Thursday, November 11, 2010
Understanding Arundhati Roy on Kashmir
By P. Chacko Joseph
October 26th, 2010
Frontier India
When I was a kid, my father had annual leave to go to wherever he wishes. Normally, he would choose to go to his home in Kerala. For me it was the dreaded month of the year. Take a train to Kerala where there was hardly any electricity, mosquito and other insect bites, trying to talk in Malayalam and worse to eat Kerala Fat Rice. I admit there were joys too. The Kerala Porrota and egg pattice were my favorite things. I have / had a cousin too. We have had many arguments together. The first ever was when he told me that sun revolves around Kerala. I asked him how? He then traced out with his finger pointing up in the sky on how sun rose and how it set down. I told him it rises similar way in the place my father was posted. And it has been same in the places I had been with him. He explained that, what I saw was sun from far rising and setting in Kerala. I had another doubt. I asked him if it goes the other way, then there must be another place behind Kerala. He told me that the place was empty.
I held the belief, until I got to study solar system. I was devastated. I challenged my cousin during my next annual leave. He told me that this is what I get via capitalistic system of education. Unfortunately for him, he too had the similar geography book on his table. He reasoned that if he does not write the same things in the book, the capitalistic system wouldn’t let him pass. This was the second time heard the word “Capitalistic.” So, I asked him what it was. He explained that an imperialistic country America dictated what we studied. True, those days American hand and profits were bad words.
Next trip, he told me was how Indian ministers were bought by imperialistic America. Especially Morarji Desai and Indra Gandhi. He said the only way to save India was via communism. He spoke passionately about his Chairman Mao. Here, I differed. I said its an enemy country. He said I was foolish. He gave me 3 scenarios. China should capture US; Communist should take over India; or India should be divided into small countries. This is the only way forward he said.
Next time, he said that “You know, kerala politics directly effects US politics!” I was laughing uncontrollably.
Slowly, as we both matured, I used to give him solid arguments back. For example, “I will buy you a ticket to your fatherland China.”
Once he showed me some chocolates his UNGLE (uncle) brought from Gulf. I told him that Mars and M&M were from imperialistic US. He should not eat it and I can make a sacrifice by eating it for him. He said that, since his UNGLE brought it from Gulf, its ok, he can eat it.
But, as I grew up, and came in contact with other Keralites, I realised that I was up against some kind of romanticism. Also, they say that every Kerala child is born with a red (communist) flag in the hand. I stopped arguing. Besides, me and my cousin got busy with our own lives. He was practicing Law as I last heard.
Similarly, on yahoo chat (late 1990), I went into a mallu chat room. I introduced myself as from Dubai. The mallu crowd was on me with words like paradesi and other unmentionable words. The funny part was, I told them that I can get people visas to Dubai and every one changed the tune. I was a chat room hero.
People like Arundhati Roy have grown in this kind of environment. They live in their own fantasy land that mix with communist ideas. Just that this one is famous, got some money from imperialist publisher (like my cousins UNGLES chocolates) and a mike to talk into. Arundhati just mouthed off what could be an “average Kerala talk.” The kind when they discuss politics.
This talk is no different from CPI (M) support for china or Baglihar Dam. You can understand why Prakash Karat and Arundhati Roy are so famous in Srinagar. These people have been picked up by the powers that be for their idiocracy.
Monday, November 08, 2010
DemocracyNow Interviews know-nothing Arundhati Roy..AGAIN!
Amy Goodman, fawns Arundhati Roy over know nothing, attention seeker from India. This woman, who's only claim to fame is having written one measly book is a darling of the western left and an "authentic" source when they want a comment on India. What qualifies this woman to address, economic, social, cultural issues is anyone's guess, but she's brown, looks good and allows the left to bash India without seeming racist.
While this interview was being recorded, These "Maoist rebels" killed eight people in Bengal, Orissa and Bihar. Four killings, including that of a woman, were reported from West Midnapore district in Bengal, where Maoists ‘punished’ people for defying their 24-hour shutdown against US President Barack Obama's visit. The woman Sandhya Mahato, was killed because her son was in the police and she had been warned that he should give up his job. Her husband was also missing.
In Jharkhand, Maoists blew up Sadbahani railway station in Palamau district and two government buildings. In Bihar they blew up railway track near Kurhani railway station in the Hajipur-Muzaffarpur section resulting in 10 wagons of a goods train derailing. Maoists also torched trucks and mobile phone towers.
In Orissa, about 60 rebels stormed into the Gamphakunda school premises under Kalimela police station and blew up a newly-constructed two-story school building that to benefit children from to the lowest castes..
All this to protest US President Obama's visit. In a written statement, they call him "the gang leader of US imperialism" and the world's "Enemy Number One," and urge people to use the slogan "Go back Obama."
Arundhati has been a vocal supporter for these murders. She also recently vocally supported an Islamic fundamentalist who wants Kashmir to become an Islamic state and separate from secular India because he claims, Islam does not allow Muslims to live under non-Islamic conditions.
The only thing connecting these two violent movements, one Islamic fundamentalist and the other communist, with are both causes supported ardently by Arundhati Roy are their anti-India stance.
How can the secular Western Left support and cheer this woman?
Acclaimed Indian Author Arundhati Roy on Obama’s Wars, Poverty and India’s Maoist Rebel
AMY GOODMAN: We move now to Arundhati Roy. Maoist rebels in India called for a strike Monday to protest President Obama’s visit. The Indian media reports, according to the police, Maoists blew up a new school building this morning and killed four people in the eastern Indian states or Orissa and Bihar.
Well, last month, I had the chance to sit down with author Arundhati Roy in London about the Maoists in India. But first I began by asking her for her assessment of President Obama.
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Well, I think the big lesson today is that—look at the richest country in the world, America, having attacked and made war on the poorest countries but not being able to win those wars. You know, they have not been able to win. And here’s the lesson. You know, you couldn’t win Vietnam, you couldn’t win Afghanistan, couldn’t win Iraq, cannot win Kashmir. You know, there has to be—Obama, I mean, he’s involved in all these war crimes. It’s not as though—you know, he has expanded the war in Afghanistan, moved it into Pakistan. You know, Pakistan is a country that is in such a lot of trouble because of this. You know, right when 9/11 happened, I remember writing saying you forced them to raise the Taliban in their midst, and now you want them to garret the pit that they grew in their own backyard. It’s going to lead to civil war. You know, you didn’t need to be a genius to figure that out. And that has happened, you know? America has interfered with Pakistan from the beginning, and Pakistan now paying a terrible price for that. I mean, I don’t know if it had a choice, when—you know, when America wants to interfere, it doesn’t give anyone a choice. So it’s destroyed Afghanistan, it’s destroyed Pakistan, it’s destroyed Iraq. And it will destroy India, if—because India doesn’t have the spine. The Indian government is just willingly allowing this to happen, the U.S. to dictate everything. So, today, Obama, I mean, whatever he’s doing in America is a separate thing. But certainly outside, he’s no less of—I mean, his foreign policy is not all that different from George Bush, you know? And if they start a war in Iran, they won’t win it. You know, I mean, it’s not possible. These wars cannot be won. So it’s about time somebody realized that and decided to change the way the world thinks about war and thinks about weapons and thinks about putting soldiers on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, since we last spoke, assassination has taken place—well, at least one—in India. Can you talk about what happened?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* It was—I mean, as you know now, there’s an almost full-fledged war going on. Actually, there are several wars are going on in India. There’s Kashmir, which is up in flames now, and there’s what’s happening in the northeast. But what I’ve been writing about recently is the war on tribal people in the tribal heartland of India, where something like 200,000 paramilitary troops have been called out to really push through about, I don’t know, 200 or more memorandums of understandings with mining companies and infrastructure companies. And there’s—it’s all being fought in the name of clearing the forests of the Maoist guerrillas.
And as the war escalates, there have been, you know, attacks and counterattacks, but really people, the poorest people in the world, are in a lot of trouble now. And there was a lot of pressure to ask for peace talks, you know, because these poor people in the villages, the tribal people, are kind of under siege—no medicines, no food, no ability to come out of the forest. And so, the government actually has been—you know, because it needs to keep on this mask of being a great democracy, it sort of offers peace talks, on the one hand, and then undermines them, on the other.
But the assassination was the assassination of a man who is known as Azad. His real name was Cherukuri Rajkumar, and he is a sort of senior leader in the politburo of the Maoist party, appointed by the party to be the negotiator in the peace talks. And somehow, you know, the carrying back and forth of these documents pulled him up to the surface. And while he was traveling on a train with a young journalist, he was caught by the police and taken to the remote forests of North Telangana, a place called Adilabad, and shot. Of course, they said, you know, he was killed in an armed encounter and so on, which they always say, but post-mortem report says that he was killed at point-blank range, along with this young journalist. So, you know, my point has always been that the government needs this war. To clear the land, it needs this war. And in a situation like this, you know, just at the beginning of peace talks, if one side kills the envoy of the other side, it’s sort of reasonable to assume that that side does not want peace.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what the Maoists—what it represents?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* See, the Communist Party of India, of course, is an old party, which has splintered into the Communist Party-Marxist. And then in 1969, there was something called the Naxalite Uprising, with the sort of precursors of what is today the Maoist party. And, you know, there’s a huge debate, of course, between the orthodox left and the Maoists, because the orthodox left more or less functions in the cities and is more or less a bourgeois party now, you know, whereas the Maoists have operated—they believe in the sort of militant armed overthrow of the Indian state. But for years, they’ve been working among the tribal people in the forests, and they do have a sort of people’s liberation guerrilla army now.
AMY GOODMAN: Of how many?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Thousands. One doesn’t know. I mean, I don’t really know the exact figure. But right now, the Maoists are just the militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements who are fighting the onslaught of this kind of "India shining" India, which is really about grabbing land from the poor, you know, and turning them either into mines or into special economic zones. I mean, when I wrote about dams ten years ago, I was talking about the fact that just dams alone had displaced 33 million people. Today, with the reforms and the structural adjustment that the IMF demanded of our country, India, which you know—you know, in America and in Europe is known as the country with the second-highest growth rate in the world, but today, you know, we have more poor people in India than 26 of Africa’s poorest countries put together. You have—
AMY GOODMAN: More poor people in India than 26 African countries?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Africa’s poorest countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Poorest countries.
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Put together.
AMY GOODMAN: How many poor people is that that you have in India?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* That’s—you know, for example, you have 830 million people living on less than 20 rupees a day. That’s less than half a dollar a day, 830 million people, you know? So, that is where the struggle is now. You know, you have the guerrillas in the forest, you have the militants in the villages, you have the Gandhians on the street, but on the whole, they’re all fighting the same battle right now.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you think needs to happen? What are you calling for?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* At the moment—I think, at the moment, there needs to be a ceasefire, and I need—from both sides. And I think that the government should come clean on all these contracts and MOUs that it’s signed. And everybody should know exactly what is on the cards, what local people want. You know, all these public hearings and all the sort of rituals of democracy have just been marginalized, you know? But we really need to know what the plans are. Why should it be secret? Why should it be a secret what’s happening to the forests and the rivers and the people and the mountains and the mines?
AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel threatened? I mean, a number of critics have said you are now the most prominent spokesperson for a violent revolution in India. What is your response to that?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* No, I am not a spokesperson for the Maoists. But the government wants everybody who doesn’t agree with it—they want to call all of us Maoists, you know? I have never, ever said that I’m a spokesperson for the Maoists. I have—you know, I have my own views on them, which I have written about. You know, I admire some things; I criticize other things, and so on.
But, you know, I mean, Azad was murdered. Many—this is the government’s way of dealing with dissent. They have—you know, one of the things that they’re very, very upset about is that it had sort of thought that the Maoists are in the forest, we’ll just encircle them, demonize them, and finish them off, you know? And when people in urban areas started to complicate the whole debate and say it’s not that simple, you know, this is not acceptable to us, these policies and so on, they started to target those people, who they seem to be almost more annoyed with, because they don’t know what to do with many of us.
AMY GOODMAN: You have an interesting quote in your piece in Outlook: "When the government uses the ploy of peace talks to draw [the] deep-swimming fish up to the surface and then kill them, do peace talks have a future? Does either side want peace or justice? Perhaps our Preamble should read, 'We, the upper castes and classes of India, [having] secretly resolved to constitute India into a Corporate, Hindu, Satellite State...'”
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Well, you know, this was—I’ve written a lot in this piece about what happens when a government, you know, institutes a constitution or its—a democracy only functions with a constitution as its legal and moral base. So, when that government is vandalizing the constitution, and in fact, whether it’s the Maoists or whether it’s any of the other resistance movements, if you listen to what they’re saying right now, they’re only people demanding their constitutional rights. So the government is vandalizing the constitution. The "terrorists," in quote-unquote, are demanding their constitutional rights. So I said, look, if the government is not going to respect the constitution, then maybe we should change the constitution, whose preamble, the Indian constitution, says we are a secular, democratic, socialist republic. So change it and say we are a corporate, Hindu, satellite state.
______________
Democracy now should know better, they did an earlier interview with her after the Mumbai Terrorist attacks. Here is Arundhati after that heinous crime, criticizing India and Indians. Yes, here is a supposed leftist, blaming the victims!!
In contrast here is Salman Rushdie taking a principled stand on this matter: Asked to comment on Arundhati Roy's remarks disparaging the "iconic" status accorded to the Taj in the context of 26/11, he said: "I thought that particular remark in her piece was disgusting. The idea that the deaths of the rich don't matter because they are rich is disgusting. The idea that 12 members of the Taj staff who heroically gave their lives to save many of the guests are to be discounted because they are, presumably, lackeys of the rich—this is nauseating. This is amoral. She should be ashamed of herself."
While this interview was being recorded, These "Maoist rebels" killed eight people in Bengal, Orissa and Bihar. Four killings, including that of a woman, were reported from West Midnapore district in Bengal, where Maoists ‘punished’ people for defying their 24-hour shutdown against US President Barack Obama's visit. The woman Sandhya Mahato, was killed because her son was in the police and she had been warned that he should give up his job. Her husband was also missing.
In Jharkhand, Maoists blew up Sadbahani railway station in Palamau district and two government buildings. In Bihar they blew up railway track near Kurhani railway station in the Hajipur-Muzaffarpur section resulting in 10 wagons of a goods train derailing. Maoists also torched trucks and mobile phone towers.
In Orissa, about 60 rebels stormed into the Gamphakunda school premises under Kalimela police station and blew up a newly-constructed two-story school building that to benefit children from to the lowest castes..
All this to protest US President Obama's visit. In a written statement, they call him "the gang leader of US imperialism" and the world's "Enemy Number One," and urge people to use the slogan "Go back Obama."
Arundhati has been a vocal supporter for these murders. She also recently vocally supported an Islamic fundamentalist who wants Kashmir to become an Islamic state and separate from secular India because he claims, Islam does not allow Muslims to live under non-Islamic conditions.
The only thing connecting these two violent movements, one Islamic fundamentalist and the other communist, with are both causes supported ardently by Arundhati Roy are their anti-India stance.
How can the secular Western Left support and cheer this woman?
Acclaimed Indian Author Arundhati Roy on Obama’s Wars, Poverty and India’s Maoist Rebel
AMY GOODMAN: We move now to Arundhati Roy. Maoist rebels in India called for a strike Monday to protest President Obama’s visit. The Indian media reports, according to the police, Maoists blew up a new school building this morning and killed four people in the eastern Indian states or Orissa and Bihar.
Well, last month, I had the chance to sit down with author Arundhati Roy in London about the Maoists in India. But first I began by asking her for her assessment of President Obama.
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Well, I think the big lesson today is that—look at the richest country in the world, America, having attacked and made war on the poorest countries but not being able to win those wars. You know, they have not been able to win. And here’s the lesson. You know, you couldn’t win Vietnam, you couldn’t win Afghanistan, couldn’t win Iraq, cannot win Kashmir. You know, there has to be—Obama, I mean, he’s involved in all these war crimes. It’s not as though—you know, he has expanded the war in Afghanistan, moved it into Pakistan. You know, Pakistan is a country that is in such a lot of trouble because of this. You know, right when 9/11 happened, I remember writing saying you forced them to raise the Taliban in their midst, and now you want them to garret the pit that they grew in their own backyard. It’s going to lead to civil war. You know, you didn’t need to be a genius to figure that out. And that has happened, you know? America has interfered with Pakistan from the beginning, and Pakistan now paying a terrible price for that. I mean, I don’t know if it had a choice, when—you know, when America wants to interfere, it doesn’t give anyone a choice. So it’s destroyed Afghanistan, it’s destroyed Pakistan, it’s destroyed Iraq. And it will destroy India, if—because India doesn’t have the spine. The Indian government is just willingly allowing this to happen, the U.S. to dictate everything. So, today, Obama, I mean, whatever he’s doing in America is a separate thing. But certainly outside, he’s no less of—I mean, his foreign policy is not all that different from George Bush, you know? And if they start a war in Iran, they won’t win it. You know, I mean, it’s not possible. These wars cannot be won. So it’s about time somebody realized that and decided to change the way the world thinks about war and thinks about weapons and thinks about putting soldiers on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, since we last spoke, assassination has taken place—well, at least one—in India. Can you talk about what happened?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* It was—I mean, as you know now, there’s an almost full-fledged war going on. Actually, there are several wars are going on in India. There’s Kashmir, which is up in flames now, and there’s what’s happening in the northeast. But what I’ve been writing about recently is the war on tribal people in the tribal heartland of India, where something like 200,000 paramilitary troops have been called out to really push through about, I don’t know, 200 or more memorandums of understandings with mining companies and infrastructure companies. And there’s—it’s all being fought in the name of clearing the forests of the Maoist guerrillas.
And as the war escalates, there have been, you know, attacks and counterattacks, but really people, the poorest people in the world, are in a lot of trouble now. And there was a lot of pressure to ask for peace talks, you know, because these poor people in the villages, the tribal people, are kind of under siege—no medicines, no food, no ability to come out of the forest. And so, the government actually has been—you know, because it needs to keep on this mask of being a great democracy, it sort of offers peace talks, on the one hand, and then undermines them, on the other.
But the assassination was the assassination of a man who is known as Azad. His real name was Cherukuri Rajkumar, and he is a sort of senior leader in the politburo of the Maoist party, appointed by the party to be the negotiator in the peace talks. And somehow, you know, the carrying back and forth of these documents pulled him up to the surface. And while he was traveling on a train with a young journalist, he was caught by the police and taken to the remote forests of North Telangana, a place called Adilabad, and shot. Of course, they said, you know, he was killed in an armed encounter and so on, which they always say, but post-mortem report says that he was killed at point-blank range, along with this young journalist. So, you know, my point has always been that the government needs this war. To clear the land, it needs this war. And in a situation like this, you know, just at the beginning of peace talks, if one side kills the envoy of the other side, it’s sort of reasonable to assume that that side does not want peace.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what the Maoists—what it represents?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* See, the Communist Party of India, of course, is an old party, which has splintered into the Communist Party-Marxist. And then in 1969, there was something called the Naxalite Uprising, with the sort of precursors of what is today the Maoist party. And, you know, there’s a huge debate, of course, between the orthodox left and the Maoists, because the orthodox left more or less functions in the cities and is more or less a bourgeois party now, you know, whereas the Maoists have operated—they believe in the sort of militant armed overthrow of the Indian state. But for years, they’ve been working among the tribal people in the forests, and they do have a sort of people’s liberation guerrilla army now.
AMY GOODMAN: Of how many?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Thousands. One doesn’t know. I mean, I don’t really know the exact figure. But right now, the Maoists are just the militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements who are fighting the onslaught of this kind of "India shining" India, which is really about grabbing land from the poor, you know, and turning them either into mines or into special economic zones. I mean, when I wrote about dams ten years ago, I was talking about the fact that just dams alone had displaced 33 million people. Today, with the reforms and the structural adjustment that the IMF demanded of our country, India, which you know—you know, in America and in Europe is known as the country with the second-highest growth rate in the world, but today, you know, we have more poor people in India than 26 of Africa’s poorest countries put together. You have—
AMY GOODMAN: More poor people in India than 26 African countries?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Africa’s poorest countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Poorest countries.
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Put together.
AMY GOODMAN: How many poor people is that that you have in India?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* That’s—you know, for example, you have 830 million people living on less than 20 rupees a day. That’s less than half a dollar a day, 830 million people, you know? So, that is where the struggle is now. You know, you have the guerrillas in the forest, you have the militants in the villages, you have the Gandhians on the street, but on the whole, they’re all fighting the same battle right now.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you think needs to happen? What are you calling for?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* At the moment—I think, at the moment, there needs to be a ceasefire, and I need—from both sides. And I think that the government should come clean on all these contracts and MOUs that it’s signed. And everybody should know exactly what is on the cards, what local people want. You know, all these public hearings and all the sort of rituals of democracy have just been marginalized, you know? But we really need to know what the plans are. Why should it be secret? Why should it be a secret what’s happening to the forests and the rivers and the people and the mountains and the mines?
AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel threatened? I mean, a number of critics have said you are now the most prominent spokesperson for a violent revolution in India. What is your response to that?
ARUNDHATI ROY:* No, I am not a spokesperson for the Maoists. But the government wants everybody who doesn’t agree with it—they want to call all of us Maoists, you know? I have never, ever said that I’m a spokesperson for the Maoists. I have—you know, I have my own views on them, which I have written about. You know, I admire some things; I criticize other things, and so on.
But, you know, I mean, Azad was murdered. Many—this is the government’s way of dealing with dissent. They have—you know, one of the things that they’re very, very upset about is that it had sort of thought that the Maoists are in the forest, we’ll just encircle them, demonize them, and finish them off, you know? And when people in urban areas started to complicate the whole debate and say it’s not that simple, you know, this is not acceptable to us, these policies and so on, they started to target those people, who they seem to be almost more annoyed with, because they don’t know what to do with many of us.
AMY GOODMAN: You have an interesting quote in your piece in Outlook: "When the government uses the ploy of peace talks to draw [the] deep-swimming fish up to the surface and then kill them, do peace talks have a future? Does either side want peace or justice? Perhaps our Preamble should read, 'We, the upper castes and classes of India, [having] secretly resolved to constitute India into a Corporate, Hindu, Satellite State...'”
ARUNDHATI ROY:* Well, you know, this was—I’ve written a lot in this piece about what happens when a government, you know, institutes a constitution or its—a democracy only functions with a constitution as its legal and moral base. So, when that government is vandalizing the constitution, and in fact, whether it’s the Maoists or whether it’s any of the other resistance movements, if you listen to what they’re saying right now, they’re only people demanding their constitutional rights. So the government is vandalizing the constitution. The "terrorists," in quote-unquote, are demanding their constitutional rights. So I said, look, if the government is not going to respect the constitution, then maybe we should change the constitution, whose preamble, the Indian constitution, says we are a secular, democratic, socialist republic. So change it and say we are a corporate, Hindu, satellite state.
______________
Democracy now should know better, they did an earlier interview with her after the Mumbai Terrorist attacks. Here is Arundhati after that heinous crime, criticizing India and Indians. Yes, here is a supposed leftist, blaming the victims!!
In contrast here is Salman Rushdie taking a principled stand on this matter: Asked to comment on Arundhati Roy's remarks disparaging the "iconic" status accorded to the Taj in the context of 26/11, he said: "I thought that particular remark in her piece was disgusting. The idea that the deaths of the rich don't matter because they are rich is disgusting. The idea that 12 members of the Taj staff who heroically gave their lives to save many of the guests are to be discounted because they are, presumably, lackeys of the rich—this is nauseating. This is amoral. She should be ashamed of herself."
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Where's the Love, Arundhati?
by Vijai (Wayfaring Stranger)
In the wake of the Maoists' killing of 75 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel in India, so many thoughts come to mind. What makes the difference between the shrill desperate voices of rebels and the powerful redemptive works of people like Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti and organizations like the International Justice Mission?
Writer Arundhati Roy said last year that the Maoists were justified in their violence because the government has been unjust to them. Ms. Roy, no stranger to controversy, has been consistent in placing the blame squarely on the government (and by implication the relatively better off society that supports it) for several ills — capitalism, free trade, military purchases and upgrades (notably on nuclear weapons), large private or government projects that displace thousands of people from their own lands without adequately compensating them, the Kashmir issue and the social and economic inequality in India.
A few weeks ago she published an article in the Guardian about her interview with the Maoists, the first time a journalist received an invitation to talk to them.
A fair reading of Ms. Roy's articles convinces us of the pain she feels in coming to acquaintance with the tragic history of these peoples and the injustice they have been victims of. A writer by profession and "activist" on the behalf of oppressed people by calling, she gets this information and does what she does best — write articles about it. These articles are clearly sympathetic to the oppressed people, and the people they kill are frequently the "emerging superpower" (full of hubris), policemen who are trained to kill in cold blood, fight like a guerrilla, use high tech weapons and training from Israel and other countries against the poor.
I wonder, has Ms. Roy ever thought about talking to some of these police men and women, their spouses, their parents, their kids? Some of these are ex-Maoists who help the police in tracking down violent criminals, trying to redeem some of their terrible past. Who are these people who are engaged in a war with the Maoists? Are they simply paid vassals of big government, corporations, landowners, et al — in short, glorified thugs who are only to eager to draw blood? If they were not around, would those of us who are not Maoists exist at all? For it seems to me that the Maoist vision of — as so many such revolutionaries of the past have envisioned in places like Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea and other places — that their vision of India is not so much cooperation but a reversal of dominance and power.
Ms. Roy often says that Maoist violence is triggered by events so horrifying that one cannot help but take arms against the government— cases of rape, humiliation, murder, forced eviction and so on. I have worked with people in the slums and others who minister to them in large cities like New Delhi and Chennai. These people are largely peaceable, going about their work diligently but thankful for the opportunity to learn from the social workers I was with. We worked with the kids, giving them basic education, sometimes material benefits, support with getting jobs or setting up businesses, medical care and very often emotional and moral support. One of my most abiding memories is that of a little girl who had lost her mother to heart disease, refusing to come out of her tiny hut. When another kid let her know that we were there, she came out hugged one of our woman team members and cried for several minutes. Their trust and pain have changed me as a person. I see that the only answer to their pain is our love and commitment.
Back to my earlier question: what makes an organization like IJM or World Serve go quietly about freeing bonded laborers in Tamil Nadu or sexual slaves in the Philippines? Is it the rush of power that comes from leading them out of the unjust system? Or could it be the promise of a new world order in which every one could be equal?
Dr. Paul Farmer described his remarkable efforts in Haiti as the "Long Defeat" — a series of soul-wrenching battles which often seem destined to be lost. But hope, in his case rooted in his Christian conviction, gives us rumours of other glories and keeps us fighting.
One has to ask as the old Bud Light commercial used to ask— Where is the love, Arundhati? I thought once that you had the love. When you were heroically and peacefully opposing the dam construction at Narmada. Besides your protest, I wonder what those long years achieved in getting the erstwhile residents of those lands to settle in communities that would have benefiited them. What have you gained for them that our society lost in the process of the dam construction? Yes, I know that the Narmada Bachao Andolan has materially helped them. Have you truly rallied the Indian people to be giving, to be generous and organize to help these people? No, you have simply raised a call to fight the good fight. Isn't it far easier to carry a placard and shout your platitudes from the rooftops than to actually sacrificially give of yourself to help people?
The Maoists can fight until the cows come home and achieve nothing in the process. The phrase 'Cooperation not Competition' has been around in social networks for some time now- meaning that small communities organized together, doing things that build societies and economies will win the day. Those who simply want to fight the good fight will end up the way they have been ending up for centuries, whether they win or lose- create other inequalities which yet others will rise up to fight.
In the wake of the Maoists' killing of 75 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel in India, so many thoughts come to mind. What makes the difference between the shrill desperate voices of rebels and the powerful redemptive works of people like Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti and organizations like the International Justice Mission?
Writer Arundhati Roy said last year that the Maoists were justified in their violence because the government has been unjust to them. Ms. Roy, no stranger to controversy, has been consistent in placing the blame squarely on the government (and by implication the relatively better off society that supports it) for several ills — capitalism, free trade, military purchases and upgrades (notably on nuclear weapons), large private or government projects that displace thousands of people from their own lands without adequately compensating them, the Kashmir issue and the social and economic inequality in India.
A few weeks ago she published an article in the Guardian about her interview with the Maoists, the first time a journalist received an invitation to talk to them.
A fair reading of Ms. Roy's articles convinces us of the pain she feels in coming to acquaintance with the tragic history of these peoples and the injustice they have been victims of. A writer by profession and "activist" on the behalf of oppressed people by calling, she gets this information and does what she does best — write articles about it. These articles are clearly sympathetic to the oppressed people, and the people they kill are frequently the "emerging superpower" (full of hubris), policemen who are trained to kill in cold blood, fight like a guerrilla, use high tech weapons and training from Israel and other countries against the poor.
I wonder, has Ms. Roy ever thought about talking to some of these police men and women, their spouses, their parents, their kids? Some of these are ex-Maoists who help the police in tracking down violent criminals, trying to redeem some of their terrible past. Who are these people who are engaged in a war with the Maoists? Are they simply paid vassals of big government, corporations, landowners, et al — in short, glorified thugs who are only to eager to draw blood? If they were not around, would those of us who are not Maoists exist at all? For it seems to me that the Maoist vision of — as so many such revolutionaries of the past have envisioned in places like Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea and other places — that their vision of India is not so much cooperation but a reversal of dominance and power.
Ms. Roy often says that Maoist violence is triggered by events so horrifying that one cannot help but take arms against the government— cases of rape, humiliation, murder, forced eviction and so on. I have worked with people in the slums and others who minister to them in large cities like New Delhi and Chennai. These people are largely peaceable, going about their work diligently but thankful for the opportunity to learn from the social workers I was with. We worked with the kids, giving them basic education, sometimes material benefits, support with getting jobs or setting up businesses, medical care and very often emotional and moral support. One of my most abiding memories is that of a little girl who had lost her mother to heart disease, refusing to come out of her tiny hut. When another kid let her know that we were there, she came out hugged one of our woman team members and cried for several minutes. Their trust and pain have changed me as a person. I see that the only answer to their pain is our love and commitment.
Back to my earlier question: what makes an organization like IJM or World Serve go quietly about freeing bonded laborers in Tamil Nadu or sexual slaves in the Philippines? Is it the rush of power that comes from leading them out of the unjust system? Or could it be the promise of a new world order in which every one could be equal?
Dr. Paul Farmer described his remarkable efforts in Haiti as the "Long Defeat" — a series of soul-wrenching battles which often seem destined to be lost. But hope, in his case rooted in his Christian conviction, gives us rumours of other glories and keeps us fighting.
One has to ask as the old Bud Light commercial used to ask— Where is the love, Arundhati? I thought once that you had the love. When you were heroically and peacefully opposing the dam construction at Narmada. Besides your protest, I wonder what those long years achieved in getting the erstwhile residents of those lands to settle in communities that would have benefiited them. What have you gained for them that our society lost in the process of the dam construction? Yes, I know that the Narmada Bachao Andolan has materially helped them. Have you truly rallied the Indian people to be giving, to be generous and organize to help these people? No, you have simply raised a call to fight the good fight. Isn't it far easier to carry a placard and shout your platitudes from the rooftops than to actually sacrificially give of yourself to help people?
The Maoists can fight until the cows come home and achieve nothing in the process. The phrase 'Cooperation not Competition' has been around in social networks for some time now- meaning that small communities organized together, doing things that build societies and economies will win the day. Those who simply want to fight the good fight will end up the way they have been ending up for centuries, whether they win or lose- create other inequalities which yet others will rise up to fight.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Haiti - What the Press Coverage Tells US
The Horror of Haiti
Dissident Voice
January 22nd, 2010
by John Chuckman
It is relentless, the pictures of terror-stricken people, broken limbs, and bloated dead, and many of us cannot stand to see or hear more.
One has to ask: what are we to do with such information?
Create pressure on governments to keep the assistance flowing? Perhaps, but there is no shortage of assistance being sent to Haiti. There is however a huge problem in Haiti’s limited ability to absorb the assistance.
Whether it’s small and inefficient sea ports, one small and inefficient airport, a lack of decent roads, and a lack of government direction – all aspects of any place as poor as Haiti – it takes time for outsiders to come in, unload their cargoes, and organize a distribution network from scratch.
Certainly the disturbing reports and pictures are useless from the point of view of prevention. It was a natural disaster, not to be predicted, not to be prevented. One could argue that post-disaster investments could ameliorate events the next time there is an earthquake. But the kinds of images and reports being broadcast will be long forgotten if and when the world’s governments get around to re-building.
So the question for me remains, what are we to do with such information?
I am reminded of another disaster, one that happened in the last few years. It was not a “natural” disaster but the deliberate work of the immensely powerful.
In this other disaster, roughly a million people died, about five times the current estimate of death in Haiti. I don’t know how many were crippled, but it must have been a great number. This other disaster created more than two million refugees fleeing for their lives. Most of them fled to poor but generous countries, not being welcome by the rich and powerful, and especially not by the country responsible for the mayhem.
As far as pictures and reports, most of them seen in North America were sanitized. Many if not most of the reports were dishonest, clearly not informing people of the magnitude of the horror as it happened. There was a brave group of reporters who produced images every bit as terrible as those we see from Haiti, including scores of hideously mangled children.
But those pictures were not broadcast in North America, were not published in The New York Times or other newspapers “of record.” Indeed, the reporters taking these images and writing tough reports actually became targets of the forces causing all the horror.
I’m referring, of course, to the invasion of Iraq, an event whose toll of killing and damage easily compared to the dropping of a thermonuclear bomb on a good-size city.
Of course, the great and bitter irony is that that disaster was both preventable and could even have been stopped once it had started. One could almost guarantee that publication and broadcast of pictures and reports comparable to what’s now coming from Haiti would have stopped that demonic brutality. Here indeed gruesome, truthful press coverage could have made a difference, but not in Haiti.
And there was another, smaller disaster recently, smaller but still terrible, and it was completely preventable. In this one about 1,400 people died, including 400 children, and a great deal of the infrastructure of a relatively poor people was destroyed. The damage cannot even be repaired because those responsible for the horror maintain a siege on the victims, allowing no material assistance to be delivered.
Here too you likely will not have seen the kind of pictures or read the kind of stories coming out of Haiti. Some were available – I recall one of poor people trying to avoid stepping in a stream of blood flowing down a narrow street – again the work of amazingly brave reporters, but their work could only be found at not-widely known sites on the Internet. None were published or broadcast by the establishment press in North America. These events occurred in a place called Gaza.
If you think the press is objective, if you think the press does not slavishly serve the interests of the powerful, you just might want to think again.
------
See also the excellent article by Mirah Riben on adoptions from Haiti in the wake of the earthquake.
Lancet accuses aid groups of 'jostling' for publicity in Haiti
Haiti earthquake
Aid organisations, governments and the United Nations have been accused of failing Haiti by competing for publicity instead of getting on with the job of disaster relief.
By Bruno Waterfield
The Telegraph 22 Jan 2010
The Lancet medical journal accused the different groups of putting self-interest, a scramble for camera opportunities and rivalry before getting post-earthquake disaster relief properly organised.
"International organisations, national governments and non-governmental organisations are rightly mobilising, but also jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the best for earthquake survivors," the journal said in an editorial.
"Some agencies even claim that they are 'spearheading' the relief effort. In fact, as we only too clearly see, the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating, and anything but co-ordinated."
The respected journal, which has been publishing since 1823, did not name any individual offenders but called for more scrutiny of an of the aid sector.
"Large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts," said the journal. "Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile."
But Brendan Gormley, the chief executive of the Disasters Emergency Committee, hit back saying there had been co-operation.
"Rather than "jostling" for position, 13 major UK aid agencies have come together under our banner," he said. "The media are essential to our efforts and our analysis shows that televised appeals have driven fund-raising for the Haiti Earthquake Appeal."
Elisabeth Byrs, a spokesman for the UN Organisation for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, also rejected the criticism.
"I think no one failed on this and the UN, the humanitarian community in general, and the Haitian people did their best to save as many lives as possible," she said.
The Lancet criticism came as the UN switched its focus from search and rescue operations to humanitarian aid for homeless refugees.
Yesterday "exhausted" aid workers started to leave the country ten days after the earthquake hit. Search teams increasingly began pulling bodies rather than survivors from the wreckage of Haiti's cities and towns.
Aid workers will now step up moves to rehouse 500,000 homeless Haitians living rough in and around the destroyed capital of Port-au-Prince to prevent a looming refugee crisis or a second disaster caused by disease and hunger.
Tens of thousands of Haitians have gathered at the capital's harbour, which partially reopened on Friday, hoping to flee the earthquake's aftermath and continuing aftershocks by sea.
US Coast Guard officials said that, while there were currently no signs of a mass migration, a refugee crisis was to be expected, with Haiti's northern coast a likely point of departure.
"Everything points to it, but it's not happening now," said Lieutenant Commander Mike Pierno of the US Coast Guard.
Aid organisations, governments and the United Nations have been accused of failing Haiti by competing for publicity instead of getting on with the job of disaster relief.
By Bruno Waterfield
The Telegraph 22 Jan 2010
The Lancet medical journal accused the different groups of putting self-interest, a scramble for camera opportunities and rivalry before getting post-earthquake disaster relief properly organised.
"International organisations, national governments and non-governmental organisations are rightly mobilising, but also jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the best for earthquake survivors," the journal said in an editorial.
"Some agencies even claim that they are 'spearheading' the relief effort. In fact, as we only too clearly see, the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating, and anything but co-ordinated."
The respected journal, which has been publishing since 1823, did not name any individual offenders but called for more scrutiny of an of the aid sector.
"Large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts," said the journal. "Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile."
But Brendan Gormley, the chief executive of the Disasters Emergency Committee, hit back saying there had been co-operation.
"Rather than "jostling" for position, 13 major UK aid agencies have come together under our banner," he said. "The media are essential to our efforts and our analysis shows that televised appeals have driven fund-raising for the Haiti Earthquake Appeal."
Elisabeth Byrs, a spokesman for the UN Organisation for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, also rejected the criticism.
"I think no one failed on this and the UN, the humanitarian community in general, and the Haitian people did their best to save as many lives as possible," she said.
The Lancet criticism came as the UN switched its focus from search and rescue operations to humanitarian aid for homeless refugees.
Yesterday "exhausted" aid workers started to leave the country ten days after the earthquake hit. Search teams increasingly began pulling bodies rather than survivors from the wreckage of Haiti's cities and towns.
Aid workers will now step up moves to rehouse 500,000 homeless Haitians living rough in and around the destroyed capital of Port-au-Prince to prevent a looming refugee crisis or a second disaster caused by disease and hunger.
Tens of thousands of Haitians have gathered at the capital's harbour, which partially reopened on Friday, hoping to flee the earthquake's aftermath and continuing aftershocks by sea.
US Coast Guard officials said that, while there were currently no signs of a mass migration, a refugee crisis was to be expected, with Haiti's northern coast a likely point of departure.
"Everything points to it, but it's not happening now," said Lieutenant Commander Mike Pierno of the US Coast Guard.
Great article on Charles Johnson's evolution at Little Green Footballs
Right-Wing Flame War!
By JONATHAN DEE
January 24, 2010
New York Times Sunday Magazine
Charles Johnson has been writing a blog for almost as long as the word “blog” has existed. A bearish, gentle-voiced, ponytailed man who for three decades enjoyed a successful career as a jazz guitarist accompanying the likes of Al Jarreau and Stanley Clarke, Johnson has always had a geek’s penchant for self-education, and in that spirit he cultivated a side interest, and ultimately an expertise, in writing computer code. His Web log, which he named “Little Green Footballs” (a private joke whose derivation he has always refused to divulge), was begun in February 2001 mostly as a way to share advice and information with fellow code jockeys — his approach was similar in outlook, if vastly larger in its reach, to the guiding spirit in the days of ham radio. His final post on Sept. 10, 2001, was titled “Placement of Web Page Elements.” It read, in its entirety: “Here’s a well-executed academic study of where users expect things to be on a typical Web page.” It linked to, well, exactly what it said. The post attracted one comment, which read, in its entirety, “Fantastic article.”
The next 24 hours would transform his blog and, ultimately, his career. “I grew up in Hawaii,” Johnson told me recently when we met in his Los Angeles home, “but I was born in New York. After I moved away at age 10, I would read the news stories about how the World Trade Center towers were getting closer to finishing. When they were attacked that day, that really hit home for me in a way that reached back into my childhood. I’ve always been kind of a voracious reader, and when I saw the attack happen, I was probably one of the first ones to make a connection with Osama bin Laden, who’d declared war on America a few years earlier. It was like a huge light bulb going on over my head about this stuff, and I wanted to really learn about it, so I started posting everything I could find.”
Those searching the Web for information on the attackers soon found Johnson. “Many of us felt guilty that we didn’t even know who had invaded this country,” says Pamela Geller, an early Little Green Footballs reader and a former associate publisher at The New York Observer, who now writes a blog of her own called Atlas Shrugs. “The media had been, I think, somewhat derelict in terms of describing our mortal enemy. Charles Johnson was covering the global jihad in an in-depth and comprehensive fashion that nobody else was. That’s where I was getting my best news, from Little Green Footballs.”
By virtue of his willingness to do and share research, his personal embrace of a hawkish, populist anger and his extraordinary Web savvy, Johnson quickly turned Little Green Footballs (or L.G.F., as it is commonly known) into one of the most popular personal sites on the Web, and himself — the very model of a Los Angeles bohemian — into an avatar of the American right wing. With a daily audience in the hundreds of thousands, the career sideman had moved to the center of the stage.
Now it is eight years later, and Johnson, who is 56, sits in the ashes of an epic flame war that has destroyed his relationships with nearly every one of his old right-wing allies. People who have pledged their lives to fighting Islamic extremism, when asked about Charles Johnson now, unsheathe a word they do not throw around lightly: “evil.” Glenn Beck has taken the time to denounce him on air and at length. Johnson himself (Mad King Charles is one of his most frequent, and most printable, Web nicknames) has used his technical know-how to block thousands of his former readers not just from commenting on his site but even, in many cases, from viewing its home page. He recently moved into a gated community, partly out of fear, he said, that the venom directed at him in cyberspace might jump its boundaries and lead someone to do him physical harm. He has turned forcefully against Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, nearly every conservative icon you can name. And answering the question of what, or who, got to Charles Johnson has itself become a kind of boom genre on the Internet.
“It’s just so illogical,” Geller told me heatedly not long ago. “I loved him. I respected him. But the way he went after people was like a mental illness. There’s an evil to that, a maliciousness. He’s a traitor, a turncoat, a plant. We may not know for years what actually happened. You think he changed his mind?”
NUMBER OF SO-CALLED warblogs were born out of the post-9/11 moment, when hanging a shingle in the still relatively frontier-like blogosphere was a way of, if not doing something exactly, at least establishing a rallying point for the considerable fury of all those who longed to do something. But even if the cliché about bloggers — that they presume to write knowledgeably about complex subjects without ever leaving their homes — is mostly true, it doesn’t mean that bloggers can’t make things happen. Perhaps the defining moment in Johnson’s new career came in 2004, when he was able not just to follow but to drive a major story: he was the central blogger behind what came to be known as Rathergate, in which a few citizen journalists did what Dan Rather and the venerable CBS News lacked either the patience or the skill to do themselves — check a typewritten letter supposedly from 1972, criticizing George W. Bush’s military service, for authenticity.
There is some dispute, even today, as to who was the first to expose the fraud behind the so-called Killian documents, but Johnson will forever be associated with the episode because, unlike most other bloggers — who know as much about the technical workings of their medium as a poet is likely to know about a printing press — he had the wherewithal to create, almost instantly, an animated .gif image that toggled between the original letter and that same letter typed in Microsoft Word 32 years later, illustrating the issue in a way that no 500-word blog post could have done.
The Rathergate era was the golden age of L.G.F., at least in terms of traffic. Johnson says that the peak was somewhere around half a million page views per day. (Over the past year or so, it has averaged about one-fifth that many.) But even after its peak, L.G.F. remained one of the most influential blogs in cyberspace, certainly at the conservative end of the political spectrum. It would be going too far to say that L.G.F. was a single-issue blog in those days, but even those issues on which it branched out — for instance, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Johnson, an agnostic and a Gentile, is a fierce supporter of Israel, mostly on account of the affection he developed for it as a touring musician), or the 2004 presidential election, or the Patriot Act — were outgrowths of the one concern that trumped all others: national security in the face of Islamic terrorism.
If the tone of Johnson’s writing on the blog sometimes bordered, as his detractors claimed, on hate speech, that of his mostly anonymous commenters was reliably worse. A popular blog like L.G.F. functions as a kind of cloud-sourced id. It is not uncommon for a simple, 200-word post to accrue upward of a thousand written responses from readers. The question of how responsible he is, or should be, for these expressions of uncensored reader sentiment is one that Johnson, like many bloggers, has struggled with; but in the middle years of the last decade, whether for free-speech reasons or simply because he enjoyed being the popular focal point of such strong nationalist feeling, he did very little to rein it in. Muslims were described as “vermin.” The posthumous nickname St. Pancake was coined for the young American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, in reference to the Israeli bulldozer that killed her. Discussion of U.S. foreign-policy options included terms like “targeted genocide.” As for Palestinians, “they don’t need statehood,” offered one commenter; “they need sterilization.” And on and on. A so-called stalker blog, called L.G.F. Watch, sprang up to document instances of what it considered hate speech on the part of Johnson and his followers. Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott compared Johnson’s site to a “disorganized Nuremberg Rally.”
But enemies themselves are a kind of currency on the Internet, and for every attack L.G.F. provoked as a place that permitted and even fostered bigotry against Muslims in particular, new allies rose up to link themselves to Johnson and his causes. Those links were both spiritual and literal; allowing (or preventing) less-successful sites to post a link to yours, and maybe offering them a link on your own site in return, turns you into a kind of taste maker, a locus of tangible power. L.G.F. was, by 2007 or so, at the heart of a vast, amorphous grid of right-wing sites of every description, an interdependence that Johnson himself had become, in a way, too popular to control.
That concept of the link, in all its permutations, is the key to what happened next, both to Johnson and because of him, and it says something enlightening not just about blogging but also about the nature and prospects of citizen journalism. Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine.
IN OCTOBER 2007, Johnson was asked to take part in what was billed as a Counter-Jihad Conference in Brussels, a gathering of fewer than a hundred politicians and opinion leaders from around the world who convened to share ideas and strategies for combating the spread of militant Islam. Johnson was not the only writer invited — Geller was there, as well as Robert Spencer of jihadwatch.org (a Web site Johnson himself designed), to name two — but he did not go. “I’m just not a joiner of these things,” he says.
The conference finished up in Brussels, and “the next day,” Johnson remembers, “people were e-mailing me saying, ‘You might want to cover this.’ So I started looking into it.” He discovered that among the conference’s 90 or so participants — though not among the speakers — was a man named Filip Dewinter, a leader of a Belgian-nationalist political party called Vlaams Belang, or “Flemish Interest.” Vlaams Belang, which has a history that reaches back to the wrong side of World War II, has an unabashed record of inflammatory rhetoric and hateful, opportunistic verbal viciousness of all sorts; a few years ago, for example, the party announced an advertising campaign in Moroccan newspapers and magazines to “discourage foreigners from coming to our country.” And as recently as 2004, it was condemned by the Belgian Supreme Court for incitement to discrimination and racial segregation. (The party responded by changing its name.) Even to most right-wing sensibilities, Vlaams Belang is certainly beyond the pale. Still, whether or not Dewinter, who has said that “in Flanders, the multicultural society has led to a multicriminal society,” is more extreme than the commenters who appeared regularly on Little Green Footballs seems like a subject on which right-wing minds might reasonably disagree. Perhaps that still happens somewhere. Gray, however, is not a popular shade on the Internet.
It seems borderline ridiculous that the political character of an extremist Belgian party, which in the last parliamentary election captured just 17 seats out of 150 in the Chamber of Representatives, should become the issue over which a kind of civil war among American conservatives broke out, but that is what happened. Opposing “Islamofascism,” Johnson had come to believe, shouldn’t require identification with fascism of the older sort. Johnson began taking shots at not only Vlaams Belang, an organization it seems safe to say the vast majority of his readers had never heard of, but also at formerly favored colleagues like Spencer and Geller, to whom, by attending the same conference, the European neofascist movement was now . . . linked. Johnson first hinted, and eventually demanded, that they publicly distance themselves from both Vlaams Belang and the conference itself, and when they demurred, he publicly distanced himself from them.
“Filip Dewinter has said some things I deplore,” Spencer says. “But I don’t consider myself responsible for him just because I was at this conference and he was, too. That’s an outrageous kind of guilt by association. Let me ask you this: a few years ago I spoke at a Yom Kippur service, and one of the other speakers was Hillary Clinton. Does that make me a supporter or her work, or her of mine?”
Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997. The speaker will never put it behind him. (Just as Johnson, despite his very reasonable contention that he later changed his mind, will never be allowed to consign to the past a blog post he wrote in 2004 criticizing that judicial condemnation of Vlaams Belang as “a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups.”) It may be difficult to travel to Belgium and build the case that Filip Dewinter is not just a hateful character but an actual Nazi (and thus that those who can be linked to him are Nazi sympathizers), but sitting at your keyboard, there is no trick to it at all. Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.
Johnson broke off relations with blogs that claimed openly to owe their own existence to him. He called the syndicated columnist Diana West and the investigative reporter Richard Miniter fascist sympathizers. He threatened to take down Michelle Malkin. In some ways, it was an exploration of the limits of his own influence: all over the blogosphere, you were either with him or with the fascists.
“I was such a small fish at the time,” Geller said. “I realized I was basically committing blog suicide by going against him. But he was wrong.” When one of Johnson’s posts about the conference was picked up and incorporated in a press release by the conservative bête noire Council on American-Islamic Relations, Geller called him out on Atlas Shrugs; he responded with a series of posts about her, the most memorable of which was titled, “Pamela Geller: Poster Girl for Eurofascism.” (Not that Geller herself, who posted a Photoshopped picture of Johnson in Joker makeup, was exactly on the high road.) Traffic at her site, she says, went down about 75 percent. “He really did put a knife in the trans-Atlantic counterjihad movement, for a long time. People were running for cover. Nobody wanted to go against him then. He was the king.”
Spencer says: “I have actually had people contact me and say, ‘I understand you’re the American representative for Vlaams Belang.’ And that is because of Johnson.” After Spencer wrote last month on Jihad Watch that I interviewed him, Johnson forwarded me several posts by other bloggers charting Spencer’s unsavory “associations”; one of them tried to connect him, via a chain of links that is too long even to summarize, to Slobodan Milosevic. The more creatively defamatory the whole dispute becomes, the further it moves from the issues around which Johnson and Spencer and many others have supposedly reframed their lives. But I never got the sense that any of it was put forth by Johnson, either in person or on the blog, in anything other than perfect earnestness. He came of age, as a writer and as a public figure, in the culture of damnation by link, and he does not exempt himself from its logic.
Thus in retrospect it also seems clear that the Vlaams Belang blog war, with its attendant scary buzzwords (“fascist,” “racist,” “Nazi”), gave Johnson the intellectual cover to do something he wanted to do anyway, which was to conduct a kind of public self-purge of the alliances he acquired on the road to fame.
THE QUESTIONING OF Johnson’s tactics started to come not just from without L.G.F. but also from within. Readers both casual and loyal spoke up in the comment threads to ask, sometimes diplomatically and sometimes not, whether all this casual flinging of epithets like “fascist” wasn’t maybe an overreaction. Johnson’s response, in thousands of cases, was to block their accounts and ban some of them from viewing the blog. “Get off my Web site” was a common farewell. (Johnson insists that this is not true — that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for disagreeing with him — but the anecdotal evidence to the contrary is voluminous, and the fact that the offending comments were instantly and permanently deleted makes it impossible to check others’ records against his.)
“Running a community is hard,” says Markos Moulitsas of the liberal Web site Daily Kos, “and I don’t criticize people for the approaches they take in trying to control their sites. As I tell my own disgruntled commenters, if they don’t like a site’s comment policies, they can always find greener pastures elsewhere. It’s a big Internet.”
A reasonable approach, which L.G.F.’s exiles mostly rejected. Comment threads all over the blogosphere were hijacked by people sharing stories of their banishment. Another stalker blog — this one assailing Johnson from the right — sprang up, administered by banned former “Lizards,” as L.G.F.’s registrants are known. Johnson responded by posting those former registrants’ real names and photographs on L.G.F. — an astounding breach of civility on the Internet, where anonymity is often prized above all else.
It was a kind of orgy of delinking, an intentionally set brush fire meant to clear the psychic area around Johnson and ensure that no one would connect him to anyone else, period, unless he first said it was O.K. No one would define Johnson’s allegiances but Johnson. Of course, much of this was accomplished by the very methods he felt so threatened by: a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon approach to political rectitude, in which the existence of even a search-engine-generated connection between two people anywhere in the world implied a mutual back-scratching, an ideological partnership. It was unfair and simplistic and petulant, but it also seems to have achieved its goal. Very few people on the right want to be linked with Charles Johnson anymore.
NO ONE SEEMS TO WANT to believe that his thinking simply changed over time — and in fact he still has that much in common with his old allies, for Johnson, too, insists that he hasn’t really changed. His recent expressions of support for abortion rights, of contempt for creationism and the religious right — all these beliefs, he told me, are elements of the “classical liberalism” he has always believed in but previously opted not to write about. Why now? The answer is so heretical it seems destined to raise the tizzy-level among his former followers to new heights: “It’s not that the war on terror has finished,” he said. “It’s never going to be finished, but I think things have reached the point now where it’s not as pressing as it was. Some of the measures we took to protect ourselves against extremists have been pretty effective. And so I realized, you know, that maybe it’s time to tell people that I’m not onboard with a lot of this social-conservative agenda. And I think that I actually speak for a lot of people.” Though our conversation took place in the fall, he told me in a subsequent e-mail message that the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing “doesn’t change my opinion about that.”
The flip side of the fact that his acolytes felt so close to him without ever actually knowing him is that he serves now, just as credibly, as a sort of blank screen upon which to project conspiracy theories. It has been suggested online, with a gravity that is hard to overstate, that he is a convicted child molester worried about public exposure; that he is a closeted homosexual threatened with blackmail; that he is in sexual thrall to an unnamed woman; that he is being paid by George Soros; or that he is not, in fact, Charles Johnson at all but some sort of cyberpirate writing the blog’s posts from an undisclosed location. Anything, apparently, seems if not more credible then certainly less hurtful than the opinion that the threat of terrorism on American soil is no longer so imminent that other disputes should be subsumed by it.
Many on the Internet cite as evidence that Johnson is in some dire need of money the fact that his blog is rife with advertisements — an argument that has a certain Yogi Berra quality to it, as most blogs can only dream of attracting his levels of revenue. Also popular is the theory that he did it only for the traffic, that he believes in nothing but the centrality of Charles Johnson and thus, seeing which way the political winds were blowing, that he betrayed his principles in order to remain in the spotlight. The problem with that theory is that the long-term decline in L.G.F.’s traffic, which its detractors delight in pointing out, began almost exactly at the moment two years ago when Johnson started turning on his allies and banning skeptical readers. If he was indeed panicked about loss of traffic to the site, blocking individual computers from being able to load his home page seems like an extraordinary way to reverse that.
But perhaps I am, as many suggested to me, just another liberal dupe. Perhaps I even fell for the pretense that Johnson lives in the modest home where I visited him, which bore none of the trappings his supposed sellout would suggest. The U.P.S. man who delivered packages to his door while I was there, and his truck, may have been hired for the day just to snow me; the decidedly un-Mata-Hari-like woman he introduced to me as his fiancée, who brought us water and fruit as we talked in his small home office, may have been a member of the Trilateral Commission. It would be just like a representative of the Mainstream Media to get caught believing his eyes like that.
THE SOUNDEST CONCLUSION seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.
No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the free exchange of ideas. “It’s his sandbox,” Pamela Geller says simply. “He can do whatever he wants.” Still, if you read L.G.F. today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of “Animal Farm.” Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines) to call commenters’ attention to yet another attack on him that was posted at some other site. On the home page, you can click to see the Top 10 comments of the day, as voted on by registered users; typically, half of those comments will be from Johnson himself. Even longtime commenters have been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he reminds them, always watching. L.G.F. still has more than 34,000 registered users, but the comment threads are dominated by the same two dozen or so names. And a handful of those have been empowered by Johnson sub rosa to watch as well — to delete critical comments and, if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult of personality — not that there’s any compelling reason, really, that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.
“This is one area where I did change,” Johnson admitted. “I realized you can’t just let it be free speech. It doesn’t work that way on the Internet. Total free speech is a recipe for anarchy when people can’t see each other.”
IN THE LAST DAY of November, Johnson delivered the final blow to his old alliances. In a post that he said took him about three minutes to write, he listed 10 reasons “Why I Parted Ways With the Right.” The “reasons” themselves amounted to little more than laundry lists: “Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.),” for instance. In the voluminous comment thread attached, Johnson was characteristically interested less in discussing the break itself than in discussing the reaction to it — calling readers’ attention to the number of times it was “re-tweeted,” linking to attacks on him, citing praise from quarters that not long ago would have considered him toxic. Anticlimactic as this moment might have seemed to right-wingers who broke with Johnson a year or more earlier, it caused a sensation: the site’s traffic spiked to about three and a half times what it was the day before. (It returned to its current levels — about 100,000 page views a day — within the week.)
“I saw the bill of particulars he nailed to the door of his Web site,” says the author Peter Collier — himself a survivor of the special vitriol directed at those who change sides in the ideological wars, after he and David Horowitz, his fellow former Ramparts editor, publicly leapt from far left to far right in the late 1980s. “Not exactly Whittaker Chambers, is he? I must say I was pretty put off by the profligate and kind of lame use of the word ‘fascism,’ a word that has been systematically denuded of its meaning, so that now it just signifies somebody you don’t agree with. I don’t want to say that it didn’t take some bravery and forethought and all that stuff — it just didn’t seem like a very considered and certainly not a very theoretical break. More of a take-this-job-and-shove-it moment.”
Johnson’s desk is flanked by a keyboard and an electric guitar, which he still plays, though not professionally. “The touring thing, when you’re younger — it’s nice and glamorous,” he said. “I’ve been to most of the continents in the world — the only big country I’ve missed is Russia, I think. I would probably still be doing it if the blog hadn’t taken off the way it did. If someone were to come to me and offer me a couple million dollars to go tour for six months, I wouldn’t say no. But at this point, the blog is more than meeting my needs, financially.” (He declines to characterize how much money he makes.)
Sitting at his desk, he read me an e-mail message he received that day from a stranger who wished upon him a series of unprintable misfortunes involving a “male black crack whore.” He closed the e-mail message and shook his head. Incivility, at least of the F2F variety, clearly makes him uncomfortable; in fact, he can be downright squeamish about it. “I don’t know why things can’t just stay on the level of the factual,” he said. “I don’t know why everything has to have a slant. I mean, The New York Times has a slant, and in the past I’ve called them out for that.” He sighed. “I miss the days of Walter Cronkite.”
Jonathan Dee is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new novel, “The Privileges,” has just been published.
More at Loonwatch, LA Times,
By JONATHAN DEE
January 24, 2010
New York Times Sunday Magazine
Charles Johnson has been writing a blog for almost as long as the word “blog” has existed. A bearish, gentle-voiced, ponytailed man who for three decades enjoyed a successful career as a jazz guitarist accompanying the likes of Al Jarreau and Stanley Clarke, Johnson has always had a geek’s penchant for self-education, and in that spirit he cultivated a side interest, and ultimately an expertise, in writing computer code. His Web log, which he named “Little Green Footballs” (a private joke whose derivation he has always refused to divulge), was begun in February 2001 mostly as a way to share advice and information with fellow code jockeys — his approach was similar in outlook, if vastly larger in its reach, to the guiding spirit in the days of ham radio. His final post on Sept. 10, 2001, was titled “Placement of Web Page Elements.” It read, in its entirety: “Here’s a well-executed academic study of where users expect things to be on a typical Web page.” It linked to, well, exactly what it said. The post attracted one comment, which read, in its entirety, “Fantastic article.”
The next 24 hours would transform his blog and, ultimately, his career. “I grew up in Hawaii,” Johnson told me recently when we met in his Los Angeles home, “but I was born in New York. After I moved away at age 10, I would read the news stories about how the World Trade Center towers were getting closer to finishing. When they were attacked that day, that really hit home for me in a way that reached back into my childhood. I’ve always been kind of a voracious reader, and when I saw the attack happen, I was probably one of the first ones to make a connection with Osama bin Laden, who’d declared war on America a few years earlier. It was like a huge light bulb going on over my head about this stuff, and I wanted to really learn about it, so I started posting everything I could find.”
Those searching the Web for information on the attackers soon found Johnson. “Many of us felt guilty that we didn’t even know who had invaded this country,” says Pamela Geller, an early Little Green Footballs reader and a former associate publisher at The New York Observer, who now writes a blog of her own called Atlas Shrugs. “The media had been, I think, somewhat derelict in terms of describing our mortal enemy. Charles Johnson was covering the global jihad in an in-depth and comprehensive fashion that nobody else was. That’s where I was getting my best news, from Little Green Footballs.”
By virtue of his willingness to do and share research, his personal embrace of a hawkish, populist anger and his extraordinary Web savvy, Johnson quickly turned Little Green Footballs (or L.G.F., as it is commonly known) into one of the most popular personal sites on the Web, and himself — the very model of a Los Angeles bohemian — into an avatar of the American right wing. With a daily audience in the hundreds of thousands, the career sideman had moved to the center of the stage.
Now it is eight years later, and Johnson, who is 56, sits in the ashes of an epic flame war that has destroyed his relationships with nearly every one of his old right-wing allies. People who have pledged their lives to fighting Islamic extremism, when asked about Charles Johnson now, unsheathe a word they do not throw around lightly: “evil.” Glenn Beck has taken the time to denounce him on air and at length. Johnson himself (Mad King Charles is one of his most frequent, and most printable, Web nicknames) has used his technical know-how to block thousands of his former readers not just from commenting on his site but even, in many cases, from viewing its home page. He recently moved into a gated community, partly out of fear, he said, that the venom directed at him in cyberspace might jump its boundaries and lead someone to do him physical harm. He has turned forcefully against Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, nearly every conservative icon you can name. And answering the question of what, or who, got to Charles Johnson has itself become a kind of boom genre on the Internet.
“It’s just so illogical,” Geller told me heatedly not long ago. “I loved him. I respected him. But the way he went after people was like a mental illness. There’s an evil to that, a maliciousness. He’s a traitor, a turncoat, a plant. We may not know for years what actually happened. You think he changed his mind?”
NUMBER OF SO-CALLED warblogs were born out of the post-9/11 moment, when hanging a shingle in the still relatively frontier-like blogosphere was a way of, if not doing something exactly, at least establishing a rallying point for the considerable fury of all those who longed to do something. But even if the cliché about bloggers — that they presume to write knowledgeably about complex subjects without ever leaving their homes — is mostly true, it doesn’t mean that bloggers can’t make things happen. Perhaps the defining moment in Johnson’s new career came in 2004, when he was able not just to follow but to drive a major story: he was the central blogger behind what came to be known as Rathergate, in which a few citizen journalists did what Dan Rather and the venerable CBS News lacked either the patience or the skill to do themselves — check a typewritten letter supposedly from 1972, criticizing George W. Bush’s military service, for authenticity.
There is some dispute, even today, as to who was the first to expose the fraud behind the so-called Killian documents, but Johnson will forever be associated with the episode because, unlike most other bloggers — who know as much about the technical workings of their medium as a poet is likely to know about a printing press — he had the wherewithal to create, almost instantly, an animated .gif image that toggled between the original letter and that same letter typed in Microsoft Word 32 years later, illustrating the issue in a way that no 500-word blog post could have done.
The Rathergate era was the golden age of L.G.F., at least in terms of traffic. Johnson says that the peak was somewhere around half a million page views per day. (Over the past year or so, it has averaged about one-fifth that many.) But even after its peak, L.G.F. remained one of the most influential blogs in cyberspace, certainly at the conservative end of the political spectrum. It would be going too far to say that L.G.F. was a single-issue blog in those days, but even those issues on which it branched out — for instance, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Johnson, an agnostic and a Gentile, is a fierce supporter of Israel, mostly on account of the affection he developed for it as a touring musician), or the 2004 presidential election, or the Patriot Act — were outgrowths of the one concern that trumped all others: national security in the face of Islamic terrorism.
If the tone of Johnson’s writing on the blog sometimes bordered, as his detractors claimed, on hate speech, that of his mostly anonymous commenters was reliably worse. A popular blog like L.G.F. functions as a kind of cloud-sourced id. It is not uncommon for a simple, 200-word post to accrue upward of a thousand written responses from readers. The question of how responsible he is, or should be, for these expressions of uncensored reader sentiment is one that Johnson, like many bloggers, has struggled with; but in the middle years of the last decade, whether for free-speech reasons or simply because he enjoyed being the popular focal point of such strong nationalist feeling, he did very little to rein it in. Muslims were described as “vermin.” The posthumous nickname St. Pancake was coined for the young American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, in reference to the Israeli bulldozer that killed her. Discussion of U.S. foreign-policy options included terms like “targeted genocide.” As for Palestinians, “they don’t need statehood,” offered one commenter; “they need sterilization.” And on and on. A so-called stalker blog, called L.G.F. Watch, sprang up to document instances of what it considered hate speech on the part of Johnson and his followers. Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott compared Johnson’s site to a “disorganized Nuremberg Rally.”
But enemies themselves are a kind of currency on the Internet, and for every attack L.G.F. provoked as a place that permitted and even fostered bigotry against Muslims in particular, new allies rose up to link themselves to Johnson and his causes. Those links were both spiritual and literal; allowing (or preventing) less-successful sites to post a link to yours, and maybe offering them a link on your own site in return, turns you into a kind of taste maker, a locus of tangible power. L.G.F. was, by 2007 or so, at the heart of a vast, amorphous grid of right-wing sites of every description, an interdependence that Johnson himself had become, in a way, too popular to control.
That concept of the link, in all its permutations, is the key to what happened next, both to Johnson and because of him, and it says something enlightening not just about blogging but also about the nature and prospects of citizen journalism. Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine.
IN OCTOBER 2007, Johnson was asked to take part in what was billed as a Counter-Jihad Conference in Brussels, a gathering of fewer than a hundred politicians and opinion leaders from around the world who convened to share ideas and strategies for combating the spread of militant Islam. Johnson was not the only writer invited — Geller was there, as well as Robert Spencer of jihadwatch.org (a Web site Johnson himself designed), to name two — but he did not go. “I’m just not a joiner of these things,” he says.
The conference finished up in Brussels, and “the next day,” Johnson remembers, “people were e-mailing me saying, ‘You might want to cover this.’ So I started looking into it.” He discovered that among the conference’s 90 or so participants — though not among the speakers — was a man named Filip Dewinter, a leader of a Belgian-nationalist political party called Vlaams Belang, or “Flemish Interest.” Vlaams Belang, which has a history that reaches back to the wrong side of World War II, has an unabashed record of inflammatory rhetoric and hateful, opportunistic verbal viciousness of all sorts; a few years ago, for example, the party announced an advertising campaign in Moroccan newspapers and magazines to “discourage foreigners from coming to our country.” And as recently as 2004, it was condemned by the Belgian Supreme Court for incitement to discrimination and racial segregation. (The party responded by changing its name.) Even to most right-wing sensibilities, Vlaams Belang is certainly beyond the pale. Still, whether or not Dewinter, who has said that “in Flanders, the multicultural society has led to a multicriminal society,” is more extreme than the commenters who appeared regularly on Little Green Footballs seems like a subject on which right-wing minds might reasonably disagree. Perhaps that still happens somewhere. Gray, however, is not a popular shade on the Internet.
It seems borderline ridiculous that the political character of an extremist Belgian party, which in the last parliamentary election captured just 17 seats out of 150 in the Chamber of Representatives, should become the issue over which a kind of civil war among American conservatives broke out, but that is what happened. Opposing “Islamofascism,” Johnson had come to believe, shouldn’t require identification with fascism of the older sort. Johnson began taking shots at not only Vlaams Belang, an organization it seems safe to say the vast majority of his readers had never heard of, but also at formerly favored colleagues like Spencer and Geller, to whom, by attending the same conference, the European neofascist movement was now . . . linked. Johnson first hinted, and eventually demanded, that they publicly distance themselves from both Vlaams Belang and the conference itself, and when they demurred, he publicly distanced himself from them.
“Filip Dewinter has said some things I deplore,” Spencer says. “But I don’t consider myself responsible for him just because I was at this conference and he was, too. That’s an outrageous kind of guilt by association. Let me ask you this: a few years ago I spoke at a Yom Kippur service, and one of the other speakers was Hillary Clinton. Does that make me a supporter or her work, or her of mine?”
Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997. The speaker will never put it behind him. (Just as Johnson, despite his very reasonable contention that he later changed his mind, will never be allowed to consign to the past a blog post he wrote in 2004 criticizing that judicial condemnation of Vlaams Belang as “a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups.”) It may be difficult to travel to Belgium and build the case that Filip Dewinter is not just a hateful character but an actual Nazi (and thus that those who can be linked to him are Nazi sympathizers), but sitting at your keyboard, there is no trick to it at all. Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.
Johnson broke off relations with blogs that claimed openly to owe their own existence to him. He called the syndicated columnist Diana West and the investigative reporter Richard Miniter fascist sympathizers. He threatened to take down Michelle Malkin. In some ways, it was an exploration of the limits of his own influence: all over the blogosphere, you were either with him or with the fascists.
“I was such a small fish at the time,” Geller said. “I realized I was basically committing blog suicide by going against him. But he was wrong.” When one of Johnson’s posts about the conference was picked up and incorporated in a press release by the conservative bête noire Council on American-Islamic Relations, Geller called him out on Atlas Shrugs; he responded with a series of posts about her, the most memorable of which was titled, “Pamela Geller: Poster Girl for Eurofascism.” (Not that Geller herself, who posted a Photoshopped picture of Johnson in Joker makeup, was exactly on the high road.) Traffic at her site, she says, went down about 75 percent. “He really did put a knife in the trans-Atlantic counterjihad movement, for a long time. People were running for cover. Nobody wanted to go against him then. He was the king.”
Spencer says: “I have actually had people contact me and say, ‘I understand you’re the American representative for Vlaams Belang.’ And that is because of Johnson.” After Spencer wrote last month on Jihad Watch that I interviewed him, Johnson forwarded me several posts by other bloggers charting Spencer’s unsavory “associations”; one of them tried to connect him, via a chain of links that is too long even to summarize, to Slobodan Milosevic. The more creatively defamatory the whole dispute becomes, the further it moves from the issues around which Johnson and Spencer and many others have supposedly reframed their lives. But I never got the sense that any of it was put forth by Johnson, either in person or on the blog, in anything other than perfect earnestness. He came of age, as a writer and as a public figure, in the culture of damnation by link, and he does not exempt himself from its logic.
Thus in retrospect it also seems clear that the Vlaams Belang blog war, with its attendant scary buzzwords (“fascist,” “racist,” “Nazi”), gave Johnson the intellectual cover to do something he wanted to do anyway, which was to conduct a kind of public self-purge of the alliances he acquired on the road to fame.
THE QUESTIONING OF Johnson’s tactics started to come not just from without L.G.F. but also from within. Readers both casual and loyal spoke up in the comment threads to ask, sometimes diplomatically and sometimes not, whether all this casual flinging of epithets like “fascist” wasn’t maybe an overreaction. Johnson’s response, in thousands of cases, was to block their accounts and ban some of them from viewing the blog. “Get off my Web site” was a common farewell. (Johnson insists that this is not true — that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for disagreeing with him — but the anecdotal evidence to the contrary is voluminous, and the fact that the offending comments were instantly and permanently deleted makes it impossible to check others’ records against his.)
“Running a community is hard,” says Markos Moulitsas of the liberal Web site Daily Kos, “and I don’t criticize people for the approaches they take in trying to control their sites. As I tell my own disgruntled commenters, if they don’t like a site’s comment policies, they can always find greener pastures elsewhere. It’s a big Internet.”
A reasonable approach, which L.G.F.’s exiles mostly rejected. Comment threads all over the blogosphere were hijacked by people sharing stories of their banishment. Another stalker blog — this one assailing Johnson from the right — sprang up, administered by banned former “Lizards,” as L.G.F.’s registrants are known. Johnson responded by posting those former registrants’ real names and photographs on L.G.F. — an astounding breach of civility on the Internet, where anonymity is often prized above all else.
It was a kind of orgy of delinking, an intentionally set brush fire meant to clear the psychic area around Johnson and ensure that no one would connect him to anyone else, period, unless he first said it was O.K. No one would define Johnson’s allegiances but Johnson. Of course, much of this was accomplished by the very methods he felt so threatened by: a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon approach to political rectitude, in which the existence of even a search-engine-generated connection between two people anywhere in the world implied a mutual back-scratching, an ideological partnership. It was unfair and simplistic and petulant, but it also seems to have achieved its goal. Very few people on the right want to be linked with Charles Johnson anymore.
NO ONE SEEMS TO WANT to believe that his thinking simply changed over time — and in fact he still has that much in common with his old allies, for Johnson, too, insists that he hasn’t really changed. His recent expressions of support for abortion rights, of contempt for creationism and the religious right — all these beliefs, he told me, are elements of the “classical liberalism” he has always believed in but previously opted not to write about. Why now? The answer is so heretical it seems destined to raise the tizzy-level among his former followers to new heights: “It’s not that the war on terror has finished,” he said. “It’s never going to be finished, but I think things have reached the point now where it’s not as pressing as it was. Some of the measures we took to protect ourselves against extremists have been pretty effective. And so I realized, you know, that maybe it’s time to tell people that I’m not onboard with a lot of this social-conservative agenda. And I think that I actually speak for a lot of people.” Though our conversation took place in the fall, he told me in a subsequent e-mail message that the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing “doesn’t change my opinion about that.”
The flip side of the fact that his acolytes felt so close to him without ever actually knowing him is that he serves now, just as credibly, as a sort of blank screen upon which to project conspiracy theories. It has been suggested online, with a gravity that is hard to overstate, that he is a convicted child molester worried about public exposure; that he is a closeted homosexual threatened with blackmail; that he is in sexual thrall to an unnamed woman; that he is being paid by George Soros; or that he is not, in fact, Charles Johnson at all but some sort of cyberpirate writing the blog’s posts from an undisclosed location. Anything, apparently, seems if not more credible then certainly less hurtful than the opinion that the threat of terrorism on American soil is no longer so imminent that other disputes should be subsumed by it.
Many on the Internet cite as evidence that Johnson is in some dire need of money the fact that his blog is rife with advertisements — an argument that has a certain Yogi Berra quality to it, as most blogs can only dream of attracting his levels of revenue. Also popular is the theory that he did it only for the traffic, that he believes in nothing but the centrality of Charles Johnson and thus, seeing which way the political winds were blowing, that he betrayed his principles in order to remain in the spotlight. The problem with that theory is that the long-term decline in L.G.F.’s traffic, which its detractors delight in pointing out, began almost exactly at the moment two years ago when Johnson started turning on his allies and banning skeptical readers. If he was indeed panicked about loss of traffic to the site, blocking individual computers from being able to load his home page seems like an extraordinary way to reverse that.
But perhaps I am, as many suggested to me, just another liberal dupe. Perhaps I even fell for the pretense that Johnson lives in the modest home where I visited him, which bore none of the trappings his supposed sellout would suggest. The U.P.S. man who delivered packages to his door while I was there, and his truck, may have been hired for the day just to snow me; the decidedly un-Mata-Hari-like woman he introduced to me as his fiancée, who brought us water and fruit as we talked in his small home office, may have been a member of the Trilateral Commission. It would be just like a representative of the Mainstream Media to get caught believing his eyes like that.
THE SOUNDEST CONCLUSION seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.
No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the free exchange of ideas. “It’s his sandbox,” Pamela Geller says simply. “He can do whatever he wants.” Still, if you read L.G.F. today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of “Animal Farm.” Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines) to call commenters’ attention to yet another attack on him that was posted at some other site. On the home page, you can click to see the Top 10 comments of the day, as voted on by registered users; typically, half of those comments will be from Johnson himself. Even longtime commenters have been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he reminds them, always watching. L.G.F. still has more than 34,000 registered users, but the comment threads are dominated by the same two dozen or so names. And a handful of those have been empowered by Johnson sub rosa to watch as well — to delete critical comments and, if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult of personality — not that there’s any compelling reason, really, that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.
“This is one area where I did change,” Johnson admitted. “I realized you can’t just let it be free speech. It doesn’t work that way on the Internet. Total free speech is a recipe for anarchy when people can’t see each other.”
IN THE LAST DAY of November, Johnson delivered the final blow to his old alliances. In a post that he said took him about three minutes to write, he listed 10 reasons “Why I Parted Ways With the Right.” The “reasons” themselves amounted to little more than laundry lists: “Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.),” for instance. In the voluminous comment thread attached, Johnson was characteristically interested less in discussing the break itself than in discussing the reaction to it — calling readers’ attention to the number of times it was “re-tweeted,” linking to attacks on him, citing praise from quarters that not long ago would have considered him toxic. Anticlimactic as this moment might have seemed to right-wingers who broke with Johnson a year or more earlier, it caused a sensation: the site’s traffic spiked to about three and a half times what it was the day before. (It returned to its current levels — about 100,000 page views a day — within the week.)
“I saw the bill of particulars he nailed to the door of his Web site,” says the author Peter Collier — himself a survivor of the special vitriol directed at those who change sides in the ideological wars, after he and David Horowitz, his fellow former Ramparts editor, publicly leapt from far left to far right in the late 1980s. “Not exactly Whittaker Chambers, is he? I must say I was pretty put off by the profligate and kind of lame use of the word ‘fascism,’ a word that has been systematically denuded of its meaning, so that now it just signifies somebody you don’t agree with. I don’t want to say that it didn’t take some bravery and forethought and all that stuff — it just didn’t seem like a very considered and certainly not a very theoretical break. More of a take-this-job-and-shove-it moment.”
Johnson’s desk is flanked by a keyboard and an electric guitar, which he still plays, though not professionally. “The touring thing, when you’re younger — it’s nice and glamorous,” he said. “I’ve been to most of the continents in the world — the only big country I’ve missed is Russia, I think. I would probably still be doing it if the blog hadn’t taken off the way it did. If someone were to come to me and offer me a couple million dollars to go tour for six months, I wouldn’t say no. But at this point, the blog is more than meeting my needs, financially.” (He declines to characterize how much money he makes.)
Sitting at his desk, he read me an e-mail message he received that day from a stranger who wished upon him a series of unprintable misfortunes involving a “male black crack whore.” He closed the e-mail message and shook his head. Incivility, at least of the F2F variety, clearly makes him uncomfortable; in fact, he can be downright squeamish about it. “I don’t know why things can’t just stay on the level of the factual,” he said. “I don’t know why everything has to have a slant. I mean, The New York Times has a slant, and in the past I’ve called them out for that.” He sighed. “I miss the days of Walter Cronkite.”
Jonathan Dee is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new novel, “The Privileges,” has just been published.
More at Loonwatch, LA Times,
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Friday, January 08, 2010
Indophobia: The Real Elephant in the Living Room
by Vamsee Juluri
Author and Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
Posted: January 8, 2010 03:29 PM
The Huffington Post
All prejudices are unpleasantly alike on some level, but the prejudice that India and Indians face on a global scale has proven to be exceptionally resistant to change.
In a week that saw innocent Indians being murdered and imaginary Indians being maligned on opposite ends of the Western world, Foreign Policy published an article that labels India a "global villain." It is time for a serious reality-check, and an even more serious attitude-check.
Let me start with the Foreign Policy article in question. Barbara Crossette, who authored the piece, formally worked at the New York Times, a publication, which has devoted entire editorials to its briskly exasperating civilizing mission vis-a-vid India. Now, Crossette writes about how annoying it is to deal with India on important global issues, such as trade and nuclear non-proliferation.
She begins with a pithy demolition of India's supposed good press in recent times (to which, one must note, a witty commentator has responded by asking the obvious: What good press?) only to go on to denounce India as a sanctimonious rogue among nations. The words that are used to describe India include "pious," "craving," "petulant," "intransigent," and "believes that the world's rules don't apply to it," all of which a student of postcolonial cultural studies would recognize as obnoxious cliches that have come to characterize Western discourse about the colonies for decades now. What else could be flashing in a writer's mind when the word "petulant" or "intransigent" is used but the belief that a a whole nation is infantile? What colonial image of a gaping-mouthed ragged supplicant must have inspired the use of a word like "craving" to describe India's goals?
The bold labeling of a sovereign, democratic nation as a "global evil" marks, I believe, a new low in what must be recognized as nothing less than Indophobia. If we have not heard that frequently enough before, it is not because it doesn't exist. Just like how the most effective propaganda is never called propaganda, but rather it is accepted as truth, the most insidious of prejudices seldom even get named as such (perhaps it is no coincidence that the phrase "elephant in the room," which means exactly that, is centered around the animal most closely identified with India). There are perhaps as many anecdotes about Indophobia at a personal level as there are Indians in foreign countries, but it is at a deeper cultural level that we need to face it first. The first sign of Indophobia many of us encounter is really its own ideological defenses; phrases which are used to preempt any discussion about it, like "Indian chauvinism," "Indian supremacism," "Indian exceptionalism," "Indian victimism," or just allegations of childish over-sensitiveness coupled with some sort of vague Eastern cultural fetishism pertaining to notions of honor (I have heard all of these sentiments informally or otherwise in my academic career from grad school until now). If we can get past these, perhaps we can see things more clearly.
India's role in the Western imagination has been a long and important one. Despite some reverential accounts of Indian civilization in the earliest days of the encounter between Europe and India, the image that has prevailed has not been a nice one, or even a truthful one. The present Indophobia has its origins in colonial Hinduphobia. Fuelled by the crazy stories of missionaries determined to rid the world of heathen Hindus and steeped in the ideologies of the colonizers' civilizing mission, Indophobia infiltrated popular, journalistic, political and academic thought. In the cold war period, some things improved, but in the great conversation of powers that Washington thought it was having, Pakistan would appear to it as a reliable favorite; tough, dependable, monotheistic, and anti-communist. India, on the other hand, was seen as too weak, too Hindu, too vegetarian, precariously past its Must Break Up By Date. At best, or worst, India was seen as "pious," with its Gandhian austerities and Nehruvian Non-Alignment dreams.
But it is the present, the post cold war, post 9/11, post outsourcing nature of Indophobia that we must return to, history in tow. The examples are many. Why is it that some Australians reacted to the beating and killing of Indian students with the odd retort that "this happens in Mumbai"? Why did NPR cheerily lend its audience to one man's claim that he saw an Indian get the Nigerian airline bomber on board? Why does Foreign Policy get to call India "evil" without a drop of concern for how it feels to Indian readers or how dangerous words like this were in the past for the colonized nations? Why does New York Times choose to show agonizing restraint when Pakistani terrorists massacre civilians in Mumbai and run screaming headlines naming the arrest of an "Indian" after Madrid? Why does Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most exhilarating movies of our time, depict the majority of Indian characters in it as irredeemably cruel and barbaric (not the nice Indian hero with the British accent though, of course not)? Why did the fictional slur "slumdog" and the image of poverty reportedly figure so often in the Australian attacks? Finally, why does Glenn Beck find the name of a life-giving sacred river similar to the name of a disease? I must admit though that the last case is less depressing because it is Glenn Beck after all and the problem must naturally lie not in the word 'Ganges' but really in his ears or what's (not) between them.
After a brief decade or so of somewhat unexpected "India Rising" stories, India-bashing is once again becoming fashionable. As a media studies teacher, I always wonder what it means when a particular way of looking at things suddenly becomes prevalent in history. What does it tell us about our times and who we are? In the past Indophobia was part of a colonial and then cold war mindset. Thinking of India as the very embodiment of wretchedness and poverty fit in with the western self-perception of the time. In recent times, things have improved at some levels. Racism is no longer legal and in many places no longer cool. With globalization and the economic success of India and Indians abroad, it is no longer possible to deny to India its talent, labor, and its contribution to the world. All should have been well, at least now. But Indophobia has found new reasons to resurface--and some of these reasons have less to do with India and more to do with where the United States sees itself in the world right now. The world's most powerful nation has been only minimally successful in its wars against its most formidable adversary. It is beset by doubts about the mortality of empires and such. It has swung from gung-ho bombs-away leadership to a low-bow bombs-away leadership. It has perhaps even painfully sensed the barb in the saying "with friends like these who needs enemies?" when it comes to the whole question of its cold war-era role in the creation of Frankenjihadis in South Asia. All of these have a bearing, directly or indirectly, on its present story on India.
The present wave of Indophobia, starting with the hate-call campaigns against Indian call centers a few years ago and culminating in the execrably immoral devaluing of Indian lives in recent times, may be at least in some parts the result of an overcompensation for a sense of imperial loss. The pinnacle of western power and prestige is no longer the only high rise in town (and I don't mean the Burj Dubai). Globalization has done to the world what it has done in India too--the days of single nation world dominance, like single party dominance in Indian politics, are over. Accepting this won't be easy for some because the culture has not found the will to change; at least not as far as India goes. The culture can grudgingly accept China as a rival. It can deem the whole of Islam as a civilizational rival. India's rise, though, is harder to accept. America is used to dealing with things on the grounds of toughness, force, power. Doing so on the grounds of smartness is new to it.
So the whole old repertoire of Indophobia returns; images of poverty and disease, allegations of corruption and piousness, insinuations about culture and religion. This time around though, there is less of the sort of restraint that existed in the past. Just as how some people think it is okay to be racist now because we have a black president, the new Indophobia deems it okay to spew nastiness because India has arrived too. But of course, post Mumbai and Slumdog the arrival story is also questioned. This is an old tired story too; of the romantic westerner eagerly turning to India despite their friends' counsel only to be tremendously disappointed that they didn't find nirvana, or even a nice airport terminal. That sort of backlash tends to get extra nasty, leaping into large scale generalizations. That is the pattern that seems to be playing out in the present India story. "You think you know India? You think India has got better/richer/nirvana?" The pitch inevitably starts (In Crossette's article this part runs with "internet entrepreneurs, hospitality industry pioneers and gurus"). "Nope," the anointed Western (and sometimes South Asian) expert gravely retorts. "Here's the real India and here are the real Indians. They are evil." At least Foreign Policy had the honesty to put that word up in lights.
As someone with an emotional stake in both India and the United States, I wonder whose loss will be greater in the end. The nastiness of Indophobia is of course bad for India in the first instance. It is young Indians who have been bearing the brunt, whether of American hate-callers or worse, of Australian murderers. But India is a survivor country; it has survived conquest, colonialism, and it survives its own chaotic self every day. America though is inexperienced on this count. It has just about started realizing, after much needless suffering of its own from blowback and backbite, that surviving the whirlwind of globalization takes smarts rather than brute force. I fear that the return of Indophobia may once again distract America from the right direction. When experts like Barbara Crossette heap sarcasm on "India's colorful, stubborn loquaciousness" they fail to see that the more we ignore this supposed "loquaciousness" the more we are signaling that the only language we recognize is that of brute force. There is no dearth of precedent on that. There is no dearth of possibilities that the future may be exactly that too, if old prejudices run unchecked.
But I cannot make myself leave on a pessimistic note. Indophobia can be fought, and I believe there is enough goodness in all communities to do so. First, I think the Indian community, in India and abroad, must get its own stories right. There has been a tendency to shy away from naming Indophobia as such because we think it affects our image of India Rising, which has been hard fought, no doubt. But there is a need to name bad stuff for what it is. To be fair, as always, we must continue our introspection into our own prejudices and shortcomings; after all, as Ramachandra Guha once wrote, 95% of blame for India's problems today lies with us and not the British. India needs a better India story too (Guha and Khilnani are the best place to start) and it won't be easy because of how diverse, divided, and indeed complicated we are. But that is our task, and indeed for those of us who have the privilege of living and writing in the Western world, indeed an important one. For our Western friends, especially those in positions of authority in the media, the task is more daunting. Your responsibility may not be towards Indian feelings, not at all. But you do have a responsibility in your profession towards Truth. As long as your Indophobia is acting up, you will remain clueless about it.
Author and Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
Posted: January 8, 2010 03:29 PM
The Huffington Post
All prejudices are unpleasantly alike on some level, but the prejudice that India and Indians face on a global scale has proven to be exceptionally resistant to change.
In a week that saw innocent Indians being murdered and imaginary Indians being maligned on opposite ends of the Western world, Foreign Policy published an article that labels India a "global villain." It is time for a serious reality-check, and an even more serious attitude-check.
Let me start with the Foreign Policy article in question. Barbara Crossette, who authored the piece, formally worked at the New York Times, a publication, which has devoted entire editorials to its briskly exasperating civilizing mission vis-a-vid India. Now, Crossette writes about how annoying it is to deal with India on important global issues, such as trade and nuclear non-proliferation.
She begins with a pithy demolition of India's supposed good press in recent times (to which, one must note, a witty commentator has responded by asking the obvious: What good press?) only to go on to denounce India as a sanctimonious rogue among nations. The words that are used to describe India include "pious," "craving," "petulant," "intransigent," and "believes that the world's rules don't apply to it," all of which a student of postcolonial cultural studies would recognize as obnoxious cliches that have come to characterize Western discourse about the colonies for decades now. What else could be flashing in a writer's mind when the word "petulant" or "intransigent" is used but the belief that a a whole nation is infantile? What colonial image of a gaping-mouthed ragged supplicant must have inspired the use of a word like "craving" to describe India's goals?
The bold labeling of a sovereign, democratic nation as a "global evil" marks, I believe, a new low in what must be recognized as nothing less than Indophobia. If we have not heard that frequently enough before, it is not because it doesn't exist. Just like how the most effective propaganda is never called propaganda, but rather it is accepted as truth, the most insidious of prejudices seldom even get named as such (perhaps it is no coincidence that the phrase "elephant in the room," which means exactly that, is centered around the animal most closely identified with India). There are perhaps as many anecdotes about Indophobia at a personal level as there are Indians in foreign countries, but it is at a deeper cultural level that we need to face it first. The first sign of Indophobia many of us encounter is really its own ideological defenses; phrases which are used to preempt any discussion about it, like "Indian chauvinism," "Indian supremacism," "Indian exceptionalism," "Indian victimism," or just allegations of childish over-sensitiveness coupled with some sort of vague Eastern cultural fetishism pertaining to notions of honor (I have heard all of these sentiments informally or otherwise in my academic career from grad school until now). If we can get past these, perhaps we can see things more clearly.
India's role in the Western imagination has been a long and important one. Despite some reverential accounts of Indian civilization in the earliest days of the encounter between Europe and India, the image that has prevailed has not been a nice one, or even a truthful one. The present Indophobia has its origins in colonial Hinduphobia. Fuelled by the crazy stories of missionaries determined to rid the world of heathen Hindus and steeped in the ideologies of the colonizers' civilizing mission, Indophobia infiltrated popular, journalistic, political and academic thought. In the cold war period, some things improved, but in the great conversation of powers that Washington thought it was having, Pakistan would appear to it as a reliable favorite; tough, dependable, monotheistic, and anti-communist. India, on the other hand, was seen as too weak, too Hindu, too vegetarian, precariously past its Must Break Up By Date. At best, or worst, India was seen as "pious," with its Gandhian austerities and Nehruvian Non-Alignment dreams.
But it is the present, the post cold war, post 9/11, post outsourcing nature of Indophobia that we must return to, history in tow. The examples are many. Why is it that some Australians reacted to the beating and killing of Indian students with the odd retort that "this happens in Mumbai"? Why did NPR cheerily lend its audience to one man's claim that he saw an Indian get the Nigerian airline bomber on board? Why does Foreign Policy get to call India "evil" without a drop of concern for how it feels to Indian readers or how dangerous words like this were in the past for the colonized nations? Why does New York Times choose to show agonizing restraint when Pakistani terrorists massacre civilians in Mumbai and run screaming headlines naming the arrest of an "Indian" after Madrid? Why does Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most exhilarating movies of our time, depict the majority of Indian characters in it as irredeemably cruel and barbaric (not the nice Indian hero with the British accent though, of course not)? Why did the fictional slur "slumdog" and the image of poverty reportedly figure so often in the Australian attacks? Finally, why does Glenn Beck find the name of a life-giving sacred river similar to the name of a disease? I must admit though that the last case is less depressing because it is Glenn Beck after all and the problem must naturally lie not in the word 'Ganges' but really in his ears or what's (not) between them.
After a brief decade or so of somewhat unexpected "India Rising" stories, India-bashing is once again becoming fashionable. As a media studies teacher, I always wonder what it means when a particular way of looking at things suddenly becomes prevalent in history. What does it tell us about our times and who we are? In the past Indophobia was part of a colonial and then cold war mindset. Thinking of India as the very embodiment of wretchedness and poverty fit in with the western self-perception of the time. In recent times, things have improved at some levels. Racism is no longer legal and in many places no longer cool. With globalization and the economic success of India and Indians abroad, it is no longer possible to deny to India its talent, labor, and its contribution to the world. All should have been well, at least now. But Indophobia has found new reasons to resurface--and some of these reasons have less to do with India and more to do with where the United States sees itself in the world right now. The world's most powerful nation has been only minimally successful in its wars against its most formidable adversary. It is beset by doubts about the mortality of empires and such. It has swung from gung-ho bombs-away leadership to a low-bow bombs-away leadership. It has perhaps even painfully sensed the barb in the saying "with friends like these who needs enemies?" when it comes to the whole question of its cold war-era role in the creation of Frankenjihadis in South Asia. All of these have a bearing, directly or indirectly, on its present story on India.
The present wave of Indophobia, starting with the hate-call campaigns against Indian call centers a few years ago and culminating in the execrably immoral devaluing of Indian lives in recent times, may be at least in some parts the result of an overcompensation for a sense of imperial loss. The pinnacle of western power and prestige is no longer the only high rise in town (and I don't mean the Burj Dubai). Globalization has done to the world what it has done in India too--the days of single nation world dominance, like single party dominance in Indian politics, are over. Accepting this won't be easy for some because the culture has not found the will to change; at least not as far as India goes. The culture can grudgingly accept China as a rival. It can deem the whole of Islam as a civilizational rival. India's rise, though, is harder to accept. America is used to dealing with things on the grounds of toughness, force, power. Doing so on the grounds of smartness is new to it.
So the whole old repertoire of Indophobia returns; images of poverty and disease, allegations of corruption and piousness, insinuations about culture and religion. This time around though, there is less of the sort of restraint that existed in the past. Just as how some people think it is okay to be racist now because we have a black president, the new Indophobia deems it okay to spew nastiness because India has arrived too. But of course, post Mumbai and Slumdog the arrival story is also questioned. This is an old tired story too; of the romantic westerner eagerly turning to India despite their friends' counsel only to be tremendously disappointed that they didn't find nirvana, or even a nice airport terminal. That sort of backlash tends to get extra nasty, leaping into large scale generalizations. That is the pattern that seems to be playing out in the present India story. "You think you know India? You think India has got better/richer/nirvana?" The pitch inevitably starts (In Crossette's article this part runs with "internet entrepreneurs, hospitality industry pioneers and gurus"). "Nope," the anointed Western (and sometimes South Asian) expert gravely retorts. "Here's the real India and here are the real Indians. They are evil." At least Foreign Policy had the honesty to put that word up in lights.
As someone with an emotional stake in both India and the United States, I wonder whose loss will be greater in the end. The nastiness of Indophobia is of course bad for India in the first instance. It is young Indians who have been bearing the brunt, whether of American hate-callers or worse, of Australian murderers. But India is a survivor country; it has survived conquest, colonialism, and it survives its own chaotic self every day. America though is inexperienced on this count. It has just about started realizing, after much needless suffering of its own from blowback and backbite, that surviving the whirlwind of globalization takes smarts rather than brute force. I fear that the return of Indophobia may once again distract America from the right direction. When experts like Barbara Crossette heap sarcasm on "India's colorful, stubborn loquaciousness" they fail to see that the more we ignore this supposed "loquaciousness" the more we are signaling that the only language we recognize is that of brute force. There is no dearth of precedent on that. There is no dearth of possibilities that the future may be exactly that too, if old prejudices run unchecked.
But I cannot make myself leave on a pessimistic note. Indophobia can be fought, and I believe there is enough goodness in all communities to do so. First, I think the Indian community, in India and abroad, must get its own stories right. There has been a tendency to shy away from naming Indophobia as such because we think it affects our image of India Rising, which has been hard fought, no doubt. But there is a need to name bad stuff for what it is. To be fair, as always, we must continue our introspection into our own prejudices and shortcomings; after all, as Ramachandra Guha once wrote, 95% of blame for India's problems today lies with us and not the British. India needs a better India story too (Guha and Khilnani are the best place to start) and it won't be easy because of how diverse, divided, and indeed complicated we are. But that is our task, and indeed for those of us who have the privilege of living and writing in the Western world, indeed an important one. For our Western friends, especially those in positions of authority in the media, the task is more daunting. Your responsibility may not be towards Indian feelings, not at all. But you do have a responsibility in your profession towards Truth. As long as your Indophobia is acting up, you will remain clueless about it.
Why India Is No Villain
So Barbara Crossette, wrote a innuendo filled fluff piece maligning India.
Here is a rebuttal from Nitin Pai
Barbara Crossette is wrong: This rising power helps solve far more problems than it creates.
BY NITIN PAI
Foreign Policy
JANUARY 7, 2010
According to the Financial Times' Lucy Kellaway, "Elephant in the Room" was the most popular cliché to appear in major newspapers and journals in 2009. It is perhaps appropriate then that Barbara Crossette's latest diatribe against India appeared in Foreign Policy under that headline. Although it claims to show that India causes "the most global consternation" and "gives global governance the biggest headache," it is merely a series of rants and newsroom clichés selected entirely arbitrarily to support the author's prejudice.
Listing India's alleged failings, Crossette makes the unfathomable assertion that it is India that causes the most consternation and the biggest headache for the world -- more than Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Pakistan, and China. Without an attempt to compare the failings across countries (And why only these countries? Why leave out the West and the rest?), it is logically impossible to arrive at the conclusion that one of them is the biggest culprit. But once you trade logic for hyperbole, you can fit just about any animal you like into the room. For Crossette, it is the pachyderm.
Consider these facts instead: The only country to have militarily intervened to halt an ongoing genocide is India, which it did in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971. After the December 2004 tsunami, it was India's navy that was the first international responder, deploying within 24 hours and delivering humanitarian assistance to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Maldives. It subsequently coordinated operations with the United States, Japan, and Australia. India has been involved in U.N. peacekeeping from the very beginning and remains one of the biggest troop contributors to this day, often putting its soldiers in danger in conflicts that have nothing to do with national interests. Indian naval ships are also involved in maritime security operations from Somalia to the Strait of Malacca. Even this partial list is enough to prove that India is not, as Crossette believes, "a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence."
Let's take a closer look at Crossette's rap sheet. First, she agrees with a quote from an article that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal that advocates arms control (hardly a neutral source), arguing that India's refusals to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty make it "comparable to other defiant nuclear states [and] will undoubtedly contribute to a deteriorating security environment in Asia." She doesn't explain how, because she would be hard-pressed to prove that India's "contribution" is comparable to that of China, which helped put the bomb in the hands of the likes of Pakistan, or North Korea, which brazenly violated the treaty it signed. Actions matter more than signatures.
Second, on the Doha round of trade negotiations, Crossette blames India for single-handedly foiling a deal that "nobody loved, but one that would have benefited developing countries most." Does she really know better than the developing countries themselves? It seems odd that they would not love a deal that "would have benefited [them] most." It is just as presumptuous and illogical to blame the failure of Doha on India alone. Gideon Rachman, for instance, argues that "the Doha round ultimately broke down because of a stand-off between the United States, India, China and the European Union over agricultural trade." Turns out it takes more than one hand to wreck a multilateral deal.
It is on the third point -- climate change -- that Crossette's proclivity for being selective with facts stands out most. She mentions the Indian environment minister's refusal to agree to binding carbon emission targets five months before the Copenhagen talks, but ignores his statement in Parliament five days before the negotiations pledging 20 to 25 percent carbon emission intensity cuts from the 2005 levels by 2020. Nonbinding yes, but nevertheless a serious commitment. And no country's commitments at Copenhagen were binding. She also ignores that in the end, the Copenhagen "deal" came about in part due to India's bridging of the differences between the United States and China.
Fourth, on the basis of one data point -- the scandal over a pay increase to Paul Wolfowitz's girlfriend that precipitated his resignation as president of the World Bank -- Crossette alleges that India "attacks individuals." Wolfowitz, she says, was ousted "not because his relationship with a female official caused a public furor, but because he had turned his attention to Indian corruption and fraud in the diversion of bank funds." It is undeniable that there is corruption in India, but Crossette glosses over the fact that in the interview she quotes, Steve Berkman alleges that World Bank officials were involved in it too. What the latter actually said, as paraphrased by a journalist for Rediff India Abroad, is that "the international bureaucrats who run the Bank ... are the ones who conspired to nail Wolfowitz using the mini-scandal with his girlfriend to call for his ouster." Where does that leave Crossette's argument?
Fifth, Crossette claims that India "regularly refuses visas for international rights advocates," a failing that she supposes occurs because such advocates are critical of the government. Granting that there is a case for India to be more liberal in its visa regime, the country does not lack robust, committed, and vocal human rights activists. Tune in to any Indian television channel. On the other hand, the U.N. Human Rights Council is not exactly a shining example of how the international community protects human rights. Domestic activism and the liberal democratic institutions that allow it are perhaps far more effective in safeguarding human rights.
Ultimately, Crossette's suggestion that India presents a "headache" for global governance is a manifestation of an outdated mindset. It ignores the growing convergence of interests between India and the United States on the biggest challenges of this century: from establishing a liberal, democratic order to managing the rise of China to containing jihadi terrorism to addressing climate change and a host of other challenges. For those worried about rising elephants, make room if you don't want to be squeezed.
Here is a rebuttal from Nitin Pai
Barbara Crossette is wrong: This rising power helps solve far more problems than it creates.
BY NITIN PAI
Foreign Policy
JANUARY 7, 2010
According to the Financial Times' Lucy Kellaway, "Elephant in the Room" was the most popular cliché to appear in major newspapers and journals in 2009. It is perhaps appropriate then that Barbara Crossette's latest diatribe against India appeared in Foreign Policy under that headline. Although it claims to show that India causes "the most global consternation" and "gives global governance the biggest headache," it is merely a series of rants and newsroom clichés selected entirely arbitrarily to support the author's prejudice.
Listing India's alleged failings, Crossette makes the unfathomable assertion that it is India that causes the most consternation and the biggest headache for the world -- more than Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Pakistan, and China. Without an attempt to compare the failings across countries (And why only these countries? Why leave out the West and the rest?), it is logically impossible to arrive at the conclusion that one of them is the biggest culprit. But once you trade logic for hyperbole, you can fit just about any animal you like into the room. For Crossette, it is the pachyderm.
Consider these facts instead: The only country to have militarily intervened to halt an ongoing genocide is India, which it did in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971. After the December 2004 tsunami, it was India's navy that was the first international responder, deploying within 24 hours and delivering humanitarian assistance to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Maldives. It subsequently coordinated operations with the United States, Japan, and Australia. India has been involved in U.N. peacekeeping from the very beginning and remains one of the biggest troop contributors to this day, often putting its soldiers in danger in conflicts that have nothing to do with national interests. Indian naval ships are also involved in maritime security operations from Somalia to the Strait of Malacca. Even this partial list is enough to prove that India is not, as Crossette believes, "a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence."
Let's take a closer look at Crossette's rap sheet. First, she agrees with a quote from an article that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal that advocates arms control (hardly a neutral source), arguing that India's refusals to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty make it "comparable to other defiant nuclear states [and] will undoubtedly contribute to a deteriorating security environment in Asia." She doesn't explain how, because she would be hard-pressed to prove that India's "contribution" is comparable to that of China, which helped put the bomb in the hands of the likes of Pakistan, or North Korea, which brazenly violated the treaty it signed. Actions matter more than signatures.
Second, on the Doha round of trade negotiations, Crossette blames India for single-handedly foiling a deal that "nobody loved, but one that would have benefited developing countries most." Does she really know better than the developing countries themselves? It seems odd that they would not love a deal that "would have benefited [them] most." It is just as presumptuous and illogical to blame the failure of Doha on India alone. Gideon Rachman, for instance, argues that "the Doha round ultimately broke down because of a stand-off between the United States, India, China and the European Union over agricultural trade." Turns out it takes more than one hand to wreck a multilateral deal.
It is on the third point -- climate change -- that Crossette's proclivity for being selective with facts stands out most. She mentions the Indian environment minister's refusal to agree to binding carbon emission targets five months before the Copenhagen talks, but ignores his statement in Parliament five days before the negotiations pledging 20 to 25 percent carbon emission intensity cuts from the 2005 levels by 2020. Nonbinding yes, but nevertheless a serious commitment. And no country's commitments at Copenhagen were binding. She also ignores that in the end, the Copenhagen "deal" came about in part due to India's bridging of the differences between the United States and China.
Fourth, on the basis of one data point -- the scandal over a pay increase to Paul Wolfowitz's girlfriend that precipitated his resignation as president of the World Bank -- Crossette alleges that India "attacks individuals." Wolfowitz, she says, was ousted "not because his relationship with a female official caused a public furor, but because he had turned his attention to Indian corruption and fraud in the diversion of bank funds." It is undeniable that there is corruption in India, but Crossette glosses over the fact that in the interview she quotes, Steve Berkman alleges that World Bank officials were involved in it too. What the latter actually said, as paraphrased by a journalist for Rediff India Abroad, is that "the international bureaucrats who run the Bank ... are the ones who conspired to nail Wolfowitz using the mini-scandal with his girlfriend to call for his ouster." Where does that leave Crossette's argument?
Fifth, Crossette claims that India "regularly refuses visas for international rights advocates," a failing that she supposes occurs because such advocates are critical of the government. Granting that there is a case for India to be more liberal in its visa regime, the country does not lack robust, committed, and vocal human rights activists. Tune in to any Indian television channel. On the other hand, the U.N. Human Rights Council is not exactly a shining example of how the international community protects human rights. Domestic activism and the liberal democratic institutions that allow it are perhaps far more effective in safeguarding human rights.
Ultimately, Crossette's suggestion that India presents a "headache" for global governance is a manifestation of an outdated mindset. It ignores the growing convergence of interests between India and the United States on the biggest challenges of this century: from establishing a liberal, democratic order to managing the rise of China to containing jihadi terrorism to addressing climate change and a host of other challenges. For those worried about rising elephants, make room if you don't want to be squeezed.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Srinagar, Kahmir attack what's in a name?
Al Jazeera's "fighters" = everyone else's "terrorists"
Indian troops storm Kashmir hotel
Aj Jazeera
Security forces surrounded the hotel, which had been overtaken by a group of fighters
A standoff in the main market area of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, has ended after nearly 24 hours, with the death of two fighters at the hands of security forces.
Kuldeep Khuda, the police chief of Indian Kashmir, said on the Thursday that "the operation as far as we are concerned is over".
A small hotel taken over by the men was left in flames after the police operation.
The standoff began when the attackers threw grenades and opened fire in Srinagar's Lal Chowk, before forcing their way into the hotel on Wednesday.
The police entered the four-storey building on Thursday morning, and killed the first fighter.
"The other terrorist tried to set the building on fire ... the building caught fire and he tried to make his escape but he was shot down," Khuda said.
"We are trying to find out if any more terrorists were inside but there are two bodies that are visible."
Khuda claimed one of the fighters was a Pakistani national.
_________________________________________
Troops storm hotel, end siege in Indian Kashmir
By Izhar Wani (AFP) – 9 hours ago
SRINAGAR, India — Commandoes stormed a hotel in Indian Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.
The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both the pro-Pakistan extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.
The gunmen had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar's main market area. One police officer was killed in the attack and one bystander succumbed to his injuries Thursday. "The operation as far as we are concerned is over," Kuldeep Khuda, the state police chief, told reporters at the scene.
_________________________________
2 militants killed in 22-hour-long gunbattle in India-controlled Kashmir
NEW DELHI, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Indian security forces Thursday killed two militants, allegedly belonging to the Pakistani terror outfit Lashker-e-Toiba, who were holed up in a hotel in the Indian-controlled Kashmir's capital city Srinagar, after a 22-hour-long fierce gun battle in which at least two people lost their lives, a senior police official said.
"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kashmir's police chief Kuldeep Khooda told the media in Srinagar.
He said a policeman was killed while a paramilitary trooper and eight civilians were injured when the terrorists opened fire and lobbed grenades when they were intercepted at a police check post in the Lal Chowk area.
"One of the civilians succumbed to his injuries today," he said.
________________________________________
Militants die as Kashmir gunbattle ends
By James Lamont in New Delhi
Financial Times (India)
Published: January 7 2010 06:04
A day-long gunfight between militants and security forces in Srinagar, the capital of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, came to an end on Thursday morning after two gunmen were killed.
The attack, blamed by Indian officials on “Pakistani elements”, was the highest profile strike since the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008, which claimed the lives of more than 160 people. It was the first militant attack on Srinagar for two years when armed men had stormed a paramilitary camp killing.
_________________________________________
Lal Chowk gunbattle ends, two terrorists killed
Peerzada Ashiq , Hindustan Times
Srinagar, January 07, 2010
In a surgical operation that lasted for more than 22 hours, security forces on Thursday claimed they have killed two Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) militants holed up inside a hotel in Srinagar after they fired at a CRPF picket at commercial hub Lal Chowk on Wednesday.
IG CRPF NC Asthana confirmed that two militants have been killed in the operation.
“We suspect one more militant has been killed but we have only recovered two bodies,” said Asthana. He said the operation took time because the security forces were busy in evacuation of civilian population stuck in the nearby building. “We ensured that before the final assault in the morning that civilians are evacuated from the nearby buildings,” said Asthana.
_______________________
Siege ends at Lal Chowk; 2 militants gunned down
Agencies Posted online: Thursday , Jan 07, 2010
Indian Express
Srinagar : Security forces stormed a hotel in busy Lal Chowk area killing two LeT terrorists including a Pakistani, ending a 22-hour fierce gunbattle that also left a policeman and a civilian dead.
....
The DGP said concerted efforts were being made by Pakistani terrorists to hit targets in J and K and in other parts of the country. "There is desperation in infiltration, there is desperation in carrying out such attacks".
Khoda said the militants probably had some other target to attack, "but because of the encounter, they rushed into the hotel and took positions there to open fire at the police".
The ultras first lobbed grenades and opened fire at a CRPF picket outside Palladium Cinema in Lal Chowk before taking shelter inside the hotel.
_____________________________________________
Fidayeen lay siege to Srinagar hotel
M Saleem Pandit, TNN, 7 January 2010,
Times of India
SRINAGAR\NEW DELHI: Two heavily armed terrorists — members of suicide squad (fidayeen) — lobbed grenades, shot dead a constable, then attacked a vehicle that came to evacuate him before entering into a hotel, triggering a fierce gunbattle — the first in over two years — in Srinagar’s business hub of Lal Chowk on Wednesday.
Initial reports indicated that the suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists wanted to enter the nearby CRPF camp. But, when they were stopped during a routine check near Pladium in the heart of Lal Chowk, they began firing and hurling grenades. They then entered the nearby Punjab Hotel, took positions and continued firing at the security forces comprising J&K police and CRPF. Soon, armoured vehicles carrying police reinforcements surrounded the hotel. Shopkeepers downed shutters and passers-by ran helter-skelter. The firing continued when reports last came in.
....
While sources in security agencies said the terrorists belonged to LeT, a little known outfit, Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the attack in a faxed statement to local media offices.
_______________________________________________
Terrorists were in touch with Pak handlers: Home Ministry sources
PTI, 7 January 2010, 07:25pm
Times of India
NEW DELHI: The Lashker-e-Taiba terrorists, who were killed by security forces during the siege at Lal Chowk in Srinagar, were in constant touch with their handlers in Pakistan when they were holed up inside a hotel there.
According to highly placed sources in the Union Home Ministry, nearly 700 terrorists, half of them foreign mercenaries, are active in Jammu and Kashmir.
They said some more attacks were expected to take place as the holed up militants at the hotel in Lal Chowk area had communicated the same to their handlers in Pakistan, the sources said.
According to the official data available with the Home Ministry, 413 infiltration attempts were made from across the border during which 93 terrorists were killed while 110 managed to sneak in.
Out of the 110 who had infiltrated, 70% were foreign militants while the remaining locals.
_______________________________________________
22 hours of terror ends in the Valley
7 Jan 2010, 1133 hrs IST
Times Now (India)
After over 22 hours of fierce gunbattle between terrorists and security forces in Lal Chowk, Srinagar, the three terrorists, who struck at the heart of the city, were killed on Thursday (January 7), the Home Ministry confirmed.
The first terrorist was gunned down yesterday evening, while the other two ‘fidayeen’ identified as Qari and Mustafa were killed today afternoon. Sources said that Qari is a local Kashmiri militant, while Mustafa is a Pakistani and could belong to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kuldeep Khooda, DGP, told reporters.
....
Though Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen claimed the responsibility for the attack, Police said it was the handiwork of Lashker terrorists only.
_________________
4 Dead After 20-Hour Gun Battle in Kashmir
By HARI KUMAR
New York Times
January 8, 2010
NEW DELHI — A 20-hour gun battle prompted by a deadly militant attack on a police outpost in Kashmir’s summer capital ended Thursday at a hotel after the police killed two militants, including one Pakistani national, Indian police officials said.
....
“In this operation just two terrorists are killed, but we are trying to ascertain whether any more terrorists are inside the building” said Kuldeep Khoda, the police chief of Jammu and Kashmir. Mr. Khoda also said that both militants belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization based in Pakistan that has been blamed for the attacks on Mumbai, India, in November 2008.
_____________________
Indian troops storm hotel, end siege in central Srinagar
Thursday, 07 Jan, 2010
Dawn
SRINAGAR: Commandos stormed a hotel in Indian-administered Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.
The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.
The gunmen – one a Pakistani and the other an Indian Kashmiri, according to police – had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar’s main market area
....
A militant group, Jamiat-ul-Mujahedin, claimed it was behind the assault, which left five police and four civilians injured. Police pointed the finger at the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).
_________________________________
Gun and bomb attacks rock Kashmir
BBC Wednesday, 6 January 2010
On the other side of the de facto border dividing Kashmir a policeman was killed in a gun battle in Srinagar.
India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir and have fought two wars over it.
Police in Srinagar say militants threw a grenade and opened fire at police in the city's historic Lal Chowk or Red Square.
At least two gunmen are thought to have taken refuge in a hotel from where they exchanged fire with the security forces.
_____________________________
Indian troops storm Kashmir hotel
Aj Jazeera
Security forces surrounded the hotel, which had been overtaken by a group of fighters
A standoff in the main market area of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, has ended after nearly 24 hours, with the death of two fighters at the hands of security forces.
Kuldeep Khuda, the police chief of Indian Kashmir, said on the Thursday that "the operation as far as we are concerned is over".
A small hotel taken over by the men was left in flames after the police operation.
The standoff began when the attackers threw grenades and opened fire in Srinagar's Lal Chowk, before forcing their way into the hotel on Wednesday.
The police entered the four-storey building on Thursday morning, and killed the first fighter.
"The other terrorist tried to set the building on fire ... the building caught fire and he tried to make his escape but he was shot down," Khuda said.
"We are trying to find out if any more terrorists were inside but there are two bodies that are visible."
Khuda claimed one of the fighters was a Pakistani national.
_________________________________________
Troops storm hotel, end siege in Indian Kashmir
By Izhar Wani (AFP) – 9 hours ago
SRINAGAR, India — Commandoes stormed a hotel in Indian Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.
The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both the pro-Pakistan extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.
The gunmen had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar's main market area. One police officer was killed in the attack and one bystander succumbed to his injuries Thursday. "The operation as far as we are concerned is over," Kuldeep Khuda, the state police chief, told reporters at the scene.
_________________________________
2 militants killed in 22-hour-long gunbattle in India-controlled Kashmir
NEW DELHI, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Indian security forces Thursday killed two militants, allegedly belonging to the Pakistani terror outfit Lashker-e-Toiba, who were holed up in a hotel in the Indian-controlled Kashmir's capital city Srinagar, after a 22-hour-long fierce gun battle in which at least two people lost their lives, a senior police official said.
"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kashmir's police chief Kuldeep Khooda told the media in Srinagar.
He said a policeman was killed while a paramilitary trooper and eight civilians were injured when the terrorists opened fire and lobbed grenades when they were intercepted at a police check post in the Lal Chowk area.
"One of the civilians succumbed to his injuries today," he said.
________________________________________
Militants die as Kashmir gunbattle ends
By James Lamont in New Delhi
Financial Times (India)
Published: January 7 2010 06:04
A day-long gunfight between militants and security forces in Srinagar, the capital of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, came to an end on Thursday morning after two gunmen were killed.
The attack, blamed by Indian officials on “Pakistani elements”, was the highest profile strike since the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008, which claimed the lives of more than 160 people. It was the first militant attack on Srinagar for two years when armed men had stormed a paramilitary camp killing.
_________________________________________
Lal Chowk gunbattle ends, two terrorists killed
Peerzada Ashiq , Hindustan Times
Srinagar, January 07, 2010
In a surgical operation that lasted for more than 22 hours, security forces on Thursday claimed they have killed two Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) militants holed up inside a hotel in Srinagar after they fired at a CRPF picket at commercial hub Lal Chowk on Wednesday.
IG CRPF NC Asthana confirmed that two militants have been killed in the operation.
“We suspect one more militant has been killed but we have only recovered two bodies,” said Asthana. He said the operation took time because the security forces were busy in evacuation of civilian population stuck in the nearby building. “We ensured that before the final assault in the morning that civilians are evacuated from the nearby buildings,” said Asthana.
_______________________
Siege ends at Lal Chowk; 2 militants gunned down
Agencies Posted online: Thursday , Jan 07, 2010
Indian Express
Srinagar : Security forces stormed a hotel in busy Lal Chowk area killing two LeT terrorists including a Pakistani, ending a 22-hour fierce gunbattle that also left a policeman and a civilian dead.
....
The DGP said concerted efforts were being made by Pakistani terrorists to hit targets in J and K and in other parts of the country. "There is desperation in infiltration, there is desperation in carrying out such attacks".
Khoda said the militants probably had some other target to attack, "but because of the encounter, they rushed into the hotel and took positions there to open fire at the police".
The ultras first lobbed grenades and opened fire at a CRPF picket outside Palladium Cinema in Lal Chowk before taking shelter inside the hotel.
_____________________________________________
Fidayeen lay siege to Srinagar hotel
M Saleem Pandit, TNN, 7 January 2010,
Times of India
SRINAGAR\NEW DELHI: Two heavily armed terrorists — members of suicide squad (fidayeen) — lobbed grenades, shot dead a constable, then attacked a vehicle that came to evacuate him before entering into a hotel, triggering a fierce gunbattle — the first in over two years — in Srinagar’s business hub of Lal Chowk on Wednesday.
Initial reports indicated that the suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists wanted to enter the nearby CRPF camp. But, when they were stopped during a routine check near Pladium in the heart of Lal Chowk, they began firing and hurling grenades. They then entered the nearby Punjab Hotel, took positions and continued firing at the security forces comprising J&K police and CRPF. Soon, armoured vehicles carrying police reinforcements surrounded the hotel. Shopkeepers downed shutters and passers-by ran helter-skelter. The firing continued when reports last came in.
....
While sources in security agencies said the terrorists belonged to LeT, a little known outfit, Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the attack in a faxed statement to local media offices.
_______________________________________________
Terrorists were in touch with Pak handlers: Home Ministry sources
PTI, 7 January 2010, 07:25pm
Times of India
NEW DELHI: The Lashker-e-Taiba terrorists, who were killed by security forces during the siege at Lal Chowk in Srinagar, were in constant touch with their handlers in Pakistan when they were holed up inside a hotel there.
According to highly placed sources in the Union Home Ministry, nearly 700 terrorists, half of them foreign mercenaries, are active in Jammu and Kashmir.
They said some more attacks were expected to take place as the holed up militants at the hotel in Lal Chowk area had communicated the same to their handlers in Pakistan, the sources said.
According to the official data available with the Home Ministry, 413 infiltration attempts were made from across the border during which 93 terrorists were killed while 110 managed to sneak in.
Out of the 110 who had infiltrated, 70% were foreign militants while the remaining locals.
_______________________________________________
22 hours of terror ends in the Valley
7 Jan 2010, 1133 hrs IST
Times Now (India)
After over 22 hours of fierce gunbattle between terrorists and security forces in Lal Chowk, Srinagar, the three terrorists, who struck at the heart of the city, were killed on Thursday (January 7), the Home Ministry confirmed.
The first terrorist was gunned down yesterday evening, while the other two ‘fidayeen’ identified as Qari and Mustafa were killed today afternoon. Sources said that Qari is a local Kashmiri militant, while Mustafa is a Pakistani and could belong to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kuldeep Khooda, DGP, told reporters.
....
Though Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen claimed the responsibility for the attack, Police said it was the handiwork of Lashker terrorists only.
_________________
4 Dead After 20-Hour Gun Battle in Kashmir
By HARI KUMAR
New York Times
January 8, 2010
NEW DELHI — A 20-hour gun battle prompted by a deadly militant attack on a police outpost in Kashmir’s summer capital ended Thursday at a hotel after the police killed two militants, including one Pakistani national, Indian police officials said.
....
“In this operation just two terrorists are killed, but we are trying to ascertain whether any more terrorists are inside the building” said Kuldeep Khoda, the police chief of Jammu and Kashmir. Mr. Khoda also said that both militants belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization based in Pakistan that has been blamed for the attacks on Mumbai, India, in November 2008.
_____________________
Indian troops storm hotel, end siege in central Srinagar
Thursday, 07 Jan, 2010
Dawn
SRINAGAR: Commandos stormed a hotel in Indian-administered Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.
The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.
The gunmen – one a Pakistani and the other an Indian Kashmiri, according to police – had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar’s main market area
....
A militant group, Jamiat-ul-Mujahedin, claimed it was behind the assault, which left five police and four civilians injured. Police pointed the finger at the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).
_________________________________
Gun and bomb attacks rock Kashmir
BBC Wednesday, 6 January 2010
On the other side of the de facto border dividing Kashmir a policeman was killed in a gun battle in Srinagar.
India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir and have fought two wars over it.
Police in Srinagar say militants threw a grenade and opened fire at police in the city's historic Lal Chowk or Red Square.
At least two gunmen are thought to have taken refuge in a hotel from where they exchanged fire with the security forces.
_____________________________
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