I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
The only reasonable way to get out of the mindset of religious
fanaticism is to turn to humanism and humane values that fanatics
oppose. The road is indeed long and hazardous, but it is worth
exploring. If rational people start thinking on these lines, they will
also be walking along these lines. Accordingly, they will influence
others. Otherwise, we will remain mired in the mud of religious fanaticism and barbarism.
Many people are justifiably afraid of the enormous influence the
right-wing forces wield and exploit religions for their nefarious
political agendas, communalism, hatred against other religious
communities, creeds, oppose social justice and equal sociopolitical
rights for all. These forces are a danger to all and are very active.
They are a big danger to all human values, which are the foundation
stones of modern democratic societies, their organization and
functioning.
But we should keep in mind that many people are actively involved in
combating and fighting against these forces of darkness and inhumanity.
What our friends and sympathizers can do in this struggle is not to
become only silent spectators and leave the field open to the fanatics,
but to side with those who are involved in political struggles against
the reactionary forces.
This work involves, among other activities, using the media for
highlighting the harm the fanatics have caused by their indoctrination
and falsehoods. This process strengthens the struggle of creating common
bonds of humanity and respect for all members of society, where the
development of all fairly and democratically is possible. That means
rejecting religious fanaticism in all forms and advancing the cause of
socialist democratic values and humanism.
The Israeli rulers had many objectives to pursue in their genocidal
war against Gaza. They declared openly some, but they didn’t disclose
all in this way. Despite the 15-month duration of one of the most
devastating bombing campaigns of the twenty-first century they launched
on the besieged Palestine of Gaza, they were unable to eradicate Hamas,
despite killing some of their prominent leaders and members.
Among the undisclosed objectives was to cause maximum damage to the
infrastructure, such as buildings, houses, factories, shops, towns,
shopping malls, mosques, hospitals, schools, universities, colleges and
other civic amenities of the people in Gaza and kill as many civilians
as they wanted. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced and
tormented by constant violence and destruction. Indeed, they have done
this with the full support of America, Britain, Germany, and others.
Israel has succeeded in all these infamies, barbarian acts and crimes
against humanity.
They hope to carry on with the policy of annihilation of Palestinians
after the negotiated ceasefire is over, if it is ever allowed to work.
However, they are certain to cause as many difficulties and ambiguities
as they desire during the implementation of the ceasefire agreement.
Their ability to accomplish this task is not a secret. They’re masters
of trickery, manipulation, and propaganda.
Mr. Dave Sheldon, I'm sorry to have missed replying to your first comment, which you mentioned. The MSM usually doesn't give much or no information about the situation in the Gaza Strip (and also in the West Bank) where Israel is killing innocent civilians, including patients in hospitals, by indiscriminate aerial bombardments, missiles, and a marauding army.
But luckily, there are some people in the alternative media doing what the MSM, should also have paid due attention to. We know how the BBC under a Zionist has suppressed news and hid the facts as much as he could. The Zionist-dominated media and political establishment in Britain and other powerful Western nations operate this way.
This hapless situation forces me to share these facts with people. I believe, no person with human conscience and humane feelings can ignore what the Western-backed colonial-settler state has been doing, not only from September 2023, but for decades, starting from 1948.
I know, many people are indifferent to what has been happening in Gaza. There is also open support for Zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine by some people; the process of ethnic cleansing is systematic to advance a long-term strategy of the Zionists. However, I concur with you that the Sudan war needs more attention. I will be pleased to see if people in this group start highlighting and finding the causes of the tragic civil war and the suffering of people there.
The problems of Zionist ideology and its ramifications are because of its political goals. It has nothing to do with religion, even though Israeli leaders have fully exploited the religious identities of Jews for their political ends.
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved
an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep
sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and
calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of
the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and
overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against
the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from
the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about
poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us
to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more
verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially
abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially
motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really
doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension
of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer
acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she
withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had
a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers
“disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used
emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not
Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept
showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to
describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and
‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus
Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of
Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is
that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How
does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the
center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all
over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct
reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was,
as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as
stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his
prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative,
disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of
Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved
with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on,
no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of
the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president
had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never
see their child again,” he said,
adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped
away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents,
and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he
asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why
do we keep letting this happen?”
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza
has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing
and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit
cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding
maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by
affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that
Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party
leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries
did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert
themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori
Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of
multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less
lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the
Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which
thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual
slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but
the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background
noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as
determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of
criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric —
unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en
masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently
concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry
editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an
ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted
through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation,
surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William
Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
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Islamic nations saw a period of social and intellectual stagnation that started around the 13th century. Any critical and creative thinking about Islamic doctrine and its social practice had stopped by then. Thus the task was only to follow what had already been achieved in Islamic philosophical, political and juridical spheres and avoid any new ideas.
But in Europe, a new era was soon to start: the era of Renaissance, from the 14th to 17th centuries, that brought new ways to change the existing attitudes to religion, art, philosophy while Muslim nations remained in a state of regression. The Islamic world didn't experience the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.
Western nations were able to colonize many parts of the globe, including the Muslim countries. For the colonial armies to subdue and bring Afro-Asian nations under their direct control was not too difficult either. After the end of colonialism in the 20th century, the newly-independent Islamic countries saw much political and social turmoil that has persisted for many decades for a number of reasons. But one major factor that has been instrumental in perpetuating, strengthening and exploiting Islamic countries through the subservient ruling cliques, monarchies, dictators, etc., has been the role of US imperialism and the neo-colonialism of the old colonial powers in these countries.
“Donald Trump will have no penalty for
criminal wrongdoing, which is an affront to accountability and to a
system where no one is above the law, though the judge had little
alternative,” said one ethics expert.
After being convicted of 34 felonies in New York last year, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Friday received an unconditional discharge during a sentencing hearing that came just over a week before the Republican’s second inauguration.
Just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court—which includes three Trump appointees—allowed
the hearing to proceed, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan
Merchan declined to impose fines or sentence Trump to prison for his
crimes, which related to hush money payments to cover up sex scandals
during the 2016 presidential election cycle.
“Donald Trump will have no penalty for criminal wrongdoing, which is
an affront to accountability and to a system where no one is above the
law, though the judge had little alternative,” said
Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of the watchdog group Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “But now, formally, the next
president of the United States is a felon.”
“Children have reportedly been killed in several mass casualty
events, including nighttime attacks in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and
al-Mawasi, a unilaterally designated ‘safe zone’ in the south,” UNICEF
said on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, an Israeli strike on al-Mawasi in
south Gaza killed five displaced children who were sheltering in tents.
The IDF has repeatedly bombed al-Mawasi despite designating it as a
so-called “humanitarian safe zone.”
Displaced
Palestinian children sheltering at a school in Deir el-Balah, central
Gaza, on January 7, 2025 (IMAGO/APAimages via Reuters Connect)
Palestinian children are also dying due to the conditions caused by
the Israeli siege and relentless bombing campaign. UNICEF said that
since December 26, “eight infants and newborns have reportedly died from
hypothermia – a major threat to young children who are unable to
regulate their body temperature.”
Gaza health officials said in December 2023 that 17,000 children had
been killed in the genocidal war, a number that does not include those
missing and presumed dead under the rubble or indirect deaths caused by
the siege.
Newborn babies are especially vulnerable since many have been born
prematurely due to the health conditions of their mothers. Palestinian
mothers in Gaza also struggle to make milk, and there have been
shortages of formula and other baby products.
In October, The New York Times published accounts
from American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza, including
many who worked with babies. “I worked in a neonatal ICU. Several
infants died every day due to lack of medical supplies and appropriate
nutrition,” said Dr. Amen Odeh, a pediatrician from Texas.
“We had to make tough decisions about which very sick baby would be
on the ventilator due to lack of equipment. I saw a family bringing in
their dead 3-day-old infant who had been living in a tent,” Odeh added.
Despite the slaughter of children and death of so many newborns under
the siege, the Biden administration has continued to provide military
aid and political support to Israel. President Biden is reportedly
planning to approve one more major arms deal worth $8 billion before he leaves office.
