2 Pak terrorists killed in Noida on R-Day eve
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Hindustan Times
First Published: 08:12 IST(25/1/2009)
Last Updated: 01:20 IST(26/1/2009)
Two suicide terrorists were shot dead Sunday on their way to Delhi to carry out terrorist strikes during Republic Day celebrations, the police said. They were both from Pakistan and heavily armed.
A police team, which had been trailing them, tried to stop them as their car — a stolen Maruti 800 — entered Noida’s sector 97. In the exchange of fire that followed the two men were shot. They died on the way to the hospital.
One of them spoke to the policemen before dying. He told them he was Farooq and came from Okra in Punjab, which is also home to Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the Mumbai 26/11 attacker in police custody now.
He also told the police his associate’s name was Abu Ismail and he came from Rawalkote, which is in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir.
[...]
The Noida terrorists belonged to a group tasked with carrying out strikes during Republic Day celebrations, said Intelligence Bureau sources. Investigators were now looking for more members of this group.
“Anti-terrorist squad officers based in Noida were working on a module of a terrorist outfit for the last one and half months,” said Brij Lal, UP police’s additional director general of police.
“Yesterday (on Saturday), the squad received information that two suspects with AK-47s have been seen in Lal Kuan, Ghaziabad on their way to Delhi,” he said, adding, "that’s when we decided to act”.
The police said they seized two AK 47 assault rifles, four magazines, 120 rounds of ammunition, five hand grenades and nine “RDX rods” from the terrorists. Plus three detonators, a Pakistani passport, and Rs.18,000 cash.
Officials of the squad said the type of arms and explosives seized indicated that the terrorists “had planned to trigger explosions at public places and were prepared to tackle resistance from security forces”.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Humiliation of Indian Army and Lt. Col. Purohit
Humiliation of Indian Army and Lt. Col. Purohit phenomenon
By Desh - Posted on 23 November 2008
Hats off to Dristikone
In reply to first commander-in-chief of the Indian armed forces, General Sir Robert Lockhart, just after Independence when Lockhart presented a plan for growth of Indian Army, Pandit Nehru said:
"We don't need a defence plan. Our policy is non-violence. We foresee no military threats. You can scrap the army. The police are good enough to meet our security needs."
Within a year, the strength of Army personnel had been reduced in half.
***********
"Your views will be communicated to Pranab Mukherjee", said Sushma Nath, India's ExpendiureSecretary, and went on to explain how Paramilitary forces had objections of placing Lt. Cols in the Pay Band 4.
This made usually very calm and thoroughly professional soldiers very irritated and the Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor lost his cool stating that this is not only a very negative attitude but the Paramilitary forces had absolutely no business commenting on what Army needed and otherwise!
********
After days of fighting and where many a battalions had gone down and only two succeeded to make it up -
The 3rd Dogras and 2nd Sikhs were asked to capture Raja and Rani. The Dogras first attacked Raja but had to retreat in the face of stiff enemy opposition and the fact that the position was located at a considerable height. Word went around that the mighty Dogras had lost their nerve. Our commanding officer (CO), Lt. Col. R.B. Nair, was so upset that he did not eat food for two days. Other officers asked Lt. Col. Nair to give them another chance. Lt. Col. Nair agreed. After performing a havan, I and the 2nd Sikh's CO, Lt. Col. Khanna, wished each other luck. That was the last I saw him alive. We traversed up to 7000 feet. The Dogras started moving up towards Rani picket through thickets while the Sikhs started moving towards Raja braving mines.
At night, our artillery in Poonch started pounding the positions to soften the enemy located on top of the mountains. The atmosphere was soon rendered with war cries. The Dogras charged and reached the pickets. Hand-to-hand fight ensued. The Pakistanis fought bravely. The Dogras got the picket. The Sikhs, however, lost their nerve and started retreating, angering their CO, Lt. Col. Khanna. With his revolver out, he started marching up. A stray bullet killed him. At this, the Sikhs were enraged. They once again attacked the picket, and captured it. The casualty evacuation started. A Captain had received bullets shattering both his thighs. A jawan's jaw was shattered with lower jaw hanging out. Soon, there other injured soldiers, a total of 200 soldiers, came one after another. Soon, we ran out of morphine injections. But the day was saved by Poonch's civilians, who came with cots to carry the wounded down. This was the first major victory in this sector. But at what cost? We had suffered heavy casualties.
And then the soldiers were asked to vacate the post. Many soldiers cried inconsolably and hugged the rocks and would not leave. The entire effort - the going against the line of fire with nothing in between.. and dying by the hundreds and thousands and walking into absolutely sure death! And when they had done the impossible.... one politician without any eye to practicality and any strength in his heart bartered it away. Or was he betrayed by his very own!! Lal Bahadur Shastri was not the only one who was betrayed! So were those many who had died without any ego or identity!
How was the betrayal done?
For a piece of paper with four words scratched on it "Without resort to arms" (words that no one ever meant) one of most popular PM returned the two posts back to Pakistan thus giving away one of biggest strategic piece of land in our relationships.
The talks used to be held late at night. At one point, Kosygin told Shastri, "You will have to give up Haji Pir and Tithwa." Shastri said, "In that case, you will have to talk to some other prime minister." The Soviets said the issue would go to the Security Council. Shastri said, "We may return them, but they must say specifically that whatever differences we have should not be sorted through war or violence, but only through negotiations." Ayub Khan agreed, but Bhutto opposed this.
Our Pakistani friends were packing their luggage. They were told it was all over. Then Kosygin intervened and a formula was reached. Pakistan would say it would never resort to arms and India would return Haji Pir and Tithwa. When the last meeting took place Shastri did not find the specific reference to arms. Shastri showed his displeasure. Ayub Khan, at that very moment, wrote in his handwriting, "Without resort to arms." That document is still in the ministry of external affairs' archives.
*********
A young 19 year old daughter of an Army officer writes:
The armed forces will take over the nation, and no one can do a thing about it. Not the police force, not Manmohan Singh(=Sonia Gandhi), not A.K. Antony. No one. A movement will arise so suddenly and with the fury of a raging tsunami, that it will rewrite India's future, inject discipline in the blood of every Indian, unscrew unopened bottles of potential and terrorise the intestines out of those who dare to oppose them or irrigate the minds of others with vile thoughts. Corruption will be eliminated 90% and progress will double. Indeed, the souls of our forefathers who fought for real freedom, will rest whole-heartily under this military control. Ironic, but true.
The question here is, why won't they do it?
*********
A Lt. Col. - Retired Lt. Col Purohit - regarded by many as highly patriotic has been arrested and being held for being the master mind for the first truly home grown terror attack.
"Imbued by patriotic spirit and fired by a desire to do something 'extra-ordinary' for the country and the society, Purohit had first thought of joining politics but I goaded him to join the army," Dighe said.
Lt. Col. Jayant Chitale (retired), who headed the services selection board centre in Pune for several years, describes Purohit, the son of a bank officer, as a bright, hard-working student overflowing with patriotic fervour.
"He met me several times after completing his training and I kept getting a very favourable feedback about him all through his stint, particularly the long one in Jammu and Kashmir," Chitale said.
In 2002 Purohit participated in 15 Maratha Light Infantry's counter-terrorism operations in Jammu and Kashmir and his tenure ended in January 2005 while serving in the Awantipura based intelligence unit of the Military Intelligence Directorate.
Where did the high level of Patriotism of a professional soldier of Indian Army go so wrong that he bombed the cities and trains of his own country? How could one who was trained to save his country and its interest, blast its very own?
People have talked of the religious angle ONLY. And I find them short sighted.
But it is not just religious. In fact the religious aspect though sad and vicious, is NOT as important!
*********
Are all these incidents above related? They all depict the utter humiliation and hurt of Indian Soldier by the Indian politician! Indian Defense forces have been used by the bureaucrats and politician in a way that would have broken even the toughest of soldiers - but the Indian soldier was supposed to remain upright and strong.
It is indeed astonishing that it took so long and so few were affected. The humiliation was complete and unwavering - the politician has left NO stone unturned to beat the very will power of Indian soldier -
....sending him to certain death.... without proper equipment... without proper back up.... no political backing.... cutting his salary .. and equating him to police and the corrupt.
And the soldier kept dying, without retaliation.
It was fine when the soldier was in a world of his own and that world was still worth some pride - but now the market value of such a vibrant and intelligent human being has grown manifold and he is also connected to the world through internet and through media.
Time for old and vile shenanigans are over. Now, the soldier will question! And that question will inevitably bring in the flavor that is prevalent in the society.
Criticising and making Lt. Col. Purohit into a monster is ONE way of looking at things. And many - in fact most today - find it to be the ONLY way to look at him and his phenomenon. But is that how you should look at the beginnning of a catastrophe staring right in your face??
No country can succeed by humiliating and hurting its OWN defense!
India won't too. But if India as a nation gets colonized or humiliated again in the coming future - it will NOT be because of people like Lt. Col. Purohit, but because of people who drove a person driven to save his country to do what he did!
I cannot believe and would not characterize Lt. Col. Purohit as a monster that others are so fond of doing these days - but I am dismayed at the path he took - the decisions he made.. they smell of indiscretion and a certain lack of hope!!
I can empathize and understand with a defense officer and one who wants to save his country even after decades of UTTER humiliation by the VERY people he/she dies for KNOWINGLY, but coming so far in the art of patience and will, it is important that our officers keep their nerves and now express their frustration in a way that is helpful for the nation. It will take lot of creativity..
... it will take the intellect of Swami Vivekananda.... the Valor of the common soldier..... the steadfast, unwavering and unspectacular Patriotism of Chanakya.... the brilliance and sheer anticipation of Subhash Bose and above all love for the weak and the victimized of Guru Gobind Singh.
It is a tall order and it is not easy. In fact it is cruel on my - our - part to expect our common soldier to be such a combination... but that is what the situation is coming to. This country of ours has been hurt and bled in the name of religion, caste and language by the VERY people who have made huge and godly claims of saving it from these curses. It is time to say that Lt. Col. Purohit is not a monster - but ONE soldier who "cracked". He knew he wanted the best for the country, but could not find the right path to channel his frustration towards. He forgot that those he thought were NOT his "own", their prosperity was integral to the growth and success of the nation.
Just because Lt. Col. Purohit was swayed by a Hindu nationalist mindset does not in any way reduce the anti-national designs of organizations that take their cue from Pakistan and China and have been relentless in breaking apart our fabric! It does not matter how many Muslims are influenced by them or not.. and how many USE Lt. Col. Purohit to JUSTIFY or attempt to soften the mess that they are involved in.. but the truth is that the minorities need a new direction and their success is of paramount importance!!
So, if out there you are a "Hindu Nationalist" then please do understand that separating yourself from the rest and thinking of taking the nation for ONE community will NOT help it remain for very long. Instead the fanatical elements need to be sorted out through education and common sense.
Same holds true for Hindu nationalists as well. What is required is the intellect of Vivekananda to understand the basics and the strength of Hinduism - which is not what the Shiv Senas and today's RSS would have us believe.
Humiliation of Indian Army and Lt. Col. Purohit phenomenon - Part 2
By Desh - Posted on 24 November 2008
General Shahbeg Singh
Continuing from the last part on Indian Army, let us understand the situation that the Indian Army has faced in a series of discussions.
Lt. Col. Purohit has become the poster child of what has gone wrong with the Army. But he is NOT the first who has resorted to arms AGAINST the Indian interests and Indians.
Back in 1980s there was another Army officer - a General - General Shahbeg Singh - a decorated War Hero of the 1965 and 1971 wars, who was a close confidant of Jarnail Singh Bhinderanwala and one who led the fight against Indian Army during Operation Bluestar and who is credited with having trained many Khalistani militants.
He was from some accounts one of the main officers who fought for the Haji Pir post as well.
In 1947, he was at Naushera in Jammu and Kashmir fighting against the Pakistan Army. While at Staff College, in addition to the academic work, he set a record in winning three, point to point and five flat races on horse back a record never equaled. Because of his knowledge of military science and excellent grasp of military operations he was appointed a Brigade Major after the staff course. As Brigade Major of 166 Infantry Brigade- a crack formation, he feit most at home when the formation was out on military exercises.
In 1962 during the India-China war, he was in NorthEast Frontier Agency as a Lt Col in HQ four Corps where he was GSO-J (Intelligence). In the 196S operations against Pakistan, he was in the Haji Pir Sector in Jammu and Kashmir, commanding a battalion of Gorkha troops. He commanded 3/11 Gorkha Rifles with distinction and was mentioned in dispatches for the capture of important enemy positions on the Haji Pir front.
In 1971 started the clandestine insurgency operations in East Pakistan. Shabeg Singh in BangladeshThe Indian Army Chief Field Marshal Manekshaw specially selected Shabeg Singh, then a brigadier, and made him in-charge of Delta Sector with lead Quarters at Aggartala. He was given the responsibility of planning, organizing and directing insurgency operations in the whole of Central and East Bangladesh.
Where did General Shahbeg Singh go wrong? He was one of the finest officers - specially a trainer of guerilla commandos that India had! He was handpicked by the Great Sam Maneckshaw for leading position in Bangladesh war.
It is the same question. His "wrong turn" did NOT start with a religious spark but it was probably the disenchantment at the utter nonsense prevalent in the Indian system where the Politicians could subjugate and humiliate the Indian soldier day in and day out and YET demand the greatest of sacrifices.
The politician can bask in the goodness of India's masses only so long as they don't completely mess the country up and, in my view, they have stepped over that line LONG time back.
There must be over 1 crore retired (and some not so old) Defense Officers in the country today. Depending on from where you look at it.. they could represent the ONLY ray of hope for saving the integrity of the Indian nation or revolting against the Indian establishment. No one wants a coup - but if that is where the common politician of the country is taking this thing.. then there are only a few options left!
Patience's virtue is NOT in its infinite existence.... but in its demonstration at the toughest of moments. Sometimes its absence shows its greatest strength as well.
By Desh - Posted on 23 November 2008
Hats off to Dristikone
In reply to first commander-in-chief of the Indian armed forces, General Sir Robert Lockhart, just after Independence when Lockhart presented a plan for growth of Indian Army, Pandit Nehru said:
"We don't need a defence plan. Our policy is non-violence. We foresee no military threats. You can scrap the army. The police are good enough to meet our security needs."
Within a year, the strength of Army personnel had been reduced in half.
***********
"Your views will be communicated to Pranab Mukherjee", said Sushma Nath, India's ExpendiureSecretary, and went on to explain how Paramilitary forces had objections of placing Lt. Cols in the Pay Band 4.
This made usually very calm and thoroughly professional soldiers very irritated and the Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor lost his cool stating that this is not only a very negative attitude but the Paramilitary forces had absolutely no business commenting on what Army needed and otherwise!
********
After days of fighting and where many a battalions had gone down and only two succeeded to make it up -
The 3rd Dogras and 2nd Sikhs were asked to capture Raja and Rani. The Dogras first attacked Raja but had to retreat in the face of stiff enemy opposition and the fact that the position was located at a considerable height. Word went around that the mighty Dogras had lost their nerve. Our commanding officer (CO), Lt. Col. R.B. Nair, was so upset that he did not eat food for two days. Other officers asked Lt. Col. Nair to give them another chance. Lt. Col. Nair agreed. After performing a havan, I and the 2nd Sikh's CO, Lt. Col. Khanna, wished each other luck. That was the last I saw him alive. We traversed up to 7000 feet. The Dogras started moving up towards Rani picket through thickets while the Sikhs started moving towards Raja braving mines.
At night, our artillery in Poonch started pounding the positions to soften the enemy located on top of the mountains. The atmosphere was soon rendered with war cries. The Dogras charged and reached the pickets. Hand-to-hand fight ensued. The Pakistanis fought bravely. The Dogras got the picket. The Sikhs, however, lost their nerve and started retreating, angering their CO, Lt. Col. Khanna. With his revolver out, he started marching up. A stray bullet killed him. At this, the Sikhs were enraged. They once again attacked the picket, and captured it. The casualty evacuation started. A Captain had received bullets shattering both his thighs. A jawan's jaw was shattered with lower jaw hanging out. Soon, there other injured soldiers, a total of 200 soldiers, came one after another. Soon, we ran out of morphine injections. But the day was saved by Poonch's civilians, who came with cots to carry the wounded down. This was the first major victory in this sector. But at what cost? We had suffered heavy casualties.
And then the soldiers were asked to vacate the post. Many soldiers cried inconsolably and hugged the rocks and would not leave. The entire effort - the going against the line of fire with nothing in between.. and dying by the hundreds and thousands and walking into absolutely sure death! And when they had done the impossible.... one politician without any eye to practicality and any strength in his heart bartered it away. Or was he betrayed by his very own!! Lal Bahadur Shastri was not the only one who was betrayed! So were those many who had died without any ego or identity!
How was the betrayal done?
For a piece of paper with four words scratched on it "Without resort to arms" (words that no one ever meant) one of most popular PM returned the two posts back to Pakistan thus giving away one of biggest strategic piece of land in our relationships.
The talks used to be held late at night. At one point, Kosygin told Shastri, "You will have to give up Haji Pir and Tithwa." Shastri said, "In that case, you will have to talk to some other prime minister." The Soviets said the issue would go to the Security Council. Shastri said, "We may return them, but they must say specifically that whatever differences we have should not be sorted through war or violence, but only through negotiations." Ayub Khan agreed, but Bhutto opposed this.
Our Pakistani friends were packing their luggage. They were told it was all over. Then Kosygin intervened and a formula was reached. Pakistan would say it would never resort to arms and India would return Haji Pir and Tithwa. When the last meeting took place Shastri did not find the specific reference to arms. Shastri showed his displeasure. Ayub Khan, at that very moment, wrote in his handwriting, "Without resort to arms." That document is still in the ministry of external affairs' archives.
*********
A young 19 year old daughter of an Army officer writes:
The armed forces will take over the nation, and no one can do a thing about it. Not the police force, not Manmohan Singh(=Sonia Gandhi), not A.K. Antony. No one. A movement will arise so suddenly and with the fury of a raging tsunami, that it will rewrite India's future, inject discipline in the blood of every Indian, unscrew unopened bottles of potential and terrorise the intestines out of those who dare to oppose them or irrigate the minds of others with vile thoughts. Corruption will be eliminated 90% and progress will double. Indeed, the souls of our forefathers who fought for real freedom, will rest whole-heartily under this military control. Ironic, but true.
The question here is, why won't they do it?
*********
A Lt. Col. - Retired Lt. Col Purohit - regarded by many as highly patriotic has been arrested and being held for being the master mind for the first truly home grown terror attack.
"Imbued by patriotic spirit and fired by a desire to do something 'extra-ordinary' for the country and the society, Purohit had first thought of joining politics but I goaded him to join the army," Dighe said.
Lt. Col. Jayant Chitale (retired), who headed the services selection board centre in Pune for several years, describes Purohit, the son of a bank officer, as a bright, hard-working student overflowing with patriotic fervour.
"He met me several times after completing his training and I kept getting a very favourable feedback about him all through his stint, particularly the long one in Jammu and Kashmir," Chitale said.
In 2002 Purohit participated in 15 Maratha Light Infantry's counter-terrorism operations in Jammu and Kashmir and his tenure ended in January 2005 while serving in the Awantipura based intelligence unit of the Military Intelligence Directorate.
Where did the high level of Patriotism of a professional soldier of Indian Army go so wrong that he bombed the cities and trains of his own country? How could one who was trained to save his country and its interest, blast its very own?
People have talked of the religious angle ONLY. And I find them short sighted.
But it is not just religious. In fact the religious aspect though sad and vicious, is NOT as important!
*********
Are all these incidents above related? They all depict the utter humiliation and hurt of Indian Soldier by the Indian politician! Indian Defense forces have been used by the bureaucrats and politician in a way that would have broken even the toughest of soldiers - but the Indian soldier was supposed to remain upright and strong.
It is indeed astonishing that it took so long and so few were affected. The humiliation was complete and unwavering - the politician has left NO stone unturned to beat the very will power of Indian soldier -
....sending him to certain death.... without proper equipment... without proper back up.... no political backing.... cutting his salary .. and equating him to police and the corrupt.
And the soldier kept dying, without retaliation.
It was fine when the soldier was in a world of his own and that world was still worth some pride - but now the market value of such a vibrant and intelligent human being has grown manifold and he is also connected to the world through internet and through media.
Time for old and vile shenanigans are over. Now, the soldier will question! And that question will inevitably bring in the flavor that is prevalent in the society.
Criticising and making Lt. Col. Purohit into a monster is ONE way of looking at things. And many - in fact most today - find it to be the ONLY way to look at him and his phenomenon. But is that how you should look at the beginnning of a catastrophe staring right in your face??
No country can succeed by humiliating and hurting its OWN defense!
India won't too. But if India as a nation gets colonized or humiliated again in the coming future - it will NOT be because of people like Lt. Col. Purohit, but because of people who drove a person driven to save his country to do what he did!
I cannot believe and would not characterize Lt. Col. Purohit as a monster that others are so fond of doing these days - but I am dismayed at the path he took - the decisions he made.. they smell of indiscretion and a certain lack of hope!!
I can empathize and understand with a defense officer and one who wants to save his country even after decades of UTTER humiliation by the VERY people he/she dies for KNOWINGLY, but coming so far in the art of patience and will, it is important that our officers keep their nerves and now express their frustration in a way that is helpful for the nation. It will take lot of creativity..
... it will take the intellect of Swami Vivekananda.... the Valor of the common soldier..... the steadfast, unwavering and unspectacular Patriotism of Chanakya.... the brilliance and sheer anticipation of Subhash Bose and above all love for the weak and the victimized of Guru Gobind Singh.
It is a tall order and it is not easy. In fact it is cruel on my - our - part to expect our common soldier to be such a combination... but that is what the situation is coming to. This country of ours has been hurt and bled in the name of religion, caste and language by the VERY people who have made huge and godly claims of saving it from these curses. It is time to say that Lt. Col. Purohit is not a monster - but ONE soldier who "cracked". He knew he wanted the best for the country, but could not find the right path to channel his frustration towards. He forgot that those he thought were NOT his "own", their prosperity was integral to the growth and success of the nation.
Just because Lt. Col. Purohit was swayed by a Hindu nationalist mindset does not in any way reduce the anti-national designs of organizations that take their cue from Pakistan and China and have been relentless in breaking apart our fabric! It does not matter how many Muslims are influenced by them or not.. and how many USE Lt. Col. Purohit to JUSTIFY or attempt to soften the mess that they are involved in.. but the truth is that the minorities need a new direction and their success is of paramount importance!!
So, if out there you are a "Hindu Nationalist" then please do understand that separating yourself from the rest and thinking of taking the nation for ONE community will NOT help it remain for very long. Instead the fanatical elements need to be sorted out through education and common sense.
Same holds true for Hindu nationalists as well. What is required is the intellect of Vivekananda to understand the basics and the strength of Hinduism - which is not what the Shiv Senas and today's RSS would have us believe.
Humiliation of Indian Army and Lt. Col. Purohit phenomenon - Part 2
By Desh - Posted on 24 November 2008
General Shahbeg Singh
Continuing from the last part on Indian Army, let us understand the situation that the Indian Army has faced in a series of discussions.
Lt. Col. Purohit has become the poster child of what has gone wrong with the Army. But he is NOT the first who has resorted to arms AGAINST the Indian interests and Indians.
Back in 1980s there was another Army officer - a General - General Shahbeg Singh - a decorated War Hero of the 1965 and 1971 wars, who was a close confidant of Jarnail Singh Bhinderanwala and one who led the fight against Indian Army during Operation Bluestar and who is credited with having trained many Khalistani militants.
He was from some accounts one of the main officers who fought for the Haji Pir post as well.
In 1947, he was at Naushera in Jammu and Kashmir fighting against the Pakistan Army. While at Staff College, in addition to the academic work, he set a record in winning three, point to point and five flat races on horse back a record never equaled. Because of his knowledge of military science and excellent grasp of military operations he was appointed a Brigade Major after the staff course. As Brigade Major of 166 Infantry Brigade- a crack formation, he feit most at home when the formation was out on military exercises.
In 1962 during the India-China war, he was in NorthEast Frontier Agency as a Lt Col in HQ four Corps where he was GSO-J (Intelligence). In the 196S operations against Pakistan, he was in the Haji Pir Sector in Jammu and Kashmir, commanding a battalion of Gorkha troops. He commanded 3/11 Gorkha Rifles with distinction and was mentioned in dispatches for the capture of important enemy positions on the Haji Pir front.
In 1971 started the clandestine insurgency operations in East Pakistan. Shabeg Singh in BangladeshThe Indian Army Chief Field Marshal Manekshaw specially selected Shabeg Singh, then a brigadier, and made him in-charge of Delta Sector with lead Quarters at Aggartala. He was given the responsibility of planning, organizing and directing insurgency operations in the whole of Central and East Bangladesh.
Where did General Shahbeg Singh go wrong? He was one of the finest officers - specially a trainer of guerilla commandos that India had! He was handpicked by the Great Sam Maneckshaw for leading position in Bangladesh war.
It is the same question. His "wrong turn" did NOT start with a religious spark but it was probably the disenchantment at the utter nonsense prevalent in the Indian system where the Politicians could subjugate and humiliate the Indian soldier day in and day out and YET demand the greatest of sacrifices.
The politician can bask in the goodness of India's masses only so long as they don't completely mess the country up and, in my view, they have stepped over that line LONG time back.
There must be over 1 crore retired (and some not so old) Defense Officers in the country today. Depending on from where you look at it.. they could represent the ONLY ray of hope for saving the integrity of the Indian nation or revolting against the Indian establishment. No one wants a coup - but if that is where the common politician of the country is taking this thing.. then there are only a few options left!
Patience's virtue is NOT in its infinite existence.... but in its demonstration at the toughest of moments. Sometimes its absence shows its greatest strength as well.
Friday, January 23, 2009
David Miliband: Briton
David Miliband is an embarrassment strutting the world stage
The Foreign Secretary's performance in India was rude, stupid and naive
Andrew Pierce
The Telegraph (UK)
22 Jan 2009
David Miliband, aged 44 but with the face of a 30-year-old, has proved yet again he is even more immature than he looks. His performance in India was rude, stupid and politically and diplomatically naive – pretty impressive in a Foreign Secretary.
Mercifully it was of little consequence to anyone but Labour MPs and their rapidly diminishing number of party activists when Miliband foolishly flirted with the leadership of the party last summer; Gordon Brown at the time was down but not quite out.
What does matter, though, is that this so-called intellectual is allowed to strut his stuff on the world stage, desperate to prove he is still a big player, and in the process deeply offend India, one of Britain's staunchest allies.
The charge sheet makes grim reading. Why did he think it was tactful or clever to deliver a speech declaring there was no such thing "as the war on terror" in the Taj Hotel in Mumbai where dozens of innocent people were killed in a hail of machine gun bullets by terrorists? Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group linked with the murderous attack, welcomed our Foreign Secretary's "positive comments!". Good work, Dave. Miliband, was, apparently trying to match his rhetoric to the post-Bush era. Oh, please. As if President Obama gives a hoot what Miliband thinks about anything, assuming he even knows who he is.
He also caused outrage with a simplistic approach to the Kashmir crisis which triggered outraged accusations in India of meddling and appeasement. I don't imagine Margaret Thatcher, John Major or Tony Blair would have taken too kindly either to a wet-behind-the-ears Indian foreign minister lecturing them – in public of all places – about how to contain the IRA.
Miliband, Oxford educated and a Kennedy scholar – which apparently makes you clever – showed off in private meetings hence the official complaint about his conduct from Delhi. He also caused grave offence by addressing his host, Pranab Mukherjee, 73, by his first name even though the veteran foreign minister called Miliband "Your Excellency". My, little David must have loved that.
If Miliband had any political courage, and had forced a leadership contest last year, I suspect he would have been steam-rollered to defeat even by a weakened Gordon Brown.
In the next reshuffle, the Prime Minister should dump Miliband, he of the trademark gormless gunning grin, whose gift for PR saw him photographed at the party conference proudly clutching a banana. He is an embarrassment not just to Labour – he is in good company there – but also to the country.
Mr Bean, a child in a grown man's body, is a hoot on the television but it's not funny when the comedy character is the real life Foreign Secretary.
As a big fan of Abba's Mamma Mia! I asked a friend's teenage daughter what she thought of the film version. She screwed-up her nose and sighed loudly. "Gross. So embarrassing. It's like watching your Dad dancing or singing in public." Her friend concurred. President Obama take note. The next time he, or any other almost 50-year-old man, contemplates the dance floor, trampling all over their wives shoes and hem lines, watch Mamma Mia! Or, in President Obama's case, he could always ask his delightful daughters for advice. I think we know what they would say. "Don't Dad. It's too embarrassing." They would be right.
A friend, who is a member of the Labour Party, received an email the other day from Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, detailing his latest botched attempts to save the banking sector. Curiously, it came with a warning: "This email may be a scam." You can say that again.
---
See also:
David Miliband comments on Kashmir welcomed by terrorist group(LeT)
Why Miliband tried to rationalize Mumbai terrorism
The Foreign Secretary's performance in India was rude, stupid and naive
Andrew Pierce
The Telegraph (UK)
22 Jan 2009
David Miliband, aged 44 but with the face of a 30-year-old, has proved yet again he is even more immature than he looks. His performance in India was rude, stupid and politically and diplomatically naive – pretty impressive in a Foreign Secretary.
Mercifully it was of little consequence to anyone but Labour MPs and their rapidly diminishing number of party activists when Miliband foolishly flirted with the leadership of the party last summer; Gordon Brown at the time was down but not quite out.
What does matter, though, is that this so-called intellectual is allowed to strut his stuff on the world stage, desperate to prove he is still a big player, and in the process deeply offend India, one of Britain's staunchest allies.
The charge sheet makes grim reading. Why did he think it was tactful or clever to deliver a speech declaring there was no such thing "as the war on terror" in the Taj Hotel in Mumbai where dozens of innocent people were killed in a hail of machine gun bullets by terrorists? Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group linked with the murderous attack, welcomed our Foreign Secretary's "positive comments!". Good work, Dave. Miliband, was, apparently trying to match his rhetoric to the post-Bush era. Oh, please. As if President Obama gives a hoot what Miliband thinks about anything, assuming he even knows who he is.
He also caused outrage with a simplistic approach to the Kashmir crisis which triggered outraged accusations in India of meddling and appeasement. I don't imagine Margaret Thatcher, John Major or Tony Blair would have taken too kindly either to a wet-behind-the-ears Indian foreign minister lecturing them – in public of all places – about how to contain the IRA.
Miliband, Oxford educated and a Kennedy scholar – which apparently makes you clever – showed off in private meetings hence the official complaint about his conduct from Delhi. He also caused grave offence by addressing his host, Pranab Mukherjee, 73, by his first name even though the veteran foreign minister called Miliband "Your Excellency". My, little David must have loved that.
If Miliband had any political courage, and had forced a leadership contest last year, I suspect he would have been steam-rollered to defeat even by a weakened Gordon Brown.
In the next reshuffle, the Prime Minister should dump Miliband, he of the trademark gormless gunning grin, whose gift for PR saw him photographed at the party conference proudly clutching a banana. He is an embarrassment not just to Labour – he is in good company there – but also to the country.
Mr Bean, a child in a grown man's body, is a hoot on the television but it's not funny when the comedy character is the real life Foreign Secretary.
As a big fan of Abba's Mamma Mia! I asked a friend's teenage daughter what she thought of the film version. She screwed-up her nose and sighed loudly. "Gross. So embarrassing. It's like watching your Dad dancing or singing in public." Her friend concurred. President Obama take note. The next time he, or any other almost 50-year-old man, contemplates the dance floor, trampling all over their wives shoes and hem lines, watch Mamma Mia! Or, in President Obama's case, he could always ask his delightful daughters for advice. I think we know what they would say. "Don't Dad. It's too embarrassing." They would be right.
A friend, who is a member of the Labour Party, received an email the other day from Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, detailing his latest botched attempts to save the banking sector. Curiously, it came with a warning: "This email may be a scam." You can say that again.
---
See also:
David Miliband comments on Kashmir welcomed by terrorist group(LeT)
Why Miliband tried to rationalize Mumbai terrorism
Pakistan's School Books
Pakistan: Do school texts fuel bias?
By Issam Ahmed | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
January 21, 2009
Christian Science Monitor
Lahore, Pakistan - As Pakistani Air Force jets circled the eastern border city of Lahore last week in a show of strength, journalist Rab Nawaz was despondent. But what occupied him was less the threat of war with India than the things his son had begun saying recently.
"My 7-year-old came home from school one day insisting that Indians are our natural-born enemies, that Muslims are good, and Hindus are evil," the widely traveled journalist recalls. "He asked about the relative strength of our air forces and insisted we would win if it came to war.
"It was only when I asked him whether my Indian friends ... were also bad," he adds, "that he began to realize that things weren't quite so simple."
Public schools, though long neglected, are still responsible for educating the vast majority of schoolchildren. Some 57 percent of boys and 44 percent of girls enroll in primary school, and about 46 percent of boys and 32 percent of girls reach high school.
All public schools must follow the government curriculum – one that critics say is inadequate at best, harmful at worst.
According to Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, the "Islamizing" of Pakistan's schools began in 1976 under the rule of the former dictator, the general Zia ul-Haq.
An act of parliament that year required all government and private schools (except those teaching the British O-levels from Grade 9) to follow a curriculum that includes learning outcomes for the federally approved Grade 5 social studies class such as: "Acknowledge and identify forces that may be working against Pakistan," "Make speeches on Jihad," "Collect pictures of policemen, soldiers, and national guards," and "India's evil designs against Pakistan."
"It sounds like the blueprint for a religious fascist state," says Professor Hoodbhoy. "You have a country where generations have grown up believing they are surrounded on all sides by enemies, they are the only righteous ones, and the world is out to get them."
It is this siege mentality that led to some of the head-in-the-sand reactions by the Pakistani media and public in the aftermath of Mumbai, he suggests.
"There was a flat denial that it could be Pakistanis," he says. "Anyone suggesting the contrary was labeled an enemy of the state or unpatriotic. When I said on television there are groups in this country dedicated to harming India – the furor ... was quite astonishing."
Amanullah Kariapper, a young software engineer and cofounder of Young Professionals of Lahore, an informal alliance dedicated to human rights causes, agrees.
Mr. Kariapper says he began revising his world views when he went to college, first at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and later in Grenoble, France. The process came full circle when he was briefly arrested in November 2007 for protesting former President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency and suspension of civil rights.
General Zia's curriculum was inherited by the successive governments of Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, General Musharraf, and now, Asif Ali Zardari.
An Islamist alphabet chart published in this month's Newsline shows Urdu letters accompanied by guns, daggers, and a depiction of planes crashing into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The chart is not approved by the government. But it is, the article claims, in use by "by some regular schools as well as madrassahs associated with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, an Islamic political party that had allied itself with General Musharraf." The Ministry of Education says there are 1.5 million students in 13,000 madrassahs acquiring a parallel religious education.
Critics also complain about insensitivity toward minorities. A section on Christian festivities in the Federal Ethics textbooks had been removed, according to a Daily Times report from 2006 titled "O Jesus, where art thou?" Hindu and Sikh festivals were mentioned only fleetingly.
In the latest edition of Pakistan Studies for Grades 9-10, approved by the Punjab textbook board, all mention of non-Muslim festivals of Pakistan had been removed. Hindus and Christians make up about 5 percent of the population of more than 170 million.
In 2007, two Pakistani students at Middlebury College, Hamza Usmani and Shujaat Ali Khan, embarked on a review of all state-sanctioned texts in a project called "Enlightened Pakistan."
They enlisted contacts ranging from seniors in high school to teachers. The bulk of their report (www.enlightenedpakistan.org), targets poor teaching in sciences, languages, and math. But in social sciences and history, they found "disturbing" themes like "Pakistan is for Muslims alone," "The world is collectively scheming against Pakistan and Islam," and "Muslims are urged to fight Jihad against the infidels."
The report notes that the textbooks routinely engage in historical revisionism and place questions designed to portray Hinduism as an inherently iniquitous religion: "There is no place for equality in Hinduism. Right/Wrong."
Mr. Usmani says the texts encourage illiberal worldviews and "dumb down" education. "No opposing views are presented, no differing ideas. It makes the population less intelligent," he says.
But Rasul Baksh Rais, a professor at LUMS, argues that every nation has the right to construct its own historical narrative as part of the legitimate process of nation-building. "Perhaps they [the critics] simply don't want us to be on that track at all or they want us be a very confused nation. It's a negative attitude toward Pakistan," he says, adding he has yet to see proof of anti-India or anti-Hindu bias.
"The roots of Pakistani resentment toward India lie in causes such as the conflict in Kashmir and the ongoing oppression of Muslims," says Mr. Rais.
Mr. Usmani says it's a case of how far one goes. "All nations need to support their national fabric. But you have to draw the line somewhere. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia – these are not examples you want to emulate. This debate is about where to draw that line."
Amir Raza Malik, a Ministry of Education spokesman, declined to comment on previous curriculums, but said the Ministry was preparing an overhaul that would be unveiled in 2010. "If there is any objectionable material, it would certainly be removed," he says.
---
See also:
Hate Lessons in Saudi, Pakistan textbooks
Pak textbooks build hate culture against India
By Issam Ahmed | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
January 21, 2009
Christian Science Monitor
Lahore, Pakistan - As Pakistani Air Force jets circled the eastern border city of Lahore last week in a show of strength, journalist Rab Nawaz was despondent. But what occupied him was less the threat of war with India than the things his son had begun saying recently.
"My 7-year-old came home from school one day insisting that Indians are our natural-born enemies, that Muslims are good, and Hindus are evil," the widely traveled journalist recalls. "He asked about the relative strength of our air forces and insisted we would win if it came to war.
"It was only when I asked him whether my Indian friends ... were also bad," he adds, "that he began to realize that things weren't quite so simple."
Public schools, though long neglected, are still responsible for educating the vast majority of schoolchildren. Some 57 percent of boys and 44 percent of girls enroll in primary school, and about 46 percent of boys and 32 percent of girls reach high school.
All public schools must follow the government curriculum – one that critics say is inadequate at best, harmful at worst.
According to Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, the "Islamizing" of Pakistan's schools began in 1976 under the rule of the former dictator, the general Zia ul-Haq.
An act of parliament that year required all government and private schools (except those teaching the British O-levels from Grade 9) to follow a curriculum that includes learning outcomes for the federally approved Grade 5 social studies class such as: "Acknowledge and identify forces that may be working against Pakistan," "Make speeches on Jihad," "Collect pictures of policemen, soldiers, and national guards," and "India's evil designs against Pakistan."
"It sounds like the blueprint for a religious fascist state," says Professor Hoodbhoy. "You have a country where generations have grown up believing they are surrounded on all sides by enemies, they are the only righteous ones, and the world is out to get them."
It is this siege mentality that led to some of the head-in-the-sand reactions by the Pakistani media and public in the aftermath of Mumbai, he suggests.
"There was a flat denial that it could be Pakistanis," he says. "Anyone suggesting the contrary was labeled an enemy of the state or unpatriotic. When I said on television there are groups in this country dedicated to harming India – the furor ... was quite astonishing."
Amanullah Kariapper, a young software engineer and cofounder of Young Professionals of Lahore, an informal alliance dedicated to human rights causes, agrees.
Mr. Kariapper says he began revising his world views when he went to college, first at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and later in Grenoble, France. The process came full circle when he was briefly arrested in November 2007 for protesting former President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency and suspension of civil rights.
General Zia's curriculum was inherited by the successive governments of Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, General Musharraf, and now, Asif Ali Zardari.
An Islamist alphabet chart published in this month's Newsline shows Urdu letters accompanied by guns, daggers, and a depiction of planes crashing into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The chart is not approved by the government. But it is, the article claims, in use by "by some regular schools as well as madrassahs associated with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, an Islamic political party that had allied itself with General Musharraf." The Ministry of Education says there are 1.5 million students in 13,000 madrassahs acquiring a parallel religious education.
Critics also complain about insensitivity toward minorities. A section on Christian festivities in the Federal Ethics textbooks had been removed, according to a Daily Times report from 2006 titled "O Jesus, where art thou?" Hindu and Sikh festivals were mentioned only fleetingly.
In the latest edition of Pakistan Studies for Grades 9-10, approved by the Punjab textbook board, all mention of non-Muslim festivals of Pakistan had been removed. Hindus and Christians make up about 5 percent of the population of more than 170 million.
In 2007, two Pakistani students at Middlebury College, Hamza Usmani and Shujaat Ali Khan, embarked on a review of all state-sanctioned texts in a project called "Enlightened Pakistan."
They enlisted contacts ranging from seniors in high school to teachers. The bulk of their report (www.enlightenedpakistan.org), targets poor teaching in sciences, languages, and math. But in social sciences and history, they found "disturbing" themes like "Pakistan is for Muslims alone," "The world is collectively scheming against Pakistan and Islam," and "Muslims are urged to fight Jihad against the infidels."
The report notes that the textbooks routinely engage in historical revisionism and place questions designed to portray Hinduism as an inherently iniquitous religion: "There is no place for equality in Hinduism. Right/Wrong."
Mr. Usmani says the texts encourage illiberal worldviews and "dumb down" education. "No opposing views are presented, no differing ideas. It makes the population less intelligent," he says.
But Rasul Baksh Rais, a professor at LUMS, argues that every nation has the right to construct its own historical narrative as part of the legitimate process of nation-building. "Perhaps they [the critics] simply don't want us to be on that track at all or they want us be a very confused nation. It's a negative attitude toward Pakistan," he says, adding he has yet to see proof of anti-India or anti-Hindu bias.
"The roots of Pakistani resentment toward India lie in causes such as the conflict in Kashmir and the ongoing oppression of Muslims," says Mr. Rais.
Mr. Usmani says it's a case of how far one goes. "All nations need to support their national fabric. But you have to draw the line somewhere. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia – these are not examples you want to emulate. This debate is about where to draw that line."
Amir Raza Malik, a Ministry of Education spokesman, declined to comment on previous curriculums, but said the Ministry was preparing an overhaul that would be unveiled in 2010. "If there is any objectionable material, it would certainly be removed," he says.
---
See also:
Hate Lessons in Saudi, Pakistan textbooks
Pak textbooks build hate culture against India
Friday, January 16, 2009
More on Sanjay Gupta!
The Surgeon General
President-elect Obama's choice for Surgeon General Dr. Sanjay Gupta gets hit for being a "lightweight" in some corners. People wonder if he is the right man for the job, and I cede that he looked like a rube when he screwed up his facts in a debate with Michael Moore. But you know what? The guy is a brain surgeon, and he is a masterful communicator, and he does have the cojones to accept an assignment from CNN to follow our troops into combat back in 2003. Then, while he was there, he had to stop reporting and go back to being a surgeon...in combat. You know what? That strikes me as a not-bad set of credentials when you want to convince people of something, particularly people who might not otherwise be willing to listen to somebody from the President-elect's side of the aisle.
Eric Alterman
-----
President-elect Obama's choice for Surgeon General Dr. Sanjay Gupta gets hit for being a "lightweight" in some corners. People wonder if he is the right man for the job, and I cede that he looked like a rube when he screwed up his facts in a debate with Michael Moore. But you know what? The guy is a brain surgeon, and he is a masterful communicator, and he does have the cojones to accept an assignment from CNN to follow our troops into combat back in 2003. Then, while he was there, he had to stop reporting and go back to being a surgeon...in combat. You know what? That strikes me as a not-bad set of credentials when you want to convince people of something, particularly people who might not otherwise be willing to listen to somebody from the President-elect's side of the aisle.
Eric Alterman
-----
The Saudi-isation of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture
The Saudi-isation of Pakistan
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
ByPervez Hoodbhoy / Pervez Hoodbhoy teaches physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad
Newsline
A stern, unyielding version of Islam is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis in Pakistan.
The common belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and that madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This is a serious misconception. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan’s towns and cities. Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind. The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan’s demise as a nation state.
For 20 years or more, a few of us have been desperately sending out SOS messages, warning of terrible times to come. In fact, I am surprised at how rapidly these dire predictions have come true.
A full-scale war is being fought in FATA, Swat and other “wild” areas of Pakistan, resulting in thousands of deaths. It is only a matter of time before this fighting shifts to Peshawar and Islamabad (which has already been a witness to the Lal Masjid episode) and engulfs Lahore and Karachi as well. The suicide bomber and the masked abductor have crippled Pakistan’s urban life and shattered its national economy.
Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones. But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.
What explains Pakistan’s collective masochism? To understand this, one needs to study the drastic social and cultural transformations that have rendered this country so completely different from what it was in earlier times.
For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula. This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture in India for a thousand years. This culture produced Mughul architecture, the Taj Mahal, the poetry of Asadullah Khan Ghalib, and much more. Now a stern, unyielding version of Islam (Wahhabism) is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints who had walked on this land for hundreds of years.
This change is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state used Islam as an instrument of state policy. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, floggings were carried out publicly, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast in Ramadan, selection for academic posts in universities required that the candidate demonstrate a knowledge of Islamic teachings and jihad was declared essential for every Muslim. Today, government intervention is no longer needed because of a spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – still in an amorphous and diffused form – is more popular now than ever before as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state.
Villages have changed drastically; this transformation has been driven, in part, by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other sects, who they do not regard as Muslims. The Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than the Pukhtuns, are now beginning to take a line resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from the recent decisions of the Lahore High Court.
In Pakistan’s lower-middle and middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement that frowns on any and every expression of joy and pleasure. Lacking any positive connection to culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate “corruption” by regulating cultural life and seizing control of the education system.
“Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichitraveena are completely dead,” laments Mohammad Shehzad, a music aficionado. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is violently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba at Punjab University. So the university has been forced to hold its music classes elsewhere. Religious fundamentalists consider music haram or un-Islamic. Kathak dancing, once popular with the Muslim elite of India, has few teachers left. Pakistan produces no feature films of any consequence. Nevertheless, the Pakistani elite, disconnected from the rest of the population, live their lives in comfort through their vicarious proximity to the West. Alcoholism is a chronic problem of the super rich of Lahore – a curious irony for this deeply religious country.
Islamisation of the state and the polity was supposed to have been in the interest of the ruling class – a classic strategy for preserving it from the wrath of the working class. But the amazing success of the state is turning out to be its own undoing. Today, it is under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers.
Pakistan’s self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.
On the previous page, the reader can view the government-approved curriculum. This is the basic road map for transmitting values and knowledge to the young. By an act of parliament passed in 1976, all government and private schools (except for O-level schools) are required to follow this curriculum. It was prepared by the curriculum wing of the federal ministry of education, government of Pakistan. It sounds like a blueprint for a religious fascist state.
Alongside are scanned pictures from an illustrated primer for the Urdu alphabet. The masthead states that it has been prepared by Iqra Publishers, Rawalpindi, along “Islamic lines.” Although not an officially approved textbook, it is being used currently by some regular schools, as well as madrassas associated with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), an Islamic political party that had allied itself with General Musharraf. These picture scans have been taken from a child’s book, hence the scribbles.
The world of the Pakistani schoolchild remained largely unchanged, even after September 11, 2001, the event that led to Pakistan’s timely desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jihad. Indeed, for all his hypocritical talk of “enlightened moderation,” General Musharraf’s educational curriculum was far from enlightening. It was a slightly toned down version of the curriculum that existed under Nawaz Sharif which, in turn, was identical to that under Benazir Bhutto who had inherited it from General Zia-ul-Haq. Fearful of taking on the powerful religious forces, every incumbent government has refused to take a position on the curriculum and thus quietly allowed young minds to be moulded by fanatics. What may happen a generation later has always been a secondary issue for a government challenged on so many fronts.
The promotion of militarism in Pakistan’s so-called “secular” public schools, colleges and universities had a profound effect upon young minds. Militant jihad became part of the culture on college and university campuses. Armed groups flourished, they invited students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, set up offices throughout the country, collected funds at Friday prayers and declared a war which knew no borders. Pre-9/11, my university was ablaze with posters inviting students to participate in the Kashmir jihad. Post-2001, this ceased to be done openly.
Still, the primary vehicle for Saudi-ising Pakistan’s education has been the madrassa. In earlier times, these had turned out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum that essentially dates back to the 11th century, with only minor subsequent revisions. But their principal function had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques, and those who eked out an existence as ‘maulvi sahibs’ teaching children to read the Quran.
The Afghan jihad changed everything. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder they needed to fight a holy war. The Americans and Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan. A detailed picture of the current situation is not available. But according to the national education census, which the ministry of education released in 2006, Punjab has 5,459 madrassas followed by the NWFP with 2,843; Sindh has 1,935; the Federally Administrated Northern Areas (FANA), 1,193; Balochistan, 769; Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), 586; the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), 135; and the Islamabad capital territory, 77. The ministry estimates that 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in the 13,000 madrassas.
These figures appear to be way off the mark. Commonly quoted figures range between 18,000 and 22,000 madrassas. The number of students could be correspondingly larger. The free boarding and lodging plus provision of books to the students, is a key part of their appeal. Additionally, parents across the country desire that their children be “disciplined” and given a thorough Islamic education. The madrassas serve this purpose, too, exceedingly well.
Madrassas have deeply impacted the urban environment. Until a few years ago, Islamabad was a quiet, orderly, modern city different from the rest of Pakistan. Also, it had largely been the abode of Pakistan’s elite and foreign diplomats. But the rapid transformation of its demography brought with it hundreds of mosques with multi-barrelled audio-cannons mounted on minarets, as well as scores of madrassas illegally constructed in what used to be public parks and green areas. Now, tens of thousands of their students, sporting little prayer caps, dutifully chant the Quran all day. In the evenings they swarm the city, making women minus the hijab increasingly nervous.
Total segregation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. For example, on April 9, 2006, 21 women and eight children were crushed to death and scores injured in a stampede inside a three-storey madrassa in Karachi, where a large number of women were attending a weekly congregation. Male rescuers, who arrived in ambulances, were prevented from moving the injured women to hospitals.
One cannot dismiss this incident as being just one of a kind. In fact, soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described to me how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girl students from under the rubble of their school building. This action was similar to that of Saudi Arabia’s ubiquitous religious ‘mutaween’ (police) who, in March 2002, had stopped school girls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas – a long robe worn in Saudi Arabia. In a rare departure from the norm, Saudi newspapers had blamed and criticised the mutaween for letting 15 girls burn to death.
The Saudi-isation of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. The drive to segregate is now also being found among educated women. Vigorous proselytisers carrying this message, such as Mrs Farhat Hashmi, have been catapulted to the heights of fame and fortune. Their success is evident. Two decades back, the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. The abaya was an unknown word in Urdu. Today, some shops across the country specialise in abayas. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, the female student is seeking the anonymity of the burqa. And in some parts of the country she seems to outnumber her sisters who still “dare” to show their faces.
I have observed the veil profoundly affect habits and attitudes. Many of my veiled female students have largely become silent note-takers, are increasingly timid and seem less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. They lack the confidence of a young university student.
While social conservatism does not necessarily lead to violent extremism, it does shorten the distance. The socially conservative are more easily convinced that Muslims are being demonised by the rest of the world. The real problem, they say, is the plight of the Palestinians, the decadent and discriminatory West, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Kashmir issue, the Bush doctrine – the list runs on. They vehemently deny that those committing terrorist acts are Muslims, and if presented with incontrovertible evidence, say it is a mere reaction to oppression.
The immediate future does not appear hopeful: increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control of the minds of worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged: Baitullah Mehsud, Maulana Fazlullah and Mangal Bagh. Poverty, deprivation, lack of justice and extreme differences of wealth provide the perfect environment for these demagogues to recruit people to their cause. Their gruesome acts of terror are still being perceived by large numbers of Pakistanis merely as a war against imperialist America. This could not be further from the truth.
In the long term, we will have to see how the larger political battle works out between those Pakistanis who want an Islamic theocratic state and those who want a modern Islamic republic. It may yet be possible to roll back those Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded Pakistani society for over 30 years and to defeat its hate-driven holy warriors. There is no chance of instant success; perhaps things may have to get worse before they get better. But, in the long term, I am convinced that the forces of irrationality will cancel themselves out because they act at random whereas reason pulls only in one direction. History leads us to believe that reason will triumph over unreason, and the evolution of the humans into a higher and better species will continue. Using ways that we cannot currently anticipate, they will somehow overcome their primal impulses of territoriality, tribalism, religiosity and nationalism. But, for now, this must be just a matter of faith.
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
ByPervez Hoodbhoy / Pervez Hoodbhoy teaches physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad
Newsline
A stern, unyielding version of Islam is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis in Pakistan.
The common belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and that madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This is a serious misconception. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan’s towns and cities. Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind. The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan’s demise as a nation state.
For 20 years or more, a few of us have been desperately sending out SOS messages, warning of terrible times to come. In fact, I am surprised at how rapidly these dire predictions have come true.
A full-scale war is being fought in FATA, Swat and other “wild” areas of Pakistan, resulting in thousands of deaths. It is only a matter of time before this fighting shifts to Peshawar and Islamabad (which has already been a witness to the Lal Masjid episode) and engulfs Lahore and Karachi as well. The suicide bomber and the masked abductor have crippled Pakistan’s urban life and shattered its national economy.
Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones. But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.
What explains Pakistan’s collective masochism? To understand this, one needs to study the drastic social and cultural transformations that have rendered this country so completely different from what it was in earlier times.
For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula. This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture in India for a thousand years. This culture produced Mughul architecture, the Taj Mahal, the poetry of Asadullah Khan Ghalib, and much more. Now a stern, unyielding version of Islam (Wahhabism) is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints who had walked on this land for hundreds of years.
This change is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state used Islam as an instrument of state policy. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, floggings were carried out publicly, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast in Ramadan, selection for academic posts in universities required that the candidate demonstrate a knowledge of Islamic teachings and jihad was declared essential for every Muslim. Today, government intervention is no longer needed because of a spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – still in an amorphous and diffused form – is more popular now than ever before as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state.
Villages have changed drastically; this transformation has been driven, in part, by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other sects, who they do not regard as Muslims. The Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than the Pukhtuns, are now beginning to take a line resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from the recent decisions of the Lahore High Court.
In Pakistan’s lower-middle and middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement that frowns on any and every expression of joy and pleasure. Lacking any positive connection to culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate “corruption” by regulating cultural life and seizing control of the education system.
“Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichitraveena are completely dead,” laments Mohammad Shehzad, a music aficionado. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is violently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba at Punjab University. So the university has been forced to hold its music classes elsewhere. Religious fundamentalists consider music haram or un-Islamic. Kathak dancing, once popular with the Muslim elite of India, has few teachers left. Pakistan produces no feature films of any consequence. Nevertheless, the Pakistani elite, disconnected from the rest of the population, live their lives in comfort through their vicarious proximity to the West. Alcoholism is a chronic problem of the super rich of Lahore – a curious irony for this deeply religious country.
Islamisation of the state and the polity was supposed to have been in the interest of the ruling class – a classic strategy for preserving it from the wrath of the working class. But the amazing success of the state is turning out to be its own undoing. Today, it is under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers.
Pakistan’s self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.
On the previous page, the reader can view the government-approved curriculum. This is the basic road map for transmitting values and knowledge to the young. By an act of parliament passed in 1976, all government and private schools (except for O-level schools) are required to follow this curriculum. It was prepared by the curriculum wing of the federal ministry of education, government of Pakistan. It sounds like a blueprint for a religious fascist state.
Alongside are scanned pictures from an illustrated primer for the Urdu alphabet. The masthead states that it has been prepared by Iqra Publishers, Rawalpindi, along “Islamic lines.” Although not an officially approved textbook, it is being used currently by some regular schools, as well as madrassas associated with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), an Islamic political party that had allied itself with General Musharraf. These picture scans have been taken from a child’s book, hence the scribbles.
The world of the Pakistani schoolchild remained largely unchanged, even after September 11, 2001, the event that led to Pakistan’s timely desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jihad. Indeed, for all his hypocritical talk of “enlightened moderation,” General Musharraf’s educational curriculum was far from enlightening. It was a slightly toned down version of the curriculum that existed under Nawaz Sharif which, in turn, was identical to that under Benazir Bhutto who had inherited it from General Zia-ul-Haq. Fearful of taking on the powerful religious forces, every incumbent government has refused to take a position on the curriculum and thus quietly allowed young minds to be moulded by fanatics. What may happen a generation later has always been a secondary issue for a government challenged on so many fronts.
The promotion of militarism in Pakistan’s so-called “secular” public schools, colleges and universities had a profound effect upon young minds. Militant jihad became part of the culture on college and university campuses. Armed groups flourished, they invited students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, set up offices throughout the country, collected funds at Friday prayers and declared a war which knew no borders. Pre-9/11, my university was ablaze with posters inviting students to participate in the Kashmir jihad. Post-2001, this ceased to be done openly.
Still, the primary vehicle for Saudi-ising Pakistan’s education has been the madrassa. In earlier times, these had turned out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum that essentially dates back to the 11th century, with only minor subsequent revisions. But their principal function had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques, and those who eked out an existence as ‘maulvi sahibs’ teaching children to read the Quran.
The Afghan jihad changed everything. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder they needed to fight a holy war. The Americans and Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan. A detailed picture of the current situation is not available. But according to the national education census, which the ministry of education released in 2006, Punjab has 5,459 madrassas followed by the NWFP with 2,843; Sindh has 1,935; the Federally Administrated Northern Areas (FANA), 1,193; Balochistan, 769; Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), 586; the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), 135; and the Islamabad capital territory, 77. The ministry estimates that 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in the 13,000 madrassas.
These figures appear to be way off the mark. Commonly quoted figures range between 18,000 and 22,000 madrassas. The number of students could be correspondingly larger. The free boarding and lodging plus provision of books to the students, is a key part of their appeal. Additionally, parents across the country desire that their children be “disciplined” and given a thorough Islamic education. The madrassas serve this purpose, too, exceedingly well.
Madrassas have deeply impacted the urban environment. Until a few years ago, Islamabad was a quiet, orderly, modern city different from the rest of Pakistan. Also, it had largely been the abode of Pakistan’s elite and foreign diplomats. But the rapid transformation of its demography brought with it hundreds of mosques with multi-barrelled audio-cannons mounted on minarets, as well as scores of madrassas illegally constructed in what used to be public parks and green areas. Now, tens of thousands of their students, sporting little prayer caps, dutifully chant the Quran all day. In the evenings they swarm the city, making women minus the hijab increasingly nervous.
Total segregation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. For example, on April 9, 2006, 21 women and eight children were crushed to death and scores injured in a stampede inside a three-storey madrassa in Karachi, where a large number of women were attending a weekly congregation. Male rescuers, who arrived in ambulances, were prevented from moving the injured women to hospitals.
One cannot dismiss this incident as being just one of a kind. In fact, soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described to me how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girl students from under the rubble of their school building. This action was similar to that of Saudi Arabia’s ubiquitous religious ‘mutaween’ (police) who, in March 2002, had stopped school girls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas – a long robe worn in Saudi Arabia. In a rare departure from the norm, Saudi newspapers had blamed and criticised the mutaween for letting 15 girls burn to death.
The Saudi-isation of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. The drive to segregate is now also being found among educated women. Vigorous proselytisers carrying this message, such as Mrs Farhat Hashmi, have been catapulted to the heights of fame and fortune. Their success is evident. Two decades back, the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. The abaya was an unknown word in Urdu. Today, some shops across the country specialise in abayas. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, the female student is seeking the anonymity of the burqa. And in some parts of the country she seems to outnumber her sisters who still “dare” to show their faces.
I have observed the veil profoundly affect habits and attitudes. Many of my veiled female students have largely become silent note-takers, are increasingly timid and seem less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. They lack the confidence of a young university student.
While social conservatism does not necessarily lead to violent extremism, it does shorten the distance. The socially conservative are more easily convinced that Muslims are being demonised by the rest of the world. The real problem, they say, is the plight of the Palestinians, the decadent and discriminatory West, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Kashmir issue, the Bush doctrine – the list runs on. They vehemently deny that those committing terrorist acts are Muslims, and if presented with incontrovertible evidence, say it is a mere reaction to oppression.
The immediate future does not appear hopeful: increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control of the minds of worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged: Baitullah Mehsud, Maulana Fazlullah and Mangal Bagh. Poverty, deprivation, lack of justice and extreme differences of wealth provide the perfect environment for these demagogues to recruit people to their cause. Their gruesome acts of terror are still being perceived by large numbers of Pakistanis merely as a war against imperialist America. This could not be further from the truth.
In the long term, we will have to see how the larger political battle works out between those Pakistanis who want an Islamic theocratic state and those who want a modern Islamic republic. It may yet be possible to roll back those Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded Pakistani society for over 30 years and to defeat its hate-driven holy warriors. There is no chance of instant success; perhaps things may have to get worse before they get better. But, in the long term, I am convinced that the forces of irrationality will cancel themselves out because they act at random whereas reason pulls only in one direction. History leads us to believe that reason will triumph over unreason, and the evolution of the humans into a higher and better species will continue. Using ways that we cannot currently anticipate, they will somehow overcome their primal impulses of territoriality, tribalism, religiosity and nationalism. But, for now, this must be just a matter of faith.
On Free Speech
If Rushdie deserves free speech, why not Harry?
Salil Tripathi
The Spectator (UK)
Wednesday, 14th January 2009
Salil Tripathis’s article on Harry calling a Pakistani cadet ‘our little Paki friend’ has some wonderful quotes
……
And then it was discovered that the heir to the throne routinely calls a polo-playing Asian friend ‘Sooty’.
..
What’s dismayingly predictable, and yet remarkable, is the fallout. From Gordon Brown to Cabinet ministers (‘offensive’), David Cameron (‘completely unacceptable’), and Nick Clegg (‘considerably offensive’), politicians of all hues have stepped in, expressing righteous indignation. Clarence House apologised profusely, and the army added it ‘does not tolerate inappropriate behaviour in any shape or form’. Columnists have had a field day.
And then there is the Ramadhan Foundation, a spokesman for which called Harry ‘a thug’. Enjoying his 15 minutes of fame, the foundation’s director Mohammed Shafiq said: ‘I am deeply shocked and saddened at Prince Harry’s racism. It has no justification. Prince Harry as a public figure must ensure that he promotes equality and tolerance and this rant, whether today or three years ago, is sickening and he should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.’ That’s strong criticism, and disproportionate to the offence caused. So what should happen next? Maybe Harry should be given an Asbo. Or perhaps asked to express contrition by going to study at a madrasa in Pakistan. Or salute the Pakistani flag. (Ironically, ‘pak’, in Pakistan, means pure, and hence, in theory, the epithet — Paki — can be turned into a compliment. But this is not the time for such semantics, either.)
Of course, when spoken in anger, ‘Paki’ is a word spoken with hate, and meant as an insult. Many British Asians rightly feel insulted when they are abused. And none of this is to defend Harry’s words; rather, it is to underscore the principle of free speech. As Woody Allen famously said, everyone has the right to be a schmuck. [..]
[…]
And then there is the curious silence over how Asians refer to other communities. Ziauddin Sardar’s personal journey into our Asian communities, Balti Britain, reveals a term many Asians use for whites — gora. Like Paki, it can be seen as light-hearted banter, but is sometimes used derisively, for instance as a reference to simple-minded whites who can’t ‘get’ Asian complexities. And much else, often worse — although Balti Britain avoids going down those alleys. Furthermore, the terms used within Asian communities to describe blacks are offensive: kallu, for black, is perhaps the mildest one among them, and beyond the pale are epithets with which angry Hindus describe Muslims, and angry Muslims describe Hindus. Indeed, among certain Hindu communities, daughters are told they can date anybody ‘except a BMW’. That’s not the car; that’s short for Black, Muslim or White. These are the dark little secrets not widely known outside Asian communities.
[…]
Twenty years ago, Inayat Bunglawala, now media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, rejoiced when the Ayatollah declared the fatwa. Now he knows better; now he says it was wrong to call for the novelist’s death. []
Harry’s silly remarks on a home video are hardly the same stuff as a literary novel. But the response to one follows from the climate fostered by the culture of acquiescence which has roots in the other. This can have only two consequences. To paraphrase the late Bernard Levin, those who live in glass houses will have to undress in the dark. And those of us who wish to speak will have to watch our words. But sunlight is a good disinfectant: why not let our schmucks be schmucks, so that our Voltaires can imagine, and express their views, without fear?
Saudi Arabia to Lead U.N. Faith Forum
From Thinking Zygote:
You have got to be kidding me. An absolute monarchy with the national motto of "There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of Allah" and whose national anthem contains the lines "Allah is the greatest,/O my country!/My country, Live as the glory of Muslims!" a country which has actually outlawed any religion but Sunni Islam that is patrolled by religious police is going to be leading a conference on religious tolerance?
What part of this makes sense?
Ok, let's keep reading this article here, maybe there's some explanation.
The Saudi leader agreed for the first time to dine in the same room with the Israeli president at a private, pre-conference banquet Tuesday hosted by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. But Ban hinted that the two leaders -- whose governments do not have diplomatic relations -- were not seated at the same table.
NOOOOO, Really?
General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto, a Roman Catholic priest from Nicaragua who is co-chairman of the conference, sought to play down the event's religious significance. "We're not here to talk about religion. . . . We're here to talk about tapping our innermost values and putting them at the service" of the world's neediest people.
Wait... what? Where is he again? Oh right, a U.N. conference on religious tolerance.
Now look, religious people, I have nothing against any of your religions in particular, I think you all have your problems (massive horrible-consequence-causing ones) but even this is a little too illogical. First of all there's the problem with the mere fact you're holding a conference on religious tolerance and yet invoking the presence of the "world's neediest people" to invoke some kind of sympathy. Having a big meeting that everyone and their brother knows won't actually result in anything but and agreement to disagree isn't going to help anyone.
Every single person there is still going to walk away thinking all the others are deluded, and possibly doomed to eternal suffering of some sort.
But still... Saudi Arabia?
That thumping sound you hear is my head, on this desk here. Hmm... Mahogany.
You have got to be kidding me. An absolute monarchy with the national motto of "There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of Allah" and whose national anthem contains the lines "Allah is the greatest,/O my country!/My country, Live as the glory of Muslims!" a country which has actually outlawed any religion but Sunni Islam that is patrolled by religious police is going to be leading a conference on religious tolerance?
What part of this makes sense?
Ok, let's keep reading this article here, maybe there's some explanation.
The Saudi leader agreed for the first time to dine in the same room with the Israeli president at a private, pre-conference banquet Tuesday hosted by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. But Ban hinted that the two leaders -- whose governments do not have diplomatic relations -- were not seated at the same table.
NOOOOO, Really?
General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto, a Roman Catholic priest from Nicaragua who is co-chairman of the conference, sought to play down the event's religious significance. "We're not here to talk about religion. . . . We're here to talk about tapping our innermost values and putting them at the service" of the world's neediest people.
Wait... what? Where is he again? Oh right, a U.N. conference on religious tolerance.
Now look, religious people, I have nothing against any of your religions in particular, I think you all have your problems (massive horrible-consequence-causing ones) but even this is a little too illogical. First of all there's the problem with the mere fact you're holding a conference on religious tolerance and yet invoking the presence of the "world's neediest people" to invoke some kind of sympathy. Having a big meeting that everyone and their brother knows won't actually result in anything but and agreement to disagree isn't going to help anyone.
Every single person there is still going to walk away thinking all the others are deluded, and possibly doomed to eternal suffering of some sort.
But still... Saudi Arabia?
That thumping sound you hear is my head, on this desk here. Hmm... Mahogany.
Studying Islam has made me an atheist
By Douglas Murray
The Spectator (UK)
Monday, 29th December 2008
Douglas Murray says that he stopped being an Anglican after analysing Muslim texts and deciding that no book — of any religion — could claim infallibility
Just over a year ago I told a lie. In print. In this magazine. I was one of those asked by The Spectator last Christmas whether I believed in the virgin birth. Since it had always seemed to me that if you believed in God a ‘pick and mix’ approach to the central tenets of the faith was pointless, I said ‘yes’. But in fact I felt ‘no’. It wasn’t that I had been wrestling over the doctrine of the incarnation, I simply felt that if I didn’t believe in the virgin birth, I would not believe in God. The truth is I didn’t and don’t. The guilt has been lingering since. This is my atheist mea culpa.
Many people hold on to belief as an unquestioned part of their make-up. They never have to confront the source of their belief, and as long as nothing actively pushes them into addressing it, they keep it as something which rarely does much harm and might actually do some good. I have been an Anglican since birth — and not just a cultural Anglican but at times (rarest of things) a real, worshipping, believing Anglican. Like a lot of believers, I knew that there were parts of my belief that wouldn’t stand up to analysis. But that was fine. I didn’t need to analyse them. I only lost faith when I was forced to.
Charles Darwin didn’t do for God. German biblical criticism did — the scholarship on lost texts, discoveries of added-to texts and edited texts. All pointed away from the initial starting-block of faith — that the texts transmitted immutable truths. Realising that ‘holy’ texts are, like most other things in life, the result of an accretion of human effort and human error is one of the most troubling discoveries any believer can make. I remember trying to read some of this scholarship when I was younger, and finding it so terrifying, so ground-shaking, that I put it off for another day.
But it found me via another route. Some years ago I started studying Islam. It didn’t take long to recognise the problems of that religion’s texts — the repetitions, contradictions and absurdities. Unlike Christianity, scholarship on these problems in Islam has barely begun. But they are manifest for anyone to see. For a holy book which in its opening lines boasts ‘that is the book, wherein is no doubt’, plenty of doubt emerges. Not least in recognising demonstrable plagiarisms from the Torah and the Christian Bible. If God spoke through an archangel to one illiterate tradesman in 7th-century Arabia, then — just for starters — why was he stealing material? Or was he just repeating himself?
Gradually, scepticism of the claims made by one religion was joined by scepticism of all such claims. Incredulity that anybody thought an archangel dictated a book to Mohammed produced a strange contradiction. I found myself still clinging to belief in Christianity. I was trying to believe — though rarely arguing — ‘Well, your guy didn’t hear voices: but I know a man who did.’ This last, shortest and sharpest, phase pulled down the whole thing. In the end Mohammed made me an atheist.
Though it was a supplementary realisation, the problems that these texts have caused cannot be avoided either. Where else does your real bona-fide bigot find his metier? Anyone can repress a woman, but you need ‘dictated’ scriptures to feel you’re really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you’ve got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious ‘Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’-style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different to you.
Anyone can be a bigot. But divine bigots must count as the most intractable — the most infuriatingly impervious to reason. Besides — to a bibliophile, indeed bibliomaniac — the idea that there is any book ‘wherein is no doubt’ is insulting as well demonstrably untrue.
Even when I stopped believing I pretended I did, or said I did for a bit, for fear of the break in the dike. Like many people, the first thing that troubled me about leaving religion was fear of meaninglessness. Where would ethics come from? If nothing was revealed then surely everything would be relative — and that way lay nihilism. As it happens, it becomes clearer the more I look at it that religious texts are not only unnecessary to the ethical life. More often than believers like to admit, they are directly contrary to it.
Then there is the loss of the guiding hand. It is the one utterly irreplaceable aspect of belief. Without God, where is the enduring melody — the cantus firmus — of life? Alexander Herzen asked, ‘Where is the song before it is sung?’ It is impossible to replace the belief in a deity’s plans for you. Though less comforting, it is simply observably truer that there is no song before you sing it — no path before you tread it. You make the song as you sing it. You make the path as you tread it. It makes life more precarious, certainly — but just as the risk of falling is greater, so, likewise, is the possibility of soaring.
My final fear was one which I think a lot of Christians in this country feel, particularly as they see Islam re-emerging and gaining adherents in spite (or perhaps because) of its intransigence and intractability. It is, I suppose, a sense of cultural abandonment. We know how much of what we enjoy and relish comes through Christianity. Can we really go on without it? Doesn’t it leave our building without foundations? Slowly I discover that it doesn’t. I still can’t pass a country church or cathedral without going in. The texts are still essential to me. They are just (and ‘just’ hardly does the job here) no more divine than Shakespeare.
The question of how, without believing it, we transmit the good of our historical faith to another generation is certainly problematic. Perhaps like many Jewish people who rejoice in their identity but don’t believe in God we could be better — and franker — at being cultural Christians. I tried it this year, at my first atheist Christmas.
I went to church on Christmas morning, and went with my family to the carol service a few nights before. The readings were comforting not only because of their familiarity but because taken as great stories they still transmit, like all great literature, truths which you can live by. The momentousness and simplicity of Adam’s fall was as tragic and resonant to this atheist heart as it once was to the believing one.
Fundamentalist Islam challenges us politically. But tackling literalism of one kind with literalism of another doesn’t work. Complexity is harder to accept, but more evident to the eye. After long struggle, I find reason enough.
My first non-believing Christmas was different, certainly. Different — but, contrary to my fears, no shallower. Quite the opposite. Things this year seemed both more open and more possible. More fragile and more precious. It also struck me, in ways which are hard to explain — and the religious language cannot be avoided — that it was all, if anything, even more miraculous.
The Spectator (UK)
Monday, 29th December 2008
Douglas Murray says that he stopped being an Anglican after analysing Muslim texts and deciding that no book — of any religion — could claim infallibility
Just over a year ago I told a lie. In print. In this magazine. I was one of those asked by The Spectator last Christmas whether I believed in the virgin birth. Since it had always seemed to me that if you believed in God a ‘pick and mix’ approach to the central tenets of the faith was pointless, I said ‘yes’. But in fact I felt ‘no’. It wasn’t that I had been wrestling over the doctrine of the incarnation, I simply felt that if I didn’t believe in the virgin birth, I would not believe in God. The truth is I didn’t and don’t. The guilt has been lingering since. This is my atheist mea culpa.
Many people hold on to belief as an unquestioned part of their make-up. They never have to confront the source of their belief, and as long as nothing actively pushes them into addressing it, they keep it as something which rarely does much harm and might actually do some good. I have been an Anglican since birth — and not just a cultural Anglican but at times (rarest of things) a real, worshipping, believing Anglican. Like a lot of believers, I knew that there were parts of my belief that wouldn’t stand up to analysis. But that was fine. I didn’t need to analyse them. I only lost faith when I was forced to.
Charles Darwin didn’t do for God. German biblical criticism did — the scholarship on lost texts, discoveries of added-to texts and edited texts. All pointed away from the initial starting-block of faith — that the texts transmitted immutable truths. Realising that ‘holy’ texts are, like most other things in life, the result of an accretion of human effort and human error is one of the most troubling discoveries any believer can make. I remember trying to read some of this scholarship when I was younger, and finding it so terrifying, so ground-shaking, that I put it off for another day.
But it found me via another route. Some years ago I started studying Islam. It didn’t take long to recognise the problems of that religion’s texts — the repetitions, contradictions and absurdities. Unlike Christianity, scholarship on these problems in Islam has barely begun. But they are manifest for anyone to see. For a holy book which in its opening lines boasts ‘that is the book, wherein is no doubt’, plenty of doubt emerges. Not least in recognising demonstrable plagiarisms from the Torah and the Christian Bible. If God spoke through an archangel to one illiterate tradesman in 7th-century Arabia, then — just for starters — why was he stealing material? Or was he just repeating himself?
Gradually, scepticism of the claims made by one religion was joined by scepticism of all such claims. Incredulity that anybody thought an archangel dictated a book to Mohammed produced a strange contradiction. I found myself still clinging to belief in Christianity. I was trying to believe — though rarely arguing — ‘Well, your guy didn’t hear voices: but I know a man who did.’ This last, shortest and sharpest, phase pulled down the whole thing. In the end Mohammed made me an atheist.
Though it was a supplementary realisation, the problems that these texts have caused cannot be avoided either. Where else does your real bona-fide bigot find his metier? Anyone can repress a woman, but you need ‘dictated’ scriptures to feel you’re really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you’ve got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious ‘Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’-style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different to you.
Anyone can be a bigot. But divine bigots must count as the most intractable — the most infuriatingly impervious to reason. Besides — to a bibliophile, indeed bibliomaniac — the idea that there is any book ‘wherein is no doubt’ is insulting as well demonstrably untrue.
Even when I stopped believing I pretended I did, or said I did for a bit, for fear of the break in the dike. Like many people, the first thing that troubled me about leaving religion was fear of meaninglessness. Where would ethics come from? If nothing was revealed then surely everything would be relative — and that way lay nihilism. As it happens, it becomes clearer the more I look at it that religious texts are not only unnecessary to the ethical life. More often than believers like to admit, they are directly contrary to it.
Then there is the loss of the guiding hand. It is the one utterly irreplaceable aspect of belief. Without God, where is the enduring melody — the cantus firmus — of life? Alexander Herzen asked, ‘Where is the song before it is sung?’ It is impossible to replace the belief in a deity’s plans for you. Though less comforting, it is simply observably truer that there is no song before you sing it — no path before you tread it. You make the song as you sing it. You make the path as you tread it. It makes life more precarious, certainly — but just as the risk of falling is greater, so, likewise, is the possibility of soaring.
My final fear was one which I think a lot of Christians in this country feel, particularly as they see Islam re-emerging and gaining adherents in spite (or perhaps because) of its intransigence and intractability. It is, I suppose, a sense of cultural abandonment. We know how much of what we enjoy and relish comes through Christianity. Can we really go on without it? Doesn’t it leave our building without foundations? Slowly I discover that it doesn’t. I still can’t pass a country church or cathedral without going in. The texts are still essential to me. They are just (and ‘just’ hardly does the job here) no more divine than Shakespeare.
The question of how, without believing it, we transmit the good of our historical faith to another generation is certainly problematic. Perhaps like many Jewish people who rejoice in their identity but don’t believe in God we could be better — and franker — at being cultural Christians. I tried it this year, at my first atheist Christmas.
I went to church on Christmas morning, and went with my family to the carol service a few nights before. The readings were comforting not only because of their familiarity but because taken as great stories they still transmit, like all great literature, truths which you can live by. The momentousness and simplicity of Adam’s fall was as tragic and resonant to this atheist heart as it once was to the believing one.
Fundamentalist Islam challenges us politically. But tackling literalism of one kind with literalism of another doesn’t work. Complexity is harder to accept, but more evident to the eye. After long struggle, I find reason enough.
My first non-believing Christmas was different, certainly. Different — but, contrary to my fears, no shallower. Quite the opposite. Things this year seemed both more open and more possible. More fragile and more precious. It also struck me, in ways which are hard to explain — and the religious language cannot be avoided — that it was all, if anything, even more miraculous.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
From the Great Bong
This [..] is done through punching together as many stereotypes that Westerners have about India as is humanly possible. People live in garbage heaps. A character jumps into a huge heap of human excreta and without batting an eyelid comes running out covered in brown slime, as if its the most natural thing in India, to get an autograph of a star. The hero, a Muslim, sees his family slaughtered by Hindu rioters and sees along with it a rioting kid (presumably) dressed as Lord Rama, in blue paint and with a bow and arrow in hand, standing as a sentinel of doom, an image whose indelibility in the character’s mind becomes a principal plot point.
A character is booked on the flimsiest of charges and then he is beaten black and blue in a police station and given volts of electricity.
What else? Let’s see.
Child prostitution. Check.
Forced begging. Check.
Blindings of innocent children. Check.
Rape. Check.
Human filth. Bahoot hain sahab.
Call centers. Oh yes most certainly.
Destiny. Of course.
But wait. Do Hindu saffron-clothed Ram Senas not run havoc through Muslim slums? Do street kids not get taken in by beggar gangs and maimed? Doesnt rape happen in India? Are those slums specially constructed sets? Why do you, third world denizen, get so defensive about your own country? Chill.
Well yes these things do happen in India. However the problem is when you show every hellish thing possible all happening to the same person. Then it stretches reason and believability and just looks like you are packing in every negative thing that Westerners perceive about India for the sake of “crowd pleasing”....
______________________________________
And >
The movie being described by these critics is not the film that I saw several weeks ago in a darkened movie theater. Instead what I saw was a cynical collection of third-world clichés sold with pretty colors and an uplifting soundtrack. Slumdog Millionaire is the story of a little boy living in a society which happily allows his mother to be murdered by a roving mob for being Muslim, and then abandons him to live in the streets alone, scrabbling in the mud. It’s the story of a boy sold into slavery by his countrymen, a boy who once he escapes slavery can only survive by repay the kindness of tourists with theft. It’s the story of a boy whose brother treats him like garbage, betrays him and threatens to kill him so he can rape the beautiful woman his sibling loves. It’s the story of a boy who grows up to be beaten and hideously tortured by the police for doing well on a game show which tries to cheat him. It’s the story without a single moment of genuine virtue or morality demonstrated by anyone around the movie’s protagonist. It’s a story full of crime, murder, and child abuse. The only time our hero Jamal is ever really happy in, he’s robbing people. Even the film’s so called happy ending is paper thin. Having watched him live a life in which each tiny success is brutally punished by a culture of bigotry, corruption, and abuse there’s every reason to believe that after our Jamal walks off camera he’ll immediately be stabbed and left for dead in a Mumbai alley.
Yet Donald Monroe of the Fresno Bee says this “Indian tale is delightful.” What? This is a movie which portrays Indian culture as bankrupt and evil. As shown in Slumdog Millionaire the Indian way of life is one of poverty and callous disregard for basic human rights. I have no idea if that’s the real India, but that’s the one portrayed in this movie. This is the story of a boy surviving in a civilization of vicious murderers and hate-mongers. This is the story of a boy scrabbling about in the dirt heaped upon him by a national heritage of brutality, learning to lie and steal as his birthright, desperate to survive in an entire nation of evil people. Yet Duncan Riley of The Inquisitor insists, “it taps in to Indian culture in a way not really seen in movies shown in the West.” If the way he’s talking about is one of savagery, then he’s correct. Somehow I don’t think that’s what he meant.
read the rest here..
Hat Tip to Shadow warrior:
The Mis-Education of a Millionaire
This [..] is done through punching together as many stereotypes that Westerners have about India as is humanly possible. People live in garbage heaps. A character jumps into a huge heap of human excreta and without batting an eyelid comes running out covered in brown slime, as if its the most natural thing in India, to get an autograph of a star. The hero, a Muslim, sees his family slaughtered by Hindu rioters and sees along with it a rioting kid (presumably) dressed as Lord Rama, in blue paint and with a bow and arrow in hand, standing as a sentinel of doom, an image whose indelibility in the character’s mind becomes a principal plot point.
A character is booked on the flimsiest of charges and then he is beaten black and blue in a police station and given volts of electricity.
What else? Let’s see.
Child prostitution. Check.
Forced begging. Check.
Blindings of innocent children. Check.
Rape. Check.
Human filth. Bahoot hain sahab.
Call centers. Oh yes most certainly.
Destiny. Of course.
But wait. Do Hindu saffron-clothed Ram Senas not run havoc through Muslim slums? Do street kids not get taken in by beggar gangs and maimed? Doesnt rape happen in India? Are those slums specially constructed sets? Why do you, third world denizen, get so defensive about your own country? Chill.
Well yes these things do happen in India. However the problem is when you show every hellish thing possible all happening to the same person. Then it stretches reason and believability and just looks like you are packing in every negative thing that Westerners perceive about India for the sake of “crowd pleasing”....
______________________________________
And >
The movie being described by these critics is not the film that I saw several weeks ago in a darkened movie theater. Instead what I saw was a cynical collection of third-world clichés sold with pretty colors and an uplifting soundtrack. Slumdog Millionaire is the story of a little boy living in a society which happily allows his mother to be murdered by a roving mob for being Muslim, and then abandons him to live in the streets alone, scrabbling in the mud. It’s the story of a boy sold into slavery by his countrymen, a boy who once he escapes slavery can only survive by repay the kindness of tourists with theft. It’s the story of a boy whose brother treats him like garbage, betrays him and threatens to kill him so he can rape the beautiful woman his sibling loves. It’s the story of a boy who grows up to be beaten and hideously tortured by the police for doing well on a game show which tries to cheat him. It’s the story without a single moment of genuine virtue or morality demonstrated by anyone around the movie’s protagonist. It’s a story full of crime, murder, and child abuse. The only time our hero Jamal is ever really happy in, he’s robbing people. Even the film’s so called happy ending is paper thin. Having watched him live a life in which each tiny success is brutally punished by a culture of bigotry, corruption, and abuse there’s every reason to believe that after our Jamal walks off camera he’ll immediately be stabbed and left for dead in a Mumbai alley.
Yet Donald Monroe of the Fresno Bee says this “Indian tale is delightful.” What? This is a movie which portrays Indian culture as bankrupt and evil. As shown in Slumdog Millionaire the Indian way of life is one of poverty and callous disregard for basic human rights. I have no idea if that’s the real India, but that’s the one portrayed in this movie. This is the story of a boy surviving in a civilization of vicious murderers and hate-mongers. This is the story of a boy scrabbling about in the dirt heaped upon him by a national heritage of brutality, learning to lie and steal as his birthright, desperate to survive in an entire nation of evil people. Yet Duncan Riley of The Inquisitor insists, “it taps in to Indian culture in a way not really seen in movies shown in the West.” If the way he’s talking about is one of savagery, then he’s correct. Somehow I don’t think that’s what he meant.
read the rest here..
Hat Tip to Shadow warrior:
The Mis-Education of a Millionaire
Marrying Mulsims in Europe
Cardinal warns Catholic women against marrying Muslim men'
From correspondents in Lisbon | January 15, 2009
Article from: Agence France-Presse
A PORTUGESE cardinal has warned Roman Catholic women against marrying Muslim men.
"Be careful with love. Think twice before marrying a Muslim, think seriously because it brings loads of hassle - and even Allah can't say where all that will end,'' Jose Policarpo, the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, said during a public debate.
"When you recognise what a young European of Christian upbringing is subjected to, given Muslim attitudes to women, the first time she goes to their countries, we can imagine what that entails.
"You can only dialogue with someone who is willing to dialogue. With our Muslim brothers, for example, dialogue is very difficult,'' he said.
"We have taken the first steps, but it's extremely difficult - because for them, their truth is the only way.''
Around 40,000 Muslims live in Portugal, according to Lisbon's Islamic community leaders - who have yet to react to the cardinal's remarks.
A spokesman for Portugal's episcopal community, Manuel Marujao, said that Policarpo was offering "realistic advice'' which he said amounted neither to "discrimination nor contempt for another culture or religion'', according to the Catholic news agency Ecclesia.
Story
From correspondents in Lisbon | January 15, 2009
Article from: Agence France-Presse
A PORTUGESE cardinal has warned Roman Catholic women against marrying Muslim men.
"Be careful with love. Think twice before marrying a Muslim, think seriously because it brings loads of hassle - and even Allah can't say where all that will end,'' Jose Policarpo, the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, said during a public debate.
"When you recognise what a young European of Christian upbringing is subjected to, given Muslim attitudes to women, the first time she goes to their countries, we can imagine what that entails.
"You can only dialogue with someone who is willing to dialogue. With our Muslim brothers, for example, dialogue is very difficult,'' he said.
"We have taken the first steps, but it's extremely difficult - because for them, their truth is the only way.''
Around 40,000 Muslims live in Portugal, according to Lisbon's Islamic community leaders - who have yet to react to the cardinal's remarks.
A spokesman for Portugal's episcopal community, Manuel Marujao, said that Policarpo was offering "realistic advice'' which he said amounted neither to "discrimination nor contempt for another culture or religion'', according to the Catholic news agency Ecclesia.
Story
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