Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice

A Separation -- A Film for US the 99%

2012-01-18T08:03:00.001-08:00

A Separation is a film for US. the 99%

A Separation -- Film by Asghar Farhadi, Country: Iran,
A Separation is an extraordinary Film that illustrates the human condition.
It is simultaneously personal, psychological, political, religious, economic and universal.
The film deservedly won the Golden Bear and the Golden Globe.
I saw it yesterday in Manhattan.

The official response from the Govt of Iran to the awards, is to be expected. No surprise there.
It is a government of a country, a government that has been made reactionary, because it has long under siege, first by colonial interests, then by neo-imperial manipulation by the U.S. Govt, -- not by US, but by the U.S.

Such governments become distorted, even to themselves and their peoples, in their actions and responses. Ditto U.S., Ditto Iran. However, whatever, no matter that that government (and especially its oppressor, the U.S. Govt.) , no matter what they say or do, cannot lessen the power of the film.

A Separation manages to vividly tell a human story about perceptions of truth, affection, power, class, loyalty, tradition and loss, a film hat has the capacity to touch US -- that is, if we are not fooled [by propaganda from the govt. of U.S. which is the principal perpetrator OR by the govt of Iran, which is in turn reactionary to neo-imperial assault], and if WE are receptive to the conditions and challenges that WE the People face, no matter where we live, in the process of becoming FAIR members of the Global Social, Economic & Political Order.

A Separation is a film for US. the 99%

CORPORATE google vs. Creative Google

2012-01-06T16:08:00.000-08:00

CORPORATE google vs. CREATIVE google
Shame on Corporate Google for BLOCKING access to my gmail mailbox.
Millions of mailboxes have been similarly blocked. Millions of users have complied as if they were sheep.
My gmail inbox continues to be BLOCKED for the 4th day.
That's corporate dictatorship!

Hey Corporate Google, Learn a lesson from Yahoo! Yahoo! has never coerced its users into viewing Yahoo! product promos as a pre-condition for using their email.
I know. I have had a Yahoo! mailbox for over 10 years.
i say Shame on ugly CORPORATE Google, while admiring the innovative CREATIVE side of Google operations example your search and research engines.
you have blocked access to my inbox until i watch your stupid video claiming your "new look' . Guess you have to try to impress your shareholders.

As someone who thinks deeply and ACTS proactively about democracy I maintain there is a significant difference between shareholders and STAKEHOLDERS in a democracy.

For those in your corporate operations who might argue that I have a choice -- either comply with corporate google or lose access to my mailbox -- my Q is: Is that a legitimate choice?

I am a STAKEHOLDER in civil society in democracy, NOT a shareholder in your corporate operations.

1. CORPORATE google, You have no legal or moral right to block access to my gmail inbox

2. CORPORATE google, You have no legal or moral right to coerce me into watching some corporate video about how new and improved your product is, as a prerequisite to having access to my gmail inbox.

I REFUSE to WATCH YOUR VIDEO about your self-proclaimed 'new look'

A Corporation is NOT a person! Therefore -- what 'new look'?!

Are you less totalitarian than China? They've been kicking your butt. You deserve each other! That's what totalitarianism looks like, boardroom mirror anyone?

If my mailbox continues to be BLOCKED by Corporate Google, I will take recourse.

Professor Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com

www.facebook.com/Chithra.KarunaKaran
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Google's alleged "new look"
Here's my point:
Even the most forward looking corporates attempt to control individual action. In other words, they think they can tell you what you want and what you need.
Example:
Today I found Google blocking access to my gmail inbox
Why?
Google wanted me to view the 'new look' they supposedly have imparted to their email services.
Google does not provide a simple "No thanks, I'm happy with my service just the way it is",
Instead, Google BLOCKED access to my Inbox.
You are required to watch their dumb video telling you about their "new look"
For now. I am refusing to comply with Google's dictatorial approach.
Hey Google, I don't watch to watch your enforced video about how great your 'new look' is.

Corporate Google,Allow me to say "No thanks" to your new look and stop BLOCKING my inbox.

What Corporate google policy is this? Sanctions? Embargo?
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Walmart Invades India

2011-11-26T05:14:00.000-08:00

See how the CORRUPT Govt. of India Collaborates with Corporate LOOTERS to destroy the PEOPLE's ECONOMY?

Walmart Invades India

See how CORRUPT Govts. collaborate with Corporate LOOTERS to destroy what has the potential to become a PEOPLE's Economy in the world's largest democracy?

The Indian Government has never helped its farmers or its small retailers, the two largest sectors of the Indian economy.

Now India's govt. bends over backwards to give favorable terms to the world's largest corporation.

Walmart withdrew its operations from Germany because, the German govt.'s antitrust lawyers would not allow Walmart to undercut prices charged by local retailers. Or to remain open long hours, because of Germany's worker protection laws.

While Walmart operates in 27 countries besides the U.S. it does not have stores in ANY of the following countries that have a high UN Human Development Index (HDI) -- Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, France

In contrast Walmart has made headway in Africa.

In the U.S. Walmart has not (yet) succeeded in bringing its operations into New York City! A recent study showed that New York city would lose jobs and hurt small retailers.

If Walmart cannot enter the NYC business arena why does it receive landing rights in India?

The India of Gandhi's highly pragmatic ideal of local self-reliant sustainability deserves a more ethical government and more ethical business practices.

Neither India's govt nor Walmart meets the Gandhian standard

Predatory Capitalism -- the 21st century U.S. type

2011-11-05T07:37:00.001-07:00

Predatory Capitalism -- the 21st century U.S. type

Predatory Capitalism -- the 21st century US type -- is represented by the US Corporate-Military-Govt complex (CMG).

US Govt. manipulation of the market to protect the 1% vs. the 99% , had led to this problem. Now, we have become Occupiers like our govt at home and overseas!

Let us be careful, 99%.

I blame the US govt. rather than Goldman Sachs, for creating and expanding this monstrous problem.

By Govt. I mean BOTH houses of Congress and the White House.
My Govt. is acting in cohesion with their fellow corporate 1%ers, to benefit themselves and each other -- the 1% --, while pretending to have opposite views, while pretending to represent the Greater Collective Good (GCG) of We the 99%.

So it's the GCG of the 99% vs. the CMG of the 1%.

You and I did NOT elect Goldman Sachs.

You and I elected the US Govt.

In democracy we elect govts. not corporates.

So what does the US GOVT. do? The US govt. uses and abuses my ballot to act against me, a member of the 99%.

Demonizing GS, while temporarily useful, even just to vent our collective rage, will not help us to fully understand and completely overhaul, step by step, the US Corporate-Military-Govt. complex (CMG).

EVERY, yes EVERY, institution or formation, including the academy, army, business, under the US model of PREDATORY CAPITALISM, is controlled and managed by a 1% that acts against the 99%.

The academy has its 1% that produces a 2-tier system of inequality in education.

The army has its 1% that sends poor young people to war to kill other poor people else

You and I are reduced to commodities.

You and I are sows' ears futures to be traded in a commodities market for predatory gain by the 1%!

We the 99% are fighting back as hard as we can to reclaim our human capacity and dignity and our claim to a Fair Share.

Let us not become the 1%.

Throughout history, Rebels became Tyrants.

Let us be careful, steadfast, truthful, caring, 99%.

Opportunistic Obama

2011-10-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

Opportunistic Obama

The U.S. President is both politically pragmatic and politically opportunistic.

He knows he can't win in 2012 on the Economy because of his abysmal, dismal performance on JOBS. That is a campaign promise he made but did not keep. Instead he prioritized Healthcare. If you don't have a job can you pay for healthcare?

So today, Obama's trying to capture the anti-war, anti-GREED, peace and unity vote that has coalesced at OWS -- Occupy Wall Street.

Whatever.

I feel relieved the USCIA is supposedly planning to get out of Iraq.

USCIA -- Get out of South Asia too.

Enough already.

Get out already.
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NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/president-obama-announces-end-of-war-in-iraq.html
by Mark Lander
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If a CORPORATION is a PERSON, Hey Texas EXECUTE ONE!

2011-10-22T07:15:00.000-07:00

My sign at OWS!
Be there.

The Occupation

Personal Accountability+Collective Responsibility = Ethical Democracy

2011-10-22T06:14:00.000-07:00

see YOU at OWS!

Be there, YOU ARE the Movement against Corporate, Military & Govt. GREED.

YOU are the Movement for Equality of Strength & Power.

Be there.

Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com

Does Occupy Wall Street Endorse Religion?

2011-10-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

Ethical Values that benefit Humanity and promote the GREATER COLLECTIVE GOOD ***neither need nor require religion to bolster such universal human values***.
Organized Religion frequently undermines Ethical HUMAN Values that promote Redistributive JUSTICE and advance the GREATER COLLECTIVE GOOD (GCG).
Occupy Wall Street -- One Breath at a Time.

Breath is a pre-religious activity of all species and living beings -- Breath!
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com/

The Rockets' Red Glare -- from Pak Against the US!

2011-10-17T07:09:00.000-07:00

The Rockets' Red Glare -- from Pak Against the US!
The USCIA manipulated Pakistan's military and govt for 60+ years, since the early 50's, the US got Pakistan to fight its US-invented Cold War, trained terrorists on Pakistan and Afghan sovereign soil.
Both Pakistan and Afghanistan's internally weak post-colonial governments took the US bait but also engaged in war profiteering and terror against their own people.

These US-initiated marriages were headed, from the word go, for Divorce Court, way way before the PAKISI and its proxy, the Haqqani,started firing the rockets on US posts (read occupation), mentioned in your article.

You sow what you reap, US.
Ditto Pak and Afghanistan.

In India, we did not allow one US soldier to set foot on Indian soil. We stayed out of your fabricated Cold War. We maintained cordial relations with both the US and the Soviets, and signed a strategic "treaty of friendship and cooperation" with the Soviets while building a vibrant democracy based on our own Gandhi-led liberation struggle.

See the resulting difference?
Learn from this, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The USCIA will not.
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New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/world/asia/cross-border-fire-frustrates-american-troops-in-afghanistan.html

OCCUPY Wall Street -- or somewhere close to it

2011-10-13T01:41:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street -- or somewhere close to it.
So I went downtown today in a light drizzle to check out the Occupy Wall Street activities. The US govt OCCUPIED Iraq & Afghanistan, now the American PEOPLE, or at least a disgruntled few hundreds, are daily occupying Wall Street.

Well not exactly Wall Street -- but close to it.
Zucotti Park to be precise, several blocks down and over. Those of us who actually are the 99%, who have been cheated by the banks and defrauded by the Govt. who stole our money and bailed out the financial houses, not just the banks.

At Zucotti, there's a lot of singing, dancing and free food. Blue tarps cover sleeping protesters and their belongings. Lots of banners and placards and flyers ranging from American Indian issues to the World Socialist Movement.

What's missing? I wish Zucotti had a Discussion Tent, where people could gather in small, decentralized groups to try to understand the many complex interrelated issues and then take the action back to their neighborhoods and to DC.

My sense is you can't talk about greed and corruption without aiming at those rabid Republicans and Tea Partiers who have just defeated Obama's Jobs Bill.

Regrettably, Obama offered TLTL -- Too Little Too Late -- he did not come up with ANY Job Action in his first 90 days in office, instead here he is,3 years later, 3 years too late, trying to get a Jobs Bill passed, in the heat of a re-election bid against those same Republicans. Good luck with that, hocus POTUS.
Yeah Yeah you will be re-elected because your opposition borders on suicidal lunacy or at the very least cynically simplistic solutions.

But to return to the Occupiers. Mainly they seemed to be feeling the moment and zen-like, were in the moment. Hope the moment can stretch and gain depth. That's essential.

Q. How did Zucotti ever become a PRIVATE Park, right off Broadway? I was shocked to research and discover that Brookfield Properties owns it.

Property IS Theft from the 99%.
Privatizing PUBLIC spaces, especially scarce green spaces, is THEFT of Public Resources, by the 1%, from the 99%.

Interestingly, Mayor Bloomberg's girlfriend, Diana Taylor, is on the Board of Directors of Brookfield Properties. She is a high-flying capitalist, who is shrewd enough to makeexcessive piles of money, access power, move with the movers and shake with the shakers, and then also sit on the boards of a fistful of PUBLIC-spirited non-profits, how shrewd is that.

So, is that why the Mayor came down yesterday to tell the Occupiers that they are ordered to vacate "temporarily" so the Park can be cleaned? Actually, it's relatively clean and well-maintained, today it's raining so Nature is cleaning as well, I saw Occupiers wielding brooms.

So my guess is the Mayor had a motive which had little to do with Lysol.

Help we really really need a cleaning crew during a Revolution! After we've been cleaned OUT already.

Wall Street, the street itself was pretty much cordoned off, lots of police and barricades, no singing, dancing, free food and overnight sleepers there. A union Local of building workers was protesting today with banners and a bullhorn, they repeated somewhat robotically "We are the 99%."

The bankers undoubtedly have central a/c, so could they hear the noisy % claim?

Then I walked over to Broadway and Morris to observe the famed Bull of high capitalism. I note he has surprisingly modest testicles. NYPD was guarding him while impressed tourists took pictures of themselves posing with him.

I asked a cop, Officer Feliciano, while leaning against a barricade and taking in the rock band, back again at Zocotti:

"How long do you figure this will last?"

He looked at his watch with a grin "Till tomorrow -- or maybe till it turns cold."

That's at least 3 months away.

Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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Infant & Child Rape in Sierra Leone

2011-10-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

Infant and Child Rape in Sierra Leone . Do UN Women UNICEF or UNIFEM interact directly with UN Integrated Office in Sierra Leone (UNIOSIL) to REDUCE/Eliminate the rape o finfants and children? There are so many UN agencies and so little coordination among them, to the extreme and unacceptable point that this issue of Infant and Child Rape is being insufficiently addressed.

Do whatever it takes, UN agencies,especially the women-focused UN Agencies, you have the resources, you have the access, now show you have the guts to do the job you are paid to do.

Q. What Can UN Women do to overturn this horror?
A. UN Women must use their status-conscious, safe, comfortable UN jobs to ACT, not just talk endlessly. Earn your salary and perks, UN Women! You are a very privileged group that is employed by the UN out of my salary, as a citizen of a member-state. We ordinary folks from all the member countries, pay you UN folks. from our wages to ensure your salaries and perks and lifestyle.
***Infant & Child RAPE in Sierra Leone***

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/kristof-In-This-Rape-Center-the-Patient-Was-3.html
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China Manipulates its Currency to Cheat Workers Everywhere

2011-10-09T01:51:00.000-07:00

China's Currency Manipulation Cheats Workers Everywhere
by Chithra KarunaKaran on Sunday, October 9, 2011 at 4:11am

China's Currency Manipulation hurts the world's workers and small businesses.

China's currency manipulation cheats workers in EVERY country, including China.

Yesterday the Dalai Lama called China's totalitarian rulers "liars" and "hypocrites" in the context of South Africa (China's largest trading partner and newest member of BRICS) refusal to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama on the occasion of fellow Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu's 80th birthday. Presumably, South Africa was fearful of China's disapproval.

Here's the point however -- Whether it is Human Rights abuses or manipulating its currency value at the expense of workers and small businesses everywhere, China leads!

For China, Performing as Sweatshop Nation to the World is finally beginning to expose its ugly downside.

None of the BRICS, India included, have spoken out against China's artificial lowering of the value of its yuan.

Great for China, bad for workers everywhere, bad for small businesses everywhere, very profitable for bankers, multinational corporations and fat cat Republican legislators in the US Congress.

Why has the US Congress taken so long to wake up to China's faux role in the world economy?
Why has currency manipulation by China been tolerated by the US for so long?

Because America's biggest businesses have profited and made Republicans richer? While small businesses in the US have suffered and millions of Americans are jobless or underemployed?

Those who are occupying Wall Street in my city of New York need to add China's currency manipulation to their manifesto against bankers and multinationals.

China's rulers are unethical.
The US Govt, especially House and Senate Republicans, through delaying action against China, is also unethical.

The time is now for the renminbi to reflect the actual value of the yuan, and if the Chinese keep balking on upward revision, through punitive action against China for cheating workers and small businesses everywhere.

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the Hill copyright
Ignoring Chinese currency manipulation costs America jobs

By Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) - 10/03/11 06:44 PM ET

In the 15 months since China announced that it would float its currency, the renminbi (RMB) has appreciated a paltry 6 percent against the U.S. dollar, well below what economists say it should. In fact, according to one reputable estimate, the RMB is still 28 percent below its true value.

The impact on America is clear. The currency manipulation by China costs at least 1 million American jobs, according to Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Bergsten has said it “is by far the largest protectionist measure adopted by any country since the Second World War — and probably in all of history.” Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman estimates that the cost of China’s action is closer to 1.5 million jobs.

As our manufacturers compete with Chinese companies to produce the products of the 21st century — from solar panels to battery cells — currency manipulation is one of the most egregious tools China is using to give its exporters an upper hand.

Yet in the face of compelling evidence for action, Republican leaders have offered no plans to bring up the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act that I reintroduced this year together with Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio and Republican Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania. The bill is designed to rein in China’s currency manipulation and has more than 200 co-sponsors. A virtually identical bill passed the House a year ago with support from the majorities of both parties.

What’s more, the Senate is preparing to act on legislation this week that includes the central components of the House bill.

Meanwhile, China continues to purchase U.S. Treasury bills in order to leverage its currency and maintain its low value. Combined, the practices artificially lower the cost of imported Chinese products and increase the cost of American exports to China.

The Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act (H.R. 639) would allow countervailing import duties for U.S. industries that are injured by the undervalued RMB. The Commerce Department, as a result of the legislation, would have the authority to impose import tariffs to offset the negative consequences of China’s undervalued currency. The bill reverses a current Commerce Department practice that has precluded it from treating foreign government currency practices as an export subsidy while also directing the department on how to measure subsidies provided to foreign producers through currency undervaluation.

Overall, the measure could help reduce our trade deficit by $200 billion.

Our nation’s workers and businesses deserve a level international playing field, and this measure provides concrete action to help make that a reality. With 14 million Americans still looking for work, it is far past time that Republican leaders took up legislation that has a history of bipartisan support and will help strengthen the hands of American workers and businesses.

There is no excuse for inaction. The specter of a “trade war” has been raised by opponents, as it is so often used against action. It masks the fact that there is economic competition — indeed, a battle — among nations and it is unwise to let the other nation refuse to abide by long-ago-developed international rules to help prevent trade wars, including rules against currency manipulation.

House Republican leaders argue that the focus should be on other Chinese practices, relating to lack of protection of intellectual property and technology transfer requirements. We should be pursuing action on all fronts — instead of playing one off against another — especially since there has been no legislative action by the House majority on any.

Levin is the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee.
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AP copyright
WASHINGTON — In one of Capitol Hill’s longest running battles, opponents of China’s trade policies have used threats, negotiation, protests from small American businesses and even the occasional Peking duck dinner in a failed effort to stop China from manipulating its currency.
Enlarge This Image
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Lindsey Graham, left, and Charles E. Schumer proposed a tariff on Chinese goods.

After eight years, that campaign is on the verge of a breakthrough, as the Senate appeared ready Thursday to approve a get-tough approach that had stalled numerous times before: a bill to punish China with high tariffs on some exports if it fails to adopt a market-driven exchange rate.

Economists say China’s artificially cheap currency has cost the United States jobs and billions in lost trade. But opponents of tariffs, including major manufacturers doing business in China, warn that penalizing China could start a trade war that would hurt American businesses even more.

“We’re already in a trade war,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who has led the push for tariffs, said in an interview. “We can’t afford to just do nothing. This is a message to China that the jig is finally up.”

The American jobless problem have combined to give the tariff proposal newfound momentum, as the Senate spent much of the afternoon Thursday debating it.

Supporters, casting the measure as a way to spur job growth, were confident the Senate would approve it. Even the measure’s fiercest opponents were grudgingly predicting passage in the Senate, and probably the House.

But 11-hour resistance by leading Republicans has clouded the outcome in the House, where the speaker, John A. Boehner, this week called the tariff plan “dangerous,” and it is unclear if the issue will even come up for a House vote.

China itself voiced strong objections this week and charged that meddling by the United States in Chinese currency violated world trade protocols. The Chinese Embassy has retained one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying shops, Patton Boggs, to represent its interests for $420,000 a year.

Lobbyists for General Motors, Caterpillar, steel producers, textile manufacturers, toy makers, poultry farmers and other businesses have also weighed in, supporting or opposing the tariffs depending on their own business relations with China.

Generally, large manufacturers like Caterpillar that operate in China have opposed it, warning of a backlash. Smaller businesses, like a tube maker in Ohio or a ceramics maker in upstate New York, have supported tariffs because they say China has artificially lowered its prices and gained an unfair edge.

While the Chinese renminbi has risen 6 percent against the dollar since China loosened currency controls last year, economists say it is still vastly undervalued. Meanwhile, China’s trade surplus with the United States stands at $273 billion — more than triple the gap a decade earlier.

In Senate testimony this week, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, went so far as to link China’s undervaluing of its currency to the slow economic recovery worldwide.

“The Chinese currency policy is blocking that process,” Mr. Bernanke testified. “And so it is to some extent hurting the recovery process.”

The Obama administration, however, has been noncommittal about the tariff proposal.

At a news conference on Thursday, President Obama would not say whether he would veto the bill it if it passed, but he raised concerns.

On the one hand, he said, “China has been very aggressive in gaming the trading system to its advantage,” and “it is indisputable that they intervene heavily in the currency markets.”

But he cautioned that he did not want to see the World Trade Organization strike down any steps the United States might take. “Then suddenly U.S. companies are subject to a whole bunch of sanctions,” Mr. Obama said.

Both supporters and opponents of the tariffs see the outcome as hugely significant financially and politically.
Page 2 of 2)

That was evident this week when the Club for Growth, a conservative free-market advocate that has led opposition to the bill, warned lawmakers that a vote supporting tariffs “will count heavily as an antigrowth action” on the group’s Congressional “scorecard,” which helps determine the group’s level of support.
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Club for Growth’s political muscle is already being felt. In the House, 99 Republicans supported a tariff plan last year. But after the club intensified its opposition, Representative Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat who favors tariffs, complained this week that “all of a sudden you can’t get a lick of Republican support.”

Early in the week, Chris Chocola, a former congressman who leads the Club for Growth, was pessimistic about chances of stopping the bill.

“It’s not politically expedient to defend China, so you won’t find many who will do that in words or deeds,” he said.

By midweek, after sharply critical remarks from Mr. Boehner on Tuesday, Mr. Chocola’s outlook had brightened.

“I give Boehner a lot of credit,” he said. “He clearly doesn’t want to bring it to the floor. And we’re trying to do everything we can to prevent it from getting to the floor.”

The maneuvering reflected the stops and starts on the issue as a whole since 2003, when Mr. Schumer and Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, first proposed a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese goods.

The two senators visited China in 2005 to press economic officials there to allow their currency to rise to market rates. They were greeted with a high-level banquet at the Great Hall of the People — Mr. Schumer pronounced the Chinese dishes “extraordinary” — and by China’s assurances that it would begin liberalizing monetary policies and allowing market forces to determine values.

The United States saw some early signs of improvement, but progress stalled. The Bush administration, after avoiding confrontations with China for years on the issue, took it to the World Trade Organization in 2007 over trade barriers.

The United States imposed tariffs on Chinese tires in 2009, and China followed the next year with steep tariffs on American poultry imports. Tariff opponents see the tit-for-tat as a small-scale version of the kind of trade wars they predict will break out en masse if the current plan becomes law.

“Every time we engage in protectionist behavior,” Mr. Chocola said, “bad things happen.”
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NYTimes copyright
As Its Economy Sprints Ahead, China’s People Are Left Behind

Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
A shopkeeper napping on a busy shopping street in Jilin. While Western companies look at China as a potentially huge market, consumers in Jilin and other heartland cities mostly settle for what state-run department stores and mom-and-pop shops offer.
By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: October 9, 2011
JILIN CITY, China — Wang Jianping and his wife, Shue, are a relatively affluent Chinese couple, with an annual household income of $16,000 — more than double the national average for urban families.
Endangered Dragon
The Price of Growth
This is the second in a series of articles examining China’s system of government-managed capitalism and the potential weaknesses that could threaten the nation’s remarkable economic growth.
Graphic
China’s Reluctant Consumers
Map

Enlarge This Image

Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Yang Yang and her son, Guo Liming. To save money, Ms. Yang, her husband and son recently moved in with her parents.
They own a modest, three-bedroom apartment here in this northeastern industrial city. They paid for their son to study electrical engineering at prestigious Tsinghua University, in Beijing. And even by frugal Asian standards, they are prodigious savers, with $50,000 in a state-run bank.
But like many other Chinese families, the Wangs feel pressed. They do not own a car, and they rarely go shopping or out to eat. That is because the value of their nest egg is shrinking, through no fault of their own.
Under an economic system that favors state-run banks and companies over wage earners, the government keeps the interest rate on savings accounts so artificially low that it cannot keep pace with China’s rising inflation. At the same time, other factors in which the government plays a role — a weak social safety net, depressed wages and soaring home prices — create a hoarding impulse that compels many people to keep saving anyway, against an uncertain future.
Indeed, economists say this nation’s decade of remarkable economic growth, led by exports and government investment in big projects like China’s high-speed rail network, has to a great extent been underwritten by the household savings — not the spending — of the country’s 1.3 billion people.
This system, which some experts refer to as state capitalism, depends on the transfer of wealth from Chinese households to state-run banks, government-backed corporations and the affluent few who are well enough connected to benefit from the arrangement.
Meanwhile, striving middle-class families like the Wangs are unable to enjoy the full fruits of China’s economic miracle.
“This is the foundation of the whole system,” said Carl E. Walter, a former J. P. Morgan executive who is co-author of “Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise.”
“The banks make loans to who the Communist Party tells them to,” Mr. Walter said. “So they punish the household savers in favor of the state-owned companies.”
It is not just China’s problem. Economists say that for China to continue serving as one of the world’s few engines of economic growth, it will need to cultivate a consumer class that buys more of the world’s products and services, and shares more fully in the nation’s wealth.
But rather than rising, China’s consumer spending has actually plummeted in the last decade as a portion of the overall economy, to about 35 percent of gross domestic product, from about 45 percent. That figure is by far the lowest percentage for any big economy anywhere in the world. (Even in the sleepwalking American economy, the level is about 70 percent of G.D.P.)
Unless China starts giving its own people more spending power, some experts warn, the nation could gradually slip into the slow-growth malaise that now afflicts the United States, Europe and Japan. Already this year, China’s economic growth rate has begun to cool off.
“This growth model is past its sell-by date,” says Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “If China is going to continue to grow, this system will have to change. They’re going to have to stop penalizing households.”
The Communist Party, in its latest five-year plan, has promised to bolster personal consumption. But doing so would risk undermining a pillar of the country’s current financial system: the household savings that support the government-run banks.
Here in Jilin City, where chemical manufacturing is the dominant industry, the state banks are flush with money from savings accounts. The banks use that money to make low-interest loans to corporate beneficiaries — including real estate developers, helping fuel a speculative property bubble that has raised housing prices beyond the reach of many consumers. It is a dynamic that has played out in dozens of cities throughout China.
As Its Economy Sprints Ahead, China’s People Are Left Behind
Published: October 9, 2011
(Page 2 of 3)
Meanwhile, China’s central bank in Beijing also depends on the nation’s vast pool of consumer savings to help finance its big investments in the foreign exchange markets, as a way to keep the currency artificially weak. The weak currency helps sustain China’s mighty export economy by lowering the global price of Chinese goods. But it also makes imports unaffordable for many Chinese people.
Enlarge This Image

Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Wang Shue and her husband live frugally and put much of their income into savings.
Endangered Dragon
The Price of Growth
This is the second in a series of articles examining China’s system of government-managed capitalism and the potential weaknesses that could threaten the nation’s remarkable economic growth.
Multimedia
Graphic
China’s Reluctant Consumers
Map

Enlarge This Image

Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Left, a billboard announcing Jilin Fortune Plaza, a real estate project in Jilin, China. Local governments have come to view such projects as a source of easy riches.
News reports of the nouveaux riches in Beijing and Shanghai snapping up Apple iPhones, Gucci bags and Rolex watches may conjure Western business dreams of China’s becoming the world’s biggest consumer market. But consumer choice here in Jilin and many other heartland cities is confined largely to the limited offerings of dingy state-run department stores and mom-and-pop shops. Any sales of global “brands” come mainly in the form of the counterfeits and knockoffs often sold at outdoor markets.
On a recent weekday at the Henan Street flea market, crowds sifted through stacks of clothes that included $3 T-shirts with images of Minnie Mouse and $5 imitation Nike sports jerseys. Just a few yards away, an authentic Nike store selling the real thing for $35 had nary a shopper. Because consumers have so little spending power, many global-brand companies do not even bother to open stores in cities like Jilin.
With the faltering economies of the United States, Europe and Japan limiting China’s ability to continue relying on growth through exports, the Chinese government knows the importance of giving its own consumers more buying power. Already, the central government has pushed to raise rural incomes and has even offered subsidies to buy cars and household appliances.
The question is whether the government can change its entrenched economic system enough to truly make a difference. “The central government is committed to increasing the share of consumption in G.D.P.,” says Li Daokui, a professor of economics at Tsinghua University and a longtime government adviser. “The issue is what is going to be the means.”
THE SAVERS
Frugality Born
Of Necessity
If China is to make consumer spending a much larger share of the economy, it will need to encourage big changes in the habits of people like Mr. Wang, 52, a highway design specialist, and Ms. Wang, also 52, who retired as an accountant seven years ago because of health problems.
“We’re quite traditional,” says Ms. Wang, who draws a pension. “We don’t like to spend tomorrow’s money today.”
But tomorrow’s money may not be worth as much as today’s — not as long as their savings account earns only a 3 percent interest rate while inflation lopes along at 6 percent or more.
Yet the Wangs see no good alternatives to stashing nearly two-thirds of their monthly income in the bank. They are afraid to invest in China’s notoriously volatile stock market. And Chinese law sharply limits their ability to invest overseas or otherwise send money outside the country.
Nor do the Wangs feel flush or daring enough to join the real estate speculation that some Chinese now see as one of the few ways to get a return on their money — risky as that might prove if the bubble bursts.
Mainly, like many in China, the Wangs save because they worry about soaring food prices and the high cost of health care, which the People’s Republic no longer fully provides. They also worry about whether they can afford to buy a home for their son, a cost that Chinese parents are expected to bear when their male children marry.
“If you have a daughter, it’s not so expensive,” Wang Shue said. “But with a son you have to save money.”
Housing prices have become crucial in pushing up savings rates. Here, too, analysts say government policies are shifting wealth away from households.
In the case of the Wangs, they are being forced to move to make way for a new real estate development authorized by municipal authorities — the sort of project that local governments throughout China have come to regard as an easy source of riches.
Although the Wangs and other current residents have received some cash compensation for the apartments they are leaving, the Jilin City government has sold the land to a developer that plans to demolish the current dwellings and erect a new complex with more, and more expensive, apartments.
(Page 3 of 3)
The Wangs are not sure they will be able to find a home comparable to their current apartment from the money they are being paid. But the developer and the local government are expected jointly to earn a profit of more than $50 million.
Endangered Dragon
The Price of Growth
This is the second in a series of articles examining China’s system of government-managed capitalism and the potential weaknesses that could threaten the nation’s remarkable economic growth.
Multimedia
Graphic
China’s Reluctant Consumers
Map

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A POLICY’S HISTORY
Averting a Crisis,
But Forming a Habit
Why would China, which hopes eventually to surpass the United States as the world’s biggest economy, deliberately suppress the consumer market that might help it reach that goal?
Some analysts trace the current policies to habits formed in the late 1990s. That’s when the bloat of China’s giant, uncompetitive state-run corporations nearly brought China’s economic expansion to a standstill. Suddenly, with state-owned companies facing bankruptcy, the state banks were saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in nonperforming loans; many banks faced insolvency.
To avert a crisis, Beijing allowed state-owned companies to lay off tens of millions of workers. In 1999 just one of those companies, the parent of PetroChina, a big oil conglomerate, announced the layoff of a million employees. And to shore up the banks, Beijing assumed tighter control over interest rates, which included sharply lowering the effective rates paid to depositors. A passbook account that might have earned 3 percent in 2002, after inflation, would today be effectively losing 3 to 5 percent, once inflation is factored in.
That is how Chinese banks can provide extremely cheap financing to state-owned companies while still recording huge profits. It has also helped the banks provide easy financing for big public works projects, which besides the high-speed train system have included the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the monumental Three Gorges Dam.
It was during this same period that the Communist government discarded the longstanding “iron rice bowl” promise of lifelong employment and state care. Beijing shifted more of the high costs of social services — including housing, education and medical care — onto households and the private sector.
Together, these measures added up to the managed-market system now known as state capitalism. They worked so well that they not only helped resuscitate China’s failing banks and state companies, but also fueled the nation’s economic boom for more than a decade. But the system also took an enormous economic toll on personal pocketbooks.
“We’d like to spend, but we really have nothing left over after paying the bills,” said Yang Yang, 34, a school administrator who lives in Jilin City with her husband, a police officer, and their son, 10. “Even though our son goes to a public school, we need to pay fees for after-school courses, which everyone is expected to take. Almost every family will do this. So there’s a lot of pressure on us to do it, too.” To save money, Ms. Yang, her husband and son recently moved in with her parents.
Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, calculates that the government policies exacted a hidden tax on Chinese households that amounted to about $36 billion in 2008 alone — or about 4 percent of China’s gross domestic product. Over the last decade, Mr. Lardy says, that figure probably amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars — money that banks essentially took from consumers’ hands.
The distortions may have actually cost households far more, because his figures do not include hidden costs like artificially high prices for imports.
For many Chinese economists, the state capitalism that helped jump-start growth has become counterproductive.
“China is already beyond the point where the law of diminishing returns starts biting,” said Xu Xiaonian, an economist who teaches at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.
Mr. Xu argues that China risks repeating the mistakes Japan made in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it relied too long on a predominantly export economy, neglected domestic markets and allowed real estate prices to soar. Since Japan’s bubble burst in the mid-1990s, its economy has never really recovered.
“If we don’t change, we will follow those same footsteps,” Mr. Xu said. “We have already seen the early signs of what we might call the Japanese disease. China invests more and more, but those investments generate less and less growth.”
PREDICTIONS FOR CHANGE
A Radical Overhaul,
But Within Reach
Some economists predict major changes, noting that the Chinese government has the cash and the power to alter course as drastically as it did in the late ’90s, this time in the people’s favor.
“China has faced more daunting challenges in the past,” said Wei Shangjin, a professor at the Columbia Business School. “I don’t doubt that they want to do it. The question is, Can they successfully engineer such a major restructuring of the economy?”
Certainly, multinationals like McDonald’s, Nike and Procter & Gamble are still betting billions of dollars that China will grow into the world’s biggest consumer market within a few decades.
But raising consumption will require a radical overhaul of the Chinese economy — not just weaning state banks off household subsidies but forcing state-run firms to pay much higher borrowing rates. It would also mean letting the currency rise closer to whatever value it might naturally reach. It would mean, in other words, a significant dismantling of the state capitalism that has enabled China to come so far so fast. “To get consumption to surge,” said Mr. Pettis, the Peking University lecturer, “you need to stop taking money from the household sector.”
=====================================================================================

Dalai Lama Criticizes China's Totalitarian Govt. for Censorship

2011-10-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

The Dali Lama is a contemporary icon of nonviolence and peace. The entire world knows him.
For China, to put pressure on South Africa to deny a Nobel Peace Laureate a chance to visit with his fellow Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu shows how petty, cynical and coercive China's rulers are.

[I say -- Boycott Chinese goods to the extent possible, if you and I have the same willpower and courage. Note the Dalai Lama wisely, for the sake of the Tibetan People and for the Govt and People of India has not called for such an action. But it is up to us to act.]

Bravo India Govt and India's people for giving safe haven to the Dalai and exiled Tibetans since the late 50's. The India Govt did not (yet) censor Dalai Lama's remarks.

That is what makes India a democracy, following the Gandhian path despite many continuing flaws and failings.

Q. Which nation-state has shown that degree of courage as well as diplomatic acumen against a more powerful and aggressive neighbor?

Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
Dalai Lama criticizes China in S.African address
By DONNA BRYSON - Associated Press | AP – 3 hrs ago

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South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, second left back, listen during a live video …

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, sitting at left, speaks during a live video …

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The Dalai Lama on Saturday sharply criticized China, which is accused of blocking him from traveling to South Africa to celebrate Archbishop Desmond Tutu's 80th birthday.

The Tibetan spiritual leader spoke with Tutu and answered questions via a video link, instead of attending an event honoring South Africa's anti-apartheid hero a day after his birthday. Tutu asked the Dalai Lama why the global giant and South Africa's main trade partner China feared his fellow Nobel peace laureate.

The Dalai Lama, sitting in a room decorated with orchids and silk hangings in his home in exile in India, was playful at first. He said communist propaganda portrayed him as a demon, as he raised his index fingers to his temples.

"Yes, I have horns," he said, drawing laughter from Tutu and others watching him on a video screen at the University of the Western Cape, near Cape Town. The encounter was streamed live on the Internet, but not broadcast by South African state television as had been expected.

The Dalai Lama said for communist officials and those in other totalitarian systems, "telling lies has unfortunately become part of their lives." He said he made Chinese officials "uncomfortable" because he tells the truth.

He added the Chinese people should be able to hear his views and judge for themselves.

"Censorship is immoral," he said.

He also called for legal reforms in China.

"The Chinese judiciary system must raise up to international law standards," he said.

The Dalai Lama earlier this week called off his South Africa visit after waiting weeks for a visa. South African officials deny they stalled because of pressure from China, which accuses the Dalai Lama of being a separatist. The Dalai Lama insists he is only seeking increased autonomy for Tibet.

Tutu, often described as South Africa's conscience, had called the African National Congress-led government worse than the country's former oppressive white regime for not issuing the visa. Tutu accused the government of failing to side with "Tibetans who are being oppressed viciously by the Chinese."

South African foreign ministry officials said the visa process was delayed by problems with the timing and completeness of the application. Officials from the offices of Tutu and the Dalai Lama have denied the application was late or incomplete.

Tutu's anger appeared to have abated Saturday. For more than an hour, two old friends brought together by technology giggled and teased one another as they exchanged views on politics and spirituality.

Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his nonviolent campaign against white racist rule in South Africa. The Nobel committee recognized the Dalai Lama in 1989 for his peaceful efforts to "preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people."

The Dalai Lama said he missed seeing Tutu at international events. Tutu has traveled less since retiring from public life after his 79th birthday, but remains outspoken.

"I can see your face," the Dalai Lama said to Tutu, gazing at a monitor. "I really feel very, very happy."

The Dalai Lama said he was looking forward to Tutu's 90th birthday.

"Don't forget to send me an invitation," he said. "Then we can test your government."
====================================================================================
NYtimes copyright Reuters opyright
Dalai Lama: China Is Built on Lies, Run by Hypocrites
By REUTERS
Published: October 8, 2011 at 12:18 PM ET

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - China is built on lies and its officials are hypocrites, the Dalai Lama said Saturday, speaking via videophone after visa problems prevented him from joining Archbishop Desmond Tutu's birthday celebrations in South Africa.
Reuters

"Some Chinese officials describe me as a demon," the Tibetan spiritual leader said to loud applause as he put his index fingers either side of his head to mimic devil's horns.

"In reality, for the communist totalitarian system ... hypocrisy (and) telling lies has unfortunately become part of their lives."

He said the Chinese government was "uncomfortable" with people who tell the truth, adding that honest people live longer and he would like to attend Tutu's 90th birthday.

"At that time, don't forget to send me an invitation ... then we can test your government," he said to Tutu in an apparent reference to his visa debacle with South African authorities.

The government's failure to allow the Dalai Lama into the country has been seen as bowing to pressure from China, South Africa's largest trading partner that pledged to invest $2.5 billion in Africa's largest economy last week.

The 80-year old Tutu retired about a year ago from most public duties but has remained a prominent figure and is still seen as a voice of integrity.

(Reporting by Shafiek Tassiem; Editing by Phumza Macanda; and Louise Ireland)

US/CIA -- Stay out of Myanmar

2011-10-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/world/asia/united-states-aims-to-encourage-change-in-myanmar.html#preview

US/CIA -- Stay out of Myanmar

The New York Times headline is misleading or at best overly sanguine about US motives.

The Myanmarese PEOPLE, yes PEOPLE, can effect their own Change.

They have already proved they can. They know how to choose their own leaders.

For the US this is an opportunity to appear they are promoting democracy, but in fact trying to gain strategic depth in South Asia, and yes to supposedly contain China.

Let South Asia and South East Asia, neighbors with common borders, negotiate their own creative, sustainable, sovereign nation-state geopolitical solutions.

US, stay out.
The argument I am making is NOT to ask the US govt. to return to an earlier unproductive policy of "isolationism."
However, a policy ff "interventionism" which is what the US has done pretty much across the world for the past 55 years is unwarranted and counterproductive.

Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice

http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
=======================================
NYTimes article follows, their copyright

Detecting a Thaw in Myanmar, U.S. Aims to Encourage Change
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and THOMAS FULLER
Published: October 6, 2011

WASHINGTON — The United States is considering a significant shift in its long-strained relationship with the autocratic government of Myanmar, including relaxing restrictions on financial assistance and taking other steps to encourage what senior American officials describe as startling political changes in the country.
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Nyein Chan Naing/European Pressphoto Agency

Myanmar's new government has met with the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, center.
Related

Burmese Wary of ‘Democracy,’ After Decades of Oppression (August 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Myanmar

The American special envoy to Myanmar, Derek Mitchell, met with government and opposition leaders in Yangon last month.

The thawing, while in its early stages, follows a political transition in Myanmar after deeply flawed elections last year that nonetheless appears to have raised the possibility that the new government will ease its restrictions on basic freedoms and cooperate with the repressed opposition movement led by the Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

The new president, U Thein Sein, a former general who was part of the military junta that ruled the country for two decades, has in six months in office signaled a sharp break from the highly centralized and erratic policies of the past. Mr. Thein Sein’s government is now rewriting laws on taxes and property ownership, loosening restrictions on the media and even discussing the release of political prisoners.

The apparent shift offers the United States the chance to improve ties with a resource-rich Southeast Asian nation that after many years of semi-isolation counts neighboring China as its main ally. Last week, Myanmar’s new leadership unexpectedly halted work on a $3.6 billion dam strongly backed by China, prompting angry criticism from the Chinese government and the state-owned Chinese company that was building it.

The Obama administration, though skeptical, has responded to this new openness with a series of small diplomatic steps of its own, hoping that a democratic transition in Myanmar could bring stability and greater economic opportunities to the region at a time of increasing American competition with China over influence in Asia.

“We’re going to meet their action with action,” the administration’s newly appointed special envoy to Myanmar, Derek Mitchell, said in an interview. “If they take steps, we will take steps to demonstrate that we are supportive of the path to reform.” Mr. Mitchell spent five days last month in Myanmar, meeting with senior leaders in the government and opposition. That visit was followed by two meetings in New York and Washington last week between senior State Department officials and Myanmar’s new foreign minister, U Wunna Maung Lwin.

Mr. Wunna Maung Lwin, whose travel in the United States is normally sharply restricted, was the first foreign minister from Myanmar invited to the State Department since the military junta took power.

The motivation for the changes has baffled American officials and others, but Myanmar appears eager to end its diplomatic isolation and rebuild a dysfunctional economy that has trapped the country’s population of 55 million people in poverty, which the government acknowledged for the first time in Mr. Thein Sein’s inaugural address in March.

Members of Mr. Thein Sein’s government have since met several times with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was released from years of house arrest last November and whose name was so demonized by the previous junta that it was typically whispered in public. She, too, has expressed cautious support for what appears to be a political opening.

The government has also for the first time discussed with her and American officials the possibility of releasing hundreds of political prisoners, after years of denying there were any at all. The government has even assembled a list of those it is considering releasing. About 600 people are on it, though opposition leaders and diplomats say that there are nearly 2,000 political prisoners listed in a database compiled by an organization in Thailand. “We told the government we cannot accept their list,” said U Win Tin, a founding member of the National League for Democracy, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party. “We gave that message to the government, but we don’t know yet whether they will change their list.”

Even so, the senior administration official said that the mere acknowledgment that Myanmar held political prisoners reflected a significant shift in the new government’s attitude. Signals like that, even if tentative, have begun to win over skeptics who have seen false dawns before in Myanmar.

“It’s very exciting,” said Priscilla A. Clapp, who was the chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Myanmar from 1999 to 2002. “They are moving into a more pluralistic form of government. I wouldn’t call it totally democratic. But things are changing very rapidly.”

Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Thomas Fuller from Bangkok.

p 2
(Page 2 of 2)

Ms. Clapp and others warned that the changes, which are exceeding expectations inside Myanmar and abroad, remained a work in progress. “Any transition this dramatic is a recipe for instability,” she said. “Anything can happen. There could be a coup, a counterrevolution.”
Related

Burmese Wary of ‘Democracy,’ After Decades of Oppression (August 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Myanmar

Senior Gen. Than Shwe, who led the junta for nearly two decades and stepped down in March, remains an uncertain factor in the tumultuous transition. It was under General Than Shwe’s leadership that the government carried out a deadly crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in 2007 and restricted foreign aid in the aftermath of a cyclone that killed more than 100,000 people.

The reasons that General Than Shwe ceded power to the current government have not been fully explained beyond the notion that he was ready for retirement. In leading the drive for reforms, Mr. Thein Sein appears to be siding with a younger generation of military officers who believe that maintaining the junta’s oppressive policies and hermetic attitudes toward the outside world would be a dead-end path for the country.

The decision by Mr. Thein Sein last week to suspend work on the giant hydroelectric dam on the Irrawaddy River was interpreted by many as a sign that the president was moving out from under the shadow of General Than Shwe.

Obama administration officials are now debating additional steps to support the nascent changes and encourage more, including the creation of a truly democratic political system and an end to violence against Myanmar’s ethnic minorities. The outreach is being closely coordinated with Congress, with other countries, including members of the European Union, and with Myanmar’s opposition.

“We’re not looking to move I think any faster than anyone else here,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I think we’re all looking to move step by step. We are going to test. There is no single point where we are absolutely certain that reform is going to be sustained and irreversible.”

Myanmar faces American sanctions first imposed in 1997 and expanded as recently as 2008. One hundred senior officials or businesses remain on the Department of the Treasury’s list banning any commercial trade. Lifting those sanctions would require new legislation in Congress. That is unlikely to happen unless Myanmar convinces its critics that its transformation is fundamental.

In the meantime, though, the administration is considering waiving some restrictions on trade and financial assistance and lifting prohibitions on assistance by global financial institutions, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. An I.M.F. team is scheduled to visit this month for consultations on modernizing the country’s exchange rate system and lifting restrictions on international transactions.

Assistance like that is needed to overhaul what for years was a Soviet-style planned economy, where the military ran factories producing soap and bicycles. Ancient-looking cars still ride on potholed roads, and some buildings look as if their last coat of paint was applied during the days when Myanmar was a British colony, known as Burma.

Many in Myanmar remain unconvinced that genuine democracy has arrived.

“All these Western countries are hearing about some changes and they are very happy and keen,” said Mr. Win Tin of the opposition party. “I think that’s wrong. They should listen very carefully and wait to see whether what this government calls change is real and genuine.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton echoed that caution. She recently noted what she called “welcome gestures” but raised a series of issues. “We have serious questions and concerns across a wide range of issues — from Burma’s treatment of ethnic minorities and more than 2,000 prisoners to its relations with North Korea,” she said, using Myanmar’s colonial name, which is official American policy.

She added that the day before she spoke, a 21-year-old journalist was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Myanmar.
Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Thomas Fuller from Bangkok.

===================================================================================

Haqqanis, USCIA, PakISI in Kashmir

2011-10-03T06:16:00.000-07:00

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/asia/americans-raid-haqqani-byways-of-afghanistan.html

Haqqanis, USCIA PAKISI in Kashmir

It is important to put 2 news story streams together:

1. 2500+ unmarked graves recently discovered along the India-Pak border in divided Kashmir.

2. the attacks on US forces by the Haqqanis along the Af-Pak border.

If we don't put these stories together the daily terror narratives emanating from the Pentagon, Kabul and Pakistan might appear baffling and discrete or at the very least, confusing.

Even though India never has, and never would permit the US to put its bloody boots on the ground anywhere in India, the Indian state of Jammu Kashmir Ladakh (JKL), particularly the Kashmir Valley has long being targeted by the PakISI who hire the Haqqanis and their rivals, to supply suicide bombers whenever and wherever needed -- from Mumbai to Kashmir

Q. But how can Pak afford a decades-long terror infiltration in which cash flow and weapons must be sustained over 55 years? Enter the USA.

The US, even before the Cold War, over 55 years has armed, paid and trained the Haqqanis and many of the Haqqanis' rivals, through the PakISI. It is called the US aid package to Pakistan.

PakISI has, not surprisingly, used the cash and weapons provided by the US, to further their own objectives, the focus of which is the destabilization of Indian Kashmir.

The 2500+ unmarked graves along the LoC (the UN-monitored Line of Control)are mainly of the desperate young men who were paid indirectly through the 'aid package\" by the USA -- and armed, trained and deployed by the PakISI.

I have heard these stories, unsolicited, for 5 years, narrated directly to me in the Kashmir Valley.

Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice

http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------------------

NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/asia/americans-raid-haqqani-byways-of-afghanistan.html
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: October 2, 2011
CHARBARAN, Afghanistan — The first helicopter landed in the bluish gray gloom before dawn. More than 20 members of an American reconnaissance platoon and Afghan troops accompanying them jogged out through the swirling dust, moving into a forest smelling of sage and pine.
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Americans Move Against Haqqani Network in Afghanistan
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Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan (September 25, 2011)
Times Topic: Haqqani Network

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Three more helicopters followed, and soon roughly 100 troops were on the floor of this high-elevation valley in Paktika Province, near the border with Pakistan. They were beginning their portion of a brigade-size operation to disrupt the Haqqani network, the insurgent group that collaborates with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and that has become a primary focus of American counterterrorism efforts since Osama bin Laden was killed.

The group, based in Pakistan’s northwestern frontier, flows fighters into Afghanistan and has orchestrated a long campaign of guerrilla and terrorist attacks against the Afghan government and its American sponsors.

Its close ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service, and Pakistan’s unwillingness to act against the Haqqani headquarters in Miram Shah, a city not far from the Afghan border, have drawn condemnation from Washington and escalated tensions between two nations that officially have been counterterrorism partners.

Against this backdrop, the helicopter assault into Charbaran this past week highlighted both the false starts and the latest set of urgent goals guiding the American military involvement in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon plans to have withdrawn most of its forces from the country by 2014. Talk among many officers has shifted sharply from discussions of establishing Afghan democracy or a robust government to a more pragmatic and realistic military ambition: doing what can be done in the little time left.

In the tactical sense, this translates to straightforward tasks for units in the security buffer along the border. While they still have their peak troop presence, American commanders are trying to bloody the strongest of the armed antigovernment groups and to put thousands more Afghan police officers and soldiers into contested areas.

The long-term ambition is that Afghan forces will have the skills and resolve to stand up to the insurgency as the Americans pull back.

And yet, even while looking beyond 2014, American units must fight a day-to-day war.

One element lies in trying to prevent more of the carefully planned attacks that have shaken Kabul, the Afghan capital, several times this year. The attacks — striking prominent targets, like the capital’s premier hotel and the American Embassy — have often been organized by the Haqqanis, and have highlighted the Afghan government’s vulnerability and the insurgents’ resiliency.

Lt. Col. John V. Meyer, who commands the Second Battalion of the 28th Infantry Regiment, which used two companies to cordon off the Charbaran Valley and another to sweep the villages, called the operation “a spoiling attack to prevent a spectacular attack in the Kabul area.” It was also intended, he said, to gather intelligence.

The Charbaran Valley has become one of the main routes for Haqqani fighters to enter Afghanistan. They generally come in on foot, American officers say, and then, after staying overnight in safe houses and tent camps, they work their way toward Kabul or other areas where they have been sent to fight.

Mid-level Haqqani leaders also meet in the valley’s villages, American officers said, including near an abandoned school and the ruins of a government center that the United States built earlier in the war but that local fighters had destroyed by 2008.

It was 2010 when the last conventional unit entered the valley. An infantry company, it landed by helicopter and was caught in a two-hour gunfight as it left.

When the American and Afghan troops fanned out this time, their mission faced a familiar law of guerrilla war: when conventional forces arrive in force, guerrillas often disperse, setting aside weapons to watch the soldiers pass by.

---
Americans Raid Byways of Haqqani Insurgents in Afghanistan
Published: October 2, 2011

(Page 2 of 2)

The operation was also probably no surprise to the Haqqani fighters in the valley, American officers said, because during the days of preparation some of the Afghan troops probably leaked that the assault was coming.

Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan (September 25, 2011)
Times Topic: Haqqani Network

As the soldiers climbed the hills — laden with body armor and backpacks heavy with water and ammunition — they almost immediately found signs of the fighters’ presence.

In the first house they entered, not far from the landing zone, only two women and several children were home. The men had all left.

Inside, the Afghan troops uncovered a case of ammunition fired by both PK machine guns and Dragunov sniper rifles. They also found two bandoleers of .303-caliber ammunition for the dated Lee-Enfield rifles that remain a common insurgent arm.

Capt. Nicholas C. Sinclair, the company commander, ordered the Afghan troops to confiscate the ammunition. The younger woman protested loudly.

“There have been many American soldiers here, and they always left it,” she said.

This, the Americans said, was most likely a lie. An Afghan police officer packed away the ammunition. The company walked off.

Later, at the now-abandoned school, which the Haqqani and Taliban fighters had forced to close, the soldiers were greeted by a taunting note written in white chalk above the main entrance.

“Taliban is good,” it read, in English.

The school, the soldiers said, was evidence of an earlier setback. According to those who advanced the counterinsurgency doctrine that swept through the American military several years ago, building schools was supposed to help turn valleys like this one around.

Instead, it was shut down by the same fighters who overran the government center and chased the police away. It stands empty — a marker of good intentions gone awry, and of time and resources lost before this latest battalion inherited duties in the province.

More signs of the fighters soon emerged. At the edge of the Charbaran bazaar, where the Haqqani and Taliban fighters were said to gather, Second Lt. Mark P. Adams, a fire support officer, glanced into a woodpile he was using for cover and saw a makeshift bomb.

The weapon — fashioned from 120-millimeter and 82-millimeter mortar rounds attached to roughly 10 pounds of homemade explosives — was powerful but not armed. It apparently had been hidden there but was meant to have been moved to a road frequented by the Afghan and American troops.

Staff Sgt. Robert Blanco, an explosive-ordnance disposal specialist, put a small explosive charge against it and detonated the bomb in place.

Soon the soldiers climbed a mountain, joining the rest of the battalion, to sleep in the relative safety of a higher ridge.

The next morning, as the sweep resumed, one elder, Ghul Mohammad, sat with First Lt. Tony E. Nicosia, an American platoon leader, as Afghan and American soldiers searched the shops a second time.

There was a ritual familiarity to their exchange, a product of a war entering its second decade.

“When you come here, that’s a big problem for us,” the elder said. “Because after you leave the Taliban comes and asks us about you, and they take our food and are not paying for it.”

Whether this was true could not be determined from this conversation alone; many villagers, the Afghan and American soldiers said, support Taliban and Haqqani fighters.

The soldiers also said that at least some of the men gathered around them were probably fighters, at least part time, who had set down their weapons for the brief period that the Americans had a large presence in the valley.

“We understand your concerns and, hopefully, we can push some security in here,” Lieutenant Nicosia said politely.

Ghul Mohammad nodded. “I cannot do anything about it,” he said. “I want my God to bring security here.”

The Americans shouldered their equipment and began the walk to the next buildings, on the opposite side of the valley.

Throughout the operation, hidden fighters were occasionally heard over the two-way radios that Afghan interpreters were monitoring for intelligence. The guerrillas had threatened to ambush the reconnaissance company.

After the American and Afghan soldiers reached the opposite slope, the guerrillas managed their only attack: they fired four mortar rounds from outside the cordon.

The rounds exploded well behind the soldiers, near the abandoned school, causing no harm but making clear that Charbaran, which had fallen almost silent as the company moved through, remained out of government hands.
===================================================================================

Americans Raid Byways of Haqqani Insurgents in Afghanistan

Did Some Self-ascribed Indian "Intellectuals" Miss the Point? Yes

2011-10-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

Did Some Indian "Intellectuals" Miss the Point? Yes some did did. Some signed on to oppose the India's govt's decision to deny a visa to a Denver radio journalist, barring him from entering JKL -- Jammu Kashmir Ladakh.

This guy Barsamian, no disrespect intended(a US-born citizen, no less than Awlaki) was, from my perspective, correctly denied a visa to from enter JKL -- Jammu Kashmir Ladakh. The broadcaster was denied access to a part of India which reportedly experiences daily attempts at cross-border infiltration sponsored by Pak's ISI, which in turn is allied with the Haqqani network, both of which are supported by US taxpayer $$, via the CIA and the Pentagon.

Given these proven realities:

Instead of reporting 4m JKL, Barsamian needs to focus on the disastrous military adventurism of his own US govt (and mine) in the South Asia region.

Glad you were refused entry bro, you got plenty of work to do right here, stateside.
I strongly suggest you stay home for a while, spend some time researching your US govt (and mine) particularly its treacherous alliances paying and training Pak's ISI, OBL and the so-called Haqqani network. Your govt and mine paid and trained them ALL.

Be ethical. I'm trying, as well. Don't become an unwitting or (worse) intentional arm of your neo-imperial govt and mine -- the USA.

Lastly, the centenary observance of the Armenian Genocide of 1915-23 shd be of some interest to you. Hope you get all your visas in Ankara, good luck with that. I am planning to join others to mark the centenary observance of the Armenian Genocide right here at the UN in April 2015, if they'll let us of course. Gotta try. Join us. Turkey is in denial, gotta persuade them to give up denial and offer a profound apology and at least some symbolic compensation (reparation is unlikely) to the descendants of the survivors of that horrific event.

Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My comment on the Armenian Genocide 1915-1923, FYI Barsamian:
Dear David Barsamian,instead of complaining abt not getting a visa to JKL, India,
Please be sure to visit Turkey and protest Turkey's denial of the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923.You are Armenian, hope you get all your visas in Ankara!
The centenary observance of the Armenian Genocide (I plan to organize this at the UN) by the Govt of Turkey is less than 3 years away.
Please raise your voice NOW against Turkey's failure to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.
Thanks.
see article below
http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/comment/reply/

Intellectuals protest the deportation of legendary broadcaster David Barsamian

We write to protest the denial of entry to David Barsamian by Immigration Authorities at the New Delhi airport in the early hours of September 23, 2011, and we write to draw attention to the growing arbitrariness of the Indian Government in dealing with dissent of any kind.

David Barsamian is a veteran broadcaster, and founder and director of Alternative Radio, a weekly one-hour public affairs programme offered free to all public radio stations in the US, Canada, Europe and beyond. For more than 25 years Alternative Radio has provided information, analyses and views that are frequently ignored in other media. Structured around intensive interviews conducted by David Barsamian, these programs are carried by over 125 radio stations and heard by millions of listeners. He is the author of numerous books with Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy and Tariq Ali.

David is a friend for many of us, but he is an older friend of India. He first came as a young man in 1966, and has since returned innumerable times, immersing himself in its music, languages and poetry. He has taught himself Urdu and Hindi, learned to play the Sitar, and closely follows events in the sub-continent.

When he was deported on September 23 he had a visa which was valid for another 5 years, and although he last visited in February 2011, he had no intimation or warning that he was in violation of any of the conditions under which his visa was issued. The only thing that the Immigration Officers were able to tell him was that he was “banned” from entering the country, and that the reasons were a “secret”.

The deportation of David Barsamian unfortunately mirrors the manner in which Prof Richard Shapiro was arbitrarily stopped from entering India in November 2010. We are dismayed that this power to send people back from the airport is slowly becoming a weapon, used to discipline and silence people who draw any kind of attention to uncomfortable truths about India. A year later Prof Shapiro still has no formal response on why he was stopped, and when he can regain his right to travel to India, where he has family.

We therefore ask that the ban on David Barsamian and others like Richard Shapiro be revoked, and the Government of India not impede their return to India.

We demand that the right to travel and the right to free exchange of ideas between scholars, journalists, artists, and human rights defenders be respected and protected, and that government agents not authorize the denial of entry and eviction of visitors to India, or monitor their movement. Free exchange of ideas is one of the most basic human rights and values in free democratic societies. Freedom of travel is one of the most important avenues for furthering such exchange among peoples. Recognizing this, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which India has ratified, protects freedom of expression, right to travel and scientific exchange.

Signed:

Amar Kanwar, Film-maker
Amit Bhaduri, Academic
Amit Sengupta, Journalist
Anuradha Chenoy, Academic
Ania Loomba, Academic
Angana Chatterji, Academic
Aunohita Majumdar, Journalist

Aruna Roy, MKSS, Activist
Arundhati Roy, Writer
Ashok Prasad, Academic
Ajay Skaria, Academic
Basharat Peer, Writer
Dibyesh Anand, Academic
Harsh Dobhal, Journalist

Jean Dreze, Scholar
Joel Geier, International Socialist Review
Kamal Mitra Chenoy, Academic
Kamala Visveswaran, Academic
Lalitha Gopalan, Academic
Manisha Sethi, Academic
Mirza Waheed, Writer

Najeeb Mubarki, Journalist
N Raghuram, Academic
Mridu Rai, Academic
Nagesh Rao, Academic
Pankaj Mishra, Writer

Parvaiz Bukhari, Journalist
Philip Gasper, Academic
Prashant Bhushan, Lawyer
Rahul Roy, Film-maker
Sanjay Kak, Film-maker
Satya Sivaraman, Journalist
Suresh Nautiyal, Journalist
Simona Sawhney, Academic

Shripad Dharmadhikary, Researcher
Shohini Ghosh, Academic
Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Artist
Sukumar Muralidharan, Journalist
Suvir Kaul, Academic
Saba Dewan, Film-maker
Snehal Shingavi, Academic
Sherry Wolf, International Socialist Review
Vandana Shiva, Academic
Vrinda Grover, Lawyer

U.S. Foreign Policy -- Create Terrorists, Then Kill Them

2011-09-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

My comment published in NYTimes, among many others
#259. EthicalDemocracy
New York
September 30th, 2011
12:53 pm
US Foreign Policy -- Create Terrorists, then Kill Them

Americans posting on these pages blame the US govt but they, the American people, [I am a US citizen] consistently vote leaders into power who promise to take a "tough stand" on "terror" and generally give them license to intervene everywhere in the world.
Americans appear to think that the opposite of an earlier policy of "isolationism" is intervention, occupation, etc. Well, now American People, you must reap the consequences.

US govt. complicity with Saudi Arabia, with a half-century long US policy of Cheap oil, no Democracy for Saudis, has kept neighboring Yemen poor, then you have Awlaki who should have freedom of speech under our very own, highly prized First Amendment, he's droned out yesterday as a terrorist.
I'm not saying Awlaki right, in fact he's deadly wrong, but i'm saying the US created Awlaki and that's wrong.

Will 10 Awlaki(s) rise in his place? Hmmm, yeah.

Same story in AfPak, the US Govt. paid and trained (as they did pay and train OBL) the Haqqani network, US still still pays 'em and trains 'em as I write, now we are out to kill them.

Grow 'em, then kill 'em.

What an astute, successful, farseeing, effective, foreign policy!

Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
======================================================
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/world/middleeast/anwar-al-awlaki-is-killed-in-yemen.html
U.S.-Born Qaeda Leader Killed in YemenBack to Article »
By LAURA KASINOF, MARK MAZZETTI and ALAN COWELL

An American drone attack killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a preacher born in the United States and a leading figure in Al Qaeda’s outpost in Yemen, on Friday morning, officials in Washington and Yemen confirmed.

U.S.-Born Qaeda Leader Killed in Yemen
Site Intelligence Group/AFP — Getty; WBTV, via AP

Anwar al-Awlaki, left, in a 2010 video and Samir Khan, shown in North Carolina in 2008.
By LAURA KASINOF, MARK MAZZETTI and ALAN COWELL
Published: September 30, 2011

SANA, Yemen — Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who was a leading figure in Al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate and was considered its most dangerous English-speaking propagandist and plotter, was killed in an American drone strike on his vehicle on Friday, officials in Washington and Yemen said. They said the strike also killed a radical American colleague who edited Al Qaeda’s online jihadist magazine and was traveling with Mr. Awlaki.
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Related

News Analysis: American Strike on American Target Revives Contentious Constitutional Issue (October 1, 2011)
Drone Strike in Yemen Was Aimed at Awlaki (May 7, 2011)
Radical Cleric Still Speaks on YouTube (March 5, 2011)
Rights Groups Sue U.S. on Effort to Kill Cleric (August 31, 2010)
Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad (May 9, 2010)
Times Topic: Anwar al-Awlaki

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Many details of the strike were unclear, but one American official said that Mr. Awlaki, whom the United States had been hunting in Yemen for more than two years, had been identified as the target in advance and was killed with a Hellfire missile fired from a drone operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. The official said it was the first C.I.A. strike in Yemen since 2002. Yemen’s Defense Ministry confirmed Mr. Awlaki’s death.

The strike appeared to be the first time in the United States-led war on terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that an American citizen had been deliberately killed by American forces, a step that has raised contentious constitutional issues in the United States. It was also the second high-profile killing of an Al Qaeda leader in the past five months under the Obama administration, which ordered the American commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May.

Mr. Awlaki was an important member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, regarded as the most dangerous Al Qaeda affiliate. He was considered the inspirational or operational force behind a number of major plots aimed at killing Americans in the United States in recent years, most notably the deadly assault at an American army base in Fort Hood, Texas, and attempts to bomb Times Square and a Detroit-bound jetliner.

“The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate,” President Obama said in remarks at a swearing-in ceremony for the new Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, outside Washington. Mr. Obama said the cleric had taken “the lead role in planning and directing the efforts to murder innocent Americans.”

Mr. Obama also called Mr. Awlaki “the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” — the first time the United States has used that description of him.

Yemen’s official news agency, Saba, reported that the attack also killed Samir Khan, an American citizen of Pakistani origin and the editor of Inspire, Al Qaeda’s English-language Internet magazine, and an American official said the United States government believed Mr. Khan had been killed as well. It was not clear whether Mr. Khan, who proclaimed in the magazine last year that he was “proud to be a traitor to America,” was also a deliberate target of the strike.

A Yemeni Defense Ministry statement said that a number of Mr. Awlaki’s bodyguards were also killed.

Neither the Americans nor the Yemenis explained precisely how they knew that Mr. Awlaki had been confirmed dead.

The strike came in the midst of a deepening political crisis in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, where President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been resisting repeated calls to relinquish power — including from the United States. Mr. Saleh has argued that he is critical to the intensifying American efforts to battle Al Qaeda here.

An Awlaki family member, reached by telephone, said Mr. Awlaki’s father, Nasser al-Awlaki, was en route from Yemen’s capital, Sana, to the site of the attack in northern Yemen on Friday afternoon to identify the body. “We don’t know anything aside from the news that has been released,” the family member said. “Obviously Mr. Awlaki is very upset and wants very much to find out if it is truly his son that has been killed. We don’t know if any relatives died with him.”

The White House decision to make Mr. Awlaki a top priority to be hunted down and killed was controversial, given his American citizenship.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which fought unsuccessfully in the American court system to challenge the government’s legal justification for its so-called targeted killings program, which was used to take aim at Mr. Awlaki, condemned that program in reaction to the news of Mr. Awlaki’s death. “As we’ve seen today, this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts,” Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said in a statement.

Laura Kasinof reported from Sana, Yemen, Mark Mazzetti from Washington, and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt and Robert F. Worth from Washington, and Souad Mekhennet and Rick Gladstone from New York.
page 2

U.S.-Born Qaeda Leader Killed in Yemen
Published: September 30, 2011

(Page 2 of 3)

Born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, Mr. Awlaki, 40, began preaching in mosques while he was a college student in the United States. During that time, as a preacher in San Diego, he met two of the Sept. 11, 2001 attackers. He returned to Yemen in 2004 and his English-language sermons became ever more stridently anti-American.
Multimedia
Interactive Map
Map of Countries Where Al Qaeda and Its Affiliates Operate
Related

News Analysis: American Strike on American Target Revives Contentious Constitutional Issue (October 1, 2011)
Drone Strike in Yemen Was Aimed at Awlaki (May 7, 2011)
Radical Cleric Still Speaks on YouTube (March 5, 2011)
Rights Groups Sue U.S. on Effort to Kill Cleric (August 31, 2010)
Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad (May 9, 2010)
Times Topic: Anwar al-Awlaki

His Internet lectures and sermons were linked to more than a dozen terrorist investigations in the United States, Britain and Canada. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, had exchanged e-mails with Mr. Awlaki before the shootings. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010, cited Mr. Awlaki as an inspiration.

A high-ranking Yemeni security official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Mr. Awlaki was killed while traveling between Marib and al-Jawf provinces in northern Yemen — areas known for having a Qaeda presence and where there is very little central government control.

President Obama’s top national security and counterterrorism officials held a video teleconference at 6:30 a.m. Washington time to discuss details of Mr. Awlaki’s death as well as its impact on the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen and the group’s broader organization.

Mr. Awlaki’s name has been associated with many plots in the United States and elsewhere after individuals planning violence were drawn to his engaging lectures broadcast over the Internet.

Those individuals included Major Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged in the Fort Hood shootings; the young men who planned to attack Fort Dix, N.J.; and a 21-year-old British student who told the police she stabbed a member of Parliament after watching 100 hours of Awlaki videos.

But his death could also play into the tangled politics of Yemen and President Saleh’s attempts to remain in power.

In early September, the Obama administration’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, said recent cooperation with Yemen was better than it has ever been despite the prolonged absence of Mr. Saleh, who returned recently after four months in Saudi Arabia recovering from wounds he suffered in a bomb attack on his presidential palace.

President Saleh’s family controls the armed forces responsible for counterterrorism, and the killing of Mr. Awlaki seemed likely to be used to further the argument that the current government is the best ally for the United States when it comes to combating Mr. Awlaki’s affiliate group.

“Awlaki may not matter much to Yemenis, but his presence in Yemen has influenced U.S. counter terrorism policy, which in turn has influenced transition politics,” said Ginny Hill, the head of the Yemen Forum at Chatham House in London.

A senior American military official in Washington said Mr. Awlaki’s death would send an important message to the surviving leaders and foot soldiers in Al Qaeda, both in Yemen and elsewhere. “It’s critically important,” the senior official said. “It sets a sense of doom for the rest of them. Getting Awlaki, given his tight operational security, increases the sense of fear. It’s hard for them to attack when they’re trying to protect their own back side.”

“You take out someone like this, it sends a message,” the military official continued. “Now they have to go into a succession effort that will cause a movement of people, of messages, which makes them more vulnerable. Bottom line, they’ve taken a severe impact.”

But some Islamist figures said Mr. Awlaki’s status could be elevated to that of a martyr. Anjem Choudhry, an outspoken Islamic scholar in London, said: “The death of Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki will merely motivate the Muslim youth to struggle harder against the enemies of Islam and Muslims.”

Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who heads the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a telephone interview: “In many ways, Awlaki was, operationally, more important than Bin Laden.”

“Clearly, he was one of the most motivated to attack the United States.”
---
page 3
U.S.-Born Qaeda Leader Killed in Yemen
Published: September 30, 2011

(Page 3 of 3)

Mr. King warned that the United States would need to guard against retaliatory attacks from Al Qaeda’s arm in Yemen, but other senior American military and counterterrorism officials said that, unless a plot was already well under way, the Qaeda affiliate is likely to be in too much disarray right now to launch an immediate counterstrike.
Multimedia
Interactive Map
Map of Countries Where Al Qaeda and Its Affiliates Operate
Related

News Analysis: American Strike on American Target Revives Contentious Constitutional Issue (October 1, 2011)
Drone Strike in Yemen Was Aimed at Awlaki (May 7, 2011)
Radical Cleric Still Speaks on YouTube (March 5, 2011)
Rights Groups Sue U.S. on Effort to Kill Cleric (August 31, 2010)
Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad (May 9, 2010)
Times Topic: Anwar al-Awlaki
Earlier this year, the American military renewed its campaign of airstrikes in Yemen, using drone aircraft and fighter jets to attack Qaeda militants. One of the attacks was aimed at Mr. Awlaki. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said in July that two of his top goals were to remove Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s new leader after the death of Bin Laden in May, and Mr. Awlaki.

Word of the killing came after months of sustained American efforts to seriously weaken the terrorist group.

In August an American official said a drone strike killed Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who in the last year had taken over as Al Qaeda’s top operational planner after Bin Laden was killed.

In July, Mr. Panetta said during a visit to Kabul, Afghanistan that the United States was “within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda” and that the American focus had narrowed to capturing or killing 10 to 20 crucial leaders of the terrorist group in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

A month earlier, an American official said the Central Intelligence Agency was building a secret air base in the Middle East to serve as a launching pad for strikes in Yemen using armed drones.

The construction of the base was seen at the time as a sign that the Obama administration was planning an extended war in Yemen against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has repeatedly tried to carry out terrorist plots against the United States.

Last year, the leader of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen sought to install Mr. Awlaki as the leader of the group, which apparently thought Mr. Awlaki’s knowledge of the United States and his status as an Internet celebrity might help the group’s operations and fund-raising efforts.

Mr. Awlaki, who came from a prestigious Yemeni family, was accused of having connections to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian former engineering student at University College London, who is awaiting trial in the United States for his attempt to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it landed in Detroit on Dec. 25, 2009. The bomb did not explode.

Mr. Awlaki had been linked to numerous plots against the United States, including the botched underwear bombing.

He had taken to the Internet with stirring battle cries directed at young American Muslims. “Many of your scholars,” Mr. Awlaki warned last year, are “standing between you and your duty of jihad.”

In Yemen, there was a muted reaction to the news of the death of Mr. Awlaki, who derived his importance from his ability to reach out to the Western, English-speaking world but was of little consequence to the Yemeni population.

Many saw the killing as confirmation of their belief that the United States becomes involved in Yemen only for counterterrorism. Mr. Awlaki’s death comes at a time when Yemeni protesters, who have been demonstrating against their government for eight months, are angry at the United States for not doing more to push President Saleh out of office.

The killing could further harm the image of the United States among average Yemenis, who are staunchly against outside military intervention in their country.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/world/middleeast/anwar-al-awlaki-is-killed-in-yemen.html

Beauty & Inferiority

2011-09-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/being-comfortable-in-your-own-skin-tone/?sort=oldest&offset=2
New York Times
Comment #27
Ethical Democracy
New York
September 25th, 2011
1:50 am

Beauty & Inferiority

India is a vast crowded complex space where numerous, seemingly conflicting stereotypes (and ideals) persist.

That's Democracy -- thirty-one centuries in the making. Give or take a few.

Where else would you have Fair and Lovely makeup, side by side with celebrating the birthday, as a national holiday, of Krishna the dark blue God of Love?
I'm an atheist, don't use beauty products, just juxtaposing contrastive ideals by way of illustration.

The author (see her article below) claims and I quote \"Over a decade of living in North America – where tans are pursued and Halle Berry is a beauty icon – helped that. Far away from the subcontinent, obsessed with Victorian ideas of beauty, it was refreshing to be part of a society that embraced a wider spectrum of skin tone.\"

Really? Even Aretha Franklin and more recently, Beyonce pretty much went blond, or do you think their hair color and skin tone are a happy accident? To uphold the US, the epicenter of racist ideology of Whiteness, is just plain ignorant and a gross distortion of racialized discourse in the US.

And, yikes, have you never heard of the racialization of the Black Irish?
Yes, they have white skin. But black hair! A Black Irish woman at London's Heathrow airport was detained, (she claimed to me), because she was Black Irish. That was in the mid-1980's, so, way before Islamist hysteria following 9/11.

People use many strategies for constructing The Other.

Suck it up , Suryatapa, you really speak from class privilege and therefore Power (dark brown though you may be), so stop being superficial, focus instead on maternal and child malnutrition in your writings, make fewer blow-dry (you have a hair problem too?) visits to the beauty salon (most Indians, including me, and I live in New York, have never been inside one) get over it, live your own life, think your own thoughts be receptive to disparate perceptions, misguided though some obviously are, be HUMYN and don't blame it on India and Indians.

Please don't let your next article be about the big boobs of Indian goddesses and how inadequate that makes you feel!

Take responsibility for constructing your own mindset.

It's not that you \"do not compute.\" You cant compute.
Or rather, you choose not to.

Harsh -- but sometimes truths are inconvenient.

Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran

City University of New York [CUNY]

Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice

http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com

=======================================
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/being-comfortable-in-your-own-skin-tone/?hp#preview
The article follows:

New York Times copyright

Being Comfortable in Your Own Skin (Tone)

By SURYATAPA BHATTACHARYA

Suryatapa at the age of six in her childhood home in Siliguri, West Bengal.

I am Indian – but after more than 15 years of living abroad, some aspects of Indian life feel fresh, if not new or altogether welcome.

Three months ago, I wandered into a salon in Kolkata with my mother and came face-to-face with a prejudice I hadn’t had to deal with in all the years abroad.

The beautician insisted she could remove my “deep tan.”

But my dark skin was not the result of a tanning bed disaster – I was born with it.

Lady with pink talons and bright pink lipstick: I can lighten you up by several shades.

Me: No.

Lady: You are roaming in the sun too much.

Me: Don’t touch my face.

No one in India seems to think it unusual to try to slap some bleach, or a herbal equivalent, on my skin to reveal a whiter me. It is mildly irritating when it comes from my beloved aunts, and maddening when strangers suggest my dark skin is something to be “fixed.”

Being dark made me feel self-conscious.

As a kid I had several nicknames that stung. Darkie, Blackie and Kaalia (pinched from the title of a Bollywood film, about someone with dark skin). My color defined me and it stuck. A friend from school sent me a message on Facebook recently. It read: Kaalia, remember me? When I pointed out that it was insulting, I was called out for being “too sensitive.”

“We called you that with love,” he said. Like that should justify the hurt.

In Bengali, the word phorsha (fair) is used interchangeably with beautiful, and with family it was no different. Well-meaning aunts and their neighbors worried about my marriage prospects. Perhaps, they suggested, a little less sun exposure, or maybe a few extra layers of sandalwood paste or a homemade concoction that the neighborhood swore by?

But I was a problem child. You couldn’t drag me home from playing outside and even back then, I wouldn’t let anyone touch my face. The aunts sighed but never really gave up.

To be dark in India is not necessarily to be invisible. Instead, in this country, it is everyone’s business to correct it or cover it up. The personal is open to public opinion, whether it makes you squirm or not.

Few Indians seem to be comfortable in their dark skin. The matrimonial classifieds every weekend ask for or offer prospective brides who are never described as dark; at best (or worst) they are “wheatish.”

So it is no surprise that a multi-billion rupee market in fairness products thrives in India. Bollywood superstars such as Shah Rukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra are complicit in the act, appearing in airbrushed, whitened versions of themselves, urging you to pick up a tube or two of the latest product. From lotions and soaps to whitening underarm deodorant; every body part it seems is could be a few shades lighter.

In a moment of adolescent weakness, I too was convinced to go on a regimen of drinking milk with crushed turmeric. Urban legends abound of how turmeric and milk, with their blood cleansing properties, had turned someone’s friend’s sister into a fair maiden – so I gulped down this vile concoction, gagged and never touched it ever again.

As an adult I’ve become much more comfortable with the color of my skin.

Over a decade of living in North America – where tans are pursued and Halle Berry is a beauty icon – helped that. Far away from the subcontinent, obsessed with Victorian ideas of beauty, it was refreshing to be part of a society that embraced a wider spectrum of skin tone.

So when I moved back to India, I was surprised and offended all over again, as I confronted people who still think porcelain skin is the epitome of beauty.

The last time I visited my parents in West Bengal, I paid a visit to the hairdresser. As I instructed the hairdresser on how to blow-dry my hair, the lady in the chair next to me seemed intrigued by my conversation. After several furtive glances she could no longer help herself and asked: “Do you do tanning?” I was dumbstruck and could barely stammer out a surprised “no.”

In retrospect, her assumption says a lot about how Indians equate skin tone with beauty, confidence and social standing. To her, my dark skin was incommensurate with me – a confident professional in a fancy salon.

I do not compute.

Suryatapa Bhattacharya is the India correspondent for “The National” newspaper.

======================================================================

Make Palestine Whole Again

2011-09-18T04:08:00.000-07:00

Make Palestine Whole Again

Yes we can!

Help create the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Undivided Palestine for EVERY Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist, tribal, indigenous person living there or who was displaced by the creation of Israel.

Overturn the injustices, heal the wounds, allow the right to return of the dispossessed and the displaced, make Palestine WHOLE. That is the ETHICAL path.

Some steps to start the process to make Palestine whole again:
1. US stop meddling.
Get out of the room.
Get out of the region.
You are not a regional neighbor and no American is a legal resident of Palestine [see new data on dual citizenship] I am a US citizen. That does not make me a citizen of Palestine, of which Israel is a part.

US, you are purely self-interested, you have a short-term ad hoc perspective, you are not committed to The Greater Collective Good of ALL the Palestinians peoples -- Arabs, Christians, Jews, atheists, tribals, indigenous, ALL of whom reside in undivided Palestine or were displaced from it.

2. Israel stop being alarmist and stop putting up roadblocks to undivided statehood. Do not prevent efforts to make Palestine whole once again. Israel is located in Palestine. Jews have asserted their right to live in Palestine. Jews are entitled to exercise that right. That right would be preserved preserved in undivided Palestine.

3. Falasteen Arabs, develop strategies of non-violence, give up terror as a means to retaliate against the injustices caused to you by stealing your land and displacing the Arab, Christian, tribal and indigenous people of Palestine, due to the creation of Israel, by the UN.

4. France stay out of this. You are a former colonial power, you are not a regional neighbor, so don't meddle. Stay in your lane, as Judge Karen would say.

5. Turkey, you are trying to broaden your strategic reach through your membership in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Hold on. You also are NOT a regional neighbor, go play in your own sandbox, that would be Turkey, stop meddling in West Asia and South Asia.

UN, especially the In-Security Council, you created the problem in the first place by dividing Palestinians and creating the State of Israel. The UNSC -- United Nations Security Council cannot set policy, it cannot hold itself above the One State One Vote authority vested in the UNGA -- The United Nationas General Assembly. The US cannot veto the UNGA.

Now UN, go ahead, solve the problem you, the UNSC, created.

UN, especially the UNGA, it is now up to you to ***Facilitate*** an Undivided Palestine -- Arabs, Christians, indigenous, tribals and Jews are ALL Palestinians -- help the Palestinians work it out.

This September 2011, the United Nations is deliberating once again. A UNSC vote, a promised US veto, is looming that may create more bitterness in Palestine once again.

2011 is the critical year to make Palestine whole once again.

To prevent division into two separate states.

To re-establish an historical undivided Palestine.

A Palestine that now can become a sovereign, democratic republic with full membership in the UN.

Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com

www.facebook.com/chithra.karunakaran
================================================================================
some articles from varied sources:

NYTimes copyright

The Middle East Has Changed

Updated September 15, 2011, 07:36 PM

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of "Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness."

There are only two genuine threats to Israel’s survival. One is its continued subjugation of the Palestinian people. The other is its failure to realize that it lives in a very different Middle East from that of Herzl or Weizmann or Ben-Gurion. That was a region dominated by outside powers that blandly accepted Herzl’s idea of Israel as a colonial outpost of the West, and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948. Such things are inconceivable in a Middle East where popular sovereignty is finally beginning to have an impact on the foreign policy of states like Turkey and Egypt, and where peoples like those of Libya and Syria are waking up to their power to resist authoritarian governments.

The U.S. too must adapt to this new Middle East, instead of continuing to rely on bullying pliable clients like the undemocratic Arab regimes that are falling like dominos.

The United States too must adapt to this new Middle East, instead of continuing to rely on bullying pliable clients like the undemocratic Arab regimes that are falling like dominos. The Palestinian Authority has been subjected to threats and pressure to prevent the inter-Palestinian reconciliation which is a precondition of any serious attempt at a peaceful settlement of the conflict, and to prevent it from going to the United Nations to achieve member state status for Palestine.

True security, stability and self-determination for the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples can only come when both enjoy precisely the same rights on a basis of complete equality. That can only happen when both peoples feel safe in a homeland that is not predicated on discrimination and the denial of the rights of the other, as is the case with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians today.

More important than whether it comes via the establishment of one or two states is arriving at a sustainable and lasting final outcome based on justice, international law and human rights. That has not been on offer in American policy for over two decades, nor is it today. As long as the United States supports Israel in standing in the way of an immediate rollback of settlements and end to illegal occupation, a Palestinian state will not see the light of day, and any discussion of it is futile. Until we Americans change this status quo, based on crass domestic political considerations as opposed to our true national interests and our moral and legal responsibilities, a just and stable peace will be a long time in coming.
===================================================================================

By EHUD OLMERT
Published: September 21, 2011

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Jerusalem
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Room For Debate: Can Israel Survive Without a Palestinian State?

AS the United Nations General Assembly opens this year, I feel uneasy. An unnecessary diplomatic clash between Israel and the Palestinians is taking shape in New York, and it will be harmful to Israel and to the future of the Middle East.

I know that things could and should have been different.

I truly believe that a two-state solution is the only way to ensure a more stable Middle East and to grant Israel the security and well-being it desires. As tensions grow, I cannot but feel that we in the region are on the verge of missing an opportunity — one that we cannot afford to miss.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, plans to make a unilateral bid for recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations on Friday. He has the right to do so, and the vast majority of countries in the General Assembly support his move. But this is not the wisest step Mr. Abbas can take.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared publicly that he believes in the two-state solution, but he is expending all of his political effort to block Mr. Abbas’s bid for statehood by rallying domestic support and appealing to other countries. This is not the wisest step Mr. Netanyahu can take.

In the worst-case scenario, chaos and violence could erupt, making the possibility of an agreement even more distant, if not impossible. If that happens, peace will definitely not be the outcome.

The parameters of a peace deal are well known and they have already been put on the table. I put them there in September 2008 when I presented a far-reaching offer to Mr. Abbas.

According to my offer, the territorial dispute would be solved by establishing a Palestinian state on territory equivalent in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip with mutually agreed-upon land swaps that take into account the new realities on the ground.

The city of Jerusalem would be shared. Its Jewish areas would be the capital of Israel and its Arab neighborhoods would become the Palestinian capital. Neither side would declare sovereignty over the city’s holy places; they would be administered jointly with the assistance of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

The Palestinian refugee problem would be addressed within the framework of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. The new Palestinian state would become the home of all the Palestinian refugees just as the state of Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people. Israel would, however, be prepared to absorb a small number of refugees on humanitarian grounds.

Because ensuring Israel’s security is vital to the implementation of any agreement, the Palestinian state would be demilitarized and it would not form military alliances with other nations. Both states would cooperate to fight terrorism and violence.

These parameters were never formally rejected by Mr. Abbas, and they should be put on the table again today. Both Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu must then make brave and difficult decisions.

We Israelis simply do not have the luxury of spending more time postponing a solution. A further delay will only help extremists on both sides who seek to sabotage any prospect of a peaceful, negotiated two-state solution.

Moreover, the Arab Spring has changed the Middle East, and unpredictable developments in the region, such as the recent attack on Israel’s embassy in Cairo, could easily explode into widespread chaos. It is therefore in Israel’s strategic interest to cement existing peace agreements with its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan.

In addition, Israel must make every effort to defuse tensions with Turkey as soon as possible. Turkey is not an enemy of Israel. I have worked closely with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In spite of his recent statements and actions, I believe that he understands the importance of relations with Israel. Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Netanyahu must work to end this crisis immediately for the benefit of both countries and the stability of the region.

In Israel, we are sorry for the loss of life of Turkish citizens in May 2010, when Israel confronted a provocative flotilla of ships bound for Gaza. I am sure that the proper way to express these sentiments to the Turkish government and the Turkish people can be found.

The time for true leadership has come. Leadership is tested not by one’s capacity to survive politically but by the ability to make tough decisions in trying times.

When I addressed international forums as prime minister, the Israeli people expected me to present bold political initiatives that would bring peace — not arguments outlining why achieving peace now is not possible. Today, such an initiative is more necessary than ever to prove to the world that Israel is a peace-seeking country.

The window of opportunity is limited. Israel will not always find itself sitting across the table from Palestinian leaders like Mr. Abbas and the prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who object to terrorism and want peace. Indeed, future Palestinian leaders might abandon the idea of two states and seek a one-state solution, making reconciliation impossible.

Now is the time. There will be no better one. I hope that Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas will meet the challenge.

Ehud Olmert was prime minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009.
===================================================================================

Op-Ed Contributor
Support the Palestinian Bid for Statehood
By KEITH ELLISON
Published: September 22, 2011

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THE United States should support the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood at the United Nations. The Palestinian people deserve a state now. As the current debate unfolds, I am reminded of what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1965: “The time is always right to do what’s right.”
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After almost two decades of unsuccessful negotiations among Israel, the Palestinians and partner states, it is understandable that the Palestinian Authority has elected to go to the United Nations — the international body empowered to mediate conflict and recognize statehood. Despite the initial promise of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s — particularly before the horrific assassination of the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin — direct negotiations have deteriorated to a dismally low point.

Given this impasse and Israel’s settlement expansion, the Palestinian Authority is following the example of dozens of current United Nations members, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Eritrea, as well as South Sudan, which successfully seceded from Sudan after a protracted civil war and gained admission to the United Nations in July. Israel, our ally, followed a comparable process and rightfully gained admission to the United Nations in 1949. And in this case, Arab countries that have never recognized Israel would implicitly be doing so when they voted to recognize a Palestinian state that envisioned itself beside Israel in a two-state solution to their conflict. That in itself would be a breakthrough, confirming Israel’s solid standing in the region.

World leaders should pause before criticizing the Palestinians’ intention to follow the same legal process by which many of their own nations achieved international recognition. Palestinian leaders have sought statehood through violence and terrorism: they hijacked planes and massacred Israeli athletes in Munich in the 1970s, and bombed buses during the second intifada. These abhorrent acts of terrorism were rightly rejected by the world community and stymied the Palestinians’ efforts to gain statehood recognition. But the Palestinian Authority, unlike Hamas, is pursuing statehood nonviolently and diplomatically now, so why are we discouraging its efforts?

Criticisms of the Palestinian Authority’s desire for the United Nations to act include assertions that this approach to statehood is unilateral and precludes negotiations with Israel. Yet the process of gaining recognition from the United Nations Security Council is multilateral by definition. No one disputes that further direct negotiations will be needed to resolve the outstanding final status issues of the conflict, including borders, repatriation of refugees, national security and the claims of both sides to Jerusalem. Indeed, the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, has said he will urge Israel to resume negotiations immediately after a United Nations vote. Both sides must avoid violence and work to repair relations.

Some of my Congressional colleagues have threatened to cut off United States aid to the Palestinian Authority if it continues pressing for statehood. However, officials from all nations involved acknowledge that American aid has vastly improved the security situation for Israel and the Palestinians. Thanks in large part to American assistance, incidents of terrorism in Israel have receded from the extraordinary levels of the first half of the last decade.

Given its successful security collaboration with the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government said in a report recently that it “calls for ongoing international support for the Palestinian Authority budget and development projects.” Undermining our current progress by cutting off American aid would be counterproductive — especially for Israel and the United States — and would further delay peace in the Middle East.

The Palestinian people are a distinct group that desires, and deserves, to have a homeland that is internationally recognized as a state. The international community has a formal process for recognizing states, and the Palestinian Authority is following that process. As it seeks to join the community of nations this month, world leaders should not forget King’s important lesson about doing what is right. The Palestinians’ use of multilateral diplomacy to achieve statehood represents a step toward achieving the two-state solution and achieving a more stable Middle East. It is an opportunity, not a threat. We should seize it now.

Keith Ellison is a Democratic representative from Minnesota.
====================================================================================
Make Palestine Whole Again. That is my central point.

http://EthicalDemocracy.blogsp...
Ethical Democracy as Lived Practice

My sincere question to Sacher (see his article below) is:

So what? Jews love their ancestral homeland. Great. Why does that preclude SHARING Palestine with others who have similar feelings about their homes, their gardens, their places of community?

Jews are DISTINCT, they wish to be considered distinct. DISTINCTNESS is the core attribute of ETHNICITY, every ethnicity, not just Jewsish ethnicity.
But that does not mean ethnic Israeli Jews can be permitted to be exclusionary, and shut out others who feel close to the same land, the land from which they were displaced.

Be ethical, Sacher. develop an argument that benefits the Greater Collective Good.
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
copyright The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1919/07/a-jewish-palestine/3393/

A Jewish Palestine

"The idea of Judaism is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish people, and the idea of the Jewish people is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish land"
By H. Sacher

THE Zionist movement dates from A.D. 70, the year of the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish State. The Zionist Organization dates from 1897, the year of the first Zionist Congress. The Zionist movement is a longing and striving to restore to the Jewish people normal national life. The Zionist Organization is a particular instrumentality for achieving that end. The Zionist movement will continue until the Jewish people are once more living a normal national life, when it will be transformed into the active expression of that normal national life. The Zionist Organization, when the particular phase of Jewish national life which called into being this special instrumentality has passed, will merge into some other instrumentality.

There are some who deny that there is such a thing as the Jewish people, but the denial is a modern innovation. Very rare is the non-Jew who thinks of Jews as merely a sect without national quality; and it is doubtful whether among the Jews themselves there could be found a single instance of such a denial much earlier than the second decade of the nineteenth century. The negation of Jewish nationality was first presented by German Jews as part of what is called the 'reform ' movement in German Jewry, which itself was hardly separable from the movement for Jewish political emancipation in that country. From Germany it spread to other lands, but it has never had much respect among any save a small minority of Jews, and it has never had any respect at all from non-Jews, except when political expediency made it convenient for a Gentile statesman or diplomat to invoke this strange dogma.

Let us try to clear the ground by attempting, not so much a definition as a characterization of Judaism. Judaism is not a religion in the Western sense of the word. Judaism is the precipitated spiritual experience of the Jewish people. The idea of Judaism is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish people, and the idea of the Jewish people is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish land. You may see this in every form and expression of Jewish religious life. Individual prayer, prayer for the individual Jew alone, is exceedingly rare. When the Jew prays, he prays not simply for himself, but for all Israel; and this national conception permeates prayer even in what might be considered to be the most personal and individual incidents of life: birth, marriage, death.

The welding of the idea of the Jewish people with the idea of the Jewish land is manifest in every page of the Jewish Liturgy. When the lad is confirmed and assumes the full burden of the law, he prays that 'God may have mercy upon Zion, for it is the hope of our life,' and that 'He may save her who is broken in spirit speedily even in our days.' He thanks God for having planted eternal life in the Jewish people. 'Gladden us, O Lord our God, with Elijah thy servant, and with the Kingdom of the House of David thy anointed. Soon may he come and rejoice our hearts. Suffer not a stranger to sit upon his throne nor let others inherit his glory.'

Let it not be supposed that this passionate identification of the Jewish people with the Jewish land is an aspiration for some allegorical spiritual Zion that never was on sea or land. The Jewish people preserve to this day the calendar of a land from which they have been exiled for two thousand years. The seasons which they mark with observance, the times of sowing and of planting, of harvest and of vintage, are the seasons and the times, not of the lands in which they dwell, but of the land in which their fathers lived and from which they have been exiled. The name in the everyday speech of the Jew for the lands of the Diaspora is Galuth, exile. The Jewish sages celebrated the bitterness of exile in many a poignant phrase: 'The Galuth atones for all the sins of the Jews.' 'With him who dwells outside Palestine it is as though God were not with him.' 'Those Jews who dwell outside Palestine do not enjoy eternal life.' Such sayings of the rabbis bring out their conception of the meaning of exile.

Rabbinical literature is full of apophthegms that express the positive passion of the teachers of Israel for the soil, the air, the water, the physical being of the national land. 'Whosoever walks four cubits in Palestine is assured of the world to come.' 'It is better to dwell in a Palestine desert than to live in a land of plenty abroad.' 'To live in the land of Israel outweighs all the commands of the Torah.' 'The air of Palestine makes men wise.' 'Even the chatter of Palestine is worthy of study.' 'Palestine is the microcosm of the world.' 'Rabbi Abah used to kiss the rocks of Palestine. Rabbi Chazah used to roll in the dust of Palestine.' The whole doctrine of the rabbis in regard to the national home is summed up in the sentence: 'God said to Moses, "the Land is me and Israel is dear to me. I will bring Israel who is dear to me to Land that is dear to me.' Here is the triple thread which is Judaism -- God, the Jewish people, the Jewish land. What the rabbis taught and felt, the Jewish people believed and felt.

THE determination of the Jewish people to recover a normal national life never limited itself to faith in a miraculous restoration independent of the effort of the Jews themselves, although the conviction that the restoration was certain to come one day was part of the faith of every Jew. A continuous series of efforts to restore the Jewish national life in Palestine marks the centuries of exile. The rising of Bar Kochba against Hadrian threatened for a time the fabric of Roman dominion. The great outburst in the early years of the seventh century, in conjunction with the Parthians, expelled the Romans for a few years. The coming of Moslem rule diverted Jewish effort for a long time from the political to the quasi-miraculous. From the thirteenth to the eighteenth century was the period of the pseudo-Messiahs, of whom the two best known are that David Alroy around whom Disraeli wove a novel, and Sabatai-Zevi, of whom Zangwill has given marvelously penetrating study.

With the nineteenth century we come to efforts which are neither strictly political nor yet miraculous. The Jew begins to return to Palestine, but to return as an individual. It is probable that there never was a period when there was no Jewish settlement of any kind in Palestine. Mediaeval Jewish travelers have left records of Jewish communities, and there is evidence of the existence of Jewish agricultural communities, perhaps from the days of the Temple. In the seventeenth century, the illustrious Don Joseph Nasi and his mother conceived the idea of planting Jews on the soil of Palestine. Early in the nineteenth century, Jews from Eastern Europe began to drift in, brought thither mainly by the profound emotion of the bliss of dying and being buried in the dust of the Holy Land. Every Jew who settled in Palestine was a link between the Diaspora and the land of Israel, for it was the duty and the pleasure of his brethren to maintain in Palestine men given up to meditation and study and dedicated to the spiritual life.

With Sir Moses Montefiore, whose journeys to Palestine began in the eighteen-thirties, Western Jewry began to occupy itself constructively with the Jewish restoration. There was established a fund for the cultivation of land in Palestine by the Jews. Sir Moses had the idea of obtaining extensive concessions, and so bringing about 'the return of thousands of our brethren to the lands of Israel.' Many years afterward he summed up the goal of his striving in the following words: 'I do not expect that all Israelites will quit their abodes in those territories in which they feel happy, even as there are Englishmen in Hungary, Germany, America, and Japan; but Palestine must belong to the Jews, and Jerusalem is destined to become the city of a Jewish commonwealth.'

Many public men in Great Britain were deeply interested in these efforts to restore the Jewish people to the Jewish land. Lord Shaftesbury was the foremost of them. 'The inherent vitality,' he wrote, 'of the Hebrew race reasserts itself with amazing persistence. Its genius, to tell the truth, adapts itself more or less to all the currents of civilization all over the world, nevertheless always emerging with distinctive features and a gallant recovery of vigor. There is unbroken identity of Jewish race and Jewish mind down to our times; but the great revival can take place only in the Holy Land.' He believed that the hour had struck for the Jewish restoration, and he labored to persuade English statesmen to take up the holy task. Another distinguished Englishman of those days who was penetrated with the same conviction was Colonel Churchill, the British Resident at Damascus, who urged upon the Jews the return to Palestine as the solution of the Eastern question.

The interest of Englishmen in the Jewish people and a Jewish Palestine dates back to the Commonwealth. The same school of thought which permitted the Jews to return to England speculated further upon the Jewish restoration to Palestine; and this religious interest, fed upon the Bible and upon Protestantism, has survived in great strength down to our own day, as is evidenced by a whole literature, including a book conceived in this spirit recently published by Sir Andrew Wingate, a distinguished ex-Indian civil servant. The religious element of English interest in Jewish nationalism was fortified by political considerations. The genius of Napoleon revived the statesmanship of Caesar and Alexander, and conceived, as they did, of the Jewish people in Palestine as a pillar of empire in the East. When Napoleon started upon his expedition to Syria, he issued a proclamation announcing his wish to restore the scattered hosts of Jewry to their ancient land. There can be little doubt that this seed planted by Napoleon found lodgment in English minds. From Colonel Churchill to Laurence Oliphant can be seen sprouting the idea of serving both God and Great Britain, as well as the Jewish people, by re-creating a Jewish Palestine. It was an alternative solution of the Eastern question, to the maintenance of the decrepit Ottoman Empire. This latter solution may be said to have been the orthodox one in the nineteenth century, and to have held the field in official England until the middle of the Great War; but the conflict of the two political conceptions persisted, although in a dormant condition, throughout the century, and in the end it was the larger and nobler which triumphed.

The big political schemes for a Jewish Palestine in the eighteen-forties, whether conceived by Gentile or conceived by Jew, were based upon the rule of Mehemet Ali over Syria and Palestine. The great Powers, in bringing about the fall of Mehemet Ali, sterilized all these projects. The foundations of a Jewish Palestine were to be laid slowly, arduously, with infinite toil, by the sacrifices of individual Jews. In the eighteen-sixties Jews from Russia and Roumania began to buy land to start colonies. In 1870 the agricultural school of Mikveh Israel was founded, to be followed by several other agricultural settlements. The pogroms of the eighteen-eighties lessened the great Jewish passion for Palestine by shattering some of the illusions of emancipation. That decade saw the establishment of numerous colonies. It also saw the intervention in this task of reconstituting a Jewish Palestine of Baron Edmund de Rothschild of Paris.

There is no chapter in the colonizing history of any people finer than the story of these Jewish pioneers. They came to Palestine ignorant of agriculture, ignorant of the land, ignorant of the people, miserably equipped. The government laid its dead hand on all development. It was only by stealth, and with the assistance of baksheesh, that a house or a shelter could be erected. There was no security for land property or life, and fever and pestilence raged. The settlers had to compete with native labor accustomed to a very low standard of life. They had to make their own roads, furnish their own police, their own schools, their own sanitary apparatus; and while the government of Palestine offered them nothing but the privilege of paying taxes, the governors of the countries from which colonists came extended them no protection. On top of these troubles there came a severe crisis in the agricultural industry on which the colonists were mainly dependent. In the end, all these difficulties were conquered, and Jewish colonies of today in Palestine, numbering over forty, are so firmly founded that they could resist the ravages of the war and of the blockade. These Jewish settlements are perhaps the only vital communities in the country.

Most of the Jewish colonies are given up to plantations of oranges, almonds, olives and vines, though there is a certain amount of cattle-raising and of corn-growing The wines of Palestine are famous throughout the Jewish world, and they are established in the neighboring markets of Egypt and Syria. The Jewish colonists have demonstrated that they have a real talent for special work, grafting and the like, in plantations, and have shown that the process of reconverting the Jew into a husbandman is natural and not difficult. The Jewish colonists have introduced the motor-pump in place of the blinded camel or mule. They have cleared the stagnant pools by planting eucalyptus. They have worked out at the Agricultural Experiment Station (which is an American foundation) many devices for combatting the enemies of their crops and for improving species. They have improved the breeds of cattle and of poultry, and have sent students all over the world, notably to California, whence they have brought back to the ancient East the latest developments in Western dry-farming. They have introduced irrigation and cooperation. They have founded at Jerusalem a school of arts and crafts which is to be the mother of a revived Jewish art.

These Jewish colonies, just because they are the children of an ideal and a passion, much more than of the pursuit of material gain, have a unique atmosphere and quality. The farmer and the laborer are scholars as well as sons of the soil. The school and the public hall are as indispensable as the shed. The cultivation of the Hebrew tongue is as natural as the cultivation of the land, and the children of the colonists speak and sing and play and jest in Hebrew, their mother-tongue. A considerable Hebrew literature of great range has sprung up, from the masterly dictionary of Ben Jehudah to the daily newspaper. There are reviews specializing in education and in agriculture; there are medical reports and a considerable variety of monographs on every aspect of the life of the colonist. This pulsating Jewish life, small in scale though it still is, is the microcosm of the Jewish Palestine that is to be. Perhaps the political charter of the New Jewish Palestine never would have come but for those few score thousands of Jewish settlers.

MEN searching for a single phrase have found it hard to express precisely the function of the Zionist Organization in the building up of the Jewish Palestine in the period before the war. Perhaps we can say that it wedded Eastern and Western Jewry for the common task, that it Hebraized Western Jewry and infused into European Jewry the technical knowledge and intelligence and the organizing gifts of Western Jews. It reintroduced into the making of a Jewish Palestine political action. Under the stimulus of the Zionist Organization there was no Jewish community, of any size, in the world which did not have a group of men who linked their own personal as well as their national hopes with Palestine, and who labored to achieve a Jewish Palestine.

The Zionist Organization called into being financial instruments such as the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Anglo-Palestine Company, which strengthened and sustained the Jewish settlements in Palestine, notably under the trials of the war. The congresses summoned by the Organization are memorable for the influence they exerted in bringing together the scattered hosts of Jewry, and in educating Jewry as to the Jewish present, the Jewish past, and the Jewish destiny. Nobody who has ever attended a Zionist Congress but has felt that here was something unique; that here, in this gathering of Jews from the remotest parts of the earth, all assembled to deliberate solely upon Jewish questions, there was a living demonstration of the ancient saying that all Israel are brethren. To be present at a congress was to have what was most Jewish in Jewry brought under one's eyes.

Again, the Zionist Organization has educated the Gentile world as to the true character of the Jewish question. The artificial status of the Jewish people had evoked self-constituted interpreters and representatives of the Jews to the outside world. These worthy and well-meaning men had, in fact, lost touch with those in whose name they spoke. The Organization ultimately overthrew this curious dynasty, and offered the world in its place Jewish representation at once democratic and faithful.

The Zionist Organization reintroduced the political element into the creation of a Jewish Palestine. It was not concerned with parties or factions inside the various countries; but its aim was to give the Jewish people in Palestine a secure home under the guaranty of the Great Powers. It is possible that Dr. Herzl, the father of the Zionist Organization, was too optimistic in his expectations that either Turkey or the Powers would recognize the value to themselves and to the world of a Jewish Palestine. Nevertheless, his efforts were not wholly sterile. He fixed the identity of the Jews and of Palestine in the political vision of modern statesmen, and he secured from Great Britain two offers which were the first recognition in modern times, by any government, that the Jews constituted a nation, and that they had a right to remake a Jewish national home; that, in the words of the old and pregnant dictum of the rabbis, Israel was not a. widower. These offers were of an autonomous Jewish settlement in East Africa, and of a Jewish settlement in the Sinai Peninsula. For a variety of reasons they came to nothing, but they sustained British interest in the Jewish national restoration, and they were a milestone on that road which was to lead to a Jewish Palestine under a British trusteeship.

Pessimists might well have argued that the war, which shattered Jewry and divided the Zionist Organization, meant the indefinite deferring of the day of Israel's redemption. Perhaps to no people did the war come at first as so enormous and so unqualified a disaster. Eastern Europe, the greatest of all Jewish centres, became the battlefield of peculiarly ferocious war, in which millions of Jewish existences were brought to naught, and ancient seats of Jewish culture went up in ruin. For practical purposes Eastern was sundered from Western Jewry, and the whole of Jewry, save the Jewish communities of the Central Powers, was separated from Palestine. That major portion of the Jewish population of Palestine which dependent on support from its brethren without, was threatened with starvation. The colonies found themselves deprived of their markets, subjected to the plunder attendant upon Oriental warfare, and exposed to persecution by the Turkish authorities. The directing heads of the Zionist Organization were scattered in half a dozen countries. The prospect was very dark, but the trial demonstrated the tenacious purpose of the Jewish national will.

On the material side, the debt of Palestine and the whole Jewish people during the years of war to American Jewry is incalculable. When the United States was neutral, and the American Jews had access to the East, they promptly assumed the responsibility which had fallen upon them. If the centre of gravity of the commonwealth of Jewry has passed from Russia to the United States, that is due, not simply to wealth and numerical strength, but to the fact that, when the call came, American Jews answered it. Justice requires that the services of German Zionists in the preservation of the nucleus of the Jewish Palestine should be noted. Alone of the Great Powers during the war, Germany could bring political influence to bear upon the Turkish authorities and on more than one critical occasion the German Zionists induced the German Government to a check on the fury of Djemal Pasha. But not the least remarkable of Zionist manifestations during this trying time was the political insight of the Zionist leaders.

During the early years of the war British alliance with Russia did not make for sympathy with Jewish sufferings and Jewish aspirations. The dominant school in British military and political thought still built upon the Turk, and showed little appreciation of nationality as the heir of the Turk in the Near and Middle East. This is manifest in the secret treaty of 1916 for the division among the Great Powers of the Turk's estate. Under that treaty France obtained 'the coastal strip of Syria,' except the ports of Haifa and Acre. There was to be an Arab zone between the French and British territories, and 'with a view to securing the religious interests of the Entente Powers, Palestine with the Holy Places was to be separated from Turkish territory and subjected to a special regime, to be determined by agreement between Russia, France, and England.' This secret treaty contains no mention of Jewish national rights. It prescribes the partition of the Jewish motherland, it sets up a condominium over that fragment of Palestine which was not otherwise distributed. Every one of the deadly sins against Jewish nationalism was embodied in this unhappy agreement. To recall it is to indicate the magnitude of the political task with which the Jewish statesmen grappled and which they overcame.

The Zionist leaders pinned their faith, a faith which never wavered in the darkest hours, to the Allied cause. The Zionist leader in England, Dr. Weizmann, a distinguished scientist attached to the Manchester University, got into touch with British statesmen in the earliest days of the war. The first of these to grasp the importance of the Jewish national claim was Mr. Balfour, whose interest has been steadily sustained, and whose merit it was to sign the famous Declaration of the British Government recognizing the Jewish rights to Palestine. Such of the leaders of the Zionist Organization as war conditions permitted assembled in England, and it was his ceaseless labors which brought about the death in London of Dr. Dchlenow, a leader of the Russian Zionists. The chief part in this diplomatic work was carried on by Mr. Sokolow, who represented the Russian Jews, and Dr. Weizmann. Dr. Weizmann was chiefly concerned with the British authorities, and Mr. Sokolow went on missions to Paris, Rome, and the Vatican.

The Zionist cause gained a valuable ally in the foundation in Manchester, in 1916, of the British Palestine Committee, which, early in 1917, commenced the issue of its weekly organ, Palestine. The British Palestine Committee presented the case for a Jewish Palestine from the British point of view. Its policy was 'to reset the ancient glories of the Jewish nation in the freedom of a new British dominion in Palestine.' It advocated a Jewish Palestine under British sovereignty, and it is a matter of historical interest that it was from the British Palestine Committee that the demand was first launched for a British mandate under the League of Nations for a Jewish Palestine. Indeed, this committee was one of the first, if not the first, to put forward the conception of the mandatory system in general, a conception which was promptly adopted by the Zionist leaders, who thus consistently associated the idea of a Jewish Palestine with the idea of the League of Nations. The British Palestine Committee early laid it down that any satisfactory solution of the Palestine question must embrace an integral Palestine, under a single sovereignty. Its slogan was 'neither partition nor condominium.' Every conceivable argument, political, economic, strategic, and moral, was brought to bear in Palestine, which became immediately a recognized authority with regard to all Palestinian questions. Without question the propaganda of the British Palestine Committee did much to convert public opinion to the idea of a Jewish Palestine.

All these efforts were ultimately dependent on the fortunes of the British military campaign in Palestine. The Eastern and Western schools fought one another over Palestine almost as hard as the Turk was fought. The Western school held that the expedition should never have been undertaken, and even as late as the spring of 1918 there was serious talk of evacuating Jerusalem and falling back on Gaza. In the en the East won, and the genius of General Allenby carried British arms the Taurus and shattered the Ottoman Empire.

But even while the military fortunes were in the balance, a great political victory had been won for a Jewish Palestine. On November 2, 1917, on the eve of the capture of Gaza and Beersheba, Mr. Balfour issued the memorable pronouncement: 'His Majesty's Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use its best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.'

The declaration of the British Government was speedily adopted by the French and Italian governments, and it has since been approved in terms or in substance by all the powers associated in the war against Germany.

It is not invidious to inquire what were the motives which brought the British Government to this momentous decision. As has been pointed out, it was in line with a long British tradition of interest, religious and political, in the Jewish restoration to Palestine, and it met with unanimous approval among the British people. The idealistic motive weighed heavily with British statesmen, as those Jews who came in contact with them during the war can testify. Another consideration was the necessity for recasting British policy in the East, now that Turkey had become an irreconcilable enemy to Great Britain. British statesmanship instinctively realized the necessity of substituting for the Ottoman Empire a new East, constituted by the revived and restored subject nations. The part which a Jewish Palestine could claim as an interpreter and a bridge and a reconciler between East and West appealed to the British imagination. These ideas weighed much with the late Sir Mark Sykes, who throughout was the chief channel of communication between Zionism and British statesmanship. A third argument was the political influence, immediate and future, of the Jewish people. America was a new recruit to the war, and England appreciated the value of Jewish friendship. A people of fourteen millions spread throughout the world was, again, a political fact not to be depreciated.

By more roads than one, therefore, Great Britain came to identify herself with a Jewish Palestine, and once having taken the decision, followed out its logic. A Zionist Commission was sent to Palestine in 1918, to prepare the way for the future. Its most inspiring act was to lay the foundation of a Hebrew University at Jerusalem. At Paris, the Zionists had 'their day in court,' as President Wilson called it, and they have submitted their demands. The British Government has accepted the Zionist idea of a British mandate under the League of Nations for a Jewish Palestine. The British Government has further cleansed itself of its original sins of partition and condominium. The Jewish Palestine is to be an integral Palestine, and it is not to be cursed by a divided rule. Zionist statesmanship has succeeded in reversing the whole policy of the secret treaty of 1916, and it has succeeded at the same time in rallying to itself the support of the American and the Italian and, finally, even of the French government. The Zionist leaders have been able to do this because they have never allowed themselves to become the instruments of British or any other imperialism, but have pursued steadily and with a single eye the interests of the Jewish nation, which are the interests of humanity.

WHAT do the Jews want in Palestine? what do they hope? what do they intend? In the proposals laid before the Peace Conference by the Zionist Organization, the following demands are submitted. (1) For the recognition of the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine, and the right of the Jews to reconstitute Palestine as their national home. (2) That the boundaries of Palestine shall extend on the west to the Mediterranean, on the north to the Lebanon, on the east to the Hedjaz railway and the Gulf of Akabah. (3) That the sovereign title to Palestine shall be vested in the League of Nations, and the government be intrusted to Great Britain as mandatory of the League. (4) That Palestine shall be placed under such political administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment there of the Jewish national home, and ultimately render possible the creation of an autonomous commonwealth, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. (5) For these purposes the mandatory power is to promote Jewish immigration and close settlement on the land; to accept the cooperation of a Council representing the Jews of Palestine and the world, and to give this Council (which is to be precluded from making a private profit) priority in any concession for public works or the development of the natural resources of Palestine. (6) Hebrew shall be one of the official languages of Palestine, and the Jewish Sabbath and Holy Days shall be recognized as legal days of rest.

Such in brief outline are the proposals which the Zionist leaders are making to the Peace Conference, and which have already commended themselves to most of the peace delegations by their moderation and good sense. The Jews are not asking that they shall govern Palestine. They constitute at present, numerically, but a small minority in the country, although qualitatively that minority is the most important element, and represents the fourteen millions of the Jewish people. What Jews are asking for is the right to make Palestine a Jewish country once again -- Jewish in the sense that the majority of the people shall be Jews; Jewish in the sense that the predominant culture shall be Hebrew culture. For this purpose a mere bare permission to emigrate into the country will not suffice. He who wills the end must also will the means. The land must be made accessible to the Jews. At present, from sixty to eighty per cent of the soil of Palestine is held in great estates, by absentee landowners, who rack-rent a miserable peasantry. The Jewish people had no intention of allowing their passion for the country, their enterprise, and their genius to be converted into unearned increment for the benefit of these absentee landlords. They are, however, anxious that the rights of the cultivating fellaheen shall be conserved, and there is plenty of room for the fellaheen and for the Jewish immigrants. Palestine to-day has not one tenth of the population it once had. The Jewish people again demand that the development of the natural resources of the country shall not pass to alien capitalists, but shall be entrusted to the Jewish Council, representing and working on behalf of the Jewish people. These economic instrumentalities are indispensable if the Peace Conference is to make real its design of calling into being a Jewish Palestine. As and when Palestine becomes Jewish once again, the Jewish people will ask that its political institutions shall express that Jewish social reality.

The Jewish people do not expect that all the Jews of the world will ever be gathered into Palestine. The country is too small to hold them all, and there is no universal desire to go there. In the fullness of time there will be several million Jews in Palestine, but in all human probability the majority of Jews will still live outside its borders. Skepticism is sometimes expressed as to the likelihood of Jewish emigration into Palestine; as to whether the comfortable or the indifferent of the new and the old worlds will turn their steps toward Zion. The anxiety of the Zionist leaders, as it happens, is lest, in the early years, the flood of immigration may be so great as to threaten the stability of a Jewish Palestine -- threaten it as an economic entity, threaten it as a Hebraic entity. During the early years the need will certainly be for selection among the immigrants, rather than for stimulation of immigration.

What kind of men will come? Palestine will get many of the best in Jewry, for, beyond a doubt, Zionism is the one vital Jewish thing in Jewry. It appeals to the idealism of the Jew, be he student, professor, craftsman, or businessman. Zionism has saved the soul of Jewry in every country of the Diaspora. Many, far more than the non-Jew even dreams, are girding themselves for the great adventure. The desolation that has swept over the European world has set free hosts of the pick of Jewry, and a Jewish Palestine will have at its disposal talents of every variety and of rare quality. Those who do not go themselves, and with their own hands and brains share in the building of the Palestine, will be happy to assist from a distance by material help and encouragement. Even those who have resisted the march of Zionism will rally the positive work of reconstruction, once the conflict of theories and politics over and done with. In the new Palestine there will be a task attractive to every man of fine spirit. Though not every Jew will ever be there physically the whole Jewish people will assuredly collaborate in making the new Jewish Palestine.

Sociologically, the Jewish Palestine will be the home of many experiments. It will set the common weal above private appetite. It will blend public ownership and private enterprise. It will make education, in accordance with Jewish tradition, the possession of every citizen. It will do justice between all the nationalities within its borders. It will establish the equality of men and men, and work toward democracy, political and economic. It will be one the pillars of the League of Nations, and by its relationship to all the scattered communities of Israel, it will forge powerful links for the brotherhood of the peoples. In the Near East and the Middle East it will strive to replace the broken tyranny of the Turk by a harmonious cooperation between Jew, Arab, and Armenian. It will read the riddle of the West to the East, and the riddle of the East to the West. For the Jews throughout the world, the new Jewish Palestine will be once again a Zion from which the Law and the word of God shall go forth. No Jew outside Palestine will have any political tie with, or obligation to, a Jewish Palestine; but every Jew who feels in himself the Jewish soul and the Jewish consciousness will see in the Jewish Palestine the example of a pure Jewish society. There he will see the Jewish faith developing freely, according to the law of its being, distracted neither by opposition, nor by surrender to an alien environment. There he will see the Jewish national spirit expressing itself in a society modeled on the Jewish idea of justice, in a Hebrew literature, in a Hebrew art, in the myriad activities which make the life of a people on its own soil, under its own sky. There he will see the Jewish nation once again making its contribution to the common task of humanity, and he will see himself the better citizen of the land in which he dwells for the spiritual ties which link him with a Jewish Palestine.

Such is the goal toward which the Jewish people are striving, and such is the fabric for which the ground is now being cleared by the labor of the Peace Conference at Paris. The Zionist ideal is the twofold ideal, national and human, of the Rabbis. 'Jerusalem is the city that made all Israel brothers. Jerusalem is destined to be the mother-city of all the lands.'
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The Real Reason Behind the Israeli Hysteria Over the UN Vote
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When Palestinians decided to go to the United Nations to seek Palestinian recognition, they knew that would anger Tel Aviv and possibly Washington. But they didn't expect the reaction that ensued.

Both the US and Israel are on record as supporting Palestinian statehood. The UN rarely has the ability to produce decisions with teeth unless the US and other Western allies are forcefully behind it.

Israel is about to declare an emergency situation in the occupied territories and the Obama administration is in emergency mode as if Palestinians were declaring war.

The idea of Palestine becoming a permanent member of the United Nations originated, say Palestinians, from none other than US President Barack Obama. Speaking at the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2010, Obama said he hoped that "when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations- - an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel".

The Palestinians decided to take the US president at his word.

Obama's efforts to rekindle the Middle East peace process was met by Israel's refusal to carry out a temporary settlement freeze. The United States was even willing to offer a $3 billion arms deal to Israel in return for suspending building Jewish-only settlements in areas earmarked for the Palestinian state. At the time the US president also offered to veto any anti Israel resolution. But Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected the US offer.

Nine months later, Obama made another effort to kick start peace talks.

"The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states," he said in May.

Once again Palestinians accepted Obama's formula, while Netanyahu publicly rejected it, leaving Palestinians with no other non-violent alternative but to go to the UN to seek a state based on the 1967 borders.

In 1967, it should be recalled, Israel occupied the remainder of historic Palestine and other Arab territories following the June War. Shortly after the war, the UN Security Council declared, in the preamble to Resolution 242, that "it is inadmissible to occupy land by force."

As threats against the Palestinians failed to produce results, the US is now pressuring international countries who have already publicly recognized Palestine not to vote for it. The Obama administration wants these countries to refrain from giving a positive vote so that the US doesn't have to veto the resolution.

So why this big fuss? Is it solely because the right-wing Israeli government and the election year in US are too fragile for any anti-Israeli UN decision? But this is not reason enough to warrant such overreaction over a toothless UN vote

A more credible answer could be found in the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.

The decades-long occupation has given the Israelis the feeling that even in negotiations they can ram ideas down the Palestinians' throats and that the weak Palestinians have no choice but to bite their lips and accept Israeli dictates. After all, Israel can and often delivered harsh, violent, financial blows against Palestinians, as well as further restricting movement of peoples and goods.

Israelis often wonder why Palestinians are not responsive to what they consider a benevolent attitude towards the Palestinian population.

When Arafat rejected Israel's " generous offer", they besieged his headquarters and kept their tanks in Ramallah until his death.

The Gaza siege is another example of what happens to Palestinians when they do not toe the Israeli line, when they do not act the way they are supposed to.

What makes this situation different is the fact that the current Palestinian leader has found the right formula. His sincere and active opposition to violence has removed a major excuse Israelis often use to justify their harsh attitude. No wonder an Israeli strategist has called Mahmoud Abbas "dangerous" for Israel. But although Abbas is opposed to violence, dresses in a suit and speaks the language of a moderate, he has refused to budge on issues of national importance to Palestinians. Hence his real strength.

Furthermore, Abbas has vowed not to run for reelection, this leaving him free to act for what he believes is the interest of his people.

In his plane ride to New York, Abbas spoke to journalists about his life starting as a refugee and fighting for Palestinian rights. The report was published top of page in the wide-circulation Palestinian daily Al Quds; it reads, clearly, as a man's last testimony. Abbas is going to the UN for history and for his personal legacy to the nation.

The Palestinian president has taken the path of UN recognition rather than continue with the charade of useless -- indeed, harmful -- direct talks. And, clearly, that change in tactics has hit a raw nerve with Israelis and frustrated the US.

Few Palestinians see anything wrong with the move, although many are not certain that it will produce many immediate and tangible results. Nonetheless, the Palestinian public is pleased for now with a leadership that has found the backbone to stand up to pressure from Israel and the US.

As Abbas has publicly said, the Palestinians' desire to obtain a UN vote on statehood (in whatever form) does not mean that they cannot have direct negotiations with Israel. There is no reason why representatives of the newly recognized state cannot negotiate with representatives of Israel.

If the UN vote succeeds, however, it will not be a people talking with the occupier, but two states negotiating how to manage their relations in peace and harmony.
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November 12, 2000
The Promised Land An Israeli journalist recounts how Britain pledged the Holy Land to Jew and Arab alike.
By OMER BARTOV
ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE
Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate.
By Tom Segev. Translated by Haim Watzman.
Illustrated. 612 pp. New York:
Metropolitan Books/
Henry Holt & Company. $35.

Reading Tom Segev's remarkable book just as another round of violence and frustration erupts in Israel and the Palestinian territories, one is instantly gripped by a powerful sense of déjà vu. Once again the region has succumbed to despair, and peace seems, at best, a distant prospect. And yet ''One Palestine, Complete'' is more than the tale of a historical tragedy in the making. For Segev is unusually attuned to the hopes and dreams that both Arabs and Jews have invested in this divided land. Instead of telling his story through the loud pronouncements of political leaders, he has woven a fine tapestry of individual portraits, curious anecdotes and penetrating insights. One is left with a faint hope that the current crisis is as much a convulsive reaction to an anticipated settlement as it is a compulsive return to old patterns of prejudice and violence.

Although Segev makes only a few fleeting references to the controversy over the so-called new historians in Israel, his book is a major, if somewhat oblique, contribution to the debate. In the last decade or so, a number of younger Israeli scholars, mostly born after the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, have boldly challenged the patriotic narrative of the past, which cast Israel as an innocent victim of Arab aggression and rejected Palestinian claims of nationhood. Sifting through previously classified documents in British and Israeli archives, scholars like Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé have used this evidence to present a more balanced and detached examination of the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict. Not surprisingly, they have provoked fierce resistance from conservative scholars as well as from right-wing and ''security-minded'' politicians, journalists and intellectuals in Israel and the United States.

Segev is something of an anomaly among the new historians. Despite a doctorate in history from Boston University, he makes his living as a journalist for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. His column is titled, significantly, ''Foreign Correspondent,'' though he lives in Jerusalem and writes mostly on domestic matters. Segev is also the author of several influential books, notably ''The Seventh Million,'' a controversial study of how the Holocaust shaped Israeli identity.

Segev's distinctive place in Israeli intellectual life, however, has as much to do with his style as with his unconventional opinions. In a culture accustomed to intense emotions, he stands out for his wry, often aloof sensibility. He has a keen eye for the ironic, even the ridiculous, detail, and seems to take particular pleasure in deflating heroes and exploding the myths that are the lore of national identity. Segev's coolness generally serves him well, but it is not always a virtue. ''One Palestine, Complete'' is written in the authoritative, sometimes arrogant tone of an author who feels no need to engage in debate with his opponents. The omniscient voice masks some significant lapses in the narrative, while Segev's apparent detachment conceals his own ideological views, which are heavily tilted against the Zionist interpretation.

That said, Segev has written an enormously important book, perhaps the best single account of Palestine under the British mandate. For the first time in the historiography of the region, the story of the mandate has been told from all three perspectives -- the Zionist, the Arab and the British. The book opens with the conquest of the land from the Ottoman Empire in World War I, when, Segev writes, ''the British were received as an army of liberation. Both Arabs and Jews wished for independence and assumed they would win it under British sponsorship.'' The British gave them no reason to think otherwise, making vague promises to the Arabs in ''an evasive and amateurish correspondence,'' and announcing in the Balfour declaration of 1917 that England ''views with favor'' the creation of a Jewish ''national home'' in Palestine. As Segev remarks, ''The Promised Land had, by the stroke of a pen, become twice-promised.''

The book ends with the departure of the British following the United Nations resolution to divide the country into two separate states in 1947. That resolution, and its rejection by the Arab leadership, led to a bloody war that culminated in the establishment of an independent Jewish state -- by then no longer in line with official British policy -- and the resulting flight and expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs. Tragically, the creation of a Jewish state just three years after the near-total destruction of the Jewish diaspora by Nazism led to the creation of a Palestinian diaspora, whose fate has yet to be determined. Thus, what Israelis remember as their War of Independence is marked by Palestinians as al nakba -- the catastrophe.

Which side did the British favor in Palestine? Segev's argument is characteristically subversive of Zionist historiography, which portrays the British as hostile to Jewish aims. Although the Jews and the British clashed in the years immediately preceding independence, Segev argues that the British played a decisive role in the transformation of the tiny Jewish population they found in Palestine into an economically viable and politically well-organized community with a statelike infrastructure. Without the mandate, he insists, a Jewish state either would never have come into being or would have been greatly delayed. The mandate, in his view, was the single most important factor in the establishment of the state, and not, as was claimed at the time and is still believed by most Israelis and Jews, an obstacle to independence.

Segev tells the story of the Palestinian Arabs with a great deal of sympathy and balance. As we get to know some of the leaders of Palestinian nationalism more closely, we realize that they hardly correspond to the stereotypes often drawn by Zionist historians of primitive serfs and corrupt, lazy and pro-Nazi elites. Segev also personalizes Arab-Jewish relations in the mandate years in a way that shatters the starkly ideological prism through which they tend to be seen by both Jews and Arabs. Among his most affecting vignettes is the troubled yet powerful friendship between Khalil al-Sakakini, a teacher and writer who represents the fate of Palestinian intellectuals, and Alter Levine, a successful insurance agent and somewhat lesser poet, who embodies the curious blend of practicality and romanticism so common among the early Jewish settlers. Their bond, sealed by the shared experience of persecution under the Turks, was irreparably frayed by the mandate. Indeed, Sakakini had become so embittered by the anticipated loss of his homeland that he expressed sympathy for Nazi Germany. Yet Segev resurrects a time when such friendship was still possible and through it reveals how narrow our view of the past has been and the extent to which it has impoverished our understanding of the tragedy. Sakakini and Levine stand for all that was once possible before even its memory was erased in decades of bitter confrontation.

Segev views the British as astonishingly ill equipped to deal with the myriad problems of Palestine. Soon after their arrival, they found themselves frustrated in their efforts to support the creation of a Jewish state while appeasing an increasingly restive Arab population. The Arab rebellion of 1936-39, which British soldiers suppressed with brutal force, only deepened their sense of despair. As Segev observes, this first intifada had paradoxical consequences. On the one hand, British retaliation considerably weakened Arab military organization and thereby helped the Jewish forces gain the upper hand during the war of 1948. On the other hand, vehement Arab resistance to Jewish settlement convinced the British that staying in Palestine was not worth the price. Had it not been for the outbreak of World War II, they might have left earlier.

Among left-wing commentators in Israel, anti-Israeli critics in Europe and Palestinian nationalists, it is often said that Israel's establishment was a direct consequence of the Holocaust. Segev wisely rejects this idea. The Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine), he notes, was well on its way to statehood before the war, while the genocide of European Jewry deprived Zionism of the human reserves needed to fortify the future state. In this sense, the Holocaust served Palestinian interests, for it greatly reduced the threat of mass immigration. What is more, sympathy for Zionism was more common in British political circles during and after World War I than it was following the Holocaust. Even in 1938, the British ambassador to Egypt wrote, ''The Jews? . . . Let us be practical. They are anybody's game these days. But we need not desert them. They have waited 2,000 years for their 'home.' They can well afford to wait a bit until we are better able to help them get their last pound of flesh.''

Segev's penchant for the eye-catching detail and for personal anecdote occasionally lends his book a somewhat gossipy quality. We learn a great deal about who was sleeping with whom and what sorts of drinks certain individuals liked to have on their porch. And we read of fascinating outsiders like the Spanish consul to Jerusalem, Antonio de Ballobar, a raffish young count whose mother was Jewish and who was ''famous for the sumptuous meals he served at his home in West Jerusalem.'' To be sure, Segev is trying to evoke the lost and, for some, romantic world of mandate Palestine. But this also means that he tells us much more about the elites than about the majority of Palestinians and Jews so keenly observed by figures like Ballobar.

This approach also tends to give short shrift to high politics and strategy. For instance, Segev makes the striking observation that some key British politicians, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George, supported the Zionist cause not only out of sympathy for Zionism, but also thanks to the notion (greatly encouraged by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann) that Jewish power and influence would help bring the United States into the war on Britain's side. But one would have liked to see a more careful analysis of Britain's far-flung strategic interests and the perceived role of Palestine as an important link between India and Europe, a crucial obstacle between North Africa and the Caucasus, a base for British air and naval operations in the Mediterranean and a center for the local production of armaments. Moreover, Segev ignores the possibility that British awareness of oil reserves in the region also served as potential motivation for their presence.

It should also be noted that while Segev pays much attention to the Arab Palestinian population, most of his materials come from British and Israeli archives, as well as private collections of diaries, letters, newspapers and memoirs. The book is obviously directed at an Israeli, American and European audience, and the myths it sets out to dispel are mainly Israeli and Jewish. Palestinian myths are hardly addressed. Then again, the Arabs do not need Segev to tell them that the British were the friends rather than the enemies of the Jews; they already said so in 1917 and 1936.

Nevertheless, the merits of this book far outweigh its limitations. It is very well written and hard to put down despite its considerable length. This will doubtlessly become the authoritative text for the pre-state history of Israel, as well as a book that Palestinian scholars will and indeed should refer to. And, considering the terrible deterioration of relations between Jews and Palestinians in the last few weeks, one can only hope that this book will draw attention not only to the nightmarish quality of the region's history, but also to the promise of coexistence that was so recklessly tossed aside.

Omer Bartov's most recent book is ''Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity.''

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The Irish Times - Saturday, January 8, 2011
Palestinian population fast approaching that of Israeli Jews
Palestinian children hold balloons during a rally marking the 46th anniversary of Fatah's foundation.Palestinian children hold balloons during a rally marking the 46th anniversary of Fatah's foundation.Photograph: Reuters
In this section »

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The land between the Mediterranean and river Jordan will be majority Palestinian from 2015, writes MICHAEL JANSEN

THE PALESTINIAN population in “historic Palestine” will equal the Jewish population before 2015, according to projections released by the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics.

The bureau said Palestinian inhabitants of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza currently total 4.1 million while Palestinian citizens of Israel amount to 1.4 million. This gives a total of 5.5 million Palestinians, approaching the 5.8 million for Israeli Jews.

Due to a higher Palestinian birth rate – 32.8 per 1,000 – as compared to the Jewish Israeli birth rate – 26.2 per 1,000 – the bureau said the “number of Palestinians will reach the number of Jewish residents by the end of 2014, around 6.1 million, at the current growth rate”.

Thereafter, the land between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river will not only become a Palestinian majority area but this majority will grow.

Since immigration numbers almost equal those for emigration, the Palestinian figure has not been affected by the 7,000 Palestinians, mostly men between the ages of 15-29, who leave annually. The lure of education, better living conditions and improved job opportunities pushed 32,000 young men to depart between 2005-09. However, during this period an estimated 30,411 returned, the highest number being 7,077 in 2009.

Palestinian migrants tend to return home because great importance is placed by the Palestinian community on “steadfastness”, they have few opportunities to settle abroad, and they do not want to become permanent exiles. The number of Palestinian refugees was set at 5.6 million, most living in Arab countries.

The latest statistics issued by the Israeli government show that the population of Israel minus the Palestinian territories, is 7.7 million, 75.4 per cent Jewish, 20.4 per cent Palestinian, and 4.2 per cent foreigners.

Israel’s figures are 5.8 million for Jewish and 1.5 million for Palestinian citizens.

While Israel’s population growth rate of 1.9 per cent remains steady, it is significant that during 2010 Israel absorbed only 16,000 immigrants. Of these 6,000 were born abroad to Israeli parents and 4,000 moved to Israel on family reunification schemes. This means that only 6,000 are new Jewish immigrants, suggesting that immigration has slowed while emigration has accelerated, particularly over the last decade.

US Census Bureau figures show that more than 140,000 US residents were born in Israel, a 30 per cent increase over the number in 2000 when Israeli residents totalled 109,720. Of those currently living in the US, 90,179 have US citizenship.

However, the US official figures are questioned by Israeli official sources and media. According to the Israeli consulate in New York, as many as 600,000 Israelis now live in the US. This figure indicates that the number of Israelis who migrate to the US is larger than that of US citizens moving to Israel – which was, according to the Jewish Agency, 23,640 from 2000-2009 – an average of 2,300 a year.

The discrepancies between US and Israeli figures are explained by differences over who is considered an Israeli. Neither Soviet-born Jews who went first to Israel and then settled in the US nor children born to Israeli residents of the US are necessarily considered to be Israeli citizens by the US Census Bureau.

Some Israelis contend that since Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005, the narrow coastal strip with its Palestinian population should be excluded from the equation.

However, Palestinians point out that Gaza is indisputably part of “historic Palestine”. Furthermore, the international community considers that the strip is not only occupied Palestinian territory but also remains firmly under Israeli domination through its control of land, air and sea access.

Other Israelis, including former prime minister Ehud Olmert, hold that the high Palestinian birth rate is a “demographic time bomb” set to rob Israel of its Jewish majority. They argue that the only way for Israel to remain a democratic Jewish state is to reach a deal for a two-state solution.

Mr Olmert insists that unless such a peace settlement is reached Israel would have to embrace the one-state solution, where Jews and Palestinians would have equal rights, or become an apartheid state, where a Jewish minority will dominate a restive Palestinian majority.
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Definitions of Palestine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Further information: History of the name Palestine

The term Palestine has several overlapping (and occasionally contradictory) definitions.
Contents
[hide]

1 Palestine as a historical region
2 Palestine as the region of the Palestinian territories
3 Palestine as a state
4 Etymology
5 Boundaries
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Palestine as a historical region
Further information: Time periods in the region of Palestine, History of Palestine, and History of the name Palestine
Historical region of Palestine showing Israel's 1948 and 1967 borders

In historical contexts predating the British mandate of Palestine, Palestine was mostly a geographical term, particularly used in the Roman Latin and Greek, and also other languages taking their geographical vocabulary from them. The Romans united Iudaea with the Galilee to form the Roman sub-province of Syria Palaestina (encapsulating territories of ancient Canaan, Kingdom of Israel, Judah, Moab, Ammon, and Philistia) and thus included much of the land on both sides of the Jordan River although with further political sub-divisions along the Jordan River valley.

Also in geographical contexts, "Palestine" is often used, as it is a distinctly unique natural unit. Rivers, vegetation and bird migration have ignored political boundaries, while contributing to the development of the natural character of the land.
[edit] Palestine as the region of the Palestinian territories
Main article: Palestinian territories
Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip) showing Israel's 1948 and 1967 borders

Sometimes people use the term Palestine in a limited sense to refer to lands currently under the administrative control of the Palestinian Authority, a quasi-governmental entity which governs but lacks full sovereignty. Since the late 1990s, this has included the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank. However in colloquial everyday usage residents of all parts of Palestine continue using the name for the entire region of Historic Palestine (as defined before the creation of the State of Israel). Palestinian citizens of Israel (who are officially referred to by Israel as "Israeli Arabs") generally make a distinction between the land (Palestine) and the political structures governing it (Israel, Palestinian Authority). Thus, many Palestinians in Israel, the Occupied Territories and in dispersion use the word "Palestine" to refer to Historic Palestine, even when they recognize Israel's existence and affirm its right to continue to exist; for such people, Palestine and Israel are one and the same territory.
[edit] Palestine as a state
Main article: Views of Palestinian statehood
Palestinian National Authority showing Israel's 1948 and 1967 borders

Modern usage of the term Palestine usually refers to a prospective Palestinian state, incorporating both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Some who oppose the existence of a Jewish state in the region regard all the land west of the Jordan River as the territory of a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea," in denial of Israel's existence or right to exist in the future.

The term is also used to convey the sense that Palestine is already a state, either (a) consisting only of Gaza & West Bank or (b) including as well all land held by Israel. Since the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, the UN General Assembly has recognized the PLO mission there under the name "Palestine."[1]
[edit] Etymology

The term Palestine (Greek: Παλαιστινη/Latin: Palaestina), originally referred to the coastal lands of the biblical Philistines, a people of Aegean origin who settled in the southern coastal plains of Canaan, in the 12th century BC, their territory being named Philistia.

The earliest known mention is thought to be in Ancient Egyptian texts of the temple at Medinet Habu from c.1150 BC which record a people called the P-r-s-t (conventionally Peleset) among the Sea Peoples who invaded Egypt in Ramesses III's reign.[2] The Assyrian emperor Sargon II called the same region Palashtu or Pilistu in his Annals dated 709 BC.[3][4][4][5] The Hebrew name Peleshet (פלשת Pəléshseth)- usually translated as Philistia in English, is used in the Bible to denote the southern coastal region that was inhabited by the Philistines to the west of the ancient Kingdom of Judah.[6]

By the Hellenistic period, the term had come to denote a wider region, including that of Judea. Herodotus wrote in c.450 BC in The Histories of a 'district of Syria, called Palaistinê" (whence Palaestina, whence Palestine).[3][7][8][9] One important reference refers to the practice of male circumcision associated with the Hebrew people: "the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians, are the only nations who have practised circumcision from the earliest times. The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine themselves confess that they learnt the custom of the Egyptians... Now these are the only nations who use circumcision"[10] In c.340 BC, Aristotle wrote in Meteorology about Palestine in a reference to the Dead Sea: "Again if, as is fabled, there is a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink, this would bear out what we have said. They say that this lake is so bitter and salt that no fish live in it and that if you soak clothes in it and shake them it cleans them."[11] And in c.40 AD, Roman-Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria wrote of the Jews in Palestine: "Moreover Palestine and Syria too are not barren of exemplary wisdom and virtue, which countries no slight portion of that most populous nation of the Jews inhabits. There is a portion of those people called Essenes"[12]

After crushing Bar Kochba's revolt in 132-135, the Roman Emperor Hadrian applied the name Syria Palestina to the entire region that had formerly included Iudaea Province,[13] which some scholars interpret to have been an attempt to suppress Jewish national feelings.[14][15] The Arabic toponym Filasteen (Arabic: فلسطين‎) is also derived from the Latin name.

"The name Palestine, which the Romans had bestowed on the conquered and subjugated land of Judea, had been retained for a time by the Arab conquerors to designate an administrative subdivision of their Syrian province." The name had disappeared from the region prior to the arrival of the Crusaders. The term was rediscovered in Europe at the time of the Renaissance and used to refer to what "European Christians ... previously called the Holy Land." "The name was not used officially, and had no precise territorial definition until it was adopted by the British to designate the area which they acquired by conquest at the end of World War I and ruled under mandate from the League of Nations."[16]
[edit] Boundaries

Prior to the Allied Powers victory in World War I and the Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, which created the British mandate in the Levant, most of the northern area of what is today Jordan formed part of the Ottoman Vilayet of Damascus (Syria), while the southern part of Jordan was part of the Vilayet of Hejaz. What later became part of British Mandate Palestine was in Ottoman times divided between the Vilayet of Beirut (Lebanon) and the Sanjak of Jerusalem.[17]

The Jordan Rift Valley (comprising Wadi Arabah, the Dead Sea and River Jordan) has at times formed a political and administrative frontier, even within empires that have controlled both territories. At other times, such as during the rule of the Kingdom of Israel and the Hasmonean state for example, territories on both sides of the river formed part of the same administrative unit.[citation needed] Alternatively, during the Arab Caliphate period, parts of southern Lebanon and the northern highland areas of Palestine and Jordan were administered as Al Jund al Urdun, while the southern parts of the latter two formed part of Jund Dimashq, which after the ninth century was attached to the administrative unit of Jund Filasteen (Arabic: جند فلسطين‎).[18]

In 1920, most of modern-day Jordan was at first incorporated into the planned League of Nations mandate territory of Palestine. However, the Transjordan was made into a separate political unit on April 11, 1921, and its separate Mandate came into force in September 1923 as the Emirate of Transjordan.

Nineteenth century sources refer to Palestine as extending from the sea to the caravan route, presumably the Hejaz-Damascus route east of the Jordan River valley. Others refer to it as extending from the sea to the desert.

Between 1922 and 1948, the term Palestine referred to the portion of the British Mandate of Palestine lying to the west of the Jordan River; that is, all of what is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. During the period of the British Mandate of Palestine, the term "Palestinian" referred to all people residing there, regardless of religion, and those granted citizenship by the Mandatory authorities were granted "Palestinian citizenship".[19] The term was used without any ethnic connotations. For example, the The Jerusalem Post, an Israeli newspaper, was called The Palestine Post from its founding in 1932 until 1950.

[edit] See also

Palestine (disambiguation)
Palestinian territories - variously defined
Palestinian National Authority - government over West Bank and Gaza
Definitions of Palestinian
Geography of the Palestinian territories
Geography of Israel

[edit] References

^ Eric Suy, Karel Wellens (1998). International Law: Theory and Practice : Essays in Honour of Eric Suy. Martinus Nijhoff. p. 378. ISBN 9041105824.
^ Fahlbusch et al., 2005, p. 185.
^ a b Sharon, 1988, p. 4.
^ a b Room, 1997, p. 285.
^ Carl S. Ehrlich "Philistines" The Oxford Guide to People and Places of the Bible. Ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan. Oxford University Press, 2001.
^ Lewis, 1993, p. 153.
^ Palestine and Israel, David M. Jacobson, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 313 (Feb., 1999), pp. 65–74
^ The Southern and Eastern Borders of Abar-Nahara, Steven S. Tuell, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 284 (Nov., 1991), pp. 51–57
^ Herodotus' Description of the East Mediterranean Coast, Anson F. Rainey, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 321 (Feb., 2001), pp. 57–63
^ http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.mb.txt
^ http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/meteorology.2.ii.html
^ http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book33.html
^ The Bar-Kokhba Revolt (132-135 C.E.) by Shira Schoenberg, The Jewish Virtual Library
^ 'The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered' By Peter Schäfer, ISBN 3-16-148076-7
^ 'The Name “Palestine”, The Jewish Virtual Library
^ Bernard Lewis (1999). Semites and Anti-Semites, An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. W.W. Norton and Company. pp. 169. ISBN 0-393-31839-7.
^ "Palestinim, Am Behivatsrut," by Kimmerling, Baruch, and Joel S. Migdal - Keter Publishing, ISBN 965-07-0797-2
^ Kamal Suleiman Salibi (1993). The Modern History of Jordan. I.B.Tauris. pp. 17–18. ISBN 1860643310.
^ Government of the United Kingdom (December 31, 1930). REPORT by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of PALESTINE AND TRANS-JORDAN FOR THE YEAR 1930. League of Nations. Archived from the original on 2007-02-22. Retrieved 2007-05-29.

[edit] External links
==============
Druze
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Druse (disambiguation).
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. (Consider using more specific cleanup instructions.) Please help improve this article if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. (March 2011)
Druze دروز Druze star.svg
Druze star
Total population
1,000,000 to 2,500,000
Regions with significant populations
Syria 700,000[1]
Lebanon 250,000[1]
Israel 120,000[1]
Jordan 20,000[2]
Outside the Middle East 100,000
United States 20,000[3][dead link]
Canada 10,000
Australia 3,000[4]
Venezuela 2,000
Religions
Unitarian Druze
Scriptures
Rasa'il al-hikmah (Epistles of Wisdom), Qur'an
Languages
Arabic
English
Hebrew (in Israel)
French (in Lebanon and Syria)
Bismillahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim
Part of a series on Shī‘ah Islam
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‘Aql · Numerology · Taqiyya
Żāhir · Bāṭin
Seven Pillars
Guardianship · Prayer · Charity
Fasting · Pilgrimage · Struggle
Purity · Profession of Faith
History
Shoaib · Nabi Shu'ayb
Seveners · Qarmatians
Fatimids · Baghdad Manifesto
Hafizi · Taiyabi
Hassan-i Sabbah · Alamut
Sinan · Assassins
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Ali · Ḥassan · Ḥusain
as-Sajjad · al-Baqir · aṣ-Ṣādiq
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Ahmed / at-Taqī
Husain/ az-Zakī/Rabi · al-Mahdī
al-Qā'im · al-Manṣūr
al-Mu‘izz · al-‘Azīz · al-Ḥākim
az-Zāhir · al-Mustansir · Nizār
al-Musta′lī · al-Amīr · al-Qāṣim
Groups and Present leaders
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v · d · e

The Druze (Arabic: درزي, derzī or durzī‎, plural دروز, durūz, Hebrew: דרוזים‎ druzim) are an esoteric, monotheistic religious community, found primarily in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, which emerged during the 11th century from Ismailism. The Druze have an eclectic set of beliefs that incorporate several elements from Abrahamic religions, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism and other philosophies. The Druze call themselves Ahl al-Tawhid (People of Unitarianism or Monotheism) or al-Muwaḥḥidūn (Unitarians, Monotheists) – the official name of the sect is al-Muwaḥḥidūn al Dururz (The Unitarian Druze).
Contents
[hide]

1 Location
2 History
2.1 Origin of the name
2.2 Early history
2.3 The closing of the faith
2.4 During the Crusades
2.5 Persecution during the Mamluk and Ottoman period
2.6 Ma'an dynasty
2.7 Shihab Dynasty
2.8 Qaysites and the Yemenites
2.9 Civil War of 1860
2.10 Rebellion in Hauran
3 Modern history
3.1 In Syria
3.2 In Lebanon
3.3 In Israel
4 Beliefs of the Druze
4.1 God in the Druze faith
4.2 Scriptures
4.3 Esotericism
4.4 Precepts of the Druze faith
4.5 Religious Symbol
4.6 ʻUqqāl and Juhhāl
5 Origins of the Druze people
5.1 Ethnic origins
5.2 Genetics
6 See also
7 Notes
8 Further reading
9 External links

[edit] Location

The Druze people reside primarily in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.[5] The Israeli Druze are mostly in Galilee (81%), around Haifa (19%), and in the Golan Heights,[6] which is home to about 20,000 Druze.[7] The Institute of Druze Studies estimates that 40%–50% of Druze live in Syria, 30%–40% in Lebanon, 6%–7% in Israel, and 1%–2% in Jordan.[8][9]

Large communities of expatriate Druze also live outside the Middle East in Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America, the United States, and West Africa. They use the Arabic language and follow a social pattern very similar to those of the other peoples of the eastern Mediterranean region.[10]

The number of Druze people worldwide exceeds one million, with the vast majority residing in the Levant or East Mediterranean.[11]
[edit] History
[edit] Origin of the name

The name Druze is derived from the name of Anushtakīn ad-Darazī (from Persian, darzi, "seamster") who was an early preacher. Although the Druze consider ad-Darazī a heretic[12] the name had been used to identify them.

Before becoming public, the movement was secretive and held closed meetings in what was known as Sessions of Wisdom. During this stage a dispute occurred between ad-Darazi and Hamza bin Ali mainly concerning ad-Darazi's ghuluww (Arabic, "exaggeration"), which refers to the belief that God was incarnated in human beings, especially 'Ali and his descendants, including Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah who was the current Caliph, and ad-Darazi naming himself "The Sword of the Faith" which led Hamza to write an epistle refuting the need for the sword to spread the faith and several epistles refuting the beliefs of the ghulat.

In 1016 ad-Darazi and his followers openly proclaimed their beliefs and called people to join them, causing riots in Cairo against the Unitarian movement including Hamza bin Ali and his followers which led to the suspension of the movement for one year and the expulsion of ad-Darazi and his supporters.[13]

Although the Druze religious books describe ad-Darazi as the "insolent one" and as the "Calf" who is narrow minded and hasty, the name "Druze" is still used for identification and for historical reasons. In 1018 ad-Darazi was assassinated for his teachings, some sources claim to be executed by Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah.[12][14]

Some authorities see in the name "Druze" a descriptive epithet, derived from Arabic dâresah ("those who study").[15] Others have speculated that the word comes from the Arabic-Persian word Darazo (درز "bliss") or from Shaykh Hussayn ad-Darazī, who was one of the early converts to the faith.[16] In the early stages of the movement, the word "Druze" is rarely mentioned by historians, and in Druze religious texts only the word Muwaḥḥidūn ("Unitarian") appears. The only early Arab historian who mentions the Druze is the 11th century Christian scholar Yahya of Antioch, who clearly refers to the heretical group created by ad-Darazī rather than the followers of Hamza ibn 'Alī.[16] As for Western sources, Benjamin of Tudela, the Jewish traveler who passed through Lebanon in or about 1165, was one of the first European writers to refer to the Druzes by name. The word Dogziyin ("Druzes") occurs in an early Hebrew edition of his travels, but it is clear that this is a scribal error. Be that as it may, he described the Druze as "mountain dwellers, monotheists, who believe in 'soul eternity' and reincarnation."[17]
[edit] Early history

The Druze faith began as a movement in Ismailism, that was mainly influenced by Greek philosophy and gnosticism and opposed certain religious and philosophical ideologies that were present during that epoch.

The faith was preached by Hamza ibn 'Alī ibn Ahmad, a Persian Ismaili mystic and scholar. He came to Egypt in 1014 and assembled a group of scholars and leaders from across the world to establish the Unitarian movement. The order's meetings were held in the Raydan Mosque, near the Al-Hakim Mosque.[18]

In 1017, Hamza officially revealed the Druze faith and began to preach the Unitarian doctrine. Hamza gained the support of the Fātimid Caliph al-Hakim, who issued a decree promoting religious freedom prior to the declaration of the divine call.

Remove ye the causes of fear and estrangement from yourselves. Do away with the corruption of delusion and conformity. Be ye certain that the Prince of Believers hath given unto you free will, and hath spared you the trouble of disguising and concealing your true beliefs, so that when ye work ye may keep your deeds pure for God. He hath done thus so that when you relinquish your previous beliefs and doctrines ye shall not indeed lean on such causes of impediments and pretensions. By conveying to you the reality of his intention, the Prince of Believers hath spared you any excuse for doing so. He hath urged you to declare your belief openly. Ye are now safe from any hand which may bring harm unto you. Ye now may find rest in his assurance ye shall not be wronged. Let those who are present convey this message unto the absent so that it may be known by both the distinguished and the common people. It shall thus become a rule to mankind; and Divine Wisdom shall prevail for all the days to come.[19]

Al-Hakim became a central figure in the Druze faith even though his own religious position was disputed among scholars. John Esposito states that al-Hakim believed that "he was not only the divinely appointed religio-political leader but also the cosmic intellect linking God with creation.",[20] while others like Nissim Dana and Mordechai Nisan state that he is perceived as the manifestation and the reincarnation of God or presumably the image of God.[21][22]

Some Druze and non-Druze scholars like Samy Swayd and Sami Makarem state that this confusion is due to confusion about the role of the early heretical preacher ad-Darazi, whose teachings the Druze rejected as heretical.[23] These sources assert that al-Hakim rejected ad-Darazi's claims of divinity,[14][24][25] and ordered the elimination of his movement while supporting that of Hamza ibn Ali.[26]

Al-Hakim disappeared one night while out on his evening ride - presumably assassinated, perhaps at the behest of his formidable elder sister Sitt al-Mulk. The Druze believe he went into Occultation with Hamza ibn Ali and three other prominent preachers, leaving the care of the "Unitarian missionary movement" to a new leader, Bahā'u d-Dīn.
[edit] The closing of the faith

Al-Hakim was replaced by his underage son, 'Alī az-Zahir. The Unitarian Druze movement, which existed in the Fatimid Caliphate, acknowledged az-Zahir as the Caliph, but followed Hamzah as its Imam.[14] The young Caliph's regent, Sitt al-Mulk, ordered the army to destroy the movement in 1021.[12] At the same time, Bahā'a ad-Dīn as-Samuki was assigned the leadership of the Unitarian Movement by Hamza Bin Ali.[14]

For the next seven years, the Druze faced extreme persecution by the new caliph, al-Zahir, who wanted to eradicate the faith.[27] This was the result of a power struggle inside of the Fatimid empire in which the Druze were viewed with suspicion because of their refusal to recognize the new Caliph, Ali az-Zahir, as their Imam. Many spies, mainly the followers of Ad-Darazi, joined the Unitarian movement in order to infiltrate the Druze community. The spies set about agitating trouble and soiling the reputation of the Druze. This resulted in friction with the new caliph who clashed militarily with the Druze community. The clashes ranged from Antioch to Alexandria, where tens of thousands of Druze were slaughtered by the Fatimid army.[12] The largest massacre was at Antioch, where 5000 Druze religious leaders were killed, followed by that of Aleppo.[12] As a result, the faith went underground in hope of survival, as those captured were either forced to renounce their faith or killed. Druze survivors "were found principally in southern Lebanon and Syria." In 1038, two years after the death of al-Zahir, the Druze movement was able to resume because the new leadership that replaced him had friendly political ties with at least one prominent Druze leader.[27]

In 1043 Bahā'a ad-Dīn declared that the sect would no longer accept new pledges, and since that time proselytization has been prohibited.[14][27]
[edit] During the Crusades

It was during the period of Crusader rule in Syria (1099–1291) that the Druze first emerged into the full light of history in the Gharb region of the Chouf Mountains. As powerful warriors serving the Muslim rulers of Damascus against the Crusades, the Druze were given the task of keeping watch over the crusaders in the seaport of Beirut, with the aim of preventing them from making any encroachments inland. Subsequently, the Druze chiefs of the Gharb placed their considerable military experience at the disposal of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt (1250–1516); first, to assist them in putting an end to what remained of Crusader rule in coastal Syria, and later to help them safeguard the Syrian coast against Crusader retaliation by sea.[28]

In the early period of the Crusader era, the Druze feudal power was in the hands of two families, the Tanukhs and the Arslans. From their fortresses in the Gharb district (modern Aley Province) of southern Mount Lebanon, the Tanukhs led their incursions into the Phoenician coast and finally succeeded in holding Beirut and the marine plain against the Franks. Because of their fierce battles with the crusaders, the Druzes earned the respect of the Sunni Muslim Caliphs and thus gained important political powers. After the middle of the twelfth century, the Ma'an family superseded the Tanukhs in Druze leadership. The origin of the family goes back to a Prince Ma'an who made his appearance in the Lebanon in the days of the 'Abbasid Caliph al-Mustarshid (1118 AD-1135 AD). The Ma'ans chose for their abode the Chouf district in the southern part of Western Lebanon, overlooking the maritime plain between Beirut and Sidon, and made their headquarters in Baaqlin, which is still a leading Druze village. They were invested with feudal authority by Sultan Nur-al-Dīn and furnished respectable contingents to the Muslim ranks in their struggle against the Crusaders.[29]
[edit] Persecution during the Mamluk and Ottoman period

Having cleared Syria of the Franks, the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt turned their attention to the schismatic Muslims of Syria. In 1305, after the issuing of a fatwa by the Hanbali Sunni scholar Ibn Taymiyyah calling for jihad against all non-Sunni Muslims like the Druze, Alawites, Ismaili, and twelver Shiites. al-Malik al-Nasir inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Druze at Keserwan and forced outward compliance on their part to orthodox Sunni Islam. Later, under the Ottoman Turks, they were severely attacked at Ayn-Ṣawfar in 1585 after the Ottomans claimed that they assaulted their caravans near Tripoli.[29]

Consequently, the 16th and 17th centuries were to witness a succession of armed Druze rebellions against the Ottomans, countered by repeated Ottoman punitive expeditions against the Chouf, in which the Druze population of the area was severely depleted and many villages destroyed. These military measures, severe as they were, did not succeed in reducing the local Druze to the required degree of subordination. This led the Ottoman government to agree to an arrangement whereby the different nahiyes (districts) of the Chouf would be granted in iltizam ("fiscal concession") to one of the region's amirs, or leading chiefs, leaving the maintenance of law and order and the collection of its taxes in the area in the hands of the appointed amir. This arrangement was to provide the cornerstone for the privileged status which ultimately came to be enjoyed by the whole of Mount Lebanon in Ottoman Syria, Druze and Christian areas alike.[30]
[edit] Ma'an dynasty
Main article: Maan family
Fakhreddin castle in Palmyra

With the advent of the Ottoman Turks and the conquest of Syria by Sultan Selim I in 1516, the Ma'ans were acknowledged by the new rulers as the feudal lords of southern Lebanon. Druze villages spread and prospered in that region, which under Ma'an leadership so flourished that it acquired the generic term of Jabal Bayt-Ma'an (the mountain of the Ma'an family) or Jabal al-Druze. The latter title has since been usurped by the Hawran region, which since the middle of the 19th century has proven a haven of refuge to Druze emigrants from Lebanon and has become the headquarters of Druze power.[29]

Under Fakhreddin II, the Druze dominion increased until it included almost all Syria, extending from the edge of the Antioch plain in the north to Safad in the south, with a part of the Syrian desert dominated by Fakhreddin's castle at Tadmur (Palmyra), the ancient capital of Zenobia. The ruins of this castle still stand on a steep hill overlooking the town. Fakhr-al-Dīn became too strong for his Turkish sovereign in Constantinople. He went so far in 1608 as to sign a commercial treaty with Duke Ferdinand I of Tuscany containing secret military clauses. The Sultan then sent a force against him, and he was compelled to flee the land and seek refuge in the courts of Tuscany and Naples in 1614.

In 1618 political changes in the Ottoman sultanate had resulted in the removal of many enemies of Fakhr-al-Din from power, signaling the prince's triumphant return to Lebanon soon afterwards.

In 1632 Ahmad Koujak was named Lord of Damascus. Koujak was a rival of Fakhr-al-Din and a friend of the sultan Murad IV, who ordered Koujak and the sultanat navy to attack Lebanon and depose Fakhr-El-Din.

This time the prince decided to remain in Lebanon and resist the offensive, but the death of his son Ali in Wadi el-Taym was the beginning of his defeat. He later took refuge in Jezzine's grotto, closely followed by Koujak who eventually caught up with him and his family.

Fakhr-al-Din finally traveled to Turkey, appearing before the sultan, defending himself so skillfully that the sultan gave him permission to return to Lebanon.

Later, however, the sultan changed his orders and had Fakhr-al-Din and his family killed on 13 April 1635 in Istanbul, the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, bringing an end to an era in the history of Lebanon, a country which would not regain its current boundaries, which Fakhr-al-Din once ruled, until Lebanon was proclaimed a republic in 1920.

Fakhr-al-Din was the first ruler in modern Lebanon to open the doors of his country to foreign Western influences. Under his auspices the French established a khān (hostel) in Sidon, the Florentines a consulate, and Christian missionaries were admitted into the country. Beirut and Sidon, which Fakhr-al-Dīn beautified, still bear traces of his benign rule.
[edit] Shihab Dynasty
Main article: Shihab family
Druze woman wearing a tantour, Chouf, Lebanon – 1870s

As early as the days of Saladin, and while the Ma'ans were still in complete control over southern Lebanon, the Shihab tribe, originally Hijaz Arabs but later settled in Ḥawran, advanced from Ḥawran, in 1172, and settled in Wadi-al-Taym at the foot of Mt. Hermon. They soon made an alliance with the Ma'ans and were acknowledged as the Druze chiefs in Wadi-al-Taym. At the end of the 17th century (1697) the Shihabs succeeded the Ma'ans in the feudal leadership of Druze southern Lebanon, although they reportedly professed Sunni Islam, they showed sympathy with Druzism, the religion of the majority of their subjects.

The Shihab leadership continued until the middle of the 19th century and culminated in the illustrious governorship of Amir Bashir Shihab II (1788–1840) who, after Fakhr-al-Din, was the most powerful feudal lord Lebanon produced. Though governor of the Druze Mountain Bashir was a crypto-Christian, and it was he whose aid Napoleon solicited in 1799 during his campaign against Syria.

Having consolidated his conquests in Syria (1831–1838), Ibrahim Pasha, son of the viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, made the fatal mistake of trying to disarm the Christians and Druzes of the Lebanon and to draft the latter into his army. This was contrary to the principles of the life of independence which these mountaineers had always lived, and resulted in a general uprising against Egyptian rule. The uprising was encouraged, for political reasons, by the British. The Druzes of Wadi-al-Taym and Ḥawran, under the leadership of Shibli al-Aryan, distinguished themselves in their stubborn resistance at their inaccessible headquarters, al-Laja, lying southeast of Damascus.[29]
[edit] Qaysites and the Yemenites
Main article: Battle of Ain Darra
Meeting of Druze and Ottoman leaders in Damascus, about the control of Jebel Druze

The conquest of Syria by the Muslim Arabs in the middle of the seventh century introduced into the land two political factions later called the Qaysites and the Yemenites. The Qaysite party represented the Ḥijaz and Bedouin Arabs who were regarded as inferior by the Yemenites who were earlier and more cultured emigrants into Syria from southern Arabia. Druzes and Christians grouped in political rather than religious parties so the party lines in Lebanon obliterated racial and religious lines and the people grouped themselves regardless of their religious affiliations, into one or the other of these two parties. The sanguinary feuds between these two factions depleted, in course of time, the manhood of the Lebanon and ended in the decisive battle of Ain Dara in 1711, which resulted in the utter defeat of the Yemenite party. Many Yemenite Druzes thereupon immigrated to the Hawran region and thus laid the foundation of Druze power there.[29]
[edit] Civil War of 1860
Main article: 1860 Lebanon conflict

The Druzes and their Christian Maronite neighbors, who had thus far lived as religious communities on friendly terms, entered a period of social disturbance in the year 1840, which culminated in the civil war of 1860.[29]

After the Shehab dynasty converted to Christianity, the Druze community and feudal leaders came under attack from the regime with the collaboration of the Catholic Church, and the Druze lost most of their political and feudal powers. Also, the Druze formed an alliance with Britain and allowed Protestant missionaries to enter Mount Lebanon, creating tension between them and the Catholic Maronites, who were supported by the French.

The Maronite-Druze conflict in 1840–60 was an outgrowth of the Maronite Christian independence movement directed against the Druze, Druze feudalism and the Ottoman-Turks. The civil war was not therefore a religious war, except in Damascus where it spread and where the vastly non-druze population was anti-Christian. The movement culminated with the 1859–60 massacre and defeat of the Christians by the Druzes. The civil war of 1860 cost the Christians some ten thousand lives in Damascus, Zahlé, Deir al-Qamar, Hasbaya and other towns of Lebanon.

The European powers then determined to intervene and authorized the landing in Beirut of a body of French troops under General Beaufort d'Hautpoul, whose inscription can still be seen on the historic rock at the mouth of Nahr al-Kalb. French intervention on behalf of the Maronites did not help the Maronite national movement since France was restricted in 1860 by Britain which did not want the Ottoman Empire dismembered. But European intervention pressured the Turks to treat the Maronites more justly.[31] Following the recommendations of the powers, the Ottoman Porte granted Lebanon local autonomy, guaranteed by the powers, under a Christian governor. This autonomy was maintained until World War I.[29][32]
[edit] Rebellion in Hauran
Main article: Hauran Druze Rebellion

The Hauran rebellion was a violent Druze uprising against Ottoman authority in the Syrian province, which erupted in 1909. The rebellion was led by al-Atrash family in an aim to gain independence, but ended in brutal suppression of the Druze, significant depopulation of the Hauran region and execution of the Druze leaders in 1910.
[edit] Modern history

In Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, the Druze have official recognition as a separate religious community with its own religious court system. Druze are known for their loyalty to the countries they reside in,[33] though they have a strong community feeling, in which they identify themselves as related even across borders of countries.[34]

Despite their practice of blending with dominant groups in order to avoid persecution and because the Druze religion doesn't endorse separatist sentiments, urging the Druze to blend with the communities they reside in, nevertheless the Druze have had a history of brave resistance to occupying powers, and they have at times enjoyed more freedom than most other groups living in the Levant.[34]
[edit] In Syria
Druze warriors preparing to go to battle with Sultan Pasha al-Atrash in 1925

In Syria, most Druze live in the Jebel al-Druze, a rugged and mountainous region in the southwest of the country, which is more than 90 percent Druze inhabited; some 120 villages are exclusively so.[35]
Flag of Jabal el Druze representing the five Druze principles; other variations of the flag exist

The Druze always played a far more important role in Syrian politics than its comparatively small population would suggest. With a community of little more than 100,000 in 1949, or roughly three percent of the Syrian population, the Druze of Syria's southeastern mountains constituted a potent force in Syrian politics and played a leading role in the nationalist struggle against the French. Under the military leadership of Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, the Druze provided much of the military force behind the Syrian Revolution of 1925–1927. In 1945, Amir Hasan al-Atrash, the paramount political leader of the Jebel al-Druze, led the Druze military units in a successful revolt against the French, making the Jebel al-Druze the first and only region in Syria to liberate itself from French rule without British assistance. At independence the Druze, made confident by their successes, expected that Damascus would reward them for their many sacrifices on the battlefield. They demanded to keep their autonomous administration and many political privileges accorded them by the French and sought generous economic assistance from the newly independent government.[35]
Druze leaders meeting in Jebel al-Druze, Syria, 1926

Well-led by the Atrash household and jealous of their reputation as Arab nationalists and proud warriors, the Druze leaders refused to be beaten into submission by Damascus or cowed by threats. When a local paper in 1945 reported that President Shukri al-Quwatli (1943–1949) had called the Druzes a "dangerous minority", Sultan Pasha al-Atrash flew into a rage and demanded a public retraction. If it were not forthcoming, he announced, the Druzes would indeed become "dangerous" and a force of 4,000 Druze warriors would "occupy the city of Damascus." Quwwatli could not dismiss Sultan Pasha's threat. The military balance of power in Syria was tilted in favor of the Druzes, at least until the military build up during the 1948 War in Palestine. One advisor to the Syrian Defense Department warned in 1946 that the Syrian army was "useless", and that the Druzes could "take Damascus and capture the present leaders in a breeze."[35]

During the four years of Adib Shishakli's rule in Syria (December 1949 to February 1954) (on August 25, 1952: Adib al-Shishakli created the Arab Liberation Movement (ALM), a progressive party with pan-Arabist and socialist views),[36] the Druze community was subjected to a heavy attack by the Syrian regime. Shishakli believed that among his many opponents in Syria, the Druzes were the most potentially dangerous, and he was determined to crush them. He frequently proclaimed: "My enemies are like a serpent: the head is the Jebel al-Druze, the stomach Homs, and the tail Aleppo. If I crush the head the serpent will die." Shishakli dispatched 10,000 regular troops to occupy the Jebel al-Druze. Several towns were bombarded with heavy weapons, killing scores of civilians and destroying many houses. According to Druze accounts, Shishakli encouraged neighboring bedouin tribes to plunder the defenseless population and allowed his own troops to run amok.[35]

Shishakli launched a brutal campaign to defame the Druzes for their religion and politics. He accused the entire community of treason, at times claiming they were agents of the British and Hashimites, at others that they were fighting for Israel against the Arabs. He even produced a cache of Israeli weapons allegedly discovered in the Jabal. Even more painful for the Druze community was his publication of "falsified Druze religious texts" and false testimonials ascribed to leading Druze sheikhs designed to stir up sectarian hatred. This propaganda also was broadcast in the Arab world, mainly Egypt. Shishakli was assassinated in Brazil on September 27, 1964 by a Druze seeking revenge for Shishakli's bombardment of the Jebel al-Druze.[35]

He forcibly integrated minorities into the national Syrian social structure, his "Syrianization" of Alawite and Druze territories had to be accomplished in part using violence, he declared: "My enemies are like serpent. The head is the Jabal Druze, If I crush the head the serpent will die" (Seale 1963:132).[35] To this end, al-Shishakli encouraged the stigmatization of minorities. He saw minority demands as tantamount to treason. His increasingly chauvinistic notions of Arab nationalism were predicated on the denial that "minorities" existed in Syria. [37]

After the Shishakli's military campaign, the Druze community lost a lot of its political influence, but many Druze military officers played an important role when it comes to the Baathist regime currently ruling Syria.[35]
[edit] In Lebanon
Prophet Job shrine in Lebanon the Chouf region

The Druze community played an important role in the formation of the modern state of Lebanon, and even though they are a minority they played an important role in the Lebanese political scene. Before and during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), the Druze were in favor of Pan-Arabism and Palestinian resistance represented by the PLO. Most of the community supported the Progressive Socialist Party formed by the Lebanese leader Kamal Jumblatt and they fought alongside other leftist and Palestinian parties against the Lebanese Front that was mainly constituted of Christians. After the assassination of Kamal Jumblatt on March 16, 1977, his son Walid Jumblatt took the leadership of the party and played an important role in preserving his father's legacy and sustained the existence of the Druze community during the sectarian bloodshed that lasted until 1990.

In August 2001, Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir toured the predominantly Druze Chouf region of Mount Lebanon and visited Mukhtara, the ancestral stronghold of Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. The tumultuous reception that Sfeir received not only signified a historic reconciliation between Maronites and Druze, who fought a bloody war in 1983-1984, but underscored the fact that the banner of Lebanese sovereignty had broad multi-confessional appeal[38] and was a cornerstone for the Cedar Revolution. The second largest political party supported by Druze is the Lebanese Democratic Party led by Prince Talal Arslan the son of Lebanese independence hero Prince Magid Arslan. Many Druze also support the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.
[edit] In Israel
Main article: Israeli Druze
[edit] Beliefs of the Druze

The Druze are considered to be a social group as well as a religion, but not a distinct ethnic group. Also complicating their identity is the custom of Taqiya—concealing or disguising their beliefs when necessary—that they adopted from Shia Islam and the esoteric nature of the faith, in which many teachings are kept secretive. Druze in different states can have radically different lifestyles. Some claim to be Muslim, some do not. The Druze faith is said to abide by Islamic principles, but they tend to be separatist in their treatment of Druze-hood, and their religion differs from mainstream Islam on a number of fundamental points.[39]

Druze does not allow conversion to the religion. Marriage between Druze and non-Druze is strongly discouraged for religious, political and historical reasons.[citation needed]
[edit] God in the Druze faith

The Druze conception of the deity is declared by them to be one of strict and uncompromising unity. The main Druze doctrine states that God is both transcendent and immanent, in which He is above all attributes but at the same time He is present.[40]

In their desire to maintain a rigid confession of unity, they stripped from God all attributes (tanzīh) which may lead to polytheism (shirk). In God, there are no attributes distinct from his essence. He is wise, mighty, and just, not by wisdom, might, and justice, but by his own essence. God is "the Whole of Existence", rather than "above existence" or on His throne, which would make Him "limited." There is neither "how", "when", nor "where" about him; he is incomprehensible.[41]

In this dogma, they are similar to the semi-philosophical, semi-religious body which flourished under Al-Ma'mun and was known by the name of Mu'tazila and the fraternal order of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Ṣafa).[29]

Unlike the Mu'tazilla, however, and similar to some branches of Sufism, the Druze believe in the concept of Tajalli (meaning "theophany").[41] Tajalli, which is more often misunderstood by scholars and writers and is usually confused with the concept of incarnation,

...is the core spiritual beliefs [sic] in the Druze and some other intellectual and spiritual traditions.... In a mystical sense, it refers to the light of God experienced by certain mystics who have reached a high level of purity in their spiritual journey. Thus, God is perceived as the Lahut [the divine] who manifests His Light in the Station (Maqaam) of the Nasut [material realm] without the Nasut becoming Lahut. This is like one's image in the mirror: one is in the mirror but does not become the mirror. The Druze manuscripts are emphatic and warn against the belief that the Nasut is God.... Neglecting this warning, individual seekers, scholars, and other spectators have considered al-Hakim and other figures divine.

...In the Druze scriptural view, Tajalli 'takes a central stage.' One author comments that Tajalli occurs when the seeker's humanity is annihilated so that divine attributes and light are experienced by the person."[41]

The concept of God incarnating either as or in a human seems "to contradict with what the Druze scriptural view has to teach about the Oneness of God, while tajalli [sic] is at the center of the Druze and some other, often mystical, traditions."[41]
[edit] Scriptures

Druze Sacred texts include the Kitab Al Hikma (Epistles of Wisdom).[42]
[edit] Esotericism

The Druze believe that many teachings given by Prophets, religious leaders, and Holy Books, had esoteric meanings preserved for those of intellect, in which some teachings are mere symbols and allegoristic in nature and for that they divide the understanding of holy books and teachings into three layers. These layers according to the Druze are:

The obvious or exoteric (Zahir), accessible to anyone who can read or hear;
The hidden or esoteric (Batin), accessible to those who are willing to search and learn through the concept of (exegesis); and
The hidden of the hidden, a concept known as Anagoge, inaccessible to all but a few really enlightened individuals who truly understand the nature of the universe.[43]

Unlike some Islamic esoteric movements known as the batinids at that time, the Druzes don't believe that the esoteric meaning abrogates or necessarily abolishes the exoteric one. For example, Hamza bin Ali, refutes such claims by stating that, if the esoteric interpretation of Taharah (purity), is the purity of the heart and soul, it doesn't mean that a person can discard his physical purity, as Salah (prayer) is useless if a person is untruthful in his speech and for that the esoteric and exoteric meanings complement each other.[44]
[edit] Precepts of the Druze faith
Main article: Seven pillars of Ismailism

The Druze follow seven precepts that are considered the core of the faith, and are perceived by them as the essence of the pillars of Islam. The Seven Druze precepts are:

Veracity in speech and the truthfulness of the tongue.
Protection and mutual aid to the brethren in faith.
Renunciation of all forms of former worship (specifically, invalid creeds) and false belief.
Repudiation of the devil (Iblis), and all forces of evil (translated from Arabic Toghyan meaning "despotism").
Confession of God's unity.
Acquiescence in God's acts no matter what they be.
Absolute submission and resignation to God's divine will in both secret and public.[45]

[edit] Religious Symbol
Druze star.svg

The Druze strictly avoid iconography but use five colors as a religious symbol: green, red, yellow, blue, and white. Each color pertains to a metaphysical power called Haad, literally meaning a limit, as in the limits that separate humans from animals, or the powers that makes the animal body human. Each Haad is color coded in the following manner: green for Aql "the Universal Mind/Nous", red for Nafs "the Universal Soul/Anima mundi", yellow for Kalima "the Word/Logos", blue for Sabq "the Potentiality/Cause/Precedent", and white for Lahq "the Future/Effect/Immanence". The mind generates qualia and gives consciousness. The soul embodies the mind and is responsible for transmigration and the character of oneself. The word which is the atom of language communicates qualia between humans and represent the platonic forms in the sensible world. The Sabq and Lahq is the ability to perceive and learn from the past and plan for the future and predict it. The colors can be arranged in a vertically descending stripes or a five-pointed star. The stripes is a diagrammatic cut of the spheres in neoplatonic philosophy while the five pointed star embodies the golden ratio, phi, as a symbol of temperance and a life of moderation.
[edit] ʻUqqāl and Juhhāl
Druze Sheikh (ʻUqqāl) wearing religious dress

The Druze are divided into two groups. The largely secular majority, called al-Juhhāl (جهال) ("the Ignorant") are not granted access to the Druze holy literature or allowed to attend the initiated Uqqal's religious meetings. They are around 80% of the Druze population and are not obliged to follow the ascetic traditions of the Uqqal.

The initiated religious group, which includes both men and women (about 20% of the population), is called al-ʻUqqāl (عقال), ("the Knowledgeable Initiates"). They have a special mode of dress designed to comply with Quranic traditions. Women can opt to wear al-mandīl, a loose white veil, especially in the presence of other people. They wear al-mandīl on their heads to cover their hair and wrap it around their mouths and sometimes over their noses as well. They wear black shirts and long skirts covering their legs to their ankles. Male ʻuqqāl grow mustaches, and wear dark Levantine/Turkish traditional dresses, called the shirwal, with white turbans that vary according to the Uqqal's hierarchy.

Al-ʻuqqāl have equal rights to al-Juhhāl, but establish a hierarchy of respect based on religious service.The most influential 5% of Al-ʻuqqāl become Ajawīd, recognized religious leaders, and from this group the spiritual leaders of the Druze are assigned. While the Shaykh al-ʻAql, which is an official position in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, is elected by the local community and serves as the head of the Druze religious council, judges from the Druze religious courts are usually elected for this position. Unlike the spiritual leaders, the Shaykh al-ʻAql's authority is local to the country he is elected in, though in some instances spiritual leaders are elected to this position.

The Druze believe in the unity of God, and are often known as the "People of Monotheism" or simply "Monotheists". Their theology has a Neo-Platonic view about how God interacts with the world through emanations and is similar to some gnostic and other esoteric sects. Druze philosophy also shows Sufi influences.

Druze principles focus on honesty, loyalty, filial piety, altruism, patriotic sacrifice, and monotheism. They reject tobacco smoking, alcohol, consumption of pork, and marriage to non-Druze. Also, in contrast to most Islamic sects, the Druze reject polygamy, believe in reincarnation, and are not obliged to observe most of the religious rituals. The Druze believe that rituals are symbolic and have an individualistic effect on the person, for which reason Druze are free to perform them, or not. The community does celebrate Eid al-Adha, however, considered their most significant holiday.
[edit] Origins of the Druze people
[edit] Ethnic origins

The Druze faith extended to many areas in the Middle East, but most of the surviving modern Druze can trace their origin to the Wadi al-Taymour in South Lebanon, which is named after an Arab tribe Taymour-Allah (formerly Taymour-Allat) which, according to Islamic historian, al-Tabari, first came from Arabia into the valley of the Euphrates where they were Christianized prior to their migration into the Lebanon. Many of the Druze feudal families whose genealogies have been preserved by the two modern Syrian chroniclers Haydar al-Shihabi and al-Shidyaq seem also to point in the direction of this origin. Arabian tribes emigrated via the Persian Gulf and stopped in Iraq on the route that was later to lead them to Syria. The first feudal Druze family, the Tanukh family, which made for itself a name in fighting the Crusaders, was, according to Haydar al-Shihabi, an Arab tribe from Mesopotamia where it occupied the position of a ruling family and apparently was Christianized.[29]

The Tanukhs must have left Arabia as early as the second or third century A.D. The Ma'an tribe, which superseded the Tanukhs and produced the greatest Druze hero in history, Fakhr-al-Din, had the same traditional origin. The Talhuq family and 'Abd-al-Malik, who supplied the later Druze leadership, have the same record as the Tanukhs. The Imad family is named for al-Imadiyyah--the Kurdish town of Amadiya, northeast of Mosul inside Kurdistan, and, like the Jumblatts, is thought to be of Kurdish origin. The Arsalan family claims descent from the Hirah Arab kings, but the name Arsalan (Persian and Turkish for lion) suggests Persian influence, if not origin.[29]

The most accepted theory is that the Druzes are "a mixture of refugee stocks, in which the Arab largely predominates, grafted on to an original mountain population of Aramaic blood."[46]

Nevertheless, many scholars formed their own hypotheses: for example, Lamartine (1835) discovered in the modern Druzes the remnants of the Samaritans;[47] Earl of Carnarvon (1860), those of the Cuthites whom Esarhaddon transplanted into Palestine;[48] Professor Felix von Luschan (1911), according to his conclusions from anthropometric measurements, makes the Druze, Maronites, and Alawites of Syria, together with the Bektashis, 'Ali-Ilahis, and Yezidis of Asia Minor and Persia, the modern representatives of the ancient Hittites.[49]

During the 18th century, there were two branches of Druze living in Lebanon: the Yemeni Druze, headed by the Hamdan and Al-Atrash families; and the Kaysi Druze, headed by the Jumblat and Arsalan families.

The Hamdan family was banished from Mount Lebanon following the battle of Ain Dara in 1711. This battle was fought between two Druze factions: the Yemeni and the Kaysi. Following their dramatic defeat, the Yemeni faction migrated to Syria in the Jebel-Druze region and its capital, Soueida. However, it has been argued that these two factions were of political nature rather than ethnic, and had both Christian and Druze supporters.
[edit] Genetics

In a 2005 study of ASPM gene variants, Mekel-Bobrov et al. found that the Israeli Druze people of the Carmel region have among the highest rate of the newly evolved ASPM haplogroup D, at 52.2% occurrence of the approximately 6,000-year-old allele.[50] While it is not yet known exactly what selective advantage is provided by this gene variant, the haplogroup D allele is thought to be positively selected in populations and to confer some substantial advantage that has caused its frequency to rapidly increase.

According to DNA testing, Druze are remarkable for the high frequency (35%) of males who carry the Y-chromosomal haplogroup L, which is otherwise uncommon in the Mideast (Shen et al. 2004).[51] This haplogroup originates from prehistoric South Asia and has spread from Pakistan into southern Iran.

Cruciani in 2007 found E1b1b1a2 (E-V13) [one from Sub Clades of E1b1b1a1 (E-V12)] in high levels (>10% of the male population) in Turkish Cypriot and Druze Arab lineages. Recent genetic clustering analyses of ethnic groups are consistent with the close ancestral relationship between the Druze and Cypriots, and also identified similarity to the general Syrian and Lebanese populations, as well as a variety of Jewish lineages (Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Iraqi, and Moroccan) (Behar et al 2010).[52]

Also, a new study concluded that the Druze harbor a remarkable diversity of mitochondrial DNA lineages that appear to have separated from each other thousands of years ago. But instead of dispersing throughout the world after their separation, the full range of lineages can still be found within the Druze population.[53]

The researchers noted that the Druze villages contained a striking range of high frequency and high diversity of the X haplogroup, suggesting that this population provides a glimpse into the past genetic landscape of the Near East at a time when the X haplogroup was more prevalent.[53]

These findings are consistent with the Druze oral tradition, that claims that the adherents of the faith came from diverse ancestral lineages stretching back tens of thousands of years.[53]

Israeli Knesset member Ayoob Kara, a Druze himself, speculated that the Druze are descended from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, probably Zebulun. Kara stated that the Druze share many of the same beliefs as Jews, and that he has genetic evidence to prove that the Druze were descended from Jews.[54]

That was after the Israeli author Tsvi Misinai claimed that the cultural and genetic background of Arabs living west of the Jordan River, proved that the majority of them descended from the Jewish nation,and that the genetic cluster of Druze coincides closely with those of the Samaritans, and is very close to the genetic clusters of Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Jews from the Caucasus, but he asserted that such findings do not prove Kara's conclusion since several Jewish villages in Palestine converted to Druze faith which means the samples can be linked to those lineages and not a broad Druze linkage.[54]
[edit] See also

List of Druze
Neoplatonism and Gnosticism
Syncretism

[edit] Notes

^ a b c The Economist. 390. Economist Newspaper Ltd.. 2009. p. 49. Retrieved 14 April 2011.
^ US State Department International Religious Freedom Report 2005
^ Institute of Druze Studies - Druze Traditions
^ "Druze Population of Australia by Place of Usual Residence (2006)". Australian Bureau of Statistics. Retrieved 27 July 2010.
^ Druze
^ "Press Release: The Druze Population of Israel" (DOC). Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2009-04-23. (Hebrew)
^ Jordanian Druze can be found in Amman and Zarka; about 50% live in the town of Azraq, and a smaller number in Irbid and Aqaba. "Localities and Population, by District, Sub-District, Religion and Population Group" (PDF). Statistical Abstract of Palestine 2006. Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics.
^ Institute of Druze Studies: Druzes
^ Dana, Nissim (2003). The Druze in the Middle East: Their Faith, Leadership, Identity and Status. Sussex University Press. pp. 99. ISBN 1903900360.
^ Rabah Halabi, Citizens of equal duties—Druze identity and the Jewish State, p. 55 (Hebrew)
^ "Druze set to visit Syria". BBC News Online. 2004-08-30. Retrieved 2006-09-08. "Around 80,000 Druze live in Israel, including 18,000 in the Golan Heights."
^ a b c d e "About the Faith of The Mo’wa’he’doon Druze" by Moustafa F. Moukarim
^ "Al-Darazî and Ḥamza in the Origin of Druze Religion" by MGS Hodgson - 1962
^ a b c d e Swayd, Samy (1998). The Druzes: An Annotated Bibliography. Kirkland, WA, USA: ISES Publications. ISBN 0966293207.
^ 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, page 606
^ a b Al-Najjar, 'Abdullāh (1965) (in Arabic). Madhhab ad-Durūz wa t-Tawḥīd (The Druze Sect and Unism). Egypt: Dār al-Ma'ārif.
^ Hitti, Philip K (2007) [1924]. Origins of the Druze People and Religion, with Extracts from their Sacred Writings (New Edition). Columbia University Oriental Studies. 28. London: Saqi. pp. 13–14. ISBN 0863566901.
^ druze.com
^ 01. ismaili.net, Islam Heritage F.I.E.L.D
^ Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds by William Potter page 156
^ Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and Self-expression by Mordechai Nisan page 95
^ The Druze in the Middle East: Their Faith, Leadership, Identity and Status, Nissim Dana
^ Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia by Josef W. Meri, Jere L. Bacharach.published by Routledge (2006), ISBN 0415966906
^ The Olive and the Tree: The Secret Strength of the Druze by Dr Ruth Westheimer and Gil Sedan
^ Swayd, Sami (2006). Historical dictionary of the Druzes. Historical dictionaries of peoples and cultures. 3. Maryland USA: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0810853329
^ M. Th. Houtsma, E.J. Brill's first encyclopaedia of Islam 1913-1936
^ a b c Rebecca Erickson. "The Druze". Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements.
^ druzeheritage.org
^ a b c d e f g h i j Origins of the Druze People and Religion, by Philip K. Hitti, 1924
^ Druze History
^ Abraham, Antoine (1977). "Lebanese Communal Relations". Muslim World 67 (2): 91–105. doi:10.1111/j.1478-1913.1977.tb03313.x.
^ The Druzes and the Maronites under the Turkish Rule from 1840 to 1860, Charles Churchill published in 1862
^ Michael J. Totten. "The Tower of the Sun".
^ a b Tore Kjeilen. "Druze".
^ a b c d e f g Joshua Landis. "Shishakli and the Druzes: Integration and intransigence". The Syrian Land: Processes of Integration and Fragmentation. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998: 369-396.. T. Philipp & B. Schäbler, eds..
^ syrianhistory.com
^ books.google.com
^ Dossier: Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir (May 2003)
^ The Druze in the Middle East: Their Faith, Leadership, Identity and Status, By Dana, Nissim
^ The Druze Faith by Sami Nasib Makarem
^ a b c d Druze Spirituality and Asceticism By Dr. Samy Swayd, SDSU (An abridged rough draft)
^ Religion - Druze Faith
^ BBC - h2g2 - The Druze
^ "The Epistle Answering the People of Esotericism" (batinids), Epistles of Wisdom, Second Volume (a rough translation from the Arabic version)
^ Origins of the Druze People and Religion, by Philip K. Hitti, published in 1924, page 51.
^ "1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, DRUSES, or DRUZES (Arab. Druz)". "There is good reason to regard the Druses as, racially, a mixture of refugee stocks, in which the Arab largely predominates, grafted on to an original mountain population of Aramaic blood."
^ Voyage, by Lamartine, II, page 109.
^ Recollections of the Druses of Lebanon (London, 1860), pp. 42-43.
^ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (London, 1911), page 241.
^ "Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens", Science, 9 September 2005: Vol. 309. no. 5741, pp. 1720-1722.
^ evolutsioon.ut.ee
^ "The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people".
^ a b c American Technion Society (2008, May 12). Genetics Confirm Oral Traditions Of Druze In Israel, ScienceDaily.
^ a b Lev, David (25 October 2010). "MK Kara: Druze are Descended from Jews". Israel National News. Arutz Sheva. Retrieved 27 October 2010.

[edit] Further reading

Sakr Abu Fakhr: "Voices from the Golan"; Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 5–36.
Jean-Marc Aractingi et Christian Lochon , Secrets initiatiques en Islam et rituels maçonniques-Ismaéliens, Druzes, Alaouites,Confréries soufies; éd. L'Harmattan, Paris, 2008 (ISBN 978-2-296-06536-9 ).
Rabih Alameddine: I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters, Norton (2002). ISBN 0-393-32356-0.
B. Destani, ed.: Minorities in the Middle East: Druze Communities 1840–1974, 4 volumes, Slough: Archive Editions (2006). ISBN 1840971657.
R. Scott Kennedy: "The Druze of the Golan: A Case of Non-Violent Resistance"; Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Winter, 1984), pp. 48–6.
Dr. Anis Obeid: The Druze & Their Faith in Tawhid, Syracuse University Press (July 2006). ISBN 0815630972.
Shmuel Shamai: "Critical Sociology of Education Theory in Practice: The Druze Education in the Golan"; British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 11, No. 4 (1990), pp. 449–463.
Samy Swayd: The Druzes: An Annotated Bibliography, Kirkland, Washington: ISES Publications (1998). ISBN 0966293207.
Bashar Tarabieh: "Education, Control and Resistance in the Golan Heights"; Middle East Report, No. 194/195, Odds against Peace (May–Aug., 1995), pp. 43–47.

[edit] External links
This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive and inappropriate external links. (November 2010)
Look up druze in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Sources

History and sites of the Druze
Rise and fall of the Syrian Druze
Institute of Druze Studies, San Diego, California
Druzenet, English publications
Druse, Druze, Mowahhidoon described at the OCRT site
Druze Catechism
1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article
Article about Druze Encyclopedia Britannica Concise
Longer article about Druze Encyclopedia Britannica Concise
Druze by Pam Rohland
SEMP - Who are the Druze?
Druze articles
Who are the Druze? Photo essay on PBS Wide Angle website

Communities

Druze Professional Network (DPN)
Druze Chat
Druze Faces
Druze News Druze News from Lebanon, Israel and the Druze world.
Lebanese Druze Online Community
American Druze Society - National
American Druze Society - Michigan
The Druze Association of Edmonton
Canadian Druze Society
Australian Druze Community
South Australian Druze Community
Israeli Druze Online - in Hebrew
European Druze Society
Meeting Druze from all over the world

Other links

Staying Druze in America video on PBS Wide Angle website
Druze: A small peace of Israel from hackwriters.com
The Druzes and the Maronites under the Turkish Rule from 1840 to 1860. Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. ISBN 1-429-73982-7.
Contestant No. 2 PBS Wide Angle documentary about a Druze teen who challenges her conservative community
Druze in Israel and Syria
The Druze by Dr. Naim Aridi
Historical Changes in the Political Role of the Druze in Lebanon by Dr. Abbas Abu Saleh
The Druze

[show]v · d · eIslam topics
[show]v · d · eEthnic groups in Israel
[show]v · d · eReligion topics
===============

The Hyphenated Body, the Hyphenated Self: Iranian & Pak Instances

2011-09-14T18:52:00.000-07:00

Date: Wednesday September 14, 2011

The Hyphenated Body, the Hyphenated Self: Investigative Inquiries of The Iranian-American Instance

Concepts of "the hyphenated self, the hyphenated body, construction of hyphenated identity."

"Immigrant Identity construction as contingent in contexts of unequal power and under conditions of encounter."

"Race ideology, Critical Race Theory (CRT), Theory of Systemic Whiteness (KarunaKaran 2007) and immigrant identity construction -- the Iranian-American instance."

Negotiating identity as Other -- The Iranian-American as Other.

Census definition of Iranian-Americans as "white" ?

Possible Racialized identity construction of hyphenated persons of Iranian descent in locations in the U.S.

Possible Racialized identity construction of hyphenated persons of Pakistani descent in locations in the U.S.

Field Research, observations, interviews -- qualitative.

[All the above, list not exhaustive]

I provided these concepts to Sepideh Saadat, a student of Iranian ethnicity living in Germany and studying in Bonn, during 2 extended discussions in New York City, on research topics for a thesis on the following dates -- September 3 and September 7. Discussions continue.

-----------------------------------
The Pakistan Instance of the Hyphenated Body, Hyphenated Self
This morning, immediately following my posting late last night on the Iranian-American instance of the Hyphenated Body, Hyphenated Self, I received a Skype request from a student-philosopher friend who has just arrived in Germany to study at the University of Gottingen.

The kid, now an insightful graduate student, loves the French structuralists, has loved them for over a decade and absolutely deserves to study and write philosophy at this venerable place of learning. He got to Gottingen by his own proven efforts.

Q. So what's the problem?

He is admitted to classes but he cannot find housing. Landlords refuse to rent to him.

One prospective landlord said he could not rent to him because he needed to have lived in German for 10 years prior!
Smells of racist injustice.

Q. Why can't this student philosopher find housing?

Because, as my friend surmised he "is a Pakistani with a beard".

I have suggested to despondent ( he stated he was depressed) Muhammad Saad Khan, my friend of 15 years, to immediately contact a campus-based student ombudsman and also ask everyone and anyone he meets, to help him, especially fellow students.

Saad says he thinks a "cute" French language teacher, he met at the uni. showed a liking for him. I urged Saad to ask her to help him.

This morning, I will call the Permanent Representative to the UN, from Germany and alert him to the problem.

I realize all this is data about the Hyphenated Body, the Hyphenated Self.

Hitler screamed for a Body that was un-hyphenated, a default body, an impossible body.

What Hitler's search led to was mass murder of bodies he despised and marked for destruction, and in the end, most definitely and predictably, his own, by his own hand.

Self hatred, buttressed by an irrational, unsubstantiated fear of the unknown, is the motivating force for the futile search for the defaulted, unattainable, nonexistent un-hyphenated Body, the un-hyphenated Self. This construct is the positioned oppositionally to Advaita, the One is the Other, The Other is the One.

Advaita does not require a patina of Faith, an overlay of Belief, to demonstrate its robustness as an umbrella theory for the Social Sciences.

Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York [CUNY]

Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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Advaita & Democracy: The One is the Other, the Other is the One

2011-09-11T03:07:00.000-07:00

Advaita, the essential non-duality of Consciousness, is the great perceptual discovery of early thought, grounded in ordinary experience on the South Asian subcontinent.

Advaita is a discovery. It exists before it is found. Therefore Advaita is not an invention, or even a construction. It is an accessible perception of the Self as indivisible from the Other, potentially available to all.

To say that it is a perceptual discovery on the South Asian subcontinent, is not to say that that which is Advaita did not and could not exist elsewhere and everywhere.
Advaita could, did and does exist anywhere and everywhere, wherever the Self is receptive and contemplative, critical and rigorous.

Advaita is a state of Awe, before the insufficient but plausible appearance of Faith, before the sedimented formation of Belief.

In fact, Advaita is not a natural precursor of Faith or Belief.
Advaita is the cursor of Self as Other, Self as none other than Other.

Advaita is not at its core and in its essence, a religious or belief-based concept though Religion, Ideology and Belief are generally its garment. Advaita is and always will be appropriated by religion or ideology or belief to serve the ends of its hierarchies, designed by a few, whose objective, (frequently intentional or unintentional and therefore not necessarily intended to cause harm or cause it), is the exclusion of the Other, the many.

Advaita is reasoned, deliberative perception of Oneness, in a state of Awe.

Advaita is dynamic reasoning in a state of Awe.
Advaita in itself is Oneness, Advaita claims no Other.

To be receptive, contemplative, rigorous and critical is a universal human inclination. As is its indivisible, seamless Other -- to be prescriptive and coercive.
No force can limit, except temporarily, the inclination to be receptive, contemplative, critical, rigorous -- and their seamless opposites -- in living things.

None can claim advaita was the perceptual discovery of any one man or woman, in isolation from others.

Advaita can be called a collective representation, in the Durkheimian sense, of social Selves, to the Self.

Therefore experiences and thoughts about an nondual, indivisible, seamless Consciousness must belong to a collective entity, a shared sociality, that pondered and still does ponder, on Self and Selves, in contexts within and beyond the Universe.

This was earlier done in a time and space, when and where, the Self stood in direct relation to the observable natural world in which earth and universe could be seen to be indivisible and seamless.
To be in direct relation is to be present with no mediating objects and instruments between Self and Universe.
Where the forest existed but no garden.
Where nothing stood, nothing that was built, to obscure the view of Self active and perceptive,contemplative, rigorous and critical, within and Beyond Universe.

At the very core of Advaita is the naive, not primitive, concrete tangible observation that all beings share Breath -- the Breath Eternal.

This Breath has as its seamless Other, the ceasing of Breath and the beginning of the Mystery of Death.
Breath and Death were and are therefore One, inseparable from One (an)Other.

In the discovery of Advaita -- Nonduality -- are to be found the roots of democracy. How? Democracy's prerequisite is the perceptual, discoverable recognition of Nonduality -- that the One is the Other and the Other is the One.

Today is September 11, in the year 2011, a day as pertinent as any other, no more, no less, the assertion of the nonduality of Self and Other, living and dead, killers and killed, destroyers and destroyed.

JKL not J&K: 2 Ladakh Panchayats Press for Name Change of State

2011-09-02T04:59:00.001-07:00

JKL not J&K: 2 Ladakh Panchayats Press for Name Change of State
by Chithra KarunaKaran on Friday, September 2, 2011 at 6:41am

On Sunday July 24, 2011 I sent out an informal verbal invitation to a prominent resident of Mulbekh, Ladakh suggesting a meeting of gram panchayats of Wakha and Mulbekh, shortly after their election following a 31 year lag, mainly due to violent ISI-fed unrest in the Kashmir Valley and the Pak attack on Kargil, not to mention the battle for Siachen. Epic events but ordinary humans find ways to connect with one another with a little help from the nation-state.

I was astonished and moved when all 18 members showed up around noon at the Chang Chup Chosling nunnery where I was staying. The Nunnery served lunch, following the meeting.
Amazing showing, where else can you get that kind of response?

Their presence showed the hunger to develop local representation and recognition, local self-governance and underlined the determination to push for economic equality for the entire Ladakh region, in order to to bring it on a par with Jammu and the Vale of Kashmir. When self-interest meets the collective interest as in this case, then there's hope for progress.

I posted the following news story (see below) to Rising Kashmir which carried an edited version, on a delayed dateline which pissed me off. The story was picked up by Dost Khan of State Times, published from New Delhi.

My Qs. now are:

Will Panchayat power in Ladakh be strong and united enough to gain local support to effect a name change for the State?

Will the name change be merely cosmetic or will the name change usher in genuine economic equality for Ladakhis, with their Kashmiri and Jammuite sisters and brothers?

Will wait see if Wakha and Mulbekh (where I have been working for the past 5 years) can bare their snow leopard teeth and seize the initiative.
================================================================
News article follows:

editor@risingkashmir.com

Attn: Shujaat Bukhari

News exclusive to Rising Kashmir newspaper

Wahka, Ladakh

Dateline: July 24, 2011

Byline: Chithra KarunaKaran

JKL not J&K: Ladakh Demands Economic Equality -- not Discrimination

Mulbekh and Wakha Panchayats Pass Unanimous Resolution to Press for Name Change of State

The newly elected members of the Panchayats of Wakha and Mulbekh in Ladakh region,

in a combined meeting of their respective Sarpanchs and Panchs, 18 in total, voted unanimously by voice vote and provided their signatures (see below), in favor of a resolution to press for recognition and inclusion of Ladakh in the name of the State.

"From now on we want our State to be known as JKL, not J&K." stated a member from Mulbekh after the vote.

In a meeting lasting over two hours, which took place at the Chang Chup Chosling monastery premises here in Wakha, and conducted in a mixture of Ladakhi, English, Urdu and Hindi, the panchayat explained their reasons for passing the resolution.

"Nyachang nya naam inna kyong gis yaphas chyang duk," said a female panch from Mulbekh. Translated: Whenever there is an opportunity, they discriminate against us in every way.

A panchayat member from Wakha, observed:

"Nyachang Ladakhspa gunglang danda yargyas cha gas," (We Ladakhi people want equal development and prosperity like Jammu and Kashmir.")

Following the unanimous passage of the above Resolution, the joint Wakha-Mulbekh Panchayat members engaged in a lively and productive discussion in which they expressed determination to cooperate to develop indigenous resources and products of Ladakh region in order to 1) generate income for Aam Ladakhis and 2) revenue for implementation of panchayat activities on a priority basis.

"We are not paid any salary for our panchayat work, but the Minister may be paid more than Rs. 45,000 per month. Also we are directly responsible to the people. They can see what we do

As examples of developing products from local resources, they spoke about making incense sticks,soap,herbal teas, mosquito repellent from local plants, trees, shrubs, roots and seeds that are unique to the Ladakh region.

Panchayat members discussed the feasibility of raising cash among their members as well as seeking microcredit resources from the State and the Centre.

"We know we can be successful and try to emulate the success of panchayats in advanced states like Kerala."

In particular, some panch members from both Wakha and Mulbekh emphasized the importance of placing women at the forefront of panchayat activities. If women can develop skills based on local knowledge and they earn money, it will benfit their children and their families directly,observed one panch member from Wakha.

Following are the signatories to the unanimous Resolution to rename the state as JKL -- Jammu Kashmir Ladakh. No ifs ands and buts. JKL not J&K.

Mulbekh Panchayat Members:

A.K. Hussain Panch

Padma Yangdol "

Stanzin Namgail "

Mohd. Hussain "

Tsewang Norboo "

Sonam Dolma "

Tsewang Tundup "

Tsering Tundup Sarpanch

Wakha Panchayat Members:

Tsering Kunzes Panch

Tsering Norboo "

Mohd. Murtaza "

Mohd. Ali "

Mohd. Hadi "

Sakina Banoo "

Sonam Tsering "

Haji Mohd. Mussa "

Tsering Stanzin Sarpanch

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

RK newspaper carried the truncated, delayed, byline omitted version below:

I'm posting here the DELAYED, TRUNCATED (note omissions and delayed dateline) Rising Kashmir article, byline omitted:

Headline:
Add Ladakh into J&K’s name:(sic) Panchs of Wakha, Mulbekh urge
Sunday, 07 Aug 2011 at 11:35

Rising Kashmir News
Srinagar, Aug 07: The newly elected members of the Panchayats of Wakha and Mulbekh in Ladakh region,in a combined meeting of their respective Sarpanchs and Panchs, 18 in total, voted unanimously by voice vote and provided their signatures, in favor of a resolution to press for recognition and inclusion of Ladakh in the name of the State.

"From now on we want our State to be known as JKL, not J&K." stated a member from Mulbekh after the vote.

In a meeting lasting over two hours, which took place at the Chang Chup Chosling monastery premises here in Wakha, and conducted in a mixture of Ladakhi, English, Urdu and Hindi, the panchayat explained their reasons for passing the resolution.

“Whenever there is an opportunity, they discriminate against us in every way” said a female panch from Mulbekh.

A panchayat member from Wakha, observed, “We Ladakhi people want equal development and prosperity like Jammu and Kashmir."

Following the unanimous passage of the Resolution, the joint Wakha-Mulbekh Panchayat members engaged in a lively and productive discussion in which they expressed determination to cooperate to develop indigenous resources and products of Ladakh region in order to generate income for Aam Ladakhis and revenue for implementation of panchayat activities on a priority basis.

"We are not paid any salary for our panchayat work, but the Minister may be paid more than Rs. 45,000 per month. Also we are directly responsible to the people.

As examples of developing products from local resources, they spoke about making incense sticks, soap,herbal teas, mosquito repellent from local plants, trees, shrubs, roots and seeds that are unique to the Ladakh region.

Panchayat members discussed the feasibility of raising cash among their members as well as seeking microcredit resources from the State as well as from the Centre.

"We know we can be successul and try to emulate the success of panchayats in advanced states like Kerala."

In particular, some panch members from both Wakha and Mulbekh empasized the importance of placing women at the forefront of panchayat activities. If women can develop skills based on local knowledge and they earn money, it will benfit their children and their families directly,observed one panch member from Wakha.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now here's the pickup from State Times of my news article that was earlier made available by me to Rising Kashmir's editor:

‘From now, call it Jammu Kashmir Ladakh State’

Posted by Administrator on Aug 9th, 2011 and filed under J&k, Page-1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

DOST KHAN
JAMMU: Should the state of Jammu and Kashmir be rechristened as Jammu Kashmir Ladakh, or JKL for the sake of convenience?
Ask Peoples Democratic Party or National Conference, it will serve like a red rag to the bull. But, the truth is that a strong voice has emanated from the Land of Lamas for renaming the state as JKL.
The recently elected Sarpanchs and Panchs of the Panchayats of Wakha and Mulbekh in Ladakh region at a joint meeting have forcefully demanded the State to be named as Jammu Kashmir Ladakh. Eighteen representatives of the two Panchayats have unanimously voted one-line resolution demanding: “From now on we want our State to be known as JKL, not J and K.”
This is departure from the strong demand of the Union Territory status for Ladakh and assertion as an equal partner in the affairs of the State. So, is it a beginning of a new chapter in the State with trouble thrust upon, which a few separatists call their exclusive domain or a few mainstreamed, deeming their fiefdom?
Ladakh is undergoing a subtle transformation with the people getting politically more conscious and reasonably awakened. Unlike the other two regions of the State, the people of Ladakh have developed a unique trait of getting united, irrespective of their party affiliations, when it comes to protecting or projecting the interests of the region.
After discarding the State flag and the emblem, the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council has decided early this year to adopt an insignia, which is almost akin to the National Emblem. By adopting a separate flag and a separate emblem depicting the Ashoka Pillar symbol, the people of Ladakh have, in fact, showed their resentment to the hegemony of Kashmiris over the administration and deprivation of their due in the development and participatory involvement in governing the State.
Dispensing with the State emblem and flag created furor among the ‘mainstreamed’ political parties with the main opposition, People’s Democratic Party reacting sharply and vowing to protect the State’s unique identity and thereby keep it distinctively away from the national mainstream.
The major partner in the State coalition dispensation, National Conference, however, underplayed the development with Chief Minister Omar Abdullah comparing the LAHDC with Srinagar Municipality, saying it too has a different emblem. Omar knows he is willfully downplaying the development which is certainly more than that appears to eyes. LAHDC is in no way just like any other municipality or municipal corporation. They have a mechanism similar to what once used to be in the national capital of Delhi. They have their own protocol and they view the council just like a Legislative Assembly. The Mayor of Srinagar Municipal Corporation or, for that matter, Jammu Municipal Corporation do not unfurl the tricolor on the Independence or Republic Day at the main official functions but in Leh and Kargil Chief Executive Councilors do not only unfurl the flag but also take salute at the march-past. So, saying that the LAHDC is just like SMC is like pretending as an ostrich and let the issue lie on a back burner till the current tenure of governance lasts. PDP has been fighting for the just cause of the people of Kashmir but gets red faced when the other two regions assert their position in the diverse Jammu and Kashmir set up. Jammu has not been assertive as the Ladakh region has emerged lately because Jammu leaders are reconciled with playing the second fiddle to the Kashmiri bosses. They are happy as long as they get small morsels for the province and mouths full for their personal selves, even if these are left overs, for satiating their appetite. But, the people of Ladakh have certainly differentiated themselves from the people of Jammu. Patriots to the core, they have out rightly rejected the cult of gun, shown high degree of self esteem and rebuffed unequivocally non-sense activities against the Indian nation. In fact, Ladakh has remained quite a peaceful region of the turbulent Jammu and Kashmir State since the outbreak of Pak sponsored terrorism.
Reacting to the decision of the LAHDC, Mehbooba Mufti pledged: “PDP will fight any attempt to dilute the special status of Jammu and Kashmir under the Constitution. Leh is part of the State. The emblem controversy is unfortunate.” This is unfortunate- okay- but what about the Self Rule doctrine that almost seeks semi Azadi for the State, presumptuously Jammu and Ladakh included?
Surprisingly, vocal and agile over every issue or non-issue, the separatists have not reacted to this development, perhaps deliberately, as this will shatter their edifice of Greater Kashmir. They have been projecting the entire Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh included, as an occupational land facing the ‘repression’ of India. The world at large has also been misled, or it has preferred to remain ignorant, about the harsh realities in the State. Ladakh has never aligned itself with any movement spearheaded by Kashmiris. In fact, sick of discrimination and step motherly treatment, they have been demanding Union Territory status for the Ladakh region, which is a big rebuff to those seeking Azdai, Autonomy or Self Rule.
It is equally surprising why the larger Indian civil society or peace activities have never thought about the people living across Zojila. If they ever think so, they will be shocked to know that Jammu and Kashmir is not just a city and few towns that demand Azadi, Autonomy or Self Rule. It is a vast land, inhabited by nationalist Gujjars, Paharis, Baltis, Sikhs, Shias, Pandits, Dogras besides a large chunk of Muslims, who are as good compatriots as in any part of India.
[end of State times pickup news article]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: I hope this news exposure and my Blog Twitter and FB will help the panchayts of Wakha and Mulbekh to gain exposure and succeed in accomplishing the name change to JKL. Ladakh exists! Let the name change show it. -- CKK
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Power Struggle among India's Civil Society Activists

2011-06-08T20:47:00.000-07:00

June 2011 marks an interesting and critical point in the development of ethical democracy in India.

While the GoI is blundering badly by authorizing violent police action on a peacefully assembled civil society group in India's capital city, New Delhi, various civil society leaders are fighting for media attention by undertaking proactive and pushback actions against the elected government of Manmohan Singh.

More later because I am on the road in India and trying to reflect on what is unfolding here daily in print and on the airwaves

Disappearing Girls Before They Are Born & After They Arrive: A 2011 Encounter Against Female Innocents

2011-05-18T08:43:00.000-07:00

Disappearing Girls Before They Are Born & After They Arrive: A 2011 ALL-INDIA Encounter Against Female Innocents

Welcome to the Girl Murder Club: Parents in J&K kill their girl fetuses and infants like in every state in India.

In Census India 2011, in the age range 0-6, for every 1,000 boys counted in India, there are 914 girls, down from a ratio of 1,000 to 927 in 2001, and the lowest recorded female sex ratio at birth since Independence. Indian parents are murdering their girls, including in J&K. It's called female foeticide, it's called selective abortion, call it what you will, it's murder most foul, in the vast majority of instances.

In fact,Indian census data gathering system on this point is deficient, because India does not collect data on live births by sex. The Indian patriarchs in the PMO and the Sansad therefore prefer to collude and be complicit in the Indian societal criminal hypocrisy value-system and they prefer to collude in hiding rising girl murder data, from public scrutiny.

Pakistan reportedly does much better than India on ages 0-6 sex ratio, as reportedly do Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, their sex ratio numbers need to be verified.

Indian PATRIARCHY combines with post-feudal agrarian and urban nexus economics and lax criminal law penalties to consistently produce fewer girls than boys in our structurally flawed Civil Society and Democracy.

Only China, a totalitarian nation-state with limited human rights (and Armenia, where correlational data is still forthcoming) are worse than India -- China's one-child policy and sweatshop-nation-to-the-world trajectory of economic growth vs human development has resulted in a worse 2010 sex ratio: 1000 girls for every 1180 boys.

China takes the Girl Murder Gold Medal, India takes Silver. Ok, China and India, play the national anthems of these two Economic Titans as they take a
victory lap around a mountain of female fetuses and dead baby girls.

In China and India, girls lose even before they are born. Shame on China, shame on India, ***shame on both their governments and their PEOPLE***.

Kerala, a much touted model for female empowerment, is not really an exception to the rule of fetal and girl murder.
The 2011 sex ratio in the 0-6 age range in Kerala is 959 girls for every 1000 boys. In 2001, there were 960 female children for every 1,000 male children in the 0-6 age group.
Again, fewer girls are allowed to be born in Kerala just like every place else throughout India.

However once girls are permitted to be born, they have a better chance of surviving in Kerala than anywhere else in India.
Kerala's matrilineal family structures, land and property rights reform, universal healthcare including maternal and child care at the Primary Health Center (PHC) level, girls' and women's education, female paid employment both inside and outside the home and overseas, have combined to produce a sex ratio of 1084 females to every 1000 males in 2011. This is an improvement over the sex ration in 2001 Census which counted 1058 females for every 1000 males.

Girls are murdered because girls are undervalued and even degraded in Indian patriarchy.
Females are murdered because the patriarchal power system favors and rewards males in property rights and land ownership rights, dowry, marriage and marital rights including marital female rape, funeral rites and other customary societal obligations of families and communities.

Here's a conversational phrase in Hindi that bears scrutiny: 'beti paraya dhan hoti hai'...meaning ' a daughter is other's wealth'.

A girl is property, therefore not fully a person like a boy, property that belongs to others.

Again that same phrase in Haryanavi: 'chori dusre ka dhan hovai sai'.
Haryana has one of the most severely skewed female sex ratios in the country with 861 girls to every 1000 boys in the 0-6 age range. It is reported that two of Haryana's villages, Behrana and Dhimana, have ages 0-6 sex ratios of 378 and 444 females per 1000 males, respectively. That's gendercide. It's female murder.

***No matter which religion, patriarchy rules society. PATRIARCHY TRUMPS RELIGION, religion is defeated by patriarchy-based inequality and GIRLS LOSE.***

One of the most criminal and disgraceful features of Indian patriarchal power is the ***MILLION PLUS*** missing girls in our population. This is not a statistical aberration, it is a consistent DECADAL phenomenon throughout most parts of India, including J&K.

Girls don't make it out of the womb.
If girls are born they are more likely to die from neglect. malnutrition and murder than boys. Girls are expendable, girls are disposable.

One of the striking aspects of Indian patriarchal girl-child murder in the womb and between the ages of 0-6 is that such criminal activity on the part of parents, usually colluding with relatives, midwives, doctors and ultrasound technicians, goes largely unpunished.
Q.Where are the laws against fetal and neonatal girl murder?
A. None. Parental murder of girl fetuses and infant girls rarely reaches the court system. Girl murder is hushed up in sex selection clinics, maternity hospitals and homes.

There are many more factors that affect the female sex ratio that I have left undiscussed. India's female foeticide and infant girl murder civil society narrative is more complex than I have been able to address here.

One fact remains. Just being female appears to pose a severe liability from the womb onwards, in all parts of India, including J&K.

Wake up PEOPLE.
Girl Power is People Power.
Allow Girls to be Born.
Allow Girls to Survive & Thrive
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Draft Working version awaiting further data:
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/decline-in-sex-ratio-a-damaging-phenomenon-omar-9901.aspx yesterday
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Disappearing Girls Before They Are Born & After They Arrive: A 2011 Encounter Against Female Innocents

Welcome to the Girl Murder Club: Parents in J&K kill their girl fetuses and infants, like in every state in India.

In Census India 2011, in the age range 0-6, for every 1,000 boys counted in India, there are 914 girls, down from a ratio of 1,000 to 927 in 2001, and now, the lowest recorded female sex ratio at birth since Independence. This means the unpunished crime of girl murder has been around for six decades and counting.

Indian parents, the same ones who visit temples, gurdwaras, mosques, undertake pilgrimages, take vows, make offerings (or not), are murdering their girls.
It's called female foeticide, it's called selective abortion, it's called gendercide, call it what you will, it's murder most foul, in the vast majority of instances.

In fact, Indian census data gathering is (intentionally?) deficient on this particular issue, because our census does not collect data on live births by sex.
The Indian patriarchs in the Sansad therefore prefer to collude and be complicit in Indian societal hypocrisy and they prefer to collude in hiding girl murder from public scrutiny. It is state-sanctioned girl murder since parental murder of girl fetuses, neonates and girl children is not criminalized.

Pakistan reportedly does much better than India on ages 0-6 sex ratio, as reportedly do Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, and their respective sex ratio numbers at birth and in the 0-6 age range need to be verified, before they can be included here.

Indian PATRIARCHY combines with post-feudal agrarian-urban nexus economics and lax criminal law penalties to consistently produce disproportionaly fewer girls than boys in our structurally flawed civil society and democracy.

One of the most criminal and disgraceful features of Indian patriarchal power is the ***millions*** of missing girls in our population. This is not a statistical aberration, it is a consistent phenomenon throughout most parts of India, including J&K.

Only China, a totalitarian nation-state with limited individual human rights (and Armenia in second place, a country case that needs further probing) are worse than India.

China's one-child policy and sweatshop-nation-to-the-world trajectory of economic growth vs human development has resulted in a worse 2010 sex ratio than India: 1000 girls for every 1180 boys.

China takes the Girl Murder Gold Medal, India takes Silver. Ok, China and India, go
ahead, play the national anthems of these two economic titans as they take a
victory lap around an ever-increasing mountain of female fetuses and dead baby girls.

In China and India, girls lose even before they are born. Shame on China, shame on India, ***shame on both their governments and their PEOPLE***. Especially shame on India, because it claims to be a democracy committed to HUMAN RIGHTS.

Q. What about protecting the human rights of female fetuses, neonates and infants?

Kerala, a much touted model for female empowerment, is not an exception to the India-wide rule of fetal, neonatal and infant girl murder.
The 2011 sex ratio in the 0-6 age range in Kerala is 959 girls for every 1000 boys. In 2001, there were 960 female children for every 1,000 male children in the 0-6 age group.
Again, fewer girls are allowed to be born in Kerala just like in every place else throughout India.

However once girls are permitted to be born, they have a better chance of surviving in Kerala than anywhere else in India.
Kerala's traditional matrilineal family structures, land and property rights reform, universal healthcare including maternal and child care at the Primary Health Center (PHC) level, girls' and women's education, female paid employment both inside and outside the home and overseas, have combined to produce a sex ratio of 1084 females to every 1000 males in 2011. This is a significant improvement over the sex ratio in the 2001 Census which counted 1058 females for every 1000 males. But it doesn't change the disheartening 0-6 sex ratio stat in Kerala.

Girls are murdered because girls are undervalued and even degraded in Indian patriarchy.
Females, especially the most vulnerable, are murdered because the patriarchal POWER SYSTEM favors and rewards males in property rights and land ownership rights, dowry, marriage and marital rights including marital female rape, funeral rites and other customary societal obligations of individuals, families and communities.

Here's a conversational phrase in Hindi that bears scrutiny: 'beti paraya dhan hoti hai'...meaning ' a daughter is other's wealth'.

A girl is property, therefore not fully a person like a boy, property that belongs to others.

Again that same phrase in Haryanavi: 'chori dusre ka dhan hovai sai'.
Haryana has one of the most severely skewed female sex ratios in the country with 861 girls to every 1000 boys in the 0-6 age range. It is reported that Two of Haryana's villages, Behrana and Dhimana, have ages 0-6 sex ratios of 378 and 444 per 1000 males, respectively. That's gendercide.

***No matter which religion, patriarchy rules society. Patriarchy trumps religion, religion is defeated by patriarchy-based inequality and girls lose.***

Girls don't make it out of the womb.
If girls are born they are more likely to die from neglect. malnutrition and murder than boys. Girls are expendable, girls are disposable.

One of the striking aspects of girl-child murder in the womb and between the ages of 0-6 is that such criminal activity on the part of parents, usually colluding with relatives, midwives, doctors and ultrasound technicians goes largely unpunished. Parental murder of girl fetuses and infant girls rarely, if ever reaches the court system. Girl murder is hushed up in sex selection clinics, maternity hospitals and homes.

There are many more factors that are implicated in the female sex ratio data that I have left undiscussed and more interrelated societal and political and economic factors certainly need to be discussed.

Our female foeticide and infant girl murder civil society narrative is more complex than I have been able to address here.

Yes we in India need to undertake a PUBLIC conversation on girl murder.

Today, one fact remains. Just being female appears to continue to pose a severe liability from the womb onwards, (with certain intra-national disparities), in all parts of India.

Wake up PEOPLE.
Girl Power is People Power.
Allow Girls to be Born.
Allow Girls to Survive & Thrive
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.iitrade.ac.in/kmarticle.asp?id=437
WTO copyright

Census 2011: India's population increased by 181 million; child sex ratio worst since independence

Category: Global Economy Sub-category: Indian Economy
Document type: news

31-Mar-2011

Census 2011India's population rose to 1.21 billion people over the last 10 years, an increase of 181 million; however, it is significant to note that the growth has been slower for the first time in nine decades.

According to the provisional Census report, 2011, India's headcount is almost equal to the combined population of the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Japan put together.

Interestingly, the addition of 181 million in population during 2001-2011 is slightly lower than the total population of Brazil, the fifth most populous country in the world.

The country's population, accounting for 17.5% of the world's population, comprises 623.7 million males and 586.5 million females. China is the most populous nation of the globe accounting for 19.4% of the total global population. The report said that the population has increased by about 181 million during the decade 2001-2011. In 2011, the growth rate is 17.64%, in contrast to 21.15% in 2001.

The 2001-2011 period is the first decade--with the exception of 1911-1921--which has actually added lesser population compared to the previous decade, Registrar General of India and Census Commissioner of India C Chandramauli said in presence of Home Secretary Gopal K Pillai.

Among the states and union territories, Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state with 199 million people and Lakshadweep the least populated at 64,429. Apart from UP, other most populous states are - Maharashtra (112.3 million), Bihar (103.8 million), West Bengal (91.3 million) and Andhra Pradesh (84.6 million). The combined population of UP and Maharashtra is more than that of the U.S. Besides Lakshadweep, smallest UTs and states are - Daman and Diu (2,42,911), Dadra and Nagar Haveli (3,42,853), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (7,79,944) and Sikkim (6,07,688).

The highest population density is in Delhi's north-east district (37,346 per sq. km) while the lowest is in Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh (just one per sq. km).

The Census indicated a continuing preference for male children over female children. The latest child sex ratio in is 914 female against 1,000 male-the lowest since Independence. On a positive note, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Mizoram and Andaman and Nicobar Islands have recorded an increasing trend in the child sex ratio (0-6 years). The highest child sex ratio is in Mizoram (971 females against 1000 males) and Meghalaya (970). However, Haryana (830), and Punjab (846), despite the improvement, are the bottom two states in 0-6 years' sex ratio.

The total number of children in the age group of 0-6 is 158.8 million - five million less since 2001.

Literacy RateAccording to the data, literates constitute 74% of the total population aged seven and above and illiterates form 26%. The literacy rate has gone up from 64.83% in 2001 to 74.04% in 2011, increase of 9.21%. During 2001-2011, literacy rate of males is 82.14% and of females is 65.46%. In 2001, the male literacy rate was 75.26% and female 53.67%.

Among the states and UTs, literacy rate in Kerala is highest - 93.91%, followed by Lakshadweep (92.28%) while lowest is in Bihar (63.82%) followed by Arunachal Pradesh (66.95%).

Mizoram's two districts - Serchhip (98.76%) and Aizawl (98.50%) have recorded highest literacy rates while Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district (37.22%) and Chhattisgarh's Bijapur district (41.58%) recorded lowest literacy rates.

The Census 2011 is the 15th census of India since 1872 and conducted in two phases--house-listing and housing census (April to September 2010) and population enumeration (February 9 to 28, 2011).

The Census covered all 35 states and UTs and cost Rs. 2,200 crore. 27 lakh enumerators were involved in the exercise where 8,000 metric tonnes of paper and 10,500 metric tonnes of material moved.

HIGHLIGHTS

o India's current population -- 1.21 billion

o Increase in population -- 181 million

o India's population as a percentage of world's population -- 17.5%

o Most populous state in India -- Uttar Pradesh

o Least populated among states and Union Territories -- Lakshadweep

o Highest Population Density -- Delhi's North-East District

o Lowest Population Density -- Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh

o Latest child sex ratio -- 914 female against 1000 male

o Highest child sex ratio -- Mizoram

o Lowest child sex ratio --Punjab

o Total literate population (aged seven and above) -- 74%

o Literacy of males -- 82.14%

o Literacy of females -- 65.46%

o State with highest literacy rate -- Kerala

o State with lowest literacy rate -- Bihar

Child Sex Ratio
Image Source: The Wall Street Journal

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http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/02/27/blowing-the-statistics/
Commentary Magazine copyright
Contentions
Blowing the Statistics
John Steele Gordon 02.27.2011 - 12:45 PM

Charles Blow in his New York Times column yesterday decried the fact that the United States ranks last among 33 developed countries in infant mortality. His solution — prepare to be shocked — is to reverse Republican proposed budget cuts for various government programs that deal with premature-birth and neonatal care. The column, which seems to be a reworked press release from the March of Dimes, contrasts Republican opposition to abortion with that party’s apparent indifference to newborn life, as evidenced by the budget cuts.

But how bad are the statistics really? That’s a good question that would take a lot of statistical horsepower to answer, if it’s even possible to do in a world where many countries quietly cook the books to make themselves look better. But had Mr. Blow dug deep in his research for the column — by, say, clicking on Infant Mortality in Wikipedia — he would have found that, while there is a standard definition of infant mortality from the World Health Organization (voluntary muscle contraction, a heart beat, or attempts to breathe spontaneously), many countries play fast and loose with it. The old Soviet Union, for instance, did not count as live births very premature babies who failed to survive for seven full days. France, the Netherlands, and other European countries don’t count as live births babies who weigh less than 500 grams or had less than 22 weeks of gestation. They are, instead, counted as stillbirths. Japan and Hong Kong, it seems, count babies that are almost a year old when they die as having lived a year and, thus, not an infant mortality.

So perhaps at least part of the reason for the low ranking of the United States with regard to infant mortality is that, in this country, we actually try to save premature and low-birth-weight babies rather than just chalk them up to stillbirths to make our numbers look good.
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IMF Luxury vs. Global South Poverty: The Strauss-Kahn Instance

2011-05-16T07:23:00.000-07:00

As we speak, IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn today 05/16 denied $1M bail in New York Criminal Court and remanded to police custody.

But what's the real story? IMF Luxury vs. Global South Poverty
What's the story within that story?

That a WORKER is equal to an IMF chief under the U.S. Rule of Law. Let the courts decide.

Yeah he's famous, yeah he's powerful, yeah he's highly competent at his job, yeah he was accused by the IMF board of a "serious error of judgment for engaging in consensual sexual relations with a female subordinate employee of IMF, yeah he's an alleged rapist of a hotel cleaning women, but he's head of IMF. So let's look deep into the IMF, its power elite structure, its Wall of Silence, its male-dominant, patriarchal Privilege system,

Yeah, she's a female, a hotel cleaning woman, a low-wage worker.

Let the evidence speak. This is not merely a case of he said she said. There's forensic evidence. DNA. Not opinion, but EVIDENCE & PROOF. Talk is cheap, DATA SPEAKS.

The mainstream news media on its 24/7 cycle frequently fails to get beyond the headlines. The IMF chief bureaucrat Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged rape assualt of a hotel maid is a case in point.
On CNN and other mainstream media overlords of the 24/7 news cycle, there's an endless regurgitation of the absolute same facts, allegations, innuendos, interviews with a multitude of talking heads, minute after minute, to keep especially TV and computer viewers hooked until their eyes and minds glaze over. That's the objective. To stop The People from thinking. To have the media do the thinking and the superficial fact-gathering for The People.

Strauss-Kahn, appearing dour-faced with a dark coat covering his handcuffed wrists, detectives on either side, holding his arms, is due to appear in court this morning and at that time the results of forensic data will be released in front of the judge hearing the case.
On this second day of the IMF head Strauss-Kahn's arrest by the NYPD after he was plucked from a seat in first class Air France, not even ONE news story has made even passing mention of the power elites at the IMF and their high rolling lifestyle, compared with the poor in the countries of the Global South.

The stark comparison is evident. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was reported to be "on private business" in New York. Did the IMF pick up the tab for his private visit to New York? Did he pay his own bill out of his own pocket. The facts await. Strauss-Kahn had a palatial $3000-a-night suite at the Sofitel Hotel, minutes from Times Square.

Whether or not IMF picked up his hotel and meals tab, is this the style to which IMF bureaucrats should become accustomed? Even if it is his own money, how does he stay in touch with the needs of poor people in Sierra Leone and Togo? By affecting a lifestyle that is unrecognizable by these poor people?

The lofty IMF has to set a standard of austerity and connectedness with the people it serves. If an alleged rape of a hotel maid, a WORKER, can teach the mighty IMF that its exalted bureaucrats can be brought face to face with ground reality, a reality of poverty, rape and faced every day especially by the female poor of the Global South, then this horrific instance in a luxury hotel in New York may serve as a sobering, valuable wake up call for the power elites of the IMF.
More likely not.
Unless We the People speak up.

Power Corrupts.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.
----------------------
Reuters Copyright
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/16/us-strausskahn-arrest-idUSTRE74D29F20110516
At scandal-hit IMF, HQ staff is stoic and silent

Related News

French woman may file Strauss-Kahn sex complaint
11:43am EDT
Sex, lies and the reckless choices of the powerful
6:18am EDT
WRAPUP 18-Handcuffed IMF chief charged in sex assault case
3:00am EDT
Analysis: IMF chief's arrest may speed up succession battle
Sun, May 15 2011
France in shock as IMF chief charged with sex assault
Sun, May 15 2011

Analysis & Opinion

Strauss-Kahn allegations are consequential for the global economy
Strauss-Kahn scandal: presidential hopes are all but dead

By Margaret Chadbourn

WASHINGTON | Mon May 16, 2011 1:32pm EDT

(Reuters) - With a downward gaze and a brisk walk past the line of camera crews, International Monetary Fund staff stoically reported for work on Monday after their charismatic boss landed in jail on sex charges.

The IMF told workers in a mass e-mail on Sunday to avoid talking to the media about Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest in New York on Saturday for attempted rape of a hotel maid, employees said.

The few who did break the rule of silence outside the headquarters, located blocks from the White House, expressed some shock and regret, but said that they, the rank and file, needed to concentrate on the institution's work while the upper echelon managed the upheaval.

"It was shocking when I found out what happened this weekend," said an IMF employee who would not provide his name. "But we all have to come into work today. Everyone is expected to show up like nothing happened."

Strauss-Kahn steered the 187-member-nation IMF through the 2007-09 global financial crisis and was central in handling the escalating euro-zone debt crisis. He was also considered a front-runner in next year's French presidential election.

The fund's No. 2 official, John Lipsky, is acting as managing director during Strauss-Kahn's absence.

It is not the first time Strauss-Kahn's character has come under scrutiny. In 2008, the IMF board cleared him of abuse of power over a brief affair he had with a female IMF economist, but warned him against any further misconduct. Strauss-Kahn on that occasion apologized publicly for an "error in judgment."

But this time, the more serious charges against Strauss-Kahn may force the world's power brokers into a frantic search for his replacement.

"His time might have just expired," said Patricia Capers, 52, who works in the Office of Personnel at the IMF.

"It is unfortunate he was accused of sexual misconduct, and from what I've heard, it seems like he has done it before," she added. "I can't condemn it until all the facts are there, he is tried in court, but people in power should show greater control and restraint."

The fund itself might have to answer to criticism that it was too soft on the managing director in its handling of the 2008 affair.

"The board ought to be pretty ashamed of themselves at this point. The board let him off with a slap of the wrist before and now we've seen allegations of a much more serious offense," Terry Miller, former U.S. assistant secretary of state, told Reuters Insider.

(Editing by Mary Milliken and Eric Beech)
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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2011/05/17/2011-05-17_us_justice_will_be_served_maids_kin.html
The US is stated to pay 17% of IMF's budget
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copyright
http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-438435

UN says World Bank and IMF “bound by international law”
News|Bretton Woods Project|21 November 2005|update 48|url
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Bold statements made by the UN special rapporteur on the right to food argue that international law is binding on organisations such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO. In his September interim report to the UN General Assembly, Jean Ziegler analyses negative impacts of the policies of the World Bank and IMF on the human rights of vulnerable populations in the South. Given that the power of nation-states is often "eclipsed by other actors", the traditional boundaries of human rights to regulate the power of other international actors such as the BWIs should be extended, and systematically elaborated.

Ziegler analyses the current crisis in Niger (see Update47), which he attributes in part to the market-based paradigm imposed by the World Bank and IMF, including cost-recovery policies in health centres, and the privatisation of public services. Ziegler also refers to large projects that have resulted in human rights violations stemming from forced displacement and involuntary resettlement. For instance, the Kedung Ombo dam in Indonesia led to 12,000 people losing their land and livelihoods; while the Bank's internal Inspection Panel recommendations for compensation and rehabilitation of those affected by a coal-mine in Jharkhand, India, were largely ignored.

The analysis is also extended to the far-reaching impacts of structural adjustment and PRSPs, which "far from improving food security for the most vulnerable, have often resulted in a deterioration of food security among the poorest". He uses case studies in Zambia and India to illustrate how such WB/IMF-imposed measures to drastically cut public spending, liberalise trade, and 'flexibilise' land, labour and financial markets has violated economic, social and cultural rights.

He premises that "the programmes of economic reform imposed by IMF and World Bank in indebted countries have a profound and direct influence on the situation of the right to food and food security".

The report challenges the Bank and Fund's denial of their human rights responsibilities, including the claim that they are restricted by their articles of agreement. The Bank and Fund's claim that they are organisations not states overlooks the widely recognised view that human rights find their source not only in treaties, but also in customary law. The obligation to realise the right to adequate food has become part of customary international law, given the almost universal ratification of treaties that contain it. Furthermore most member states of these institutions have ratified at least one human rights treaty in which the right to food is contained.
With power must come responsibility

Ziegler suggests that in order to fully comply with their obligations under the right to food, international organisations must "respect, protect and support the fulfilment of the right to food by their member states". He concludes that the Bank and Fund should at least recognise their minimum obligation to refrain from promoting policies or projects that negatively impact the right to food, particularly where no social safety nets are implemented. Lastly, they should also recognise positive obligations by ensuring that those they sponsor do not violate the right to food in the implementation of common projects, and should support governments in the fulfilment of the right to food.
Related articles

IMF accused of exacerbating famine in Niger News|Bretton Woods Project|12 September 2005|update 47|url

The IMF's external relations department has spent the last two months furiously rebuffing charges that the Fund has exacerbated famine in Niger. The debate centres around the impact of structural adjustment measures and accusations that donors initially refused to allow the government to distribute free food to affected areas. read article...

Related resources

UN special rapporteur on the right to food Resource|United Nations|14 November 2005|Web page|URL

Home page of the UN special rapporteur on the right to food
Overview of the mandate of key UN special rapporteurs on economic, social and cultural rights Resource|ESCR-net|14 November 2005|Web page|URL

Overview of the mandate of key UN special rapporteurs on economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to food, health, education and housing.

This text may be freely used providing the source is credited.

This page is:

Published: Monday 21st November 2005, last edited: Thursday 27th May 2010
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_strausskahn_indictment

Former IMF chief Strauss-Kahn gets bail in sex assault case
Reuters

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn stands before the judge as he appears in Manhattan Criminal Court for his arraignment in New York Reuters – International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn stands before the judge as he appears …
By Basil Katz and Lesley Wroughton – Thu May 19, 8:13 pm ET

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Dominique Strauss-Kahn won bail on Thursday but faced one more night in a New York jail, hours after he quit as head of the IMF under the cloud of sex crime charges.

His resignation intensified a race for global finance's top job. It has gone to Europe for 65 years and the favorite is now French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde but fast-growing developing economies want to put up their own candidate.

A judge granted Strauss-Kahn $1 million bail and ordered him to be detained in a New York apartment. He will be subject to electronic monitoring under the watch of an armed guard, costing him $200,000 a month, a prosecutor estimated.

Prosecutors argued vehemently the French national should remain behind bars, calling him a flight risk.

"The defendant in this case has shown a propensity for impulsive criminal conduct," said prosecutor John McConnell.

He said the hotel maid who accused Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her on Saturday, a 32-year-old immigrant from Guinea, had told a "compelling and unwavering story."

Strauss-Kahn denies the charges and his lawyers say he will plead not guilty. His bail package was due to be signed on Friday and an arraignment hearing, when he will formally answer the charges, was set for June 6.

The case represents a spectacular fall from grace for a man held in high esteem for his role in tackling the financial crisis of 2007-09 and being central to ongoing efforts to keep Europe's debt crisis under control.

Dressed in a blue shirt and gray jacket, Strauss-Kahn looked tired and whispered occasionally to his lawyer during Thursday's proceedings. He was flanked by seven guards as his wife and one of his daughters watched from the public gallery.

The charges that Strauss-Kahn tried to rape the maid and committed other sex offenses, plus the prospect of a lengthy legal process, have ruined his once strong-looking chances of winning France's presidential election next year.

One of his attorneys denied he would flee.

"I have to say that the prospect of Mr. Strauss-Kahn teleporting himself to France and living there as an accused sex offender, fugitive, is ludicrous on its face," lawyer William Taylor told the judge.

"He is an honorable man ... He has only one interest at this time and that is to clear his name."

In his resignation letter, composed at New York's notorious Rikers Island jail and released by the International Monetary Fund overnight, Strauss-Kahn vowed to fight the charges.

"I deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations that have been made against me," he wrote.

A trial could be six months or more away. If convicted, he could face 25 years in prison.

A senior source at the IMF said Strauss-Kahn had tendered his resignation as managing director of his own accord. "He wasn't strong-armed," a source familiar with the events said.

One Strauss-Kahn attorney, Benjamin Brafman, has said the evidence "will not be consistent with a forcible encounter."

A lawyer for the alleged victim, who has gone into hiding to avoid media attention, told Reuters she opposed bail.

"The idea that the man who did this to her is now on the street, so to speak, and able to do what he wants to do in the world is something which is frightening to her," attorney Jeffrey Shapiro said.

LAGARDE EMERGES AS IMF FAVORITE

Lagarde emerged as the favorite to take over the IMF leadership even as China and other nations stepped up a challenge to Europe's grip on the job.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called for an "open process that leads to a prompt succession," although sources in Washington said the United States, the IMF's biggest financial contributor, would back a European for the post.

The crisis at the IMF comes at a sensitive time given its role in helping euro zone states such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal deal with huge debt problems. Europeans argue that shows why it makes sense for them to retain the post.

"The tradition can be changed but not now," said Herman Van Rompuy, who as president of the European Council represents the European Union's member countries.

The succession issue will probably be discussed at a summit of Group of Eight leaders in France next week. Together, the United States and European nations hold more than 50 percent of the IMF's voting power, giving them say over who leads it.

A Reuters poll of economists showed 32 of 56 think Lagarde is most likely to succeed Strauss-Kahn.

The prime ministers of Italy and Luxembourg publicly backed her on Thursday. Diplomats said she also had backing from France, Germany and Britain, Europe's three biggest economies.

"If the Europeans very strongly endorse Lagarde, that will help, whereas I'm not sure the developing countries will coalesce around one person," said Stephany Griffith-Jones, financial markets program director at Columbia University.

Lagarde is a fluent English speaker and has experience of balancing the demands of rich and developing countries because France is chair of the Group of 20 nations this year.

She was expected to get U.S. backing, not least because Washington wants to keep the number two IMF job and the leadership of the World Bank, the Fund's sister organization.

In veiled warnings against another U.S.-European stitch-up, China and Japan both called for an open, transparent process to choose a successor on merit. Canada agreed but conceded that a European was likely to get it, a government official said.

Lagarde, 55, declined to say if she was interested but told reporters: "Any candidacy, whichever it is, must come from Europeans jointly, all together."

Several European diplomats said she had been quietly canvassing support in the expectation that Strauss-Kahn would stand down within weeks to run for the French presidency.

A former head of the U.S. law firm Baker & McKenzie in Chicago before joining the French government in 2005, Lagarde is also under something of a legal cloud herself.

A French public prosecutor recommended this month she be investigated over an arbitration case involving businessman and former politician Bernard Tapie. Judges are expected to decide in mid-June whether to order a full-scale inquiry.

One non-European candidate could be former Turkish Economy Minister Kemal Dervis, 62, an economist with IMF experience.

In a poll released in France on Wednesday, 57 percent of respondents thought Strauss-Kahn, a Socialist politician, was definitely or probably the victim of a plot.

But French politics has moved on to the search for a challenger to unpopular conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy next year. Former Socialist leader Francois Hollande is now the center-left front-runner but party leader Martine Aubry is under pressure to enter a Socialist primary.

(Additional reporting by Emily Kaiser in Singapore, Tetsushi Kajimoto in Tokyo, Sam Cage and Andreas Rinke in Berlin, Elizabeth Pineau in Paris, David Milliken in London, David Morgan and Mark Felsenthal in Washington, Noeleen Walder and Mark Hosenball in New York, John O'Donnell in Brussels; Writing by William Schomberg, Matt Daily and Paul Taylor; Editing by John O'Callaghan)
___________________________________________________________________________________

Outrageously Fine Political Satire: Pak's Nadeem Paracha

2011-05-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Outrageously Fine Political Satire by Pakistan's Nadeem Paracha
by Chithra KarunaKaran on Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 11:44am

Paracha is arguably sharper at political satire than Jon Stewart, leaves Colbert in the dust. Paracha has the edge on both.

So long as people like Paracha can be heard in Pakistan, that's good news for ALL Pakistanis, for ALL South Asians.

Thanks Nadeem for being funny and sharp at the same time.

Chithra Karunakaran
see below, Dawn.com copyright
===============================================

Dawn.com copyright

Extra! Extra! Mullah Omar arrested in Pakistan

by Nadeem F. Paracha on May 13th, 2011 | Comments (64)

ISLAMABAD: In a daring raid, Saudi Special Forces arrested renegade Afghan leader, Mullah Omar, from a famous five-star hotel located in one of Pakistan’s most popular vacation spots – Bhurban.

The news spread like wildfire and people were seen cursing the Pakistani government for allowing the Americans to undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty – again.

However, when it became clear that the raid was not conducted by the Americans but the Saudis, the frowns turned into smiles and many were heard saying, ‘Jazzakallah!’

Only minutes after the raid, Pakistan’s prime minister and Army Chief appeared on state-owned television and congratulated the nation and thanked the Saudi regime for helping Pakistan in its war against terror.

Interestingly, religious parties like Jamaat-i-Islami, (JI) Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) and some banned sectarian organisations, along with Imran Khan’s Pakistan Thereek-i-Insaf (PTI) which had originally called a joint press conference to condemn the raid, changed their stance half-way through the conference when told that the raid was by Saudi forces and not the Americans.

Munawar Hussain, JI, chief, was first heard lambasting Pakistan’s PPP-led civilian government for letting the country’s sovereignty be violated by the Americans, but after a reporter confirmed that the raid was executed by Saudi forces, Munawar turned to Imran Khan and embraced him.

‘Mahshallah!’ he exclaimed. “Today is a glorious day for our Islamic republic!”

Imran Khan and JUI chief Fazalur Rehman had earlier questioned the real identity of the man arrested from the five-star hotel, saying that even if it was Mullah Omar, we should be ashamed because Omar was a freedom fighter, conducting a liberation war against the Americans.

However, after it became clear that the arrest was made by Saudi forces, both Imran and Fazal then claimed that Mullah Omar was no friend of Pakistan and that he was not even a Muslim.

In a joint statement, JI, JUI and PTI, congratulated the nation and said that they had been saying all along that the Taliban were Pakistan’s greatest enemies and should be exterminated.

The statement also said that the PTI and JI will continue to hold sit-ins against American drones which were parachuting evil men like Mullah Omar into Pakistan and violating the sovereignty of the country. For this, the statement suggested, that Ahmad Shah Abdali should be invited to invade Pakistan and defeat the Americans.

When told that Abdali died almost two hundred years ago, PTI and JI termed this to be nothing more than western propaganda.

Imran Khan added, that from now on he should be addressed as Imran of Ghaznavi and that one of Pakistan’s most prominent revolutionary and youngest nuclear physicists, Zohair Toru, was building anti-drone missiles.

Toru, who was also present at the conference, confirmed this while licking a lemon flavoured popsicle. He said it was a very hot day and popsicles helped him concentrate.

Meanwhile, a military spokesman also held a press conference to give the media a briefing on the details of the raid.

He said the raid was executed by Saudi Special Forces who came from Saudi military bases in Riyadh.

The helicopters then landed on Margala Hills in Islamabad. On the lush hills, Saudi soldiers disembarked from the copters, got on camels and rode all the way to Bhurban in broad daylight.

They were twice stopped at checkpoints by Pakistani Rangers but were allowed to cross when some Saudi soldiers said something to the rangers in Arabic. It is believed that the Saudis promised the Rangers jobs in Saudi Arabia.

An eyewitness claims the Rangers smiled and waved to the departing camels, cheering ‘marhaba, marhaba.’

The camel army reached the five-star hotel in Bhurban at 11:00 am and right away rode their way into the sprawling premises.

The camels were also carrying rocket launchers, sub-machineguns, pistols, grenades and popcorn, all concealed in large ‘Dubai Duty Free’ shopping bags.

The military spokesman added that although the Pakistan Army had no clue about the raid, there were a dozen or so Pakistani military personnel present at the hotel.

When asked whether these men questioned the camel riders, the spokesman said that they did see the armed camels enter the hotel but the military men were at the time more interested in interrogating a 77-year-old Caucasian male whom they had arrested for smoking in a non-smoking area.

“After the Abbottabad incident, we are keeping a firm eye on Europeans and Americans,” the spokesman said.

Even though the white man turned out to be an old Polish tourist, the spokesman praised the military men’s vigilance. “Our country’s sovereignty is sacred,” he added.

According to the Pakistan military, the Saudis then rode their camels into one of the hotel’s kitchens and fired teargas shells.

This way they smoked out the chefs and their staff out into the open. From these, a Saudi commander got hold of a one-eyed chef with an untidy beard.

The Saudi commander looked at the chef and compared his face to a photograph he was carrying. He asked: ‘Al-Mullah-ul-Omar?’ To which the chef was reported to have said: “No, al-chicken jalfrezi. Also make very tasty mutton kebabs.”

The commander then asked, ‘Al-Afghani?’ to which the chef said, “Yes make Afghani tikka too. You want?”

A reporter asked the military spokesman whether the Pakistani military men present at the hotel witnessed the operation. The spokesman answered in affirmative but said they didn’t take any action after confirming that Pakistan’s sovereignty was not being violated.

The reporter then asked how the military men determined that Pakistan’s sovereignty was not being violated. Answering this, the spokesman said that since the camel riders were speaking Arabic there was thus no reason for the military to charge them with violating Pakistan’s sovereignty.

This statement made the media men at the press conference very happy and they consequently began applauding and raising emotional slogans praising Islam, ISI and palm trees.

Soon after the announcement that Mullah Omar was arrested by Saudi forces, the country’s private TV channels became animated. One famous TV talk-show host actually decided to host his show in a Bedouin tent. Instead of a chair, he sat on a camel wearing a Pakistan Army uniform.

Though most of his guests — that included prominent ex-generals, clergymen and strategic analysts — praised the operation and heaped scorn at Mullah Omar, there was one guest, a small-time journalist, who disagreed with the panelists.

He asked how a wanted man like Mullah Omar was able to live in Pakistan undetected and that too while working as a chef in a famous five-star hotel. He also said that Mullah Omar had also been appearing on various cooking shows as a chef on various food channels.

To this, the host snubbed the journalist telling him that he was asking irrelevant questions.

‘But before this operation, everyone was supporting the Taliban and telling us they were fighting a liberation war against the Americans,’ the journalist protested.

‘No,’ said the host, ‘it was the civilian government that was in cahoots with the Taliban. It should resign.’

‘No,’ the journalist replied, ‘it was our agencies!’

This made the host angry and he slapped the journalist. He threatened the journalist by saying that he would lodge a case against him in accordance with the Islamic hudood ordinance.

The journalist responded by saying that the Saudis had violated Pakistan’s sovereignty. Hearing this, the host slapped the journalist again, saying he will get him booked for blasphemy.

At the end of the show the host and the panelists burned an American flag and sang the Pakistani national anthem in Arabic. Then, after handing over the treacherous journalist to the authorities, they proceeded to Saudi Arabia to perform hajj.

However, they were soon deported by the Saudi regime for violating Saudi sovereignty.

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.
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A Corrupt Congress: Bribe-based vs Ethics Based Lobbying

2011-05-10T04:25:00.000-07:00

One example of the neo-imperial lie is one that the US has invented, under cover of the overarching BIG Lie

Free Market Democracy -- the Lobby System.

Lobbyists rule Congress.

The rights of individual Americans, are largely and almost exclusively negotiated by lobbyists, not by the individuals themselves. The lobby system has overtaken the will and consequently the rights of the American People.

The lie is that US govt is clean government.

Wrong.

This is a lie that is believed by those of us living in post-colonial democracies of the Global South. By this I don't mean the lie is believed by our own homegrown post-feudal government elites,( who are in collusion with US govt, corporate and military elites). I mean the big lie that US Govt. is clean government and that the US govt is pro-people, is a lie believed by our people in the Global South.

We the People believe that the US govt. looks out for its own citizens by upholding civil society individual rights and liberties. Wrong!

Of course US democracy, in 235 years, has gradually created multiple spaces within which individuals and groups can exercise rights and privileges. The US rights-based model locates rights in the individual.

Recently, the US Supreme Court declared Corporations to be persons! Therefore lobbies are persons. PACs are persons. Therefore they have rights, just like you and me. Corporations are People!

Here's one unanticipated but totally predictable consequence:

American Lawyer Copyright

Pakistan Taps Locke Lord Strategies for Lobbying Work Following Bin Laden Fallout

Brian Baxter
The American Lawyer

May 09, 2011

Pakistan has launched an aggressive lobbying effort led by Locke Lord Strategies to keep open a U.S. pipeline of billions in aid after al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed on Sunday.

Reuters reports that Locke Lord Strategies -- the lobbying arm of Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell -- has been retained by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to fight accusations that Islamabad was complicit in giving refuge to bin Laden in a compound 50 miles outside of the country's capital city and adjacent to its national military academy.

Locke Lord partner Mark Siegel told Reuters that he has spoken twice with Zardari since U.S. special forces killed bin Laden, and "countless" times to the country's ambassador in Washington, D.C., Husain Haqqani. Siegel said that his clients "are certainly concerned" about suggestions that the Pakistani government knew all along about bin Laden's whereabouts, but that there was no proof that a support system for the al-Qaida leader "was government-based."

Locke Lord has a long relationship with Pakistan and its current leaders. The Am Law Daily reported in February on Zardari's hire of Locke Lord and Siegel for a possible libel suit against Jang Media Group over a story by the Pakistani publisher about the president's marital status. Zardari's late wife, former Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, was killed in a terrorist attack in December 2007.

Mark Siegel served as a speechwriter to Bhutto, a former Pakistani prime minister, for nearly 25 years, according to a press release put out by Locke Lord two years ago announcing the firm's hire by Pakistan for U.S. lobbying work. Locke Lord said in a statement to The Am Law Daily on Friday that the firm represented Bhutto before she was assassinated "at the hands of whom many believe was Al Qaeda" and thereafter the Pakistani government and Zardari.

"Locke Lord is continuing to assist President Zardari in his efforts to work with the [U.S.] to combat global terrorism and to establish a more stable and prosperous Pakistan," said the firm, noting that many prominent U.S. politicians consider the country to be an important ally of the U.S. in counterterrorism efforts.

Reuters reports that Locke Lord is paid $75,000 per month by Pakistan and has earned nearly $2 million since being retained by the country two years ago. Records on file under the U.S. government's Foreign Agents Registration Act show that Locke Lord also does work for Pakistan International Airlines, Zardari's Pakistan Peoples Party, and the U.S. Embassy for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

This article first appeared on The Am Law Daily blog on AmericanLawyer.com.
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http://www.lockelord.com/

Locke Lord Strategies is a person! Its a lobbying group but it is a person like you and me!
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Slate copyright

http://www.slate.com/id/2242208/

The Pinocchio Project

Watching as the Supreme Court turns a corporation into a real live boy.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010, at 2:15 PM ET

John Paul StevensYou will doubtless hear today that 89-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens read aloud from his partial dissent in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission for almost 20 minutes in a slow, halting voice, periodically getting tangled up in thickets of words like "corporation" and "corruption." Meanwhile, a loud banging noise from the bench all but drowned him out. That's true. But Justice Anthony Kennedy fared no better reading from his majority opinion beforehand, tearing through the first part of his summary, then losing his place and stumbling through the holding. If Citizens United really represents the moment at which the Roberts court allows itself to finally give voice to its full-throated judicial activism, it's not clear Anthony Kennedy managed much more than a vocal mumble. He looked like he'd have preferred to have been reading his dissent from a soapbox. Or maybe from a crouch underneath the bench. Stevens haltingly worked his way through all five of his objections to the majority's holding today. Kennedy barely gulped out the holding itself.

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In part, as Rick Hasen suggests that's because Kennedy's soaring sonnet for corporate free speech has very little to do with the case at hand. The court had to reach out far beyond any place it needed to go to strike down century-old restrictions on corporate spending in federal elections. This started off as a case about a single movie. It morphed into John Roberts' Golden Globe night.

So Kennedy doesn't really find his voice today until he gets to the fist-pounding bits: "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." "The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach." And: "When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves."

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As Stevens says in reading his dissent, none of that has anything to do with the court's decision to topple decades' worth of legal architecture that had never been questioned in the courts. And Kennedy's visceral terror of speech bans (the word "ban" appears 29 times in his 57-page opinion) and "censorship" seems to override any sort of temperate assessment of either the facts of the case before him, the lack of substantial record in the lower courts, the significance of the cases he is overruling, or the consequences of today's opinion. Perhaps because this is the same Anthony Kennedy who was so exquisitely sensitive to the corrupting influence of money on public confidence in judicial elections in the Caperton case about judicial corruption, it's hard to comprehend what it is about unlimited corporate contributions that so moves him.

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If Kennedy is tentative this morning and Stevens is horrified, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas say nothing at all. They don't have to: They're the architects of the edifice Kennedy has erected. Reading from his dissent, Stevens describes their "sweeping" attacks on Michigan's campaign finance law in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (one of the cases overruled today) as "having planted the seed that flowered" into today's majority opinion.

While Stevens is reading the portion of his concurrence about the "cautious view of corporate power" held by the framers, I see Justice Thomas chuckle softly. (Scalia takes on this argument in his concurrence.) Stevens hammers, more than once this morning from the bench on the principle that corporations "are not human beings" and "corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires." He insists that "they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the "voices of the real people" who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is "to confuse metaphor with reality." Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.

copyright

http://blog.nj.com/njv_john_farmer/2010/01/campaign_finance_supreme_court.html

Mark Wilson/Getty Images Members of the US Supreme Court, who recently issued a ruling in a landmark campaign finance case.Few things are more fundamental to our notion of political liberty and equality than freedom of speech. We’re all supposed to enjoy it more or less equally. Ideally, no one’s supposed to have too much more of it than anyone else, or it isn’t very equal.

We all know that’s not how it works, however. Some individuals or groups will, for one reason or another (usually money), always enjoy more of our constitutional freedoms.

The Constitution, in its majesty, guarantees the pauper as well as the prince the right to a lawyer. But it’s better than even money that the prince is going to get Clarence Darrow while the pauper is likely to get the last guy in the class in law school.

That’s why federal courts are there, to smooth out at least some of these inequities.

But it didn’t work that way this week. Instead, a five-man majority of the U.S. Supreme Court transformed freedom of speech into an instrument for inequality by wiping out a century of laws and court decisions curbing the power of rich corporations to buy elections.

Money is political speech, the court held, and can’t be curbed. It’s all the same, whether it’s Bill Gates’ billions or the nickels and dimes in the tin cup of the blind guy on the corner; whether it’s Goldman Sachs using its millions to beat back financial regulations in Washington or the piggy bank change available to individuals or public-interest advocacy groups fighting for reform. All the same.

But if the five justices who wrote the majority decision really believe that, then they’re spending too much time in chambers; they should get out a little more. Corporate cash is corrupting our politics and shredding faith in the system, as the government’s solicitor-general argued in a losing fight to keep the curbs on corporate spending and level the field between haves and have-nots.

It’s by no means a fair fight when citizen groups are forced to go up against Corporate America in the political arena.

"The nature of business corporations," the solicitor-general’s brief maintained, "makes corporate political activity inherently more likely than individual advocacy to cause quid quo pro corruption." It went on to warn of an increase in "pay-to-play" that hands a huge advantage to the boys in the board room because they’re better able "to afford the ante."

In rejecting that argument, the court majority found that corporations have no fewer rights than individuals — in effect adopting the argument of those opposed to any limits on corporate campaign spending. Thomas Jefferson would have gagged on that one.

What will the decision mean politically? Republicans, conservative activists and business lobbyists (see U.S. Chamber of Commerce) are ecstatic. They see the high court as a kind of sugar plum fairy, leading them to an even more bountiful era of federal policy-making and political power. Democrats and liberals fear they’re right.

But who really knows? These things often have unintended consequences. Ben L. Ginsberg, a long-time lawyer for GOP conservative causes, counsels caution.

"It’s going to be a wild, wild West" in future campaigns, he warned, "with a lot more voices and the loudest voices are going to be corporations and unions." In the process, the power of both parties, Republicans as well as Democrats, could be diminished as corporations and unions run their own campaigns and give less cash to either party.

Why run money through the parties — the middle men — when corporations are free now to spend all they want on their own more tightly targeted campaigns for issues and candidates? Conceivably, they could now spend enough to dominate party primaries, denying Democrat and Republican leaders the power to nominate preferred candidates.

Special interest lobbyists are about to become more special than ever.

It’s equally unclear how far this self-indulgent Supreme Court will take its campaign to strip away even reasonable limits on the political power of money.

The law still bars corporations from directly contributing cash to federal candidates — and to overturn that would be a bold-faced invitation to outright bribery. A prudent court would leave that prohibition in place. But with this court, one never knows.

For the record, Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and company are outspoken defenders of judicial restraint, of following precedent and deferring to legislators as the voice of the people. But by lifting the ban on corporate campaign spending, they trashed precedent and gave Congress the one-finger salute.

With faith in the system already at a low ebb, it wasn’t what one would expect from a responsible Supreme Court.
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USSA not SAARC, USSA not AfPak

2011-05-07T06:25:00.000-07:00

USSA not SAARC

USSA

United States of South Asia

Not SAARC

Not South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation

SAARC is a regional civil service bureaucrat's attempt to manage, contain and restrict the yearnings of the South Asian PEOPLE.

SAARC as geopolitical concept is not sustainable in view of momentous, geopolitical events sweeping South Asia. SAARC, formally established in 1985, has accomplished practically nothing.

Why USSA?
It is abundantly clear that Pakistan and Afghanistan, acting alone, frequently acting against each other, cannot sustain their people against USCIA and USNATO acting at will, that overrun their sovereign territories, in the so-called AfPak.

AfPak is a geopolitical construct intended to dislocate South Asia peoples by inventing neo-imperial identities and neo-imperial territories that do NOT exist on the ground. Nobody in Lahore or Kandahar, Swat or Kabul(or even Abbottabad!) walks around saying "I'm male, 6ft 2 and i'm AfPak."

AfPak is not a South Asian identity on any level -- personal, national, regional or geopolitical.

AfPak is a convenient, self-serving ad hoc invention of the Pentagon, The US Department of State, USCIA and The White House under President Obama. The US Congress didn't come up with AfPak, AfPak is not even in the interests of the American People (yes and millions of others I voted Obama to prevent a Mccain-Palin debacle), AfPak prevents the American People from escaping the stranglehold of a $trillion plus debt from unnecessary war in South Asia. AfPak is against

The bottom line is AfPak a self-serving geopolitical construct of US neo-imperialism, colluding with South Asia's postcolonial post-feudal militaristic landed elites, using religion as a convenient ploy to divide peoples and land, to dislocate people from land.

Want to be reminded of an earlier self-agrandising geopolitical construct now in wide, ethically unsupportable use? The "Middle East".

The term Middle East invented by the colonizing, resource-extracting Brits circa 1900 implies a similar attempt by Empire to dislocate and dispossess the Peoples of West Asia and North Africa. Middel East? Middle of What? East of Where? No folks, its West Asia. It's North Africa. It's PLACE, not SPACE.

USSA is the way forward for ALL South Asians striving for peace through prosperity. For a borderless seamless stability through Social Justice and through economic opportunity. Peacde without scoial and economic justice is a non-starter, a no-brainer, a no-go, a no-show.

The move towards USSA is pragmatic idealism. The move towards USSA is pragmatic ethical geopolitics. It's an embracing, pervasive South Asia Idea.

USSA NOT SAARC
USSA NOT AfPak
Welcome!
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http://www.medical-answers.org/hd/index.php?t=SAARC&retry=yes
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An Arab Spring in Palestine?

2011-05-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

The inspiringly-named "Arab Spring" is not a monolithic liberatory event.
Each sovereign post-colonial nation-state, still grasped in the right claw of neo-imperialism, often colluding with domestic post-colonial feudal landed elites, has its own trajectory, whether it's Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen or even Libya (was this last 'revolution' fabricated in London and armed by the USCIA/Saudia, and now bombed by France/USNATO?)

Has Palestine had an Arab Spring yet? Did I miss it?
Falasteen Gandhians, where are you?
Israeli Gandhians, where are you?

The recent rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah, provide some hope that that the Arab Spring may be contagious in Gaza.

Civil society nonviolent street protest, as in Cairo's Tahrir Square, highly motivated, persistent, actively, dynamically peaceful, ethically-driven, is so far absent in Gaza.

Going back six decades, Is it possible or feasible to reverse the massive mis-step, by the UNSC (1946), an entity made up of erstwhile colonizers, neo-imperialists and totalitarian nations, that resulted in the creation of the "State of Israel" in 1948?
The UNSC is not the UNGA.
The UNGA would likey have vetoed that mis-step, if that had ever been brought to UNGA's attention. It was not.

Israel, the dominant client-state (contrast Pakistan the dependent client-state) of the US cannot be dismantled, except voluntarily through grassroots action by the Israelis themselves).

Hardly likely under Zionist expansion, acting with the support of a 60-year US policy driven by dominant militarist, political and economic power, interests and influence here in the US. Thanks AIPAC.

Q. Can Israelis, I mean the Israeli PEOPLE, continue to enjoy the right to exist, but not Israel the State? That would be an argument on behalf of PEOPLE, the Israeli people, but not the state.

If that were acceptable then there could come into being a great diverse secular unified State of Palestine. For ALL Philistines. For ALL Falasteen. A PEOPLE-Centered, not a territory-centered, solution would result in a unified secular diverse multireligious, multiethnic, multilingual Palestine. That's what all modern democratic nation-states look like.

Sometimes, in order to move and progress beyond the painful dislocating past, we may need to acknowledge and accept the unfair, even grievously unfair, mis-steps of history.

And then move forward unified, perhaps in yet another an upcoming Spring, to correct these mis-steps.

That is pragmatic idealism.

For the sake of the Greater Collective Good (GCG). of a Unified Palestine.
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AP & Yahoo! copyright

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110505/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_palestinians_reconciliation

Palestinian deal ends rift, hurts peace prospects
AP

Mahmoud Abbas, Khaled Mashaal AP – In this photo released by the Hamas Media Office, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, center-left, and …

Palestinian leaders hail end to four-year rift Play Video Mideast Video:Palestinian leaders hail end to four-year rift AFP
Mideast Video:Unity deal in Middle East Australia 7 News
Palestinians hail landmark reconciliation pact Play Video Mideast Video:Palestinians hail landmark reconciliation pact AP

By MAGGIE MICHAEL, Associated Press – Wed May 4, 9:19 pm ET

CAIRO – Rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas signed a landmark reconciliation pact on Wednesday, ending a four-year rift that had divided the territory envisioned for a future Palestinian state. The deal plunged Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking deeper into uncertainty as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a "mortal blow to peace."

The agreement, which followed years of bitter acrimony between the two Palestinian movements, was made possible in large measure by the political changes sweeping the Arab world and the deadlock in U.S.-brokered peace talks with Israel.

A unity government foreseen by the accord would also allow the Palestinians to speak with a single voice if they go ahead with plans to ask the United Nations to recognize Palestine as a state during the annual General Assembly session in September.

With Wednesday's signing, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority governs the West Bank, joined forces with Khaled Mashaal, the Syrian-based head of Hamas, which rejects Israel's existence and is backed by Iran.

The alliance set off ecstatic celebrations in the Palestinian territories — and warnings from both the Obama administration and international mediator Tony Blair that the new Palestinian government must recognize Israel or risk international isolation.

Abbas brushed off the criticism and instead used the occasion to deliver a scathing attack on Israel, saying "We reject blackmail and it is no longer possible for us to accept the (Israeli) occupation of Palestinian land."

Both Palestinian leaders emphasized a united Palestinian direction, with Mashaal declaring the pact means the Palestinians will have "one leadership, ... one decision."

"The common national goal is to establish a Palestinian state, independent with sovereignty on the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Jerusalem as the capital, without settlements, without giving up a single inch of it and with the right of return" of Palestinian refugees, the Hamas leader said.

Netanyahu denounced the new Palestinian alliance as "a mortal blow to peace and a big prize for terrorism."

"Israel continues to want peace and seek peace but we can only achieve that with our neighbors that want peace," the Israeli leader said. "Those of our neighbors that seek the destruction of Israel and use terrorism are not partners to peace."

The Palestinians have been torn between rival governments since a previous unity arrangement collapsed into civil war in June 2007. In five days of fighting, Hamas overran the Gaza Strip, leaving Abbas' Palestinian Authority in charge of the West Bank. Reconciliation is essential for Palestinian dreams to establish a state in the two areas.

Wednesday's pact provides for the creation of a joint Palestinian caretaker government ahead of national elections next year. But it leaves key issues unresolved, such as who will lead the government or control the competing Palestinian security forces, and makes no mention of relations with Israel.

In his speech, Abbas rejected Israel's opposition to the pact, saying the reconciliation with Hamas was an internal Palestinian affair.

"They are our brothers and family. We may differ, and we often do, but we still arrive at a minimum level of understanding," he said.

Abbas said Israel cannot continue to act as "a state above the law" and called for an end to construction in Jewish settlements on lands the Palestinians want for a future state.

"Mr. Netanyahu, you must choose between settlements and peace," he said.

It's not clear whether Western powers would deal with the new government that is to emerge from the unity deal. So far, they've said they are waiting to see its composition.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said it was important that Palestinians ensure that their agreement is implemented "in a way that advances the prospects of peace rather than undermines them."

He said the U.S. was still waiting to see what the agreement actually means in practical terms, but stressed Hamas' inclusion in the government must be accompanied by recognition of the state of Israel, a commitment to nonviolence and acceptance of previous agreements.

"If Hamas wants to play a meaningful role in the political process there, and indeed in the peace process, they need to adhere to these principles," Toner said.

Blair agreed. "I think the central question people ask is, 'Does this mean a change of heart on behalf of Hamas or not?'" he told The Associated Press.

Unlike Fatah, which has negotiated several partial peace accords with Israel, Hamas does not accept a place for a Jewish state in an Islamic Mideast, though leaders like Mashaal say they would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as an interim step.

Hamas, which is considered a terror group by Israel, the U.S. and European Union, has sent dozens of suicide bombers into Israel, killing hundreds, and thousands of rockets have been fired from Gaza at Israel, many by Hamas. Israel has retaliated with strikes into Gaza that have killed dozens of Palestinian civilians.

The Quartet of Mideast mediators — the U.S., the EU, the United Nations and Russia — has long demanded that Hamas renounce violence and recognize the principle of Israel's right to exist. Hamas' continued refusal to accept these conditions could jeopardize hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid.

Palestinian political activist Mustafa Barghouti said Hamas, by signing the accord, "showed a sign of moderation."

"I hope the United States starts seeing the situation not through Israeli eyes. I hope the United States can have its own independent policy," he said.

Reservations over key differences between the two sides linger, and Palestinian leaders had a brief dispute ahead of Wednesday's signing ceremony when Mashaal objected to being seated in the front row rather than on the podium along with Abbas, the Egyptian foreign minister and intelligence chief.

He grudgingly accepted his seat and the atmosphere remained generally upbeat, with many among those present saying they saw the deal as a byproduct of the political changes sweeping the Arab world.

Uprisings toppled or weakened some of the leaders who had patronized Hamas and Fatah, and angry Palestinians, inspired by Arab youth movements in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere, had begun to take to the streets to demand an end to the Fatah-Hamas rift.

"The general atmosphere in the region imposed a different reality," said Cairo-based Mohammed Sobeih, the Arab League official handling Palestinian affairs. "Everybody believed that the continuation of the division is dangerous, destructive and none will be able to bear it any longer."

Syria, long Hamas' traditional Arab backer and home to several of its top leaders, has been rocked in recent weeks by a wave of protests demanding the ouster of President Bashar Assad. Similarly, the regime of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Fatah's main backer, collapsed in February after an 18-day uprising.

Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, a spokesman for Abbas, said Syria had always been the decision-maker for Hamas. "There was a Syrian veto, but now it doesn't exist," he said.

Samir Ghattas, head of the Cairo-based Maqdus Center for Strategic Studies, suggested that Syria's weakened leadership may no longer feel it prudent to doggedly maintain its close ties with Hamas.

Palestinian businessman Munib al-Masri, head of an independent political bloc, said Mubarak's personal enmity toward Hamas was a major barrier to unifying the Palestinian rivals.

After Mubarak's ouster, al-Masri helped arrange for Fatah and Hamas delegations to meet with new Egyptian officials in the foreign ministry and intelligence service, leading to Wednesday's accord.

"The youth in the streets brought awakening, a spring and a revival," al-Masri said.

___

Associated Press writers Amy Teibel in Jerusalem and Ibrahim Barzak in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, contributed to this report.

May Day Mubarak!

2011-05-01T09:39:00.000-07:00

May I has especial meaning this year for workers in Wisconsin.

On their behalf and in support of our own right, held individually and collectively, to human dignity through work, we celebrate May 1, locally and globally.

The Arab Spring is driven by working people. Call them protesters but they are workers.
That Gandhian ethos of activism for social justice through collective conscience and self-renewal has just begun to touch yet again (they had their chance in the 40's -60's), the post-colonial-imperial peoples of societies in West Asia and North Africa.
This culture area is referred to by dominant former colonizing states and current neo-imperial states as the Middle East -- Middle of what? East of where?
A colonial-imperial construct to dislocate the peoples of those lands on yet another May Day Remembrance.

Now off to spend some hours reflecting in historic Union Square, New York City. Gandhi's statue stands in a little corner of the park there.

May Day Mubarak!

The 2011 G-20 November Meetup in Cannes -- What Topic is Off Limits?

2011-04-28T01:45:00.000-07:00

The G-20 meets in November in Cannes this year. Heads up, People.

You know what the G-20 don't discuss?
Arms. Weapons of destruction, mass or otherwise. Mass means People, right?

The vast, enormously profitable arms sales from which military contractor elites in the Pentagon, the defence establishments in India and Pak and China, and every one of the G-20, make huge covert profits.

Manmohan will not be bringing up India's arms purchases either. He and India are part of that cynical, fairly covert, G-20 maneuver.

Why covert? Because G-20 has no charter and it's meetings are mainly closed-door. A great moment for democracy. You and I wont know what went down among the great ones. Happy with that Aam Log?

Arms profiteers don't have to actually exchange cash under the table to make a profit, right?

The US has been a war machine and economy since World War II. So are the UK, France.

India's economy as a post-colonial democracy will ultimately end up in the same sorry boom-and-bust so-called 'free market" imbroglio, if India, the world's largest economy, plays the same US game of a hidden arms-driven budget agenda, instead of a human development, social justice agenda.

India should chart a different course away from arms dependency on the G-3 and instead foster social justice collaboration with the Global South~South economies, example Brazil, Ghana, South Africa. That post-colonial option has the potential of India further developing the Gandhian pragmatic ideal, The Peoples' Ideal, of Ethical Democracy, now largely missing in corruption-ridden India.

Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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G-20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-20_major_economies
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BBC copyright
14 April 2011 Last updated at 09:18 ET

London G20 demo: Met Police 'kettling' not justified
Bishopsgate Climate Camp Demonstrators at the climate camp were kept in a tight police cordon for more than four hours
Continue reading the main story
Related Stories

G20 policing tactics questioned
Met complaints rise over average
Warning over policing of protests

Two activists have won their case against policing of the G20 protests, as the High Court ruled police containment was "not justified".

The judges upheld Hannah McClure and Josh Moos's case that police used "violence" to control the Camp for Climate Action in London in April 2009.

There was "no reasonable" justification for "kettling" but police did not unlawfully try to clear the camp.

The Metropolitan Police said it would appeal against the court's judgement.

In response to this, Frances Wright, from the climate camp's legal team, said: "It is outrageous that public money is continuing to be used to defend the kettling of the climate camp for five hours.

"The police lost the argument in the media and public confidence dropped, two parliamentary committees were critical and now the court has agreed."

John Halford, counsel for the demonstrators, said: "The court has roundly condemned the unlawful and oppressive police response, exposing it as unacceptable in a democratic society."

The Met's decision to push protesters at the Bishopsgate camp was "not necessary or proportionate", the judges decided.

Three activists at the camp had challenged the legality of police using riot shields to land blows on protesters at the G20 demonstrations, known as "shield strikes".

Chris Abbott's case was dropped because he could not get legal aid, his lawyers said.

Sir Anthony May, the president of the Queen's Bench Division, and Mr Justice Sweeney rejected the complaint that the Met decided unlawfully to clear the climate camp before it was due to end.

Met officers "kettled" demonstrators for more than four hours on 1 April, the same day newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson died after being pushed down by a police officer in Royal Exchange.

Ruling in the case, the judges said: "There was at 7.07pm no reasonably apprehended breach of the peace, imminent or otherwise, within the Climate Camp itself sufficient to justify containment."
Metropolitan police officers on duty in the City of London during clashes between police and protesters at the time of the G20 summit The case challenged the use of riot shields to strike protesters

But the court heard that later in the evening there was a risk and police reaction was appropriate.

There had already been incidents at the Bishopsgate camp where bottles and coins and other items were thrown at the police lines, but the protest had been largely peaceful, the court heard.

"When the Royal Exchange protesters were dispersing from 7.25pm there was clearly a risk that some of them might head for the Climate Camp and the police were right to anticipate the risk and take appropriate steps to deal with it, if it materialised," the judges said.

They said the Met's decision to push protesters 15-person deep was not needed.

"We think that the police were right to have an eye to infiltration from Great St Helens Street and the street or alleyway opposite, but we are not persuaded that the pushing operation of a 15-person deep crowd to move them approximately 20-30m to the north and beyond these side roads was reasonably necessary.

"It follows that, in our judgement, the pushing operation from the south was not necessary or proportionate."
'Prevented violence'

On the use of shields the judges ruled: "The policy and training about the use of shields as it came over to us in the evidence appeared to be insufficient for individual circumstances.

"There needed to be clear-cut instructions as to whether shield strikes were ever justified, and, if so, when."

The judges said the Met had a duty to clear the road, "by force if necessary", but added: "If there were individual occasions when the force used may have been excessive, that is a matter for individual complaint, not for these judicial review proceedings."

A Met statement said the judgement recognised police concerns about the possibility of a breach of peace at the camp and officers believed "the Bishopsgate containment prevented further scenes of violence and criminal damage occurring on 1 April 2009".

The force said: "We have rigorously defended the claims against the MPS because at the heart of this case lies a vital public order policing tactic that prevents disorder and protects the public.

"It should be noted that the judgement relates to the individual circumstances of 1 April 2009 and not the use of containment at other events.

"Where necessary we will continue to use containment as a last resort to prevent serious disorder and violence.

"We will be appealing the Administrative Court's finding that the containment and pushing operations on the 1 April 2009 in Bishopsgate were not lawful."
More on This Story
Related Stories

G20 policing tactics questioned 14 APRIL 2011, LONDON
Met complaints rise over average 24 FEBRUARY 2011, LONDON
Warning over policing of protests 09 FEBRUARY 2011, UK
Met boss 'sorry' over false claim 25 JANUARY 2011, LONDON
'Covert Met officers at G20 demo' 19 JANUARY 2011, LONDON
Police 'kettle' tactic feels the heat 09 DECEMBER 2010, UK

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Frayed Fabric of South Asia-US Geopolitics

2011-04-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

Frayed Fabric of South Asia-US Geopolitics

Both India and Pakistan governments have respectively dismissed as "false" "unfounded and totally baseless" The Times (London) April 23, 2011 report of "back channel" diplomacy.

The following news story appears to have been faked all the way up and down. Or not.

Because the story was allegedly faked, the question is Why? Actually the more productive line of inquiry would be, why did all the India and Pakistan media run with the news story, before checking whether it was fact?

Look, this is not about building a conspiracy theory. Instead, the story gained weight and credibility because it's really all about the drone-weary, terror-wary PEOPLE, the Aam Janata in India and Pakistan, hoping for some stability, some positive momentum, some hope to keep the positive feelings going, after the heady India double victory against a sporting Sri Lanka side and a fumbling Pakistan team in an unprecedented ALL South Asia 2011 World Cup Cricket Final.

The allegedly fake news report, excerpted from The Times of London states:

"Singh appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy"

"De facto control"? Really? Not so much.

The US controls Pak's foreign policy, which is shaped by the CIA acting in its own interest against various factions of the ISI.
The LeT is therefore funded both directly and indirectly by the USCIA.

The CIA dictates US Govt's Foreign policy, not the other way around.
[Most recent example, CIA operatives are and have long been in Libya]

That is the rocky, murky terrain of South Asia-US geopolitics that Manmohan Singh, born in Pakistan (!) has to negotiate. The tragedy of Partition becomes more real every day.

Further, the Times article states Manmohan sent "an unofficial envoy" to talk to Ashfaq Kayani and ISI chief Shuja Pasha.

I lived in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and saw the raped and pregnant Bengali Hindu women, broken but still survivors, enter the streets as brutalized refugees from Dacca (now Dhaka).

Kayani (b. 1952, same year as ISI head honcho Shuja Pasha) was commissioned, age 19, a highly impressionable age, in the year (1971) that the Pakistan Army was driven out of East Bengal under the leadership of Libertador Sheikh Mujb-ur-Rahman (BangaBandhu) and East Bengal became the sovereign nation-state of Bangladesh.

Q.Will Kayani or Pasha, ever forget that humiliating defeat and lost territory?
If we rely on the hard evidence of political psychology,
India will have to wait for bitter but pragmatic Kayani's and bitter but pragmatic Pasha's successors, successors born in a later generation, to see significant progress and change.

This defeat is why Pakistan will keep clamoring for Kashmir because of the psychological and political scars of a forever lost East Bengal. It's understandable but not tenable.

Pakistan now shrinks by the minute, its territory overrun by USCIA/NATO and its people droned from the air by the USCIA. The Raymond Davies CIA agent, who was set free by the PakISI, is only the latest predictable twiststory in PakISI/USCIA geopolitics.

See how complex and challenging our shared history with Pakistan is?
So long as the territory of Pakistan, not just the Af-Pak border, is owned and operated by the USCIA, India will continue to need to take ***baby steps*** towards dialogue, always watching our backs and looking over our shoulders.
No problem, India can keep doing that, we have become adept at watching the US operating in our region against both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

USCIA operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan go back to the early US-invented Cold War 1950's, just about the time Kayani and Pasha were born!

Pity and empathy for the people of Pakistan, our blood sisters and brothers, who are suffering, in propagandist/hate Hindu denial for the crimes committed against them by:
1) Pak/ISI,
2) in collusion with the USCIA
South Asia-US Geopolitics: Collective Memory Vs. Militarist Memory

To deepen the gravitas of South Asia-US geopolitics in 2011, let us note that Kayani and Pasha, both newly commissioned at age 19 in 1971, would even now, in 2011, gratefully remember 1)the US Seventh Fleet and 2)the CIA. How would they remember that?

The US Seventh Fleet, (specifically the TF 74, which included the nuclear-powered Enterprise and Gumard, destroyers and missile escorts ) was there when Pakistan needed them most, in 1971.

The USCIA was there again, after 9/11, when the US airlifted key CIA-directed ISI/Taliban operatives out of Kabul and Kandahar, before the US invasion of Afghanistan.

It can be gratifying (not to mention profitable) to be a dependent-client state. Kayani and Pasha can understandably appreciate that.

In 1971, at the height of Bangladesh’s war of Liberation, the United States Seventh Fleet conducted an incursion into the Bay of Bengal, to advance its own interest vis a vis Pakistan, its dependent-state client.

This is the same US Seventh Fleet that supported combat intelligence that divided the Koreas (1945) in the context of the US- invented Cold War against the Soviets. This is the same Seventh Fleet that provided the balltle support that napalmed little girls in VietNam (1972). Se how that Vietnam atrocity in 1972 is neatly juxtaposed with the Bay of Bengal incursion in 1971?

See how our current geopolitics is driven by collective memory of powerful militarists in a client dependent-state ?

To perform Development Journalism, Kayani and Pasha’s anti-people, geopolitical militarist memory needs to be outweighed and outmaneuvered by Aam Log Collective Social Justice memory, based on evidence, proof and personal experience of dislocation and dispossession from Swat to Sylhet.

South Asian Aam Log Collective Memory can prevail against Militarist Memory, so long as We the People, our activists, our media (even some of our governments and some of our armies some of the time), take effective ethical steps on that collective path, in the name of All South Asians for the sake of a Greater Collective Good (GCG). That’s pragmatic idealism with a calm, steely eye fixed on the geopolitics of the dependent-client state(s) in our region.

Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
[blog funded by CUNY]
www.facebook.com/chithra.karunakaran
www.disqus.com/EthicalDemocracy
@EthicalDemocracy
http://Southasianidea.com
posts on "A People's General."
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Rising Kashmir newspaper copyright

Manmohan in secret talks with Kayani: THE TIMES

London, April 23: India's Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh opened secret talks with Pakistan Army chief ten months ago to build on the cricket-inspired diplomatic thaw between the two countries, a media report said today.
“Singh appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy," The Times reported. It said the talks, through a back channel, have encouraged the UK and US believe that the countries competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process.

Earlier also, there were reports that India has asked its envoy in Pakistan to open channels of communication with Pakistani army chief General Pervez Kayani as well as ISI chief Shuja Pasha.

"We have given the green signal.

As a new season of Indo-Pak engagement bursts upon the sub-continent, there is a realization that India's efforts to talk is incomplete because there is no communication with the Pakistani army — effectively the real power centre. The diplomatic outreach to General Kayani is under the rubric of engaging all stakeholders so as not to attract extra attention, but it's a special effort by India,” sources in Indian government had said.

The visit of Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the semi-final match between India and Pakistan in the cricket World Cup last month has sparked hope of a diplomatic thaw between the two neighbouring countries.

Kayani visited Kabul this week to meet members of the High Peace Council, a body set up by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to build contacts with Taliban groups. The army chief was accompanied by General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

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The Times (London) copyright
The Times (London) April 23, 2011
Restart of cricket relations leads to secret India-Pakistan diplomatic drive
Francis Elliott and Tom Coghlan
• The Times
• Published: 23 April 2011
• Asia

[Full text obtained through LexisNexis]
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 42

LENGTH: 440 words

The Prime Minister of India has opened secret talks with the head of Pakistan's military to build on the cricket-inspired diplomatic thaw between the rivals.
appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's Chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy, about ten months ago, The Times has learnt.

The talks, through a back channel, have encouraged London and Washington to believe that the countries' competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process.

General Kayani visited Kabul this week to meet members of the High Peace Council, a body set up by President Karzai, to build contacts with Taleban groups. General Kayani was accompanied by General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Delhi, which in the past would have condemned the visit as Pakistani "meddling", remained silent - providing the latest evidence of rapprochement being driven by the US, after the Cricket World Cup semi-final between the two nations.

Cricketing ties, severed in the wake of the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, have been restored and a series of three one-day games will take place to coincide with a visit to Islamabad by Mr Singh.

The settling of a disputed border at Sir Creek in the south, and the demilitarisation of the Siachen glacier in the north, are also being used to create an impression of diplomatic momentum.

Genuine progress, however, requires the co-operation of Pakistan's military, which India has long accused of fostering militant groups to fight a proxy war in Kashmir. For its part, Pakistan accuses India of promoting separatists in the province of Baluchistan and seeking undue influence in Afghanistan as a counterbalance to its neighbour. It questions the need for India to maintain four consulates in Afghanistan, two of them close to its borders in Kandahar and Jalalabad.

Pakistan insists that it must insure against a possible collapse of Afghanistan into civil war, by retaining proxies within the country. It is pressing the US to open talks with figures from the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, as it seeks to influence the future Afghan government.

Despite US pressure and Mr Singh's commitment there remain other substantial obstacles to a lasting thaw. Access for Indian investigators to the suspected conspirators behind the Mumbai attacks, who are detained in Pakistan, remains a sticking point.

Although it will allow the investigators to travel, Islamabad said that they may interview only the interrogators, not the suspects.
-------------------------------------------

Rising Kashmir copyright

News report 2 days later:

‘Kayani did not contact Singh’

Islamabad, April 25: Pakistan Army Monday dismissed as unfounded and totally baseless a media report that its powerful chief Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani held talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh through a "secret envoy and back channel".

A spokesperson of the Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate (ISPR) denied the news item which appeared in The Times of London on April 23 and called it "unfounded and totally baseless".

The paper had reported that Singh had appointed an "unofficial envoy" to make contact with Kayani, "who exercises de facto control over Pakistan's foreign policy".

The talks, through a back channel, have encouraged the UK and US believe that the countries' competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process, the media report had said.

The prime minister's office in New Delhi had yesterday termed as 'false' the report that Singh had contacted Kayani before the Mohali meeting between prime ministers of the two countries.
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Cyberbullying, Sexual Orientation & Suicide

2011-04-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

Indicted Rutgers student Dharun Ravi and criminologist Sameer Hinduja are both "overzealous", Clementi is the Victim

A printed quote (has to be verified) supposedly from Hinduja:

“I understand the prosecutor wants to send a clear message, and that this case has and will continue to receive the national spotlight,” says Sameer Hinduja, a criminologist at Florida Atlantic University and the codirector of the Cyberbullying Research Center. “But pursuit of such charges is, in my opinion, incredibly overzealous.”

Really, should this guy, this criminal criminologist Hinduja be co-director of such a sensitive, presumably human-rights-justice-oriented group?

There are two "overzealous" actors in this sad, horrific real life-death narrative.

1. If anyone is overzealous it is Dharun Ravi, the Rutgers student who spied on Clementi's most private moments, broadcast words and images about Clementi's most private and personal identity.

I am wondering what parenting and which siblings and peers Ravi had that partly influenced his criminal and inhuman actions against Clementi. Ravi is of course entirely responsible for his own criminal acts. Let him do the time.

2. Sameer Hinduja, the co-director no less, of the Cyberbullying Research Center is "overzealous" in whitewashing Dharun Ravi's criminal intent and acts.

Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
www.disqus.com/EthicalDemocracy
@EthicalDemocrac
------
Daily Beast copyright
story by Jessica Bennett on Yahoo (did she get her quotes right?)
Should Tyler Clementi's Bully Be Charged With a Hate Crime?

Email
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Jessica Bennett – Fri Apr 22, 11:22 am ET

NEW YORK – Should Tyler Clementi's Bully Be Charged With a Hate Crime?Tyler Clementi's roommate—who broadcast the gay teen's sexual encounter with a man, leading to his suicide—could get 10 years in prison. Jessica Bennett on cyberbullying's new price.

It was perhaps the most brutal example of a private moment gone public. A shy 18-year-old, an accomplished violinist, learns a month into the school year that his college roommate has been spying, via a computer webcam, on his sexual relations with another young man. This student is not openly gay, nor does he know how many of his peers have viewed the recording. So it’s easy to imagine that Tyler Clementi was assuming the worst when, two days later, on September 21, the Rutgers freshman jumped 202 feet to his death from the George Washington Bridge.

Clementi’s death set off an immediate firestorm. Gay rights groups, devastated by the latest in a string of recent teen suicides, called for his roommate, Dharun Ravi—along with Ravi's alleged accomplice, Molly Wei—to be charged with hate crimes. Schools and law enforcement agencies began tearing through legislation to prevent bullying in the future. “Bullied to Death,” quickly becoming the year's most-discussed social crisis, was the talk of cable news shows all over the country.

On Wednesday, the case made headlines yet again when a Middlesex, New Jersey grand jury issued a 15-count indictment against Ravi, adding bias intimidation to the previous charges of privacy invasion—essentially, alleging that Ravi’s act rises to the level of hate crime because Clementi was gay. "The criminal case is about the line between acceptable conduct and unacceptable conduct... particularly in this era of electronic media," the attorney for the family of Clementi told Reuters. (Neither he nor Ravi’s attorney returned request for comment.) In order to prove the claim in court, prosecutors will have to show that Ravi’s motivation for the act was spurred by Clementi’s sexual orientation, and was not simply a nasty college prank gone terribly wrong. If convicted, the 19-year-old could face up to 10 years in prison.

Experts say the case has entered new legal territory—a hate crime charge for what has become, rationally or not, every parent’s worst fear: cyberbullying. New Jersey passed one of the strictest anti-bullying laws in the nation in the months following Clementi’s death, and 45 states now have such policies on their books. We now know that 1 in 5 students is harassed each year, along with a shocking 9 in 10 gay teens, according to the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. Kids who are bullied are five times more likely to be depressed, and nearly 160,000 of them skip school each day, fearful of their peers. The problem is epidemic.

But as painful as Clementi's story is to hear about—and as much as the indictment has been applauded by some activists—there are legal experts who question whether the punishment fits the crime. Today’s world of cyberbullying is no doubt more potent than the bullying of yore. With smart phones and social media following kids wherever they go, the end of the school day no longer marks a reprieve from the taunts and torment bullies dole out. But most cases of this kind are infinitely more complicated than the public discourse makes them out to be. “People are thirsty for these quick fixes,” says Samuel Goldberg, a former New York prosecutor and legal analyst. “It was a horrible thing that happened, there’s no question. But I think people’s knee-jerk reaction is to simply throw the book at these kids.”

"Pursuit of such charges is, in my opinion, incredibly overzealous.”

Which brings us to the story of Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old Massachusetts girl who brought bullying into the national spotlight early last year. Prince killed herself in January 2010, after suffering months of alleged verbal torment by her high school peers. Five of those former peers, all minors, have been indicted on felony charges that range from stalking and harassment to violation of civil rights; like Ravi, they face up to 10 years in prison. A sixth defendant, now 19, faces charges of statutory rape related to consensual sex with Prince when he was a senior. Each of these students was forced to drop out of school, many put off hopes of graduation, and one lost a football scholarship to college.

The public was quick to indict on their own in Prince’s case, long before the facts were in. As more details emerged, however, we learned that Prince had tried to kill herself before, was on medication for depression, and was struggling with her parents’ separation. As Goldberg put it at the time, “What happened until innocent until proven guilty? It's politically incorrect to even suggest that. These cases are very high-profile, but very few people know all the facts involved.”

Prince and Clementi’s cases have brought long-overdue attention to the bullying issue. But they have also shown that efforts to solve bullying problems through crusading prosecution can do more harm than good. Ravi and Wei were both over 18 when their crime was committed, but they were still teens. There is longstanding research to show that law is not a deterrent to young people, who often respond emotionally to their surroundings. Ultimately, labeling teens "criminals," say criminologists, will only make it harder for them to engage with society when they return. “I understand the prosecutor wants to send a clear message, and that this case has and will continue to receive the national spotlight,” says Sameer Hinduja, a criminologist at Florida Atlantic University and the codirector of the Cyberbullying Research Center. “But pursuit of such charges is, in my opinion, incredibly overzealous.”

Under the glare of a national spotlight, nobody would dare argue that Ravi’s crime go unpunished. But there are certainly details that have yet to make their way into the public eye. For one: Ravi’s attorney’s insistence that the images of Clementi—while widely reported to have been “live-streamed”—were never in fact transmitted beyond a single computer belonging to Ravi’s alleged accomplice.

Whatever the outcome, Ravi's and Wei's punishments will rightly continue. “They’re going to have to cope with the proverbial blood on their hands for the rest of their lives,” says Hinduja. Whether that's good enough will be decided in court.

Jessica Bennett is a Newsweek senior writer covering society, youth culture and gender. Her special reports, multimedia packages and original Web video have been honored by the New York Press Club, the Newswomen's Club of New York and GLAAD, among other organizations. Follow her on Twitter.

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