On the Return of Kashmiri Pandits to Kashmir

Nasir Khan, April 28, 2015

I will offer only a short comment on Dr Badri Raina’s article. As a Kashmiri Pandit who had witnessed the trauma of the partition of India in 1947 and of his native land, the Princely State of the Jammu and Kashmir, Raina has continued to offer his ideas for resolving the Kashmir conflict. His ideas, as far as I have understood him from his articles, were primarily motivated to finding a way through which the legitimate political grievances of the people of Jammu and Kashmir can be addressed. Incidentally, any long sentences of this erudite professor of English should not scare anyone! He means well.

The flight of the Kashmiri Pandits to India in the 1990s during the militant insurgency was one vicious aspect of the political quagmire that prevailed in Kashmir. However, the question of their return to the Valley needs a careful assessment based on a close knowledge of the problem and a dispassionate scrutiny of the political environment existing there. For a number of reasons, Raina is well suited to do that and his article shows his political realism. What he says about the conditions under which they can return and the practical matters involved in their resettlement are far-sighted and judicious. Perhaps he could have given his readers some more information with regard to the overall political context under which the Pandits fled. As I see it, that context continues to be the old problem of the partition in 1947.

The passage of six decades has not resolved or removed the causes of the conflict. In fact, Delhi has shown little inclination to deal with the basic demands of the people of the Valley and instead has kept on repeating the slogans the vast majority of Kashmiris reject. I welcome the present calm in the Valley but that should not let any well-wisher of the people of Kashmir think that the period of political strife and violence is behind us. If the Indian rulers continue to follow the same old policies without addressing the demands of the people then the present calm may be only temporary. That can make the fate of returning Pandits risky once again.

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Jammu And Kashmir: Return Of The Natives

By Badri Raina

Source: Mainstream Weekly, April 26, 2015

First a non-sequitor: the return of Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley is fraught with great perplexities of emotion, organisation, and healthy sustainability. This contemplated return will not but be attended with consequences of historic import both for the State of Jammu and Kashmir and the subcontinent, one way or another. Of that there should be no doubt. Reason why the premises on which the project is undertaken need to be as comprehensively and objectively understood and acknowledged as may be possible.

I write, of course, as a Kashmiri Pandit who migrated from the State in normal course more than half-a-century ago; and, although I am in the Valley frequently—every second year if not every year—and have friendships and inter-actions that span a very wide spectrum of the population, I cannot possibly lay any claim to the substance of the experience of those Pandits who were forced to flee the Valley in 1990—a fact which, however, may not rob me of the prerogative to express myself on the question with otherwise a legitimate vantage, more perhaps than of those who are neither Kashmiris, nor Pandits, nor frequent visitors to the State, especially the Valley. It is just that those of us who have not experienced the brutalities we speak of worldwide have only the option of empathising with them with what sincere force of imagination we command.

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Embracing the Saudi War on Yemen

Consortium News, April 25, 2015

 

Exclusive: Fearful of further offending the powerful Saudi-Israeli alliance, President Obama is deploying the U.S. Navy to seal off poverty-stricken Yemen so the Saudi air force has free rein to pummel its regional rivals from the air while the population faces a humanitarian crisis on the ground, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

As the humanitarian crisis in Yemen worsens, the Obama administration seems less concerned about the plight of the desperate Yemeni people than the feelings of the Saudi royals who have spent the last month indiscriminately bombing a nearly defenseless Yemen, using high-tech U.S. jets and bombs to reportedly kill hundreds of civilians and damage its ancient cities.

On Friday, the Obama administration took credit for blocking nine Iranian ships from reaching Yemen with relief supplies, claiming that the ships may have carried weapons that the Yemenis could use in their civil war or to defend against Saudi attacks. President Barack Obama had dispatched a U.S. aircraft carrier fleet to the Yemeni coast to enforce an embargo that has helped the Saudis seal off the country from outside help.

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Commemorating the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan

Nasir Khan, April 27, 2015

Today is the anniversary of the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan. On 27 April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took over power. The socialist friends of Afghanistan are aware of the historic significance of this revolution in Afghanistan and for the people of the neighbouring countries.

 What happened to the Afghan Revolution and the revolutionaries is the story of the US intervention with the help of other US-friendly countries, such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc., and the American help to create and arm the so-called Afghan Mujahidin to wreak havoc in Afghanistan.

In this way, the US and the Mujahidin were able to extinguish the candle of fraternity, social and political reforms, women’s equal rights and people’s power that the Afghan revolution had lit. After destroying the revolution, the US imperialism fought a 13-year long destructive war in Afghanistan against the same forces of religious fanaticism and Islamism that it had helped to create to use against Afghanistan and revolution’s Soviet backers. 

Now America is happy. It controls the destiny of Afghanistan with the help of its nominal rulers who are closely allied to Washington. But the Islamist Taliban are still there and are a potential threat to the political arrangement the US had chartered for Afghanistan.

US presence in Ukraine in breach of Minsk accord: Russia

Press TV, Apr 23, 2015

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov © AFP

The presence of US paratroops in Ukraine to train government forces is in violation of the Minsk agreement on the Kiev side, Russia’s foreign minister says.

Sergei Lavrov made the remarks during a phone conversation with US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

“Lavrov drew [Kerry’s] attention to the fact that the arrival of [US] soldiers … indicates that Kiev has violated its commitments to withdraw all foreign units, military hardware and mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine,” the ministry added.

Earlier this month about 300 US troops from the US 173rd Airborne Brigade for Operation Fearless Guardian arrived in Ukraine’s western city of Yavoriv to train the Ukrainian National Guard in their fight against pro-Russia forces in the country’s eastern provinces.

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EU’s Israel-Palestine Policy Is Out Of Touch With Reality

Alan Hart, Information Clearing House, April 22, 2015

In a letter calling on European Union foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini to promote and implement a 2012 plan to mark produce and products for the European marketplace from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, 16 EU foreign ministers stated that what they are requesting is “an important step in the full implementation of EU longstanding policy in relation to the preservation of the two-state solution”.

If that’s what they truly believe, the 16 who signed the letter – they included the foreign ministers of Britain and France but not Germany – are clearly out of touch with reality because the two-state solution has long been dead, killed by Israel’s on-going colonisation and ethnic cleansing by stealth.

There are, of course, two other possible explanations.

One is that those who signed the letter (as well as their EU ministerial colleagues who didn’t) are entertaining the hope that the Palestinian Authority can be bullied and bribed into accepting a two-state solution on Israel’s terms – terms which would leave Israel in occupation of large chunks of the West Bank and the Palestinian “state” little more than a collection of disconnected Bantustans, with Israel’s various security services still in overall control.

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Causing genocide to protect us from terror

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer and broadcaster. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. Follow him on Twitter

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Published time: March 30, 2015 

An Iraqi family watches U.S. soldiers in in Baquba early June 28, 2007. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)

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A report called Body Count has revealed that at least 1.3 million people have lost their lives as a result of the US-led “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s a report which should have made front page news across the world.

In the comprehensive 101 page document ‘Body Count,’ Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, have produced figures for the number of people killed from September 11, 2001 until the end of 2013.

The findings are devastating: the in-depth investigation concludes that the ‘war on terror‘ has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan. As awful as that sounds, the total of 1.3 million deaths does not take into account casualties in other war zones, such as Yemen – and the authors stress that the figure is a “conservative estimate”.

“The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely,” the executive summary says.

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Richard Falk: Weakening and Discrediting the UN: The Mission of Israeli QGOs

Richard Falk,  GLOBAL JUSTICE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, April 17, 2015


[Prefatory Note: This post is the full text of my presentation at an excellent conference “The Israeli Lobby: Is it good for US? Is it Good for Israel?” National Press Club, Washington, D.C., April 10, 2015; the conference was sponsored and organized by the editorial leadership of the magazine Washington Report, which brings together some of the best writing on the Israel/Palestine struggle. I encourage readers of this blog to look at the full conference either at the YouTube website or the audio recording at http://www.israellobbyus.org Although there were many illuminating presentations during the day, and I would call particular attention to the memorable remarks of two highly informed Israelis, Gideon Levy and Miko Peled.]


There are no better texts for assessing the damage done to the role and reputation of the UN by the Israeli Lobby than to consider Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent statements boasting about the U.S. success in protecting Israel from criticisms arising from its non-fulfillment of responsibilities under international law and as a member of the United Nations. It should be understood that the lobby does not act in a vacuum, and its leverage is greatly enhanced in global settings to the considerable extent that its priorities overlap with the strategic and economic interests of the United States in the Middle East.

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Can We Be Moral Without Believing in Supernatural?

Dr Reza Varjavand, Iranian.com,  July 21, 2013

While imperative, morality is a subjective matter that involves judgment about right and wrong. Like the concept of rationality, morality entails behaving in a certain way that is consistent with a specific objective that may be personal gratification or primarily religious conviction. Historically, religion has served as a source of morality. A religious morality system is designed to guide and control the conducts of the believers. The problem with religious morality scheme, however, is that it is derived from a supernatural deity and believed to be irrefutable, timeless, and no one can challenge its preeminence. Ergo, those who do not believe in supernatural power, like secular/atheists, will be ostracized by religion and labeled as depraved. As I argue below, such stereotyping is as unsubstantiated as claiming that students who attend religious colleges cheat less than those who attend secular universities.

Is immorality really an outgrowth of secularism/atheism? There are 7 billion people living in the world today, almost 14 percent of them do not believe in supernatural. Are they any less moral than religious people? The primary motive why religious enthusiasts try to link secularity /atheism to immorality and even social anarchy is to create fear or to prey on the gullibility of regular folks.  Frankly, the accusation that irreligiosity is the source of immorality in the society is nothing but wishful thinking for three reasons.

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Religious Fanaticism is a Huge Factor in Americans’ Support for Israel

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept,  April 15, 2015

A new poll from Bloomberg Politics contains a finding that, if you really think about it, is quite remarkable:

 
Almost half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide. It’s the ultimate violation of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address warning that “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded. … The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”

It is inconceivable that a substantial portion of Americans would want to support any other foreign country even where doing so was contrary to U.S. interests. Only Israel commands anything near that level of devoted, self-sacrificing fervor on the part of Americans. So it’s certainly worth asking what accounts for this bizarre aspect of American public opinion.

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Hyping the Iranian ‘Threat’

Consortium News, April 9, 2015

Iran hasn’t invaded another country for centuries and is helping the U.S. push back against the Islamic State in Iraq, but Israeli leaders and American neocons want to enlist the West in the Saudi cause of promoting Sunni Islam over Shiite Islam, while America’s interests suffer, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.

By Paul R. Pillar

The idea of Iran as a regional marauder that is gobbling up other countries in the Middle East and against which pressure must therefore be unrelenting has become one of the favorite themes of those determined to kill the nuclear agreement with Tehran. As an argument for rejecting the nuclear deal, this approach has always suffered from major factual and logical flaws.

Given the casual and automatic manner in which references to Iran supposedly sowing mayhem all over the region are routinely worked into almost any discussion of policy toward Iran, it perhaps is too much to expect many people to stop and study the flaws. Perhaps we should just remind people who make those casual references that if Iran really were bent on causing all that mayhem, that is all the more reason to support an agreement to assure that the marauder does not get a nuclear weapon.

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NATO rearmament increases risk of war in Europe

By Johannes Stern, wsws, 11 April 2015

NATO’s rearmament in Eastern Europe is increasingly taking on the form of open war preparations against Russia, raising the danger of a nuclear war between the Western powers and Moscow.

On Friday, the Western military alliance completed the first test of its new super-rapid reaction force, the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF). As part of the “Noble Jump” manoeuvres, the chain of command from NATO Headquarters SHAPE in Belgium was tested via the NATO command in Naples, the German-Netherlands Corps in Münster, and the units in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the Czech Republic. There were troop movements in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.

The exercise is part of the systematic military rearmament of NATO in Eastern Europe following the pro-Western coup in Ukraine and the subsequent military offensive by Kiev in the east of the country.

Western heads of state and government agreed to the establishment of the VJTF at the NATO summit in September last year in Wales. It belongs to the NATO Response Force (NRF), the NATO rapid reaction force, whose troop strength was doubled in early February to 30,000 soldiers. In an emergency, the 5,000-strong so-called “spearhead” of the NRF can be operational within 48 hours.

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Badri Raina: My God Problem

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Why people believe in a God

Nasir Khan, April 10, 2015

In a ZNet article Badri Raina reflects upon an old humanist tradition that shaped the social and religious outlook of different religious communities – Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists – in his native land, Kashmir, and the contributions of Kashmiri saints and rishis that enriched the Indian thought. He compares those bygone days with the present times when we see a strict observance of religious dogmas in place of a free exchange of ideas on these matters between Muslims and Hindus.

The ideas that Raina advances and the questions he raises about God, divinity and religion are understandable when we see the contemporary scene, not only in Kashmir but also in many other places and amongst the followers of Islam and other religions. His views are primarily of a tolerant, secularist person who is willing to enter into a free exchange of views with some intelligent religious people, including Muslims from his native land. I admire the humanist impulse that underlies his spiritual stirrings and see how the present situation anguishes him. Somehow, he also seems interested in that his intelligent compatriots may explore the rational ways of looking at God, divinity instead of remaining prisoners of their exclusivist dogmas. If that is to happen then the preconditions for such an enlightened approach do not exist in the social and political arenas at present.

In fact, it is quite unrealistic to track God and his divinity to a manageable level. People have looked at him in various ways and have given him all the attributes human beings have. He sees, watches, listens, speaks to some, knows-all, controls everything, becomes happy, gets angry and revengeful; he rewards or punishes us for our actions; he loves to be praised a lot and venerated by all. He is kind, generous and very rich because he owns everything in the universe. Many sacred books count all such qualities of him. We have learnt about his qualities.

But we can inform a theist that if anyone speaks, listens or sees then he must have a tongue, ears and eyes in his physical body because we cannot say that a non-objective being can speak, listen, see or has other attributes of a biological organism. It is common knowledge that we have the capacity to imagine such a being but that does not mean it can have an independent existence. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx pithily wrote, "A non-objective being is a non-being." Certainly, a theist cannot refute this; he will have no answer. The only availabel answer he will have is to point to some sacred book or some holy men who said this or that and by doing so he will feel that he has proven the existence of his inscrutable ‘objective being’!

So the final solution is not to question or explore but to accept what the authorities say about the Ultimate Authority and that is the end of the matter! But why so many intelligent and knowledgeable people continue to believe in a deity/deities may be due to the force of social tradition and early indoctrination from which they cannot easily break away. 

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 My God Problem

By Badri Raina , ZNet, April 4, 2015

These thoughts are occasioned by my most recent week-long embrace of the valley of Kashmir (March 22-28), among whose people I am, despite some five decades or more of living in metropolitan India. My visits and my engagement with Kashmir remain relentless, and my language, despite a half century of marriage outside the Kahmiri fold, still rolls from my tongue with accents of love and belonging, and I am owned there without the least subterfuge or qualification. My people are presciently brilliant of intellect and will question and research everything that may be questioned or researched barring one  thing—god  and religion therefrom.  There are of course those who do so, but away from public notice, it must be said. And presumably many others who keep their cogitations to themselves altogether as they conform to everyday  religious observance. 

 Let me quickly add that such questioning has now becoming a hazardous enterprise across the world’s religions, differing only in degrees of accommodation and consequence. This was not so until some three decades  ago. During my years in the valley, and long after as well, it was common to hear Kashmiris of all hues spar about divinity, argue many dark corners, lovingly mock at God’s frailties, propagate godliness as human selflessness and a habit of non-doctrinal embrace of the other, to laud the rich treasures of sufi-rishi wisdom that transcended denominations, indeed that challenged denominations, to celebrate the lives of saints as emblems of  all-encompassing love, and not to hold the definition of  faith  down to personal habits that may have been proscribed in a sacred text.

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President Zeman Tells Washington That the Czech Republic Is Not an American Protectorate

by Paul Craig Roberts , Foreign Policy Journal,  April 7, 2015

European governments are regarded by Washington as vassals who behave according to Washington’s wishes.

 

As readers know, I have emphasized for years that European governments are regarded by Washington as vassals who behave according to Washington’s wishes.  It has been 70 years—two or three generations—since former world powers, such as Great Britain and Germany had an independent foreign policy.

 In addition to this ignobility, European governments are also vassals to the EU, so on the sovereignty front European countries are twice damned.  They simply have no sovereignty.

This is why it is so easy for Washington to spin a web of lies and drive its vassals into a “crisis” with Russia that does not serve the interests of Europeans.  Washington’s European puppets don’t count.  Only Washington counts.
Next month is Russia’s Victory Day celebration over Nazi Germany.  Washington has told its puppets not to attend, and many including German chancellor Merkel have complied with their overlord’s demand.  But not the President of the Czech Republic.

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Blaming Iran for Shi’ite Unrest Throughout the Middle East

by GARY LEUPP, Counterpunch, April 8, 2015

A few minutes exposure to U.S. cable news gives the viewer the impression that Iran is relentlessly carving out an empire in the Middle East. This is approximately as absurd as the proposition that Vladimir Putin is striving to recreate the empire of the tsars. Talking heads who never think to mention Israel’s wars of aggression since its inception (much less its nukes), or the pattern of NATO expansion (= U.S. imperial expansion) since the end of the Cold War, bristle with indignation at any reported shipment of Iranian arms to some Shiites (or anyone, really) somewhere, or any Russian effort to thwart the expansion of a hostile military alliance along their borders.

The fact is, Iraq has not invaded another country since the 1730s, when Nader Shah waged war on both the Ottoman and Mughal empires and established an ephemeral empire stretching from the Caucasus to the Indus Valley. In modern times Iran has been the victim of repeated attacks and encroachments on its sovereignty—by Britain, tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union just after the Second World War, and Iraq (with U.S. blessing and support) from September 1980 to August 1988. But it has not directly attacked any of its neighbors.

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What if US & UN Sanctioned Israel over its Nukes as they did Iran over Enrichment?

By Juan Cole, Source: Informed Comment, April 5, 2015

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There is a lot of talk about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and the ways in which an Iranian bomb would provoke Saudi Arabia and others to acquire nuclear warheads of their own.
But for decades, the primary impetus to a nuclear arms race in the region has been Israel, which probably had an atom bomb by about 1970. It was helped behind the scenes by France and Britain– which actively proliferated nuclear weapons to Israel.

It was Israel’s bomb that, in part, impelled Iraq to go for broke. Iraq’s nuclear weapons program of the 1980s in turn convinced some in Iran that Iran needed at least a nuclear break-out capacity if two of its enemies were going to have bombs. Since Israel destroyed an Iraqi light water reactor, OSIRAK, in 1981 (which had been built by the French and could not easily have been used to produce fissile material), when Iran began its experiments in uranium enrichment, it kept them secret lest Tel Aviv send out F-14s.

Ideally, the whole Middle East should be an atomic bomb- free region. The area has enough horrible problems without a weapon of mass destruction. But the UN Security Council has treated Israel very differently from the way they treated Iran. For centuries, Europeans have been held to different standards and different rules than have peoples of the Global South. Israel as a “European” country was allowed to get a nuclear bomb, indeed was helped to do so, and no sanctions were ever applied to it. Iran was targeted for economic warfare just for having an enrichment program.

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Protests Growing in Okinawa Over U.S. Military Presence

Jon Letman,  Huffington Post, April 3, 2015

Photo by Ojo de Cineasta via Flickr

If you live in Hawaii, you probably have more exposure to things Okinawan than most Americans. According to the University of Hawaii Center for Okinawan Studies, an estimated 45,000-50,000 Hawaii residents, including Gov. David Ige, have Okinawan roots. Local festivals and community events provide the chance to experience the culture of this once independent kingdom formerly known as Ryukyu.

Before it was annexed by Japan in 1879, Ryukyu played a unique role between its powerful and almost equally distant neighbors, China and Japan.

Today Okinawa prefecture includes dozens of inhabited and many more smaller uninhabited islands, yet in total it occupies only about one-seventh the area of the Hawaiian Islands. Okinawa island (by far the largest), is about 20 percent smaller (466 sq. miles) than Kauai but has a population over 20 times greater (1.4 million).

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Poof! There goes Netanyahu’s Iran bogeyman

The breakthrough agreement with Iran may have stifled attempts at scaremongering from the Israeli right.

Rachel Shabi, Aljazeera, 03 Apr 2015

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Iran’s nuclear negotiating committee arrive in Tehran [Getty]

Long before a historic deal was finally agreed upon, we might have guessed what the Israeli government would make of it. Having warned about the perils of any rapprochement with Iran for some years – going to the US Congress, twice, and to the UN, with the same doom-laden messages – it was probably safe to assume that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to any agreement would be: We hate it.

 

Indeed, days before this ground-breaking framework agreement was reached, days before the marathon negotiations finally broke through and Iranians broke out onto the streets in celebration, Israeli officials loudly heckled from the sidelines, proclaiming that the imminent deal was set to be even worse than had previously been thought.

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Ray McGovern: Why Iran Distrusts the US in Nuke Talks

Consortium News,  April 1, 2015

Exclusive: The mainstream U.S. media portrays the Iran nuclear talks as “our good guys” imposing some sanity on “their bad guys.” But the real history of the West’s dealings on Iran’s nuclear program shows bad faith by the U.S. government, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes.

By Ray McGovern

The Iranians may be a bit paranoid but, as the saying goes, this does not mean some folks are not out to get them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his knee-jerk followers in Washington clearly are out to get them – and they know it.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the surreal set of negotiations in Switzerland premised not on evidence, but rather on an assumption of Iran’s putative “ambition” to become a nuclear weapons state – like Israel, which maintains a secret and sophisticated nuclear weapons arsenal estimated at about 200 weapons. The supposed threat is that Iran might build one.



Israel and the U.S. know from their intelligence services that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program, but they are not about to let truth get in the way of their concerted effort to marginalize Iran. And so they fantasize before the world about an Iranian nuclear weapons program that must be stopped at all costs – including war.

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