celebrate the 125th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru. I must confess that I hate anniversaries when they turn out to be rote affairs, when memory, which hurts like frostbite, is presented painlessly. I hate this era that measures Nehru with calipers and titrates his foreign policy. It is a dull world today when memory turns inane and history seems empty. Life must indeed be meaningless when almost two decades of the Nehru era produce less meaning than five months of a Modi regime. When memories fade, icons die, and when an icon dies, something dies in all of us.

Nehru cannot be seen merely as an object of history, a fragment of policy. He was a dream, a hope, a claim to innocence, an aesthetic which gave to modernity a touch of elegance. I think that is why Gandhi opted for him. The practical Gandhi realised that one needed the impractical Nehru to survive the first decade of Independence. It is only the impractical who survive, who understand desire, hope and dream. Words like development and planning are dull words borrowed from a dismal social science. Nehru gave them a touch of poetry and it is only the poetics of the first decade that allowed us to retain hope and dream differently.

Harnessing science

Imagine a country which suffers two genocides, the Bengal Famine and Partition. Imagine a nation littered with refugees and the bittersweet memories of displacement. Such a nation could have turned melancholic, bitter, even tyrannical. Yet with all the violence, India of the Nehruvian years had a touch of innocence. Indians felt they had done the impossible (win freedom) and now wanted to repeat it. It was Nehru who gave India that lightness of being, that childlike innocence and yet that sophistication that came with a civilisational confidence.

Nehru inspired a generation to hope and believe. In fact, it was the first decades of Independence that could be called the Indian century because Nehru made India feel that Indians were special.

We used science as an enzyme of hope, an elixir of development. Where else could a nation talk of the future as belonging to science or those who make friends with science? The concentration camps were still a stark fact and the atomic bomb had been tested over Japan.

No other nation saw science as a dream. The Russians and the West saw it as a tool of economic development. Nehru insisted science was culture, a form of playfulness, providing a sense of discovery and excitement. This was a man who felt that science would prolong his discovery of India and even the world. For Nehru, science was not about productivity. It was a way of looking at the world. In fact, if one looks at Nehruvian scientists one senses that same elegance about science, whether it was P.C. Mahalanobis, Homi J. Bhabha, K.S. Krishnan, Vikram Sarabhai or Satish Dhawan. For all of them, science was not just knowledge. It was an aesthetic for approaching the world, an insight we have lost in this dismal age of the information revolution.

One is reminded of a story about the Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who spent his student days with William Bateson at Cambridge. Vavilov was once referring to an English colleague, a nuts and bolts empiricist. Vavilov claimed that he was a good worker but insisted in his accented English that he had no-“Phi-Lo-so-phee.” Nehru provided philosophy to the first years of Independence.

I admit it had a touch of innocence. In fact, it was re-echoed in Hindi cinema by Raj Kapoor, who, like Nehru, was an incurable romantic, who saw in being Indian and nationality, a dream of a different being. When Kapoor sang “Mera¯ ju¯ta¯ hai Ja¯pani¯, ye patlu¯n Inglista¯ni¯, Sar pe la¯l topi¯ Ru¯si¯, phir bhi¯ dil hai Hindusta¯ni¯,” he was reciting one of the new anthems of the Nation, a country, a generation which believed it had a tryst with destiny.

Ideology and elegance

Even ideology had a touch of romance. Today one laughs at socialism and the dreams of the Left when one watches the dreary rhetoric of the CPI(M). But ideology in that era was an aesthetic of justice, a poetics of solidarity with people. I know the words might sound empty today but when the Indian People's Theatre Association performed, or Nehru spoke ideology, Marxist-Socialist ideology made sense of the world. As an old Marxist explained, in India, Marxism was not just about class. It gave a touch of class to the way we thought of the world. One misses that elegance, that aesthetic of democracy when we talk of secularism today as it gets viscous with political correctness.

One must remember that the first decade was an idealistic decade. When I think of my parents or their friends, one senses the deep celebration of India. Every Indian felt his sacrifice was worth it. It was a moral, aesthetic and scientific world where character-building, nation-building and dam-building went together. There was little cynicism, a great realism about poverty and yet a hope that nation-building Nehruvian style was one of the great epics of the century. India has lost that epic quality of hope and innocence.

May be the Nehruvian era needed that touch of pragmatism we call Patel. May be Nehru could have absorbed the insights of Rajaji. At that time we had such a surplus of leaders, from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Rajendra Prasad, B.C. Roy and Rajaji that we did not realise that the first decade was a festival of leadership, with each individual adding to the richness of the Indian vision.

I remember when the Nehruvian era died. For me, as a child it was a composite of two events. India, invincible India, the India that gave us Dhyan Chand, lost in hockey at the Rome Olympics. For my biased mind, cricket, tedious cricket, only emerged into the limelight after that. Then, even more poignantly, India lost a border war with China. It was a collapse of a world view where India which had conquered colonialism was mired once again in defeat. Nehru, our immaculate Nehru, sounded old and vulnerable. There was a loneliness, a tiredness about him. When a legend is threatened, mediocre critics like termites creep out of the woodwork of history to recite his mistakes. The magic was gone and Nehru faded soon afterward. The question “after Nehru who?” popped up soon and one then senses the momentous nature of the loss. One realised that for all the mistakes, those were the last magical years of the nation.

Institution building

Today, given the mediocrity of his epigone and the autism of the Congress party, we forget that the Nehruvian era was the great period of institution building, where we initiated community development, celebrated planning, built our great IITs, revitalised our science laboratories. India could not have been India without harvesting the achievement of the Nehruvian years.

I remember my old friend and teacher U.R. Ananthamurthy. Before he died, he left behind a great manuscript, a testament, a manifesto. URA criticised the Nehruvian years but he made a more critical point. Nehru might have made mistakes but Narendra Modi is the mistake that India might regret one day in its angry backlash against the family. Nehru was a classic. Our current regime is a footnote. It can only become history if it destroys the Nehruvian years.

Today, there is an epidemic of seminars, conferences and newspaper articles about 125 years of Nehru. Writers will give Nehru the good conduct certificates he does not need and praise his concern for poverty and his interest in science. The Congress is petty enough not to invite Mr. Modi but pompously invites guests from overseas. It is an un-Nehruvian act in its aesthetics and one must condemn it. Yet, what will be even more depressing is the social science litany about a man who gave us the poetics of a nation. In our current politics, it is not memory and its poignancy we are evoking. Our anniversaries become dull timetables, empty acts of repetition. When the magic is gone, only an official catechism remains. It is simpler to open a book of photographs and travel down memory lane. I wish there was something simpler, more abstract, a simple poem that caught the magic of the man without shrinking it to nostalgia, because Nehru, our Nehru deserved much more.

(Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal School of Government and Public Policy.)“”

Source: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/opinion-on-jawaharlal-nehru-125th-birth-anniversary/article6600161.ece

"Syria: Turkish Ambivalence"

Immanuel Wallerstein — 2014-12-01T08:21:03Z

Amid the many and ever-evolving shifts of policies and geopolitical alliances in the various countries of the Middle East, one used to be at least sure what are the prime objectives of the major actors, both in the region and in the outside world.

This is not true of Syria today. Syrian politics today are formed by a triad: supporters of the Bashar al-Assad regime; supporters of the caliphate that calls itself the Islamic State (IS); and so-called moderate Islamic groups that claim to be fighting both of the other two groups. Triadic struggles are notoriously difficult both to analyze and to predict because triads have an almost fatal way of reducing themselves in the relatively short run to a clearer two-sided struggle. However, in this case many of the main actors in the region and beyond are highly ambivalent about what it is they want. Many of them prefer to maintain the triad if they can, and are afraid of being forced to choose to which dyad they give priority. This ambivalence is particularly true of Turkey, although also of Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Turkey shares a large border with Syria. It has been governed for some time now by the AKP (Justice and Development Party), an Islamic party that seeks to project itself as oriented to Islamic values and practices but nonetheless tolerant of other perspectives and commitments. It started its rule with an announced foreign policy of maintaining its links with the western world as a member of NATO and a country seeking to join the European Union while at the same time attempting to restore Turkey's role as a major power in the Middle East, one that would maintain good relations with all other Middle Eastern countries.

When the civil war began in Syria, Turkey offered its services as a mediator. In the process, at some point, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thought that Syria's President Bashar al-Assad had lied to him. Deeply affronted, he turned from being a mediator to being a leading proponent of a change in Syrian regime.

Turkey has a very large Kurdish minority to which the successive governments have always denied recognition, devolution, and linguistic rights. Ever since the establishment of a Turkish republic over ninety years ago, Turkish governments have reacted to Kurdish demands with total suppression, some even denying that there was such a group as the Kurds. Some thirty years ago, a Kurdish militant Marxist-Leninist movement, the PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party), sought to achieve Kurdish objectives with armed revolt. The leader of this movement, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A few years ago, the present Turkish regime changed course and surprised the world by entering into negotiations with the PKK to see if a compromise could be realized. For its part, the PKK indicated that they no longer were a Marxist-Leninist movement and were ready to contemplate devolution as an objective instead of independence for the Kurdish region. These discussions have been difficult but ongoing and seemingly promising.

The Syrian civil war upended the internal situation in Turkey. The caliphate forces (so-called IS) expanded considerably in northern Syria and have been seeking to control the Syrian side of the border with Turkey. This is actually a region peopled largely by Syrian Kurds. Their main movement, the PYD (Party of Unity and Democracy) has been the principal target of IS attack as well as the principal force in the zone that is resisting the advance of the IS. The IS is presently attacking Kobani, the de facto capital of the Syrian Kurdish region.

The movement of Syrian Kurds is also in close relation with Turkey's Kurdish movement, the PKK. When the United States announced its policy of creating a "coalition" of forces to fight the IS forces and using its airplanes to try to stem their advance, Turkey found itself immediately under considerable US pressure to join the struggle. In particular, the Kurds on both sides of the border, and the United States, have called for Turkey's opening its borders in both directions: to permit Syrian Kurds who are under threat in Kobani and elsewhere from the IS forces to enter Turkey for safe haven and to allow Turkish Kurds to enter Syria to assist militarily the Syrian Kurds.

Turkey has been most reluctant to accede to any of these requests. President Erdogan declared that, from Turkey's point of view, both the IS and the Turkish Kurdish movement, the PKK, are equally terrorist movements, and Turkey saw no reason to open its frontier in this way. This is a strange position to take since the Turkish government has been negotiating for some time with the PKK despite the fact that they label it as a terrorist movement. The Kurdish movements, the PKK and the DYP, cannot in any sense be equated with the IS which is pursuing a very aggressive military campaign against all and sundry.

So what is Turkey saying to the world? The government has argued that fighting the IS will strengthen Bashar al-Assad. This is probably true. But therein lies Turkey's choice and its ambivalence. The Turkish government is demanding a promise from the United States that it will not be diverted from pursuing a struggle against the al-Assad regime, and in particular that it establish now a no-fly zone on the frontier. The United States argues this is impossible to do without troops on the ground, which they will not send.

And here is the choice: which dyad? If one gives priority to the struggle against the IS, it does reduce the support given to the ever smaller so-called moderate Islamists in Syria. If one gives priority to fighting al-Assad, it does strengthen the IS and will undoubtedly lead to a widespread massacre of Syrian Kurds by the IS, as the United Nations Syria envoy has just warned.

The other Turkish ambivalence concerns their negotiations with the PKK. If Turkey turns its back on the dilemmas of the Syrian Kurds, it will probably lead to a rupture in the negotiations with the PKK in Turkey. They have been so warned publicly by the PKK. But if the Turkish government turns more actively against the IS, the result could be that the PKK would have a stronger position in the continuing negotiations.

In addition, Turkey has been trying to improve its relations with Iran. The two countries share strong common interests in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even support the same forces in Palestine. But not fighting actively against the IS will interfere with this attempt to increase ties. On the other hand, active opposition to the IS will interfere with Turkey's attempt to present itself as a champion of Sunni Islamists.

One way or the other, Turkey will have to come to a more coherent policy in the very near future. Otherwise, its claim to be a major actor in the region will fall flat. And its internal struggle with the Kurds will probably explode into violence again. Ambivalence is not admired in a zone of such hot struggles.

The Nanavati Commission: Another Hoax On The People Of India!

Fr. Cedric Prakash sj — 2014-12-01T08:19:03Z

Finally, yesterday (November 18th 2014), exactly 12 years 8 months and 12 days after it was first constituted by the Gujarat Government on March 6th 2002 to probe the burning of the Godhra train and the subsequent carnage which broke out in several parts of Gujarat, the Commission headed by G.T Nanavati (a former judge of the Supreme Court of India) submitted its report to the current Chief Minister of Gujarat, Anandiben Patel.

It was originally known as the K.G. Shah Commission but it was later reconstituted to include Justice Nanavati, after several civil rights groups and individuals protested over the closeness that Justice Shah had with Narendra Modi. Justice Shah died in 2008; and Justice Akshay H. Mehta (who granted bail to Babu Bajrangi in the Naroda Patiya case) was appointed on 5th April 2008 to be a member of this Commission.

The content of this more than 2000-page report has not yet been made public but if one goes by the grapevine and what seems to be “leaked out” to sections of the media, then one can very easily conclude the following: that those really responsible for the law and order in the State have been given a ‘clean chit'; that the burning of S-6 Coach of the Sabarmati Express on 27th February, 2002, just outside the Godhra railway station was a ‘meticulously planned act of conspiracy' (this was already said in the Commission's interim report in 2008); and finally the only people who seemed to be ‘responsible' for not preventing or controlling the violence are some lower rung policemen and some apparently anti-social elements.

The Commission which has claimed to have looked into 4,160 cases of violence in Gujarat between February 27th and May 31st 2002 also states that it has gone through 46,000 affidavits submitted by over 4,000 victims of the violence that paralysed Gujarat and continues to be one of the darkest and bloodiest chapters of independent India. It was given 24 extensions (of almost six months each) before it submitted its report. Till July 2012, the Commission ran up an expenditure bill of more than Rs.5.00 crores with an additional miscellaneous expense of Rs.1.62 crores. It has been past two and a half years since; so the final cost of this Commission (including the disguised expenditure) will surely run to a mind-boggling amount and all at the cost of the State exchequer (a Gujarati newspaper today puts a conservative cost of Rs.9.00 crores)

Several concerned citizens like the late Mukul Sinha of Jan Sangharsh Manch, Sanjiv Bhatt and others have tried their level best to bring the Commission – any thinking citizen will know - on track and ensure that truth prevails and that the victim-survivors are given justice. The Commission, has been full of inconsistencies, lapses and loopholes. Sinha who cross-examined several witnesses, has consistently demanded that Modi who was the Chief Minister of Gujarat at that time, had to be interrogated too. Why the Commission took the pains to deny this request from Sinha and several others does not leave much room for doubt!

Even though the Commission has submitted its report, many for the victim-survivors (and several others who have accompanied them) are the Gujarat Carnage of 2002 is not a closed chapter. The relentless pursuit for truth and justice will continue until those who presided over this carnage are brought to book. Only then, will they truly be able to sing our motto emblazoned on our national emblem “satyameva jayate” (truth alone triumphs!)

19th November, 2014

Fr. Cedric Prakash sj is the Director of Prashant, the Ahmedabad-based Jesuit Centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace

Source: http://humanrightsindia.blogspot.ca/2014/11/the-nanavati-commission-another-hoax-on.html?spref=tw

Israel's Nation State Law: Jewish Sharia

Eli Aminov — 2014-12-01T08:16:36Z

The nation state law currently proposed by the government is yet another signal to Israel's Palestinian citizens: Israel is for Jews!

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government are currently promoting the crème de la crème of anti-semitic laws: the definition of Israel as a state of the “Jewish nation”, i.e. the state of Jews of the world and not of its non-Jewish citizens. So Israel is the state of the Jewish Americans and Russians, but not of the residents of Kufr Qassem. The proposed legislation determines the superiority of the Jewish character of the state over the remains of its democratic nature. With this Israel joins those same anti-semitic states or movements that discriminate amongst citizens according to their origins. The slogan of this law, whose meaning is Israel for the Jews!, is strikingly similar to anti-semitic slogans. In France, for example, the central slogan of anti-semitism was France for the French! This loathsome law determines that the right to exercise national self-definition in Israel is unique to those whose mothers are members of the Jewish religion, or those who underwent a religious ceremony to join the Jewish religion. The law determines also that “Eretz Israel”, i.e. Palestine, is solely the historical homeland of the Jewish people. This anti-semitic law does not recognise the fact that this land is the sole homeland of the Palestinians, whose national life was uprooted due to the Israeli takeover.

In the lands of the Mediterranean the corrupt, national regimes which led their peoples from failure to failure were finally recognised as bankrupt, but now arises the netherworld of Islamic reactionary-ism. Such foundations of fundamentalism always represented competitors to the national trends of the regimes that came to power in the region following liberation from colonialism. The Islamic movements are attempting to transform Islam into a factor that will unite the Arab world and seemingly allow it to deal with the historical tasks standing before the weakened states. The ISIS organisation is prominent amongst these foundations.

Precisely to this repulsive and central trend in the “new Middle East” the government of Israel is connecting. Its “winning card” is imposition of the Jewish sharia on the limited Israeli democracy. For the Jewish masses, fed continuous hatred of Arabs, and in the past year poisoned by racist incitement flowing directly from the government, this proposed legislation is clear: this is a Jewish state and because of this, Arabs out! Just like the slogans “Jews out”, which spread throughout Europe in the 1930s.

Indeed, since its establishment, Israel has transmitted to its Arab minority which survived the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 war, that Israel is not its home. The legislation in the heart of matters which discriminates against Arab citizens began immediately after acceptance of Israel as a member of the UN. The political, legislative and legal system since then has created non-stop racist regulations and laws which refer to citizens not according to their deeds, but their origins. The ongoing legislation serves not only the theft and dispossession of the indigenous population, but is also intended to ensure continued supply of a Jewish immigrant population, through the strengthening and empowerment of the most important ally of Zionism, which is none other than international anti-semitism. This supply is also intended to ensure an ever-increasing number of poor people at the bottom of the Jewish society, who will be forced to agree to to harmful employment via employment agencies, for the benefit of those close to the regime.

Since 1949 the intensive legislation of more and more laws discriminating between Jews and Arabs has continued. Each year state institutions automatically extended the amendment to the citizenship law, which prevents reunification of Palestinian families; also legislated was the acceptance committee law, which allows for legal discrimination; the prohibition to commemorate the Naqba law by Arab municipalities; the Prawer plan intended to steal Bedouins' land; and some fifty additional laws and proposed legislation in only the past seven years which discriminate between Jews and Arabs! (see publications of Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel). To these, of course, we must add the emergency regulations adopted directly from the British colonialists, and laws related to land and entry into Israel. These are apartheid laws existing for some three generations. What characterises the Israeli discrimination laws is hypocrisy. In contrast to apartheid laws which existed in South Africa, the word Arab, which explicitly refers to the inferior indigenous person, does not appear in Israeli apartheid laws. However, apartheid policy is policy, which refers to people differently only due to their origins, ethnic or national identity, and legislates laws and regulations for implementing this policy. A sequence of such laws is certainly sufficient to define Israel as an apartheid state.

Now, as the crowning jewel the government is promoting the new nation state law. Indeed, through blood and sweat we established a race. Even amongst colonial states, Israel stands out as the sole country in the world which applied its immigration laws to residents of the indigenous nation in the area and transformed them into foreigners. If such is the situation, why does Israeli leadership, which is essentially only the leadership of the Jewish community, bother with this racial law?

The answer is simple, but few understand it: precisely because there is no Jewish people. Zionism tries again and again to build a nation on the basis of religion, i.e. a nation which exists thanks to the Jewish law (sharia) and not due to its holding of the territory of historical Palestine. If Zionism was a national movement, it would build in this land a Palestinian territorial nation whose ethnic or religious elements do not discriminate between the nation's people. Even if Zionism would recognise the Israeli nation, the citizens of the Israeli territory would be equal citizens and all of the citizens would form a nation. However, Zionism is a reactionary movement, tied to imperialism and representing its watch dog in the region. It therefore requires an imaginary and abstract nation whose members will be willing to kill and be killed for a religion lacking in mercy. Precisely like the horrific soldiers of the Islamic state.

Source: http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/news/214-israel-s-nation-state-law-jewish-sharia