It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.
Helen Keller
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Our scientific power
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Among all the people
Among all the people the most detested before Allah are two persons.
One is he who is devoted to his self. So he is deviated from the true path and loves speaking about (foul) innovations and inviting towards wrong path. He is therefore a nuisance for those who are enamored of him, is himself misled from the guidance of those preceding him, misleads those who follow him in his life or after his death, carries the weight of others’ sins and is entangled in his own misdeeds.
The other man is he who has picked up ignorance. He moves among the ignorant, is senseless in
the thick of mischief and is blind to the advantages of peace. Those resembling like men have named him scholar but he is not so.
He goes out early morning to collect things whose deficiency is better than plenty, till when he has quenched his thirst from polluted water and acquired meaningless things. He sits among the people as a judge responsible for solving whatever is confusing to the others. If an ambiguous problem is presented before him he manages shabby argument about it of his own accord and passes judgments on its basis. In this way he is entangled in the confusion of doubts as in the spider’s web, not knowing whether he was right or wrong. If he is right he fears lest he erred, while if he is wrong he hopes he is right. He is ignorant, wandering astray in ignorance and riding on carriages aimlessly moving in darkness. He did not try to find reality of knowledge. He scatters the traditions as the wind scatters the dry leaves.
Amír al-mu’minín Ali A.S.
Sermon 17
One is he who is devoted to his self. So he is deviated from the true path and loves speaking about (foul) innovations and inviting towards wrong path. He is therefore a nuisance for those who are enamored of him, is himself misled from the guidance of those preceding him, misleads those who follow him in his life or after his death, carries the weight of others’ sins and is entangled in his own misdeeds.
The other man is he who has picked up ignorance. He moves among the ignorant, is senseless in
the thick of mischief and is blind to the advantages of peace. Those resembling like men have named him scholar but he is not so.
He goes out early morning to collect things whose deficiency is better than plenty, till when he has quenched his thirst from polluted water and acquired meaningless things. He sits among the people as a judge responsible for solving whatever is confusing to the others. If an ambiguous problem is presented before him he manages shabby argument about it of his own accord and passes judgments on its basis. In this way he is entangled in the confusion of doubts as in the spider’s web, not knowing whether he was right or wrong. If he is right he fears lest he erred, while if he is wrong he hopes he is right. He is ignorant, wandering astray in ignorance and riding on carriages aimlessly moving in darkness. He did not try to find reality of knowledge. He scatters the traditions as the wind scatters the dry leaves.
Amír al-mu’minín Ali A.S.
Sermon 17
Samuel P. Huntington dies
Samuel P. Huntington - a longtime Harvard University professor, an influential political scientist, and mentor to a generation of scholars in widely divergent fields - died Dec. 24 on Martha's Vineyard. He was 81.
He was famous for his book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”. The work proved to be controversial and scholars around the world had different opinions on it.
Christopher Caldwell wrote in Financial Times on January 3 2009 in his article titled, “Huntington's disputed legacy”
Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist who popularised the expression "clash of civilisations", died on Christmas eve at age 81. Obituaries have been evenly divided about whether he outlived the world he described. The phrase was coined by Bernard Lewis, the scholar of Islam, in 1990, but it was Huntington's essay of that name, published in 1993, that encapsulated the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic," Huntington wrote. "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural."
The early 1990s presented fresh data that did not conform to the cold war rubrics, including the break-up of Yugoslavia, wars in the Caucasus, China's rapid industrialisation, the first Iraq war and the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Huntington's thesis was an admirably simple explanation. But after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 2001 and western coalitions invaded Afghanistan and Iraq it was used in ways that were simplistic. Half the world hailed Huntington as having foreseen the conflict between Islam and the west and half mistook him for a promoter of it.
Huntington's opponents did not have an alternative idea of where conflicts would arise from. They had the hope - which they tended to mistake for an analysis - that there would be no conflicts at all, because humanity was converging on some uniform set of cultural values. Huntington was sceptical. "The very phrase 'the world community'," he wrote, "has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing 'the free world') to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other western powers." Human rights were western provincialism masquerading as universalism. What Huntington saw less clearly was that, while universalism might be an illusion, it was an illusion with a constituency?
Huntington focused on civilisations (Arab, Chinese, western, eastern Orthodox and so on) rather than cities or nations or tribes because they were "the broadest level of identification with which [a person] intensely identifies". That has been true for most of history, but in the era of globalisation an alternative level of identification emerged (or re-emerged): that of class. The new global "leadership class", which developed first in Europe and then spread to the business and governmental classes of even the poor nations, followed the pattern of the US social system and was accessible in similar ways - through education and self-promotion. Paradoxically, these global elites identify more readily with suffering humanity than humanity itself does, because elites feel they can speak on humanity's behalf and wield power in its name. For a peasant to proclaim himself a member of "humanity" is to efface and subordinate himself. For a member of an elite it is to exalt himself.
Huntington sometimes believed that elites were becoming more diverse. "A de-westernisation and indigenisation of elites is occurring in many non-western countries," he wrote, "at the same time that western, usually American, cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people."
That was true in Iran and somewhat true in France. It may become more true in coming years if western economies weaken relative to Asian ones. But in recent years, elites have become more homogeneous. Sometimes Huntington acknowledged this. Almost everywhere, he noted, the International Monetary Fund was more popular among finance ministers than among peoples.
Huntington never arrived at a general explanation of how globalisation got transmitted through (and disrupted) individual nations' class systems. Perhaps no such explanation was possible. But without one, it was unclear to many of Huntington's readers whether the centrepiece of western diplomacy, spreading democracy, would avert inter-civilisational violence or incite it. Most assumed Huntington thought the former. In fact, he consistently thought the latter. The book that made his reputation, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), argued that liberalisation was not an automatic route to either prosperity or peace and could indeed bring penury and violence.
In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Huntington noted that no sentence in his 1993 essay had aroused more controversy than: "Islam has bloody borders." To him, this was an empirical statement, not a judgment on Islam's merits as a civilisation and still less an argument for western meddling.
Anyway, the west's increasing entanglement with Islam has not been the result of an increasing enmity. On the contrary. Viewed from Orthodox Christian civilisation, in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo the west took the Muslims' side. It is curious that the west has shown so little inclination to ask whether it did not perhaps back the wrong horse. Western policy towards Islam did considerably more to produce Vladimir Putin than it did to produce Osama bin Laden.
It is bizarre that The Clash of Civilizations has been taken in some quarters as "orientalist" or "imperialist" or even as an endorsement, avant la lettre , of the Bush administration's efforts to reorder the Middle East through political liberalisation. The Iraq war was the supreme expression of the belief that Islamic civilisations are not different from western ones in any fundamental way. It was the expression not of a hard-headed doctrine but of a woolly-minded one and, as such, a repudiation of ideas Huntington held his whole life.
He was famous for his book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”. The work proved to be controversial and scholars around the world had different opinions on it.
Christopher Caldwell wrote in Financial Times on January 3 2009 in his article titled, “Huntington's disputed legacy”
Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist who popularised the expression "clash of civilisations", died on Christmas eve at age 81. Obituaries have been evenly divided about whether he outlived the world he described. The phrase was coined by Bernard Lewis, the scholar of Islam, in 1990, but it was Huntington's essay of that name, published in 1993, that encapsulated the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic," Huntington wrote. "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural."
The early 1990s presented fresh data that did not conform to the cold war rubrics, including the break-up of Yugoslavia, wars in the Caucasus, China's rapid industrialisation, the first Iraq war and the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Huntington's thesis was an admirably simple explanation. But after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 2001 and western coalitions invaded Afghanistan and Iraq it was used in ways that were simplistic. Half the world hailed Huntington as having foreseen the conflict between Islam and the west and half mistook him for a promoter of it.
Huntington's opponents did not have an alternative idea of where conflicts would arise from. They had the hope - which they tended to mistake for an analysis - that there would be no conflicts at all, because humanity was converging on some uniform set of cultural values. Huntington was sceptical. "The very phrase 'the world community'," he wrote, "has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing 'the free world') to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other western powers." Human rights were western provincialism masquerading as universalism. What Huntington saw less clearly was that, while universalism might be an illusion, it was an illusion with a constituency?
Huntington focused on civilisations (Arab, Chinese, western, eastern Orthodox and so on) rather than cities or nations or tribes because they were "the broadest level of identification with which [a person] intensely identifies". That has been true for most of history, but in the era of globalisation an alternative level of identification emerged (or re-emerged): that of class. The new global "leadership class", which developed first in Europe and then spread to the business and governmental classes of even the poor nations, followed the pattern of the US social system and was accessible in similar ways - through education and self-promotion. Paradoxically, these global elites identify more readily with suffering humanity than humanity itself does, because elites feel they can speak on humanity's behalf and wield power in its name. For a peasant to proclaim himself a member of "humanity" is to efface and subordinate himself. For a member of an elite it is to exalt himself.
Huntington sometimes believed that elites were becoming more diverse. "A de-westernisation and indigenisation of elites is occurring in many non-western countries," he wrote, "at the same time that western, usually American, cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people."
That was true in Iran and somewhat true in France. It may become more true in coming years if western economies weaken relative to Asian ones. But in recent years, elites have become more homogeneous. Sometimes Huntington acknowledged this. Almost everywhere, he noted, the International Monetary Fund was more popular among finance ministers than among peoples.
Huntington never arrived at a general explanation of how globalisation got transmitted through (and disrupted) individual nations' class systems. Perhaps no such explanation was possible. But without one, it was unclear to many of Huntington's readers whether the centrepiece of western diplomacy, spreading democracy, would avert inter-civilisational violence or incite it. Most assumed Huntington thought the former. In fact, he consistently thought the latter. The book that made his reputation, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), argued that liberalisation was not an automatic route to either prosperity or peace and could indeed bring penury and violence.
In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Huntington noted that no sentence in his 1993 essay had aroused more controversy than: "Islam has bloody borders." To him, this was an empirical statement, not a judgment on Islam's merits as a civilisation and still less an argument for western meddling.
Anyway, the west's increasing entanglement with Islam has not been the result of an increasing enmity. On the contrary. Viewed from Orthodox Christian civilisation, in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo the west took the Muslims' side. It is curious that the west has shown so little inclination to ask whether it did not perhaps back the wrong horse. Western policy towards Islam did considerably more to produce Vladimir Putin than it did to produce Osama bin Laden.
It is bizarre that The Clash of Civilizations has been taken in some quarters as "orientalist" or "imperialist" or even as an endorsement, avant la lettre , of the Bush administration's efforts to reorder the Middle East through political liberalisation. The Iraq war was the supreme expression of the belief that Islamic civilisations are not different from western ones in any fundamental way. It was the expression not of a hard-headed doctrine but of a woolly-minded one and, as such, a repudiation of ideas Huntington held his whole life.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
What Makes Ahmadinejad Smile?
The assault in Gaza has boosted Iran's hawks and hurt moderate Arabs who were tilting toward Israel.
By Fareed Zakaria
Explaining the size and scale of Israel's actions in Gaza, several prominent Israelis have argued that the real enemy they are taking on is not Hamas but Iran. The historian Michael Oren, who is currently serving as a press officer in the Israeli military, has argued along with Yossi Klein Halevi that "the operation against Hamas represents a unique chance to deal a strategic blow to Iranian expansionism." The logic is that Hamas is an Iranian client. Crush its military might and you will weaken Tehran and set back its agenda. But is that actually happening?
First, Hamas is not Iran's pawn. For decades Iran actually preferred and funded another Palestinian faction, Islamic Jihad. Recently, Hamas has been taking funds and weapons from Iran, but that does not mean it also takes orders from it. Hamas's provocations and its decision not to renew the ceasefire probably took place without direction from Tehran.
But more important, how exactly have Israel's military actions weakened Iran? "Iran does not have tangible assets in Gaza or the Palestinian territories," says Vali Nasr, the author of "The Shia Revival." "It's a misunderstanding to think of its strength in that way. Its real influence in the Arab world comes from its soft power, the reputation it has built as the defender of the great Arab cause of Palestine."
Look at the effects of the invasion. Moderate Arabs are on the defense. Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt despises Hamas—seen as an offshoot of its own outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. But after blaming the Islamists in the first few days of the Israeli assault, Mubarak has now hastily joined in the condemnations of Israel. Jordan and Saudi Arabia are similarly backtracking. This is a repeat of their reaction during Israel's 2006 war with Hizbullah.
If moderate Arabs have been quiet, the Iranians have been speaking up everywhere. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has noisily denounced Israel's actions. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has attacked Arab regimes for not responding to their people. "Today the heart of the Egyptian, Jordanian and the people of other Islamic countries is overwhelmed with sorrow," he said in a statement released Dec. 28. "Now, I ask the scholars...of the Arab world and the chiefs of the Egyptian Al-Azhar center, 'Isn't it the time to feel the threat facing Islam and Muslims?' " Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, went further. "I'm not calling for a coup d'état," he said recently, addressing the Egyptian people (and their army), "but go talk to your leaders and tell them you do not accept what is happening in Gaza."
Men like Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan don't have to worry about winning elections, so they can merely stay quiet. If you want to get a sense of where public opinion now stands in the region, listen to the only democratically elected leader in the Arab world. The prime minister of Iraq, America's staunch ally, Nuri al-Maliki, has called on all Arab and Muslim countries to "cancel their diplomatic relations and stop all contacts—public and private—with this murderous regime, which continues its painful aggression against peaceful, unarmed civilians." Iraq's most respected religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, praised by many American neoconservatives, issued a fatwa last week describing the Israeli attack as "vicious" and calling on all Arabs and Muslims to "take practical steps in order to stop this cruel aggression."
Israel's military actions undercut a tide that had been moving in its favor. Over the last two years, countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have come to recognize that their major regional concern is the rise of Iran—and on that issue, they are allied in their interests and perspectives with Israel. In other words, on the major strategic issue of the day, Israel is moving into a tacit alliance with moderate Arab states for the first time in its history. This soft alliance has been encouraged and nurtured by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But its weak point is Arab public opinion, and Iran has always understood this. Tehran's strategy to undermine this alliance is to signal to the Arab public that it is the chief defender of the Palestinian cause and so cannot be an enemy of the Arab people. The real enemy, Tehran signals to the Arabs, is their own regimes.
Within Iran also, the balance is shifting. The moderates are now silent. Reformist newspapers display photographs of dead Palestinian babies on their front pages. "One month ago, the great debate in Tehran was about low oil prices and economic mismanagement," says Nasr. "Now it's about Palestine and the anger in the Arab world. President Ahmadinejad would rather have the current conversation."
Israel believes that the lesson of its 2006 war with Hizbullah was to improve its military tactics. And its superb defense forces have adapted well. But by crushing Gaza militarily, Israel might actually be giving Iran's mullahs the ideological issue they thrive on. That might be the political lesson of this war.
http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/articles.html
By Fareed Zakaria
Explaining the size and scale of Israel's actions in Gaza, several prominent Israelis have argued that the real enemy they are taking on is not Hamas but Iran. The historian Michael Oren, who is currently serving as a press officer in the Israeli military, has argued along with Yossi Klein Halevi that "the operation against Hamas represents a unique chance to deal a strategic blow to Iranian expansionism." The logic is that Hamas is an Iranian client. Crush its military might and you will weaken Tehran and set back its agenda. But is that actually happening?
First, Hamas is not Iran's pawn. For decades Iran actually preferred and funded another Palestinian faction, Islamic Jihad. Recently, Hamas has been taking funds and weapons from Iran, but that does not mean it also takes orders from it. Hamas's provocations and its decision not to renew the ceasefire probably took place without direction from Tehran.
But more important, how exactly have Israel's military actions weakened Iran? "Iran does not have tangible assets in Gaza or the Palestinian territories," says Vali Nasr, the author of "The Shia Revival." "It's a misunderstanding to think of its strength in that way. Its real influence in the Arab world comes from its soft power, the reputation it has built as the defender of the great Arab cause of Palestine."
Look at the effects of the invasion. Moderate Arabs are on the defense. Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt despises Hamas—seen as an offshoot of its own outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. But after blaming the Islamists in the first few days of the Israeli assault, Mubarak has now hastily joined in the condemnations of Israel. Jordan and Saudi Arabia are similarly backtracking. This is a repeat of their reaction during Israel's 2006 war with Hizbullah.
If moderate Arabs have been quiet, the Iranians have been speaking up everywhere. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has noisily denounced Israel's actions. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has attacked Arab regimes for not responding to their people. "Today the heart of the Egyptian, Jordanian and the people of other Islamic countries is overwhelmed with sorrow," he said in a statement released Dec. 28. "Now, I ask the scholars...of the Arab world and the chiefs of the Egyptian Al-Azhar center, 'Isn't it the time to feel the threat facing Islam and Muslims?' " Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, went further. "I'm not calling for a coup d'état," he said recently, addressing the Egyptian people (and their army), "but go talk to your leaders and tell them you do not accept what is happening in Gaza."
Men like Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan don't have to worry about winning elections, so they can merely stay quiet. If you want to get a sense of where public opinion now stands in the region, listen to the only democratically elected leader in the Arab world. The prime minister of Iraq, America's staunch ally, Nuri al-Maliki, has called on all Arab and Muslim countries to "cancel their diplomatic relations and stop all contacts—public and private—with this murderous regime, which continues its painful aggression against peaceful, unarmed civilians." Iraq's most respected religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, praised by many American neoconservatives, issued a fatwa last week describing the Israeli attack as "vicious" and calling on all Arabs and Muslims to "take practical steps in order to stop this cruel aggression."
Israel's military actions undercut a tide that had been moving in its favor. Over the last two years, countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have come to recognize that their major regional concern is the rise of Iran—and on that issue, they are allied in their interests and perspectives with Israel. In other words, on the major strategic issue of the day, Israel is moving into a tacit alliance with moderate Arab states for the first time in its history. This soft alliance has been encouraged and nurtured by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But its weak point is Arab public opinion, and Iran has always understood this. Tehran's strategy to undermine this alliance is to signal to the Arab public that it is the chief defender of the Palestinian cause and so cannot be an enemy of the Arab people. The real enemy, Tehran signals to the Arabs, is their own regimes.
Within Iran also, the balance is shifting. The moderates are now silent. Reformist newspapers display photographs of dead Palestinian babies on their front pages. "One month ago, the great debate in Tehran was about low oil prices and economic mismanagement," says Nasr. "Now it's about Palestine and the anger in the Arab world. President Ahmadinejad would rather have the current conversation."
Israel believes that the lesson of its 2006 war with Hizbullah was to improve its military tactics. And its superb defense forces have adapted well. But by crushing Gaza militarily, Israel might actually be giving Iran's mullahs the ideological issue they thrive on. That might be the political lesson of this war.
http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/articles.html
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Nadda Continental
“Do you want to eat something?” asked my friend who happens to be one of the intellectuals of Kabirwala. Looking at the watch and realizing that it was too late to expect any food from home, I accepted the offer. He promised me good food and we walked through the streets. In mid of the night, he took me to Hazrat Peer Kabir to pay his respects and we continued our journey.
Shehar More and in the middle of nowhere, I asked if he was serious. Jugians in fauji ground are later development so you may sympathize with me. 10 more minutes, and we were at Nadda Continental. It was pleasant feeling to sit there, eat something and discuss world.
Surprised on Kabirwala having a continental hotelL well it has oneJ
I was fan of George Gurdjieff in those days; we had huge debates afterwards at Nadda Continental. Later it was normal in the nights, if someone called for me at my home, they used to tell the caller to check at Nadda Continental firstJ
Nadda Continental – I am thinking about it and many memories are hitting me...
The function is over in town hall and we are sitting here to discuss individual performances…
Nisar is reading his poem Ja Mohabbatey bhairiye
Gujjari is being discussed and future of relationships is under scrutiny
Book launch of “Mattan Maal Walley” has finished and Faisal is trying to state to one of the guests that his friend didn’t mean to insult the old poet…
Nadda Continental stood as our best bit and “classic” example of hospitality.
My regards to all, whose presence made Nadda Continental special and chats made hotel worth visiting.
Shehar More and in the middle of nowhere, I asked if he was serious. Jugians in fauji ground are later development so you may sympathize with me. 10 more minutes, and we were at Nadda Continental. It was pleasant feeling to sit there, eat something and discuss world.
Surprised on Kabirwala having a continental hotelL well it has oneJ
I was fan of George Gurdjieff in those days; we had huge debates afterwards at Nadda Continental. Later it was normal in the nights, if someone called for me at my home, they used to tell the caller to check at Nadda Continental firstJ
Nadda Continental – I am thinking about it and many memories are hitting me...
The function is over in town hall and we are sitting here to discuss individual performances…
Nisar is reading his poem Ja Mohabbatey bhairiye
Gujjari is being discussed and future of relationships is under scrutiny
Book launch of “Mattan Maal Walley” has finished and Faisal is trying to state to one of the guests that his friend didn’t mean to insult the old poet…
Nadda Continental stood as our best bit and “classic” example of hospitality.
My regards to all, whose presence made Nadda Continental special and chats made hotel worth visiting.
Hazaras: Afghanistan's Outsiders
Hazaras: Afghanistan's Outsiders
By Phil Zabriskie
At the heart of Afghanistan is an empty space, a striking absence, where the larger of the colossal Bamian Buddhas once stood. In March 2001 the Taliban fired rockets at the statues for days on end, then planted and detonated explosives inside them.
The Buddhas had looked out over Bamian for some 1,500 years. Silk Road traders and missionaries of several faiths came and went. Emissaries of empires passed through—Mongols, Safavids, Moguls, British, Soviets—often leaving bloody footprints.
A country called Afghanistan took shape. Regimes rose and collapsed or were overthrown. The statues stood through it all. But the Taliban saw the Buddhas simply as non-Islamic idols, heresies carved in stone. They did not mind being thought brutish. They did not fear further isolation. Destroying the statues was a pious assertion of their brand of faith over history and culture.
The article continues at
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/afghanistan-hazara/phil-zabriskie-text/1
By Phil Zabriskie
At the heart of Afghanistan is an empty space, a striking absence, where the larger of the colossal Bamian Buddhas once stood. In March 2001 the Taliban fired rockets at the statues for days on end, then planted and detonated explosives inside them.
The Buddhas had looked out over Bamian for some 1,500 years. Silk Road traders and missionaries of several faiths came and went. Emissaries of empires passed through—Mongols, Safavids, Moguls, British, Soviets—often leaving bloody footprints.
A country called Afghanistan took shape. Regimes rose and collapsed or were overthrown. The statues stood through it all. But the Taliban saw the Buddhas simply as non-Islamic idols, heresies carved in stone. They did not mind being thought brutish. They did not fear further isolation. Destroying the statues was a pious assertion of their brand of faith over history and culture.
The article continues at
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/afghanistan-hazara/phil-zabriskie-text/1
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
It was meant
It was meant to be light hearted take on events in and around Kabirwala.
It was meant to shed lights on our daily lives
It was meant to share more about Kabirwala
But recent events and my interests from Psychology to Global politics dragged me away.
Will try to come back to Kabirwala and its affairs soon..
It was meant to shed lights on our daily lives
It was meant to share more about Kabirwala
But recent events and my interests from Psychology to Global politics dragged me away.
Will try to come back to Kabirwala and its affairs soon..
Another Hazara killed?
Hussain Ali Yousufi Chairman Hazara Democratic Party (HDP) was killed yesterday in Quetta.
May God rest his soul in peace!
Who are Hazaras; I asked myself and found the following link
http://www.hazara.net/hazara/hazara.html
Majority of Hazaras belong to the Shia sect of Islam. Many Hazaras also belong to Ismaili and Hanafi sects as well.
Just one example of the oppression they have suffered over the years is the following text from speech given by Mullah Manon Niazi
"If you want to live along with other Afghan ethnic groups, you should never think of sharing and participating in the future government structure. Hazaras! Where would you escape? If you jumped in to the air we will grasp your legs, if you enter the earth we will grasp your ears. Hazaras are not Muslim. You can kill them. It is not a sin. Oh Hazaras! Become Muslims and pray God like us. We won't let you to go away. We will kill you and nobody is allowed to bury the dead bodies till three days…"
Mullah Manon Niazi the appointed Governor of Mazar after Taliban massacred 15,000 Hazaras and raped women.
May God rest his soul in peace!
Who are Hazaras; I asked myself and found the following link
http://www.hazara.net/hazara/hazara.html
Majority of Hazaras belong to the Shia sect of Islam. Many Hazaras also belong to Ismaili and Hanafi sects as well.
Just one example of the oppression they have suffered over the years is the following text from speech given by Mullah Manon Niazi
"If you want to live along with other Afghan ethnic groups, you should never think of sharing and participating in the future government structure. Hazaras! Where would you escape? If you jumped in to the air we will grasp your legs, if you enter the earth we will grasp your ears. Hazaras are not Muslim. You can kill them. It is not a sin. Oh Hazaras! Become Muslims and pray God like us. We won't let you to go away. We will kill you and nobody is allowed to bury the dead bodies till three days…"
Mullah Manon Niazi the appointed Governor of Mazar after Taliban massacred 15,000 Hazaras and raped women.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Success isn't written in the stars, it's in the length of your fingers
Success isn't written in the stars, it's in the length of your fingers
Take a look at your hands – you will learn a lot about yourself, Cambridge University scientists say
By Jeremy Laurance, It is the simplest hands-on experiment – and, for once, it is safe to try this at home. Compare the length of your fingers and predict your own future.
Everything from sporting prowess to academic ability, sexual orientation to susceptibility to disease can be assessed on the twin measurements of the length of the ring and index fingers. It is science's answer to palmistry.
Researchers at Cambridge University have found that finger length can point to success in the City. Traders with longer ring fingers made the most money – up to six times more than those whose ring fingers were relatively short.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found finger size accounted for 20 per cent of the difference. Though the finding provoked scepticism – one blogger tartly responded, "Scientists with little else to do than measure fingers should pull their own out" – the Cambridge boffins are not alone. The significance of finger length has been investigated by research groups worldwide – with surprising results.
The ratio between index and ring finger is believed to be linked to exposure to the male hormone testosterone in the womb. On average, men tend to have longer ring fingers and women longer index fingers. The higher the testosterone, the greater the length of the ring finger and the more "masculine" the resulting child – whether male or female. The longest ring finger is known as the "Casanova pattern".
Professor John Manning, author of The Finger Book, said the ratio was a "living fossil" of the early period of pregnancy – a measure of past exposure to testosterone, and future potential.
Ring finger longer than index finger
More often found in men than women, people with longer ring fingers tend to excel on the sports field, especially in running and football. Scientists at the University of Bath found that children who had longer ring fingers are better with numbers-based subjects such as maths and physics, which are traditionally male favourites. A study this week showed autism may be linked with exposure to testosterone in the womb. Autism is sometimes described as the "extreme male brain" and is four times more common in boys than girls. Finger length might provide an early warning of the condition. Canadian researchers from the University of Alberta have found a correlation between length of the ring finger and levels of physical aggression – as would be expected in the most masculinised individuals.
Index finger longer than ring finger
The traditional pattern in women, long index fingers can predict a child's academic strengths. Scientists at the University of Bath found that longer index fingers indicated good verbal and literacy skills, where girls dominate. The findings were published in the British Journal of Psychology in 2007. Studies of sexual orientation have shown that lesbian women are more likely to have longer ring fingers, suggesting exposure to higher levels of foetal testosterone. Professor John Manning said research he had conducted suggested that gay men were more likely to display feminised finger ratios, suggesting less testosterone exposure in the womb. However, sceptics have observed that twin studies show that 70 per cent of the difference in finger length is inherited from our parents.
Take a look at your hands – you will learn a lot about yourself, Cambridge University scientists say
By Jeremy Laurance, It is the simplest hands-on experiment – and, for once, it is safe to try this at home. Compare the length of your fingers and predict your own future.
Everything from sporting prowess to academic ability, sexual orientation to susceptibility to disease can be assessed on the twin measurements of the length of the ring and index fingers. It is science's answer to palmistry.
Researchers at Cambridge University have found that finger length can point to success in the City. Traders with longer ring fingers made the most money – up to six times more than those whose ring fingers were relatively short.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found finger size accounted for 20 per cent of the difference. Though the finding provoked scepticism – one blogger tartly responded, "Scientists with little else to do than measure fingers should pull their own out" – the Cambridge boffins are not alone. The significance of finger length has been investigated by research groups worldwide – with surprising results.
The ratio between index and ring finger is believed to be linked to exposure to the male hormone testosterone in the womb. On average, men tend to have longer ring fingers and women longer index fingers. The higher the testosterone, the greater the length of the ring finger and the more "masculine" the resulting child – whether male or female. The longest ring finger is known as the "Casanova pattern".
Professor John Manning, author of The Finger Book, said the ratio was a "living fossil" of the early period of pregnancy – a measure of past exposure to testosterone, and future potential.
Ring finger longer than index finger
More often found in men than women, people with longer ring fingers tend to excel on the sports field, especially in running and football. Scientists at the University of Bath found that children who had longer ring fingers are better with numbers-based subjects such as maths and physics, which are traditionally male favourites. A study this week showed autism may be linked with exposure to testosterone in the womb. Autism is sometimes described as the "extreme male brain" and is four times more common in boys than girls. Finger length might provide an early warning of the condition. Canadian researchers from the University of Alberta have found a correlation between length of the ring finger and levels of physical aggression – as would be expected in the most masculinised individuals.
Index finger longer than ring finger
The traditional pattern in women, long index fingers can predict a child's academic strengths. Scientists at the University of Bath found that longer index fingers indicated good verbal and literacy skills, where girls dominate. The findings were published in the British Journal of Psychology in 2007. Studies of sexual orientation have shown that lesbian women are more likely to have longer ring fingers, suggesting exposure to higher levels of foetal testosterone. Professor John Manning said research he had conducted suggested that gay men were more likely to display feminised finger ratios, suggesting less testosterone exposure in the womb. However, sceptics have observed that twin studies show that 70 per cent of the difference in finger length is inherited from our parents.
Is Religion Adaptive? It's Complicated
Is Religion Adaptive? It's Complicated
A group of Darwinian theorists discuss religion in Edinburgh, Scotland
By Jesse Bering
Last weekend I traveled to Edinburgh to attend a small workshop on religion. The group consisted of a multidisciplinary group of scholars—psychologists, biologists, political scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists—each of whom were studying the natural (that is, Darwinian) foundations of religious belief and behavior. The meeting took place at a marvelously opulent hotel near Waverly Station on Princes Street, with distant glimpses of the castle and the Old Town district. Each morning, about ten of us, still bloated with wine and food from the evening before, sat around an enormous lion-pawed walnut table in a Victorian suite while the bitterly cold Scottish winds rattled the windowpanes and rushed down the flue of the chimney, where a coal fire quietly warmed us. Here, we hatched out a variety of ideas related to the evolutionary puzzle of religion.
Now, since all of this probably reads to you like a bunch of spoiled academics being paid to engage in idle theorizing on some wealthy grant agency’s dime, I hasten to add that this was an atypical experience, as far as conferences go. Usually on these types of trips I stay at the equivalent of a Best Western that’s adjacent to a freeway or convenience store, not at a 5-star hotel. And I’m usually chewing on a Tabasco flavored Slim-Jim rather than indulging in filet mignon and crème brûlée.
Given the world’s political climate, it is hardly necessary to point out why having a better scientific understanding of religious behavior is worthwhile. In fact, while we were meeting in this overly decadent tearoom, a large group protesting Israel’s recent Gaza strikes against Hamas was marching outside the hotel, demonstrating against yet another conflict at least partially fueled by head-scratching religious ideologies. Fortunately, the past decade has seen tremendous and quite rapid developments in the naturalistic study of religion. Topics such as God, souls and sin are no longer being treated as “outside science” but rather as biologically based emanations of the evolved human mind, subject to psychological scrutiny like any other aspect of human nature. And I can only hope that soon these scientific discoveries will translate to real world intervention strategies in the reconciliation of spiritually based social conflicts.
Here is the fly-on-the-wall’s view of just a few of the topics discussed last weekend:
As the resident psychologist, I reiterated my empirically based argument that belief in the afterlife is more or less an inevitable byproduct of human consciousness. Since we cannot conceptualize the absence of consciousness, even non-believers are susceptible to visions of the hereafter.
Political scientist and evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson from the University of Edinburgh presented his argument that the idea of omniscient supernatural agents served an adaptive social policing function in the ancestral past. Johnson reasons that this would have encouraged individuals in groups to conform to group sanctions out of the fear of divine punishment, thus lessening the chances of social fission. This phenomenon would have been biologically adaptive since larger groups meant better chances of survival and reproductive success for individual members. It’s a bit like Santa Claus knowing whether we’re bad or good (but Santa doesn’t cause you to suffer renal failure, kill your crops, or sentence you to everlasting torment).
Anthropologist Richard Sosis summarized his “costly signaling” hypothesis of religious behavior. The gist of Sosis’s clever theory is that people engage in all sorts of costly religious behaviors—wasting time on rituals, wearing uncomfortable clothes, spending their hard-earned money—because, in doing so, they are advertising their commitment to the religious in-group. In other words, if you’re willing to do things such as cut off your child’s foreskin, pay a regular alms tax of 2.5 percent of your net worth or sit twiddling your thumbs for two hours every Sunday morning on a hard church pew, then your fellow believers will assume that you’re really one of them and can therefore be trusted.
Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from Rutgers University, meanwhile, discussed the possible role of psychological self-deception in the realm of religion and reviewed the impossible to ignore evidence that religiosity positively effects human health. And Westmont College biologist Jeff Schloss, who has worked extensively on the theological implications of Darwinism, gently compelled us to consider what these scientific developments in the study of religion will ultimately mean philosophically.
Schloss’s point is the one that gets most people thinking. “That’s all fine and dandy about the scientific research, but what does it all tell us about the existence of God?” What if, as I suggested in my answer to this year’s “Annual Question” at Edge, the data suggest that God is actually just a psychological blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? Would you still believe if you knew God were a byproduct of your evolved mental architecture?
This research committee in Edinburgh is one of three I’m currently serving on to investigate the evolutionary bases of religion. Another is the “Explaining Religion” project (EXREL) with its hub at Oxford University led by anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse. And there’s even a new sub-discipline in evolutionary biology called “Evolutionary Religious Studies” being spearheaded by David Sloan Wilson at SUNY-Binghamton. All of these projects promise to infuse new life into the tired old religion versus science debate by injecting actual data into the discussions.
At the very least, I hope that this type of research helps people get past the simplistic pigeonholing that all too often occurs when discussing science and religion—that religious people are “airheads and stubborn to science” and scientists are “cold materialists without a spiritual side.” I, for one, am a bit of both of these things.
In this new column presented by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Ever wonder why yawning is contagious, why we point with our index fingers instead of our thumbs or whether being breastfed as an infant influences your sexual preferences as an adult? Get a closer look at the latest data as “Bering in Mind” tackles these and other quirky questions about human nature.
A group of Darwinian theorists discuss religion in Edinburgh, Scotland
By Jesse Bering
Last weekend I traveled to Edinburgh to attend a small workshop on religion. The group consisted of a multidisciplinary group of scholars—psychologists, biologists, political scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists—each of whom were studying the natural (that is, Darwinian) foundations of religious belief and behavior. The meeting took place at a marvelously opulent hotel near Waverly Station on Princes Street, with distant glimpses of the castle and the Old Town district. Each morning, about ten of us, still bloated with wine and food from the evening before, sat around an enormous lion-pawed walnut table in a Victorian suite while the bitterly cold Scottish winds rattled the windowpanes and rushed down the flue of the chimney, where a coal fire quietly warmed us. Here, we hatched out a variety of ideas related to the evolutionary puzzle of religion.
Now, since all of this probably reads to you like a bunch of spoiled academics being paid to engage in idle theorizing on some wealthy grant agency’s dime, I hasten to add that this was an atypical experience, as far as conferences go. Usually on these types of trips I stay at the equivalent of a Best Western that’s adjacent to a freeway or convenience store, not at a 5-star hotel. And I’m usually chewing on a Tabasco flavored Slim-Jim rather than indulging in filet mignon and crème brûlée.
Given the world’s political climate, it is hardly necessary to point out why having a better scientific understanding of religious behavior is worthwhile. In fact, while we were meeting in this overly decadent tearoom, a large group protesting Israel’s recent Gaza strikes against Hamas was marching outside the hotel, demonstrating against yet another conflict at least partially fueled by head-scratching religious ideologies. Fortunately, the past decade has seen tremendous and quite rapid developments in the naturalistic study of religion. Topics such as God, souls and sin are no longer being treated as “outside science” but rather as biologically based emanations of the evolved human mind, subject to psychological scrutiny like any other aspect of human nature. And I can only hope that soon these scientific discoveries will translate to real world intervention strategies in the reconciliation of spiritually based social conflicts.
Here is the fly-on-the-wall’s view of just a few of the topics discussed last weekend:
As the resident psychologist, I reiterated my empirically based argument that belief in the afterlife is more or less an inevitable byproduct of human consciousness. Since we cannot conceptualize the absence of consciousness, even non-believers are susceptible to visions of the hereafter.
Political scientist and evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson from the University of Edinburgh presented his argument that the idea of omniscient supernatural agents served an adaptive social policing function in the ancestral past. Johnson reasons that this would have encouraged individuals in groups to conform to group sanctions out of the fear of divine punishment, thus lessening the chances of social fission. This phenomenon would have been biologically adaptive since larger groups meant better chances of survival and reproductive success for individual members. It’s a bit like Santa Claus knowing whether we’re bad or good (but Santa doesn’t cause you to suffer renal failure, kill your crops, or sentence you to everlasting torment).
Anthropologist Richard Sosis summarized his “costly signaling” hypothesis of religious behavior. The gist of Sosis’s clever theory is that people engage in all sorts of costly religious behaviors—wasting time on rituals, wearing uncomfortable clothes, spending their hard-earned money—because, in doing so, they are advertising their commitment to the religious in-group. In other words, if you’re willing to do things such as cut off your child’s foreskin, pay a regular alms tax of 2.5 percent of your net worth or sit twiddling your thumbs for two hours every Sunday morning on a hard church pew, then your fellow believers will assume that you’re really one of them and can therefore be trusted.
Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from Rutgers University, meanwhile, discussed the possible role of psychological self-deception in the realm of religion and reviewed the impossible to ignore evidence that religiosity positively effects human health. And Westmont College biologist Jeff Schloss, who has worked extensively on the theological implications of Darwinism, gently compelled us to consider what these scientific developments in the study of religion will ultimately mean philosophically.
Schloss’s point is the one that gets most people thinking. “That’s all fine and dandy about the scientific research, but what does it all tell us about the existence of God?” What if, as I suggested in my answer to this year’s “Annual Question” at Edge, the data suggest that God is actually just a psychological blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? Would you still believe if you knew God were a byproduct of your evolved mental architecture?
This research committee in Edinburgh is one of three I’m currently serving on to investigate the evolutionary bases of religion. Another is the “Explaining Religion” project (EXREL) with its hub at Oxford University led by anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse. And there’s even a new sub-discipline in evolutionary biology called “Evolutionary Religious Studies” being spearheaded by David Sloan Wilson at SUNY-Binghamton. All of these projects promise to infuse new life into the tired old religion versus science debate by injecting actual data into the discussions.
At the very least, I hope that this type of research helps people get past the simplistic pigeonholing that all too often occurs when discussing science and religion—that religious people are “airheads and stubborn to science” and scientists are “cold materialists without a spiritual side.” I, for one, am a bit of both of these things.
In this new column presented by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Ever wonder why yawning is contagious, why we point with our index fingers instead of our thumbs or whether being breastfed as an infant influences your sexual preferences as an adult? Get a closer look at the latest data as “Bering in Mind” tackles these and other quirky questions about human nature.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Shadow Stats
Have you ever wondered why the CPI, GDP and employment numbers run counter to your personal and business experiences? The problem lies in biased and often-manipulated government reporting.
Shadow Stats offers an exposé of the problems within the reporting system, and an assessment of underlying economic reality.
http://www.shadowstats.com/
Shadow Stats offers an exposé of the problems within the reporting system, and an assessment of underlying economic reality.
http://www.shadowstats.com/
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Glory
The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Can Israel Survive Its Assault on Gaza?
Can Israel Survive Its Assault on Gaza?
How to Deal with Hamas
The most immediate challenge facing Israel is that posed by Hamas. Gaza's tragedy has for days been playing out on the world's TV sets. By Jan. 7, more than 700 Palestinians, many of them noncombatants, had been killed. But there's something tragic, too, in Israel's predicament: in any confrontation with its enemies, it is damned if it does and doomed if it doesn't. Across Israel's political spectrum there seems to be a consensus that Hamas' provocative rocket barrages could not go unanswered — though whether Israel's response has been proportional to the threat is, at the least, questionable.
Perhaps more threatening than the rockets themselves was the doubt they cast over Israel's vaunted power of deterrence, which is key to keeping its hostile neighbors at bay. That power was badly eroded in 2006, when Hizballah was able to withstand the Israeli onslaught, force a cease-fire and claim victory in the process. That surely emboldened Hamas, which intermittently sent rockets into southern Israel and finally prompted Israel to respond in force. As respected Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, "A country that is afraid to deal with Hamas won't be able either to deter Iran or to safeguard its interests in dealing with Syria, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority."
But the cold reality is that eventually Israel may need to look not to "deal" with Hamas so much as do a deal with it. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he doesn't intend to topple Hamas; he knows Israel can't fill the vacuum of leadership that its elimination would produce in Gaza. Neither can Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's preferred Palestinian leader, who is fading into the background in the West Bank. So Israel has said it will be satisfied if Hamas stops shooting rockets and an international force polices the Egyptian border to keep the militants from re-arming themselves with weapons smuggled through tunnels.
Hamas says it will agree to a truce if Israel retreats from Gaza and loosens the economic choke hold that has strangled the 1.5 million Palestinians who live on the sliver of land along the Mediterranean. After weeks of global outrage over the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Gaza, any mediator — France, the European Union, Turkey and Egypt are all auditioning for the role — will insist that Israel end its 18-month blockade.
What then? Like Hizballah, Hamas will declare itself victorious: not only will it have survived a direct assault by a far superior military force, but it will also have freed Gazans from Israeli tyranny. As an added bonus, any economic revival of Gaza would put money into Hamas' coffers. But Israel would gain some breathing space and force Hamas to prove it can actually govern and maintain stability in Gaza rather than heap blame entirely on Israel.
The Specter of Iran
One indirect objective of the Gaza offensive might have been to warn off Israel's other nonstate militant foe: Hizballah. While the Lebanese group has been cheering on Hamas from the sidelines, it has refrained from entering the fray. Hizballah may have a stockpile of new rockets, but Israeli generals hope Gaza will serve as a cautionary example of what would happen if it used them. This is a reassuring thought, but it remains to be tested. After all, Hizballah's rockets have only one purpose, and that is to be used against Israel.
The broader aim of the Gaza war, Israeli security experts argue, was to send a message to Hamas' sponsor, Iran. It's certainly true that the assault has broken the Iranian pipeline that delivered weapons and funds to the militants. But by killing hundreds of Palestinians, Israel may have undermined its hopes of forming common cause with moderate Sunni Arab states against the nuclear ambitions of Shi'ite Iran.
The Gaza offensive has greatly weakened Israel's few Arab allies. Moderate Arab countries that were edging closer to recognition of the Jewish state are now recoiling from what they see as the slaughter of fellow Arabs in Gaza. In Egypt, pro-Gaza protests turned into thinly veiled attacks on President Hosni Mubarak's rule, which has helped maintain the blockade of Gaza. The pressure may force Mubarak to support a truce that entails opening the Egypt-Gaza border as Hamas demands, but he is unlikely to soften his position on the Palestinian group that maintains links with Egyptian Islamists as well as the Iranian regime.
But how far Arab states will be willing to go now to make peace with Israel is unclear. The Saudi-sponsored Arab Peace Plan, which offered Israel peace with 22 Arab countries if it withdrew to its 1967 borders, will remain on the table for Israel's new PM to consider. Even Syria, a prime supporter of Hamas, spent part of 2008 in indirect peace talks with Israel mediated by Turkey. But Syria has broken off its talks for now, destroying any chance that Damascus, on behalf of Israel, might put pressure on the exiled Hamas leaders residing there.
Confronting the Danger Within
Even in a dangerous neighborhood, it is possible to imagine that, secure in its military power, Israel could continue for years in a state of neither all-out war nor true peace, always willing to fight bitter but limited conflicts of the kind it did in Lebanon and Gaza. But military might would be useless against the threat that looms within its borders. Israel's population of 7.1 million is today divided into 5.4 million Jews and 1.6 million Arabs. But if you include Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, they may already have a slender majority; and given their higher birthrate, the gap will widen quickly. This tectonic shift in demographics is what scared even hawkish Israelis like former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon into abandoning the biblical dreams of a Greater Israel stretching all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. As Olmert recently warned, "If we are determined to preserve the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel, we must inevitably relinquish, with great pain, parts of our homeland." In other words, if Israelis cling to the West Bank and Gaza, as many religious Zionists insist, Jews will find themselves a shrinking minority in their own state.
Not only would Israel cease to be a Jewish state, it would no longer be a democratic one either, unless Arabs are given a fair share of power. A few bold Arab intellectuals are saying Palestinians should abandon the idea of a two-state solution and just wait until they outnumber the Jews. That would take decades, and it may rest more on wishful thinking by Palestinians than a real calculation of political reality. But the population shift underscores a plain fact: for Israel, the status quo won't be good enough for much longer.
A Road Map for Survival
The path to a workable peace, one with a Palestinian state alongside Israel and both with internationally recognized borders, has long been well known. A succession of Israeli and Palestinian leaders have been reluctant to take it. Israelis have doubted that they had a partner who could deliver them peace; aside from being plagued by disunity, the Palestinians have been unwilling to modify their demands that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to their ancient homes inside Israel, which Israel will never accept. With a general election looming in Israel — polls suggest that the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to become the next Prime Minister — there is an opportunity to start talking again.
Israel's leaders need to recognize that if Hamas cannot be beaten militarily, then it must be engaged politically. That means accepting the idea of dealing with some kind of Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas. A coalition between Hamas and Abbas is essential for the future of a Palestinian state and for moderating Hamas' extremism. Hamas, which 18 months ago chased Abbas' men from Gaza, says it will pair up with Abbas if he, along with the international community, recognizes that the Islamic militants legitimately came to power in the January 2006 elections. Israelis rightly view such claims with skepticism, and yet all Palestinians and their Arab backers reject the current situation, where the meager land set aside for a future state is chopped into two, Gaza and the West Bank, ruled by rivals.
A new Administration in Washington has a chance to be both supportive of Israel and honest with it. Over the past three years, many Israelis have told me that President George W. Bush was too good a friend of theirs. He gave Israelis all they wanted but didn't rein them in when they needed it. Israel eventually will have to pull back to the 1967 borders and dismantle many of the settlements on the Palestinian side, no matter how loudly its ultra-religious parties protest. Only then will the Palestinians and the other Arab states agree to a durable peace. It's as simple as that. But for 60 years, in the Holy Land, there has been a yawning gap between what was simple and what could be achieved.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1870314-3,00.html
How to Deal with Hamas
The most immediate challenge facing Israel is that posed by Hamas. Gaza's tragedy has for days been playing out on the world's TV sets. By Jan. 7, more than 700 Palestinians, many of them noncombatants, had been killed. But there's something tragic, too, in Israel's predicament: in any confrontation with its enemies, it is damned if it does and doomed if it doesn't. Across Israel's political spectrum there seems to be a consensus that Hamas' provocative rocket barrages could not go unanswered — though whether Israel's response has been proportional to the threat is, at the least, questionable.
Perhaps more threatening than the rockets themselves was the doubt they cast over Israel's vaunted power of deterrence, which is key to keeping its hostile neighbors at bay. That power was badly eroded in 2006, when Hizballah was able to withstand the Israeli onslaught, force a cease-fire and claim victory in the process. That surely emboldened Hamas, which intermittently sent rockets into southern Israel and finally prompted Israel to respond in force. As respected Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, "A country that is afraid to deal with Hamas won't be able either to deter Iran or to safeguard its interests in dealing with Syria, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority."
But the cold reality is that eventually Israel may need to look not to "deal" with Hamas so much as do a deal with it. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he doesn't intend to topple Hamas; he knows Israel can't fill the vacuum of leadership that its elimination would produce in Gaza. Neither can Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's preferred Palestinian leader, who is fading into the background in the West Bank. So Israel has said it will be satisfied if Hamas stops shooting rockets and an international force polices the Egyptian border to keep the militants from re-arming themselves with weapons smuggled through tunnels.
Hamas says it will agree to a truce if Israel retreats from Gaza and loosens the economic choke hold that has strangled the 1.5 million Palestinians who live on the sliver of land along the Mediterranean. After weeks of global outrage over the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Gaza, any mediator — France, the European Union, Turkey and Egypt are all auditioning for the role — will insist that Israel end its 18-month blockade.
What then? Like Hizballah, Hamas will declare itself victorious: not only will it have survived a direct assault by a far superior military force, but it will also have freed Gazans from Israeli tyranny. As an added bonus, any economic revival of Gaza would put money into Hamas' coffers. But Israel would gain some breathing space and force Hamas to prove it can actually govern and maintain stability in Gaza rather than heap blame entirely on Israel.
The Specter of Iran
One indirect objective of the Gaza offensive might have been to warn off Israel's other nonstate militant foe: Hizballah. While the Lebanese group has been cheering on Hamas from the sidelines, it has refrained from entering the fray. Hizballah may have a stockpile of new rockets, but Israeli generals hope Gaza will serve as a cautionary example of what would happen if it used them. This is a reassuring thought, but it remains to be tested. After all, Hizballah's rockets have only one purpose, and that is to be used against Israel.
The broader aim of the Gaza war, Israeli security experts argue, was to send a message to Hamas' sponsor, Iran. It's certainly true that the assault has broken the Iranian pipeline that delivered weapons and funds to the militants. But by killing hundreds of Palestinians, Israel may have undermined its hopes of forming common cause with moderate Sunni Arab states against the nuclear ambitions of Shi'ite Iran.
The Gaza offensive has greatly weakened Israel's few Arab allies. Moderate Arab countries that were edging closer to recognition of the Jewish state are now recoiling from what they see as the slaughter of fellow Arabs in Gaza. In Egypt, pro-Gaza protests turned into thinly veiled attacks on President Hosni Mubarak's rule, which has helped maintain the blockade of Gaza. The pressure may force Mubarak to support a truce that entails opening the Egypt-Gaza border as Hamas demands, but he is unlikely to soften his position on the Palestinian group that maintains links with Egyptian Islamists as well as the Iranian regime.
But how far Arab states will be willing to go now to make peace with Israel is unclear. The Saudi-sponsored Arab Peace Plan, which offered Israel peace with 22 Arab countries if it withdrew to its 1967 borders, will remain on the table for Israel's new PM to consider. Even Syria, a prime supporter of Hamas, spent part of 2008 in indirect peace talks with Israel mediated by Turkey. But Syria has broken off its talks for now, destroying any chance that Damascus, on behalf of Israel, might put pressure on the exiled Hamas leaders residing there.
Confronting the Danger Within
Even in a dangerous neighborhood, it is possible to imagine that, secure in its military power, Israel could continue for years in a state of neither all-out war nor true peace, always willing to fight bitter but limited conflicts of the kind it did in Lebanon and Gaza. But military might would be useless against the threat that looms within its borders. Israel's population of 7.1 million is today divided into 5.4 million Jews and 1.6 million Arabs. But if you include Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, they may already have a slender majority; and given their higher birthrate, the gap will widen quickly. This tectonic shift in demographics is what scared even hawkish Israelis like former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon into abandoning the biblical dreams of a Greater Israel stretching all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. As Olmert recently warned, "If we are determined to preserve the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel, we must inevitably relinquish, with great pain, parts of our homeland." In other words, if Israelis cling to the West Bank and Gaza, as many religious Zionists insist, Jews will find themselves a shrinking minority in their own state.
Not only would Israel cease to be a Jewish state, it would no longer be a democratic one either, unless Arabs are given a fair share of power. A few bold Arab intellectuals are saying Palestinians should abandon the idea of a two-state solution and just wait until they outnumber the Jews. That would take decades, and it may rest more on wishful thinking by Palestinians than a real calculation of political reality. But the population shift underscores a plain fact: for Israel, the status quo won't be good enough for much longer.
A Road Map for Survival
The path to a workable peace, one with a Palestinian state alongside Israel and both with internationally recognized borders, has long been well known. A succession of Israeli and Palestinian leaders have been reluctant to take it. Israelis have doubted that they had a partner who could deliver them peace; aside from being plagued by disunity, the Palestinians have been unwilling to modify their demands that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to their ancient homes inside Israel, which Israel will never accept. With a general election looming in Israel — polls suggest that the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to become the next Prime Minister — there is an opportunity to start talking again.
Israel's leaders need to recognize that if Hamas cannot be beaten militarily, then it must be engaged politically. That means accepting the idea of dealing with some kind of Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas. A coalition between Hamas and Abbas is essential for the future of a Palestinian state and for moderating Hamas' extremism. Hamas, which 18 months ago chased Abbas' men from Gaza, says it will pair up with Abbas if he, along with the international community, recognizes that the Islamic militants legitimately came to power in the January 2006 elections. Israelis rightly view such claims with skepticism, and yet all Palestinians and their Arab backers reject the current situation, where the meager land set aside for a future state is chopped into two, Gaza and the West Bank, ruled by rivals.
A new Administration in Washington has a chance to be both supportive of Israel and honest with it. Over the past three years, many Israelis have told me that President George W. Bush was too good a friend of theirs. He gave Israelis all they wanted but didn't rein them in when they needed it. Israel eventually will have to pull back to the 1967 borders and dismantle many of the settlements on the Palestinian side, no matter how loudly its ultra-religious parties protest. Only then will the Palestinians and the other Arab states agree to a durable peace. It's as simple as that. But for 60 years, in the Holy Land, there has been a yawning gap between what was simple and what could be achieved.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1870314-3,00.html
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Enough: It's time for a boycott
Enough: It's time for a boycott
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa
Naomi Klein
The Guardian
Saturday 10 January 2009
The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."
Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.
Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.
The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.
Israel is not South Africa.
Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.
Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.
This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.
Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."
Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa
Naomi Klein
The Guardian
Saturday 10 January 2009
The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."
Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.
Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.
The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.
Israel is not South Africa.
Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.
Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.
This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.
Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."
Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.
Monday, January 12, 2009
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
By Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations, University of Oxford
The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.
Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
By Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations, University of Oxford
The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.
Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
When You Shouldn’t Go Global
As companies of all types rush to become more global, it’s easy to overlook how badly many have stumbled in their globalization strategies – missteps that in some cases have resulted in rivals or activist share owners dismantling the firm’s international network and kicking out the management team that built it.
» Before launching a global move, senior managers need to conduct a simple but rigorous self-assessment to gauge the likelihood of success.
» By taking the time to do this, they can ensure that their international efforts make strategic sense and avoid potentially disastrous consequences.
When You Shouldn’t Go Global
by Marcus Alexander and Harry Korine
Harvard Business Review December 2008
» Before launching a global move, senior managers need to conduct a simple but rigorous self-assessment to gauge the likelihood of success.
» By taking the time to do this, they can ensure that their international efforts make strategic sense and avoid potentially disastrous consequences.
When You Shouldn’t Go Global
by Marcus Alexander and Harry Korine
Harvard Business Review December 2008
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
When Imitation Is More Than Flattery
When Imitation Is More Than Flattery
Imitating others' emotional expressions may foster empathy
By Siri Carpenter
Most of us reflexively grin when we see another beaming face and grimace when we see a comrade in pain. New research suggests that such mimicry helps people—especially women—more quickly grasp others’ emotional expressions.
In their recent study Dutch psychologists Mariëlle Stel of Leiden University and Ad van Knippenberg of Radboud University Nijmegen showed 62 research participants a series of photographs of faces, each for less than a tenth of a second. After viewing each face, participants pressed a button to indicate whether the image displayed positive or negative emotion. For half the experimental trials, Stel and van Knippenberg instructed participants to avoid mimicking the faces’ emotional expressions and to clench their teeth, which hindered their ability to do so. In a control condition, participants were asked to hold their shoulders still as they responded, a constraint that the researchers believed was about as distracting as having to avoid moving facial muscles. The investigators measured how quickly participants responded to each face and found that when women were free to mimic emotional expressions, they were faster than men were to recognize whether the emotion was positive or negative. When mimicry was constrained, the men were not affected, but the women slowed down to the males’ speed.
The results square with brain-imaging studies that suggest that our brain possesses a shortcut for processing emotional expressions, the authors say. The findings also hint that women may make more use of this biological shortcut than men do. Social psychologist Dacher Keltner, who studies emotions at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is important because it corroborates other work showing that, as compared with men, women report greater correspondence between their own emotions and those of others and that they experience higher levels of empathy. Most existing data, Keltner explains, depend on research participants’ self-reported perceptions: “This study shows that these gender differences are also observed in very fast, behavioral mimicry.”
What remains unknown is how commonly people mimic emotional expressions in natural circumstances or whether mimicry is essential for the “fast route” that women take to emotion recognition, according to psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge. “Certainly there is lots of evidence that females have a stronger drive to empathize, but whether this is mimicry-mediated remains to be firmly established. This new study is at least consistent with that possibility,” he says.
Imitating others' emotional expressions may foster empathy
By Siri Carpenter
Most of us reflexively grin when we see another beaming face and grimace when we see a comrade in pain. New research suggests that such mimicry helps people—especially women—more quickly grasp others’ emotional expressions.
In their recent study Dutch psychologists Mariëlle Stel of Leiden University and Ad van Knippenberg of Radboud University Nijmegen showed 62 research participants a series of photographs of faces, each for less than a tenth of a second. After viewing each face, participants pressed a button to indicate whether the image displayed positive or negative emotion. For half the experimental trials, Stel and van Knippenberg instructed participants to avoid mimicking the faces’ emotional expressions and to clench their teeth, which hindered their ability to do so. In a control condition, participants were asked to hold their shoulders still as they responded, a constraint that the researchers believed was about as distracting as having to avoid moving facial muscles. The investigators measured how quickly participants responded to each face and found that when women were free to mimic emotional expressions, they were faster than men were to recognize whether the emotion was positive or negative. When mimicry was constrained, the men were not affected, but the women slowed down to the males’ speed.
The results square with brain-imaging studies that suggest that our brain possesses a shortcut for processing emotional expressions, the authors say. The findings also hint that women may make more use of this biological shortcut than men do. Social psychologist Dacher Keltner, who studies emotions at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is important because it corroborates other work showing that, as compared with men, women report greater correspondence between their own emotions and those of others and that they experience higher levels of empathy. Most existing data, Keltner explains, depend on research participants’ self-reported perceptions: “This study shows that these gender differences are also observed in very fast, behavioral mimicry.”
What remains unknown is how commonly people mimic emotional expressions in natural circumstances or whether mimicry is essential for the “fast route” that women take to emotion recognition, according to psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge. “Certainly there is lots of evidence that females have a stronger drive to empathize, but whether this is mimicry-mediated remains to be firmly established. This new study is at least consistent with that possibility,” he says.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Nothing happens by chance, my friend
Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck. A meaning behind every little thing, and such a meaning behind this. Part for you, part for me, may not see it all real clear right now, but we will, before long.
Richard Bach
Richard Bach
Friday, January 02, 2009
Real Man
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910
Theodore Roosevelt
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910
Theodore Roosevelt
The price of Pride
A Beduin once had business in the cattle market of a town. He took his young som with him, but in the confusion of the place he lost track of his boy and the child was stolen.
The father hired a crier to shout through the streets that a reward of the one thousand piasters was offered for the return of the child. Although the man who held the boy heard the crier, greed had opened his belly and he hoped to earn an even larger sum. So he waited and said nothing.
On the following day the crier was sent through the streets again. But this time hte sum he offered was five hundred piasters, not a thousand. The kidnapper still held out. To his surprise, on the third day the crier offered a mere one hundred piasters. He hurried to return the boy and collect his reward. Curious, he asked the father why the sum of money had dwindled from day to day.
The father said, "On the first day my son was angry and refused to eat you food; is that not so?" "Yes," agreed the kidnapper. "On the second day he took a little, and on the last he asked for bread of his own accord," said the father. It had been so, the kidnapper agreed. "Well," said the father, "as I judge it, that first day my son was as unblemished as refined gold. Like a man of honor, he refused to break bread with his captor. To bring hem back with his pride untarnished, I was ready to pay one thousand piasters. On the second day, when hunger made him forget the conduct of a nobleman, he accepted food at your table, and I offered five hundred piasters for him. But when he had been reduced to begging humbly for food, his return was worth but one hundred piasters to me".
The father hired a crier to shout through the streets that a reward of the one thousand piasters was offered for the return of the child. Although the man who held the boy heard the crier, greed had opened his belly and he hoped to earn an even larger sum. So he waited and said nothing.
On the following day the crier was sent through the streets again. But this time hte sum he offered was five hundred piasters, not a thousand. The kidnapper still held out. To his surprise, on the third day the crier offered a mere one hundred piasters. He hurried to return the boy and collect his reward. Curious, he asked the father why the sum of money had dwindled from day to day.
The father said, "On the first day my son was angry and refused to eat you food; is that not so?" "Yes," agreed the kidnapper. "On the second day he took a little, and on the last he asked for bread of his own accord," said the father. It had been so, the kidnapper agreed. "Well," said the father, "as I judge it, that first day my son was as unblemished as refined gold. Like a man of honor, he refused to break bread with his captor. To bring hem back with his pride untarnished, I was ready to pay one thousand piasters. On the second day, when hunger made him forget the conduct of a nobleman, he accepted food at your table, and I offered five hundred piasters for him. But when he had been reduced to begging humbly for food, his return was worth but one hundred piasters to me".
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Walk through
We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.
Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential.
Ellen Goodman
Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential.
Ellen Goodman
Happy New Year
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"
Happy New Year from Kabirwala
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"
Happy New Year from Kabirwala
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