“Jornalist” Somini Sengupta has another “scoop” in the NY Tines. Ms. Sengupta has apparently just discovered that there are disparities in Indian society that extend, to the rapidly privatizing,health delivery system.
She starts with this bizarre statement: “To get the best care,” Robin Steeles said gamely, “you gotta pay for it.”
If Mr. Steele is willing to pay for it, why then is he in India? One would think Ms. Sengupta is making the argument that people come to India because, even though health care there is more expensive than their own countries, it is so much better that they are willing to pay extra for it. Not so. In the very next sentence she states that the reason Mr. Steel is in India is to get a Mitral valve repaired “at a price he could pay.”
As she nears the end of her short piece the quality improves, but not much. She recognizes somewhat obliquely that the American health system has disparities too and that “the American health care system could no more care for Mr. Steele’s than the Indian system could for Mr. Amin” (a poor laborer in India).
Ms. “Gunga Din” Sengupta is following in a long line of Indian sycophants who will speak to power with deference and admiration. To do that, however they must first internalize their values and despise themselves. If you find in hear article a curious similarity to those in the US press about health disparity in America its because, she follows in a footsteps many of India Journalists who recycle news ideas from the west into Indian versions for local consumption.
Although to be fair she has come a long way from her “four men facing their monkey god” days only a couple of years ago.
____________
An interesting discussion on her can be read here.
A blog post here.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Angelina Joli - should this person be allowed to adopt?
From Heroin to Heroine
ANGELINA JOLIE hangs out at a drugs den – in a grainy video of the Hollywood babe before she spectacularly turned her life around.
The Tomb Raider beauty is seen wide-eyed and babbling in the seedy amateur footage – as a woman next to her casually smokes heroin.
Angelina, now 32, pregnant and a model mum of four, has admitted turning to drugs when she was an up-and-coming actress.
She said: “I’ve done coke, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, everything. I gave them up long ago.”
Angelina does not take any drugs herself in the video.
But the shocking scenes show just how far she has come to now travel the Third World as a UN ambassador.
At times her eyelids are so heavy she can barely keep them open. She is also seen with dishevelled hair as she rubs her teeth.
In the video, shot in 1999 when she was 23, the actress brags about loving sado-masochistic SEX – and KILLING her pets.
She says of taking part in sex games where someone is tied down or hurt: “It’s just a cool thing.”
She tells how her mouse met a tragic fate after she dyed it blue – and how a hamster and lizards also died.
The hamster got pneumonia after she took it into the shower while the lizards were left too long in the sun.
Angelina continues: “My snake I had – I tried killing him.” She recalls how at 12 she was “a bad girl – beating up my friends.”
The star was said to have been a regular at the filthy drugs den in New York’s Chelsea Hotel – where junkie SEX PISTOL SID VICIOUS stabbed his girlfriend to death.
Angelina, who has a daughter Shiloh, one, is pregnant with twins. She and actor BRAD PITT, 44, also adopted Maddox, six, Pax, four, and Zahara, three.
A fellow den regular said: “Even back then I remember her talking about how she’d adopt a huge family from around the world.”
more here: http://gawker.com/391692/young-angelina-jolies-greatest-sin-its-not-sm-or-heroin
ANGELINA JOLIE hangs out at a drugs den – in a grainy video of the Hollywood babe before she spectacularly turned her life around.
The Tomb Raider beauty is seen wide-eyed and babbling in the seedy amateur footage – as a woman next to her casually smokes heroin.
Angelina, now 32, pregnant and a model mum of four, has admitted turning to drugs when she was an up-and-coming actress.
She said: “I’ve done coke, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, everything. I gave them up long ago.”
Angelina does not take any drugs herself in the video.
But the shocking scenes show just how far she has come to now travel the Third World as a UN ambassador.
At times her eyelids are so heavy she can barely keep them open. She is also seen with dishevelled hair as she rubs her teeth.
In the video, shot in 1999 when she was 23, the actress brags about loving sado-masochistic SEX – and KILLING her pets.
She says of taking part in sex games where someone is tied down or hurt: “It’s just a cool thing.”
She tells how her mouse met a tragic fate after she dyed it blue – and how a hamster and lizards also died.
The hamster got pneumonia after she took it into the shower while the lizards were left too long in the sun.
Angelina continues: “My snake I had – I tried killing him.” She recalls how at 12 she was “a bad girl – beating up my friends.”
The star was said to have been a regular at the filthy drugs den in New York’s Chelsea Hotel – where junkie SEX PISTOL SID VICIOUS stabbed his girlfriend to death.
Angelina, who has a daughter Shiloh, one, is pregnant with twins. She and actor BRAD PITT, 44, also adopted Maddox, six, Pax, four, and Zahara, three.
A fellow den regular said: “Even back then I remember her talking about how she’d adopt a huge family from around the world.”
more here: http://gawker.com/391692/young-angelina-jolies-greatest-sin-its-not-sm-or-heroin
Sunday, April 13, 2008
What the west wants from Mugabe
...
"I have the gumption to say that the West hates the Zimbabwe Government precisely because they are not happy that it seized the land from the "White" farmers. The rule of law, human rights, democracy, method of land reform arguments they use are mere smokescreens to conceal their real aim: they did not want the land to be seized from the White farmers, and the White farmers themselves did not want to give back the land they inherited, even if the inheritance was stolen. They did not however, have the audacity to say so, because their unjust stand would be transparently untenable. So their desire to keep the land manifests via indirect avenues that impress most...they don't fool me. I say so because the timing of the USA and EU sanctions closely corresponded with the first land takeovers. Second, the Zimbabwe Democracy Bill was partly sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms, who has long supported the Rhodesians' cause and opposed the independence of Zimbabwe. Third, the Lancaster House Constitution barred the Zimbabwean Government from re-claiming privately owned land for the first 10 years after independence perhaps to buy time. Fourth, it is important to understand that all the White countries in the World have always made a united stand against Zimbabwe since the land takeovers - USA, EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Britain. It is perfectly sensible to believe that it is only the above countries that care about the democracy and human rights of Zimbabweans."
....
complete article
____________other stories___________
See also this article for examples of western media bias regarding Mugabe.
‘We’ve beaten Mugabe’, said a frontpage headline in the London Evening Standard yesterday.
More at Zimbabwe Watch
Zimbabwe's Lonely Fight for Justice
By Stephen GowansStephen Gowans's Blog
March 31, 2007
Ever since veterans of the guerrilla war against apartheid Rhodesia violently seized white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, the country's president, Robert Mugabe, has been demonized by politicians, human rights organizations and the media in the West. His crimes, according to right-wing sources, are numerous: human rights abuses, election rigging, repression of political opponents, corruption, and mismanagement of the economy. Leftist detractors say Mugabe talks left and walks right, and that his anti-imperialist rhetoric is pure demagogy.
And the leftist press is not far behind
Grassroots Lieutenants of Imperialism?
By Stephen Gowans
Patrick Bond would probably never balk at being accused of contributing to the barrage of negative publicity against the Mugabe government. Bond appears to hate Mugabe with a passion.
Nor, I suspect, would he object to anyone pointing out that, where he can, he acts to alienate left support for Mugabe’s government by portraying Mugabe as a reactionary who dishonestly exploits anti-imperialist rhetoric to cling to power at any cost.
Bond doesn’t believe Mugabe is engaged in an anti-neo-colonial struggle. He sees Mugabe as nothing more than a corrupt demagogue who has become so addicted to the perks of power that he’ll never give them up willingly.
Bond’s argument resonates with some progressives because it gives them an easy way out of the dilemma of feeling obliged to support a beleaguered leader everyone says is a brutal dictator who steals elections and mismanages the economy. No one wants to be known as a thug-hugger. When Bond reinforces the crudest CNN and BBC propaganda, and tells progressives that Mugabe is a phony, he signals it’s okay to join in the two minutes hate.
While there may be an emotional appeal to what Bond has to say, his argument, examined dispassionately, is weak. If Mugabe is the crypto reactionary, pro-imperialist Bond says he is, why are the openly reactionary, imperialists in London and Washington so agitated about Mugabe and his policies?
In an article posted at Counterpunch.org, and subsequently reposted at MRZine, Bond urges readers to look to the “independent” left to find out what’s really going on in Zimbabwe.
Bond doesn’t say what the “independent” left is independent of. What’s clear, however, is that it isn’t independent of the governments and foundations that want to replace Mugabe’s economic and land reform policies with a neo-liberal tyranny and return to a glacial pace of land reform. Indeed, Bond’s “independent” left appears to be as much a part of the US and British foreign policy apparatus as the Foreign Office, the Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Consider, for example, Sokwanele, one of the groups Bond urges progressives to check out to find out what’s really going on in Zimbabwe.
Sokwanele is an offspring of Otpor, the underground movement that was established, funded, trained and organized by the US State Department, USAID, and the US Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy (which is said to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly) to bring down the Milosevic government in 2000.
Here’s how it worked: The West ordered the formal political opposition to unite under a single banner, and to select a name that emphasized the word “democracy,” to invest the united party with moral gravitas. In Serbia, the anti-Milosevic opposition became known as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia. (In Zimbabwe, the opposition, following the same game plan, calls itself the Movement for Democratic Change.) The opposition’s anointing itself as the champion of democracy serves the additional function of calling the government’s commitment to democracy into question. If the opposition is “the democratic opposition” then what must the government be? The answer, of course, is undemocratic.
The plan called for the opposition to accuse the government of electoral fraud to justify a transition from electoral to insurrectionary politics. The accusations built and built as the day of the vote approached, until, by sheer repetition, they were accepted as a matter of indisputable truth. The failure of the opposition candidate, Kostunica, to win the election on the first ballot, provided the pretext for people to take to the streets to force the government to step down. Otpor was central to organizing the planned “spontaneous” demonstrations.
Wherever Washington is engaged in regime change operations, known now as color revolutions, the same plan is put into play. And where Washington is interfering in a country’s internal politics to oust governments it doesn’t like, you’ll also find Sokwanele’s sister organizations: Zubr in Belarus, Khmara in Georgia, Pora in the Ukraine. All translate into the same English phrase: enough is enough.
Zvakwana, “an underground movement that aims to …. undermine” the Mugabe government, is another Optor offspring. (Sokwanele, “specialize(s) in anonymous acts of civil disobedience.”) (1) Both groups receive generous financing from Western sources. (2) While the original, Otpor, was largely a youth-oriented anarchist-leaning movement, at least one member of Sokwanele is “A conservative white businessman expressing a passion for freedom, tradition, polite manners and the British Royals.” (3) That, in Bond’s view, counts as the independent left.
Not surprisingly, the Bond-recommended Sokwanele Web site links to Zvakwana’s Web site. Members of Zvakwana say their movement is homegrown and free of foreign control (4), but free from foreign control doesn’t mean free from foreign funding. The US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, signed into law by US President George W. Bush in December 2001, empowers the president under the US Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to “support democratic institutions, the free press and independent media” in Zimbabwe – which is to say, groups like Sokwanele and Zvakwana.
Movements, political parties and media elsewhere have knowingly accepted funding from Western governments, their agencies and pro-imperialist foundations, while proclaiming their complete independence. (5) Members of these groups may genuinely believe they remain aloof from their backer’s aims (and in the West it is often the very groups that claim not to take sides that are the favored recipients of this lucre), but self-deception is an insidious thing – and the promise of oodles of cash is hard to resist.
There’s no doubt Sokwanele and Zvakwana are well-financed. Their Web sites alone betray a level of funding and organization that goes well beyond what the meager self-financing of truly independent grassroots movements — even in the far more affluent West – are able to scrape together.
If Zvakwana denies its links to the US, other elements of the Western-backed anti-Mugabe apparatus are less secretive. Studio 7, an anti-ZANU-PF radio program carries programming by the Voice of America, an agency whose existence can hardly be said to be left-oriented or independent. Studio 7 is carried on SW Radio Africa, a shortwave radio station operating from the UK, also endorsed by the Bond-recommended Sokwanele. The station is funded by “international pro-democracy groups” (6) (i.e., US ruling class foundations and Western governments.)
Groups like Sokwanele, Zvakwane and SW Radio Africa – and the arguments of individuals like Bond who promote them as the independent left – should be examined with a fair degree of skepticism. Are they really “independent”? If not, and they’re bound up with the foreign policy apparatus of imperialist countries, are they really left, or do they simply talk left, to hide a fundamentally pro-imperialist orientation?
1. “Grass-Roots Effort Aims to Upend Mugabe in Zimbabwe,” The New York Times, (March 28, 2005)
2. Los Angeles Times (July 8, 2005)
3. Ibid.
4. New York Times (March 27, 2005)
5. See Frances Stonor Saunders, “The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters,” New Press, April 2000; and “The Economics and Politics or the World Social Forum,” Aspects of India’s Economy, No. 35, September 2003, http://www.rupe-india.org/35/contents.html
6. Globe and Mail (March 26, 2005)
April 2, 2007
10:27 pmBy Stephen Gowans
Patrick Bond would probably never balk at being accused of contributing to the barrage of negative publicity against the Mugabe government. Bond appears to hate Mugabe with a passion.
Nor, I suspect, would he object to anyone pointing out that, where he can, he acts to alienate left support for Mugabe’s government by portraying Mugabe as a reactionary who dishonestly exploits anti-imperialist rhetoric to cling to power at any cost.
Bond doesn’t believe Mugabe is engaged in an anti-neo-colonial struggle. He sees Mugabe as nothing more than a corrupt demagogue who has become so addicted to the perks of power that he’ll never give them up willingly.
Bond’s argument resonates with some progressives because it gives them an easy way out of the dilemma of feeling obliged to support a beleaguered leader everyone says is a brutal dictator who steals elections and mismanages the economy. No one wants to be known as a thug-hugger. When Bond reinforces the crudest CNN and BBC propaganda, and tells progressives that Mugabe is a phony, he signals it’s okay to join in the two minutes hate.
While there may be an emotional appeal to what Bond has to say, his argument, examined dispassionately, is weak. If Mugabe is the crypto reactionary, pro-imperialist Bond says he is, why are the openly reactionary, imperialists in London and Washington so agitated about Mugabe and his policies?
In an article posted at Counterpunch.org, and subsequently reposted at MRZine, Bond urges readers to look to the “independent” left to find out what’s really going on in Zimbabwe.
Bond doesn’t say what the “independent” left is independent of. What’s clear, however, is that it isn’t independent of the governments and foundations that want to replace Mugabe’s economic and land reform policies with a neo-liberal tyranny and return to a glacial pace of land reform. Indeed, Bond’s “independent” left appears to be as much a part of the US and British foreign policy apparatus as the Foreign Office, the Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Consider, for example, Sokwanele, one of the groups Bond urges progressives to check out to find out what’s really going on in Zimbabwe.
Sokwanele is an offspring of Otpor, the underground movement that was established, funded, trained and organized by the US State Department, USAID, and the US Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy (which is said to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly) to bring down the Milosevic government in 2000.
Here’s how it worked: The West ordered the formal political opposition to unite under a single banner, and to select a name that emphasized the word “democracy,” to invest the united party with moral gravitas. In Serbia, the anti-Milosevic opposition became known as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia. (In Zimbabwe, the opposition, following the same game plan, calls itself the Movement for Democratic Change.) The opposition’s anointing itself as the champion of democracy serves the additional function of calling the government’s commitment to democracy into question. If the opposition is “the democratic opposition” then what must the government be? The answer, of course, is undemocratic.
The plan called for the opposition to accuse the government of electoral fraud to justify a transition from electoral to insurrectionary politics. The accusations built and built as the day of the vote approached, until, by sheer repetition, they were accepted as a matter of indisputable truth. The failure of the opposition candidate, Kostunica, to win the election on the first ballot, provided the pretext for people to take to the streets to force the government to step down. Otpor was central to organizing the planned “spontaneous” demonstrations.
Wherever Washington is engaged in regime change operations, known now as color revolutions, the same plan is put into play. And where Washington is interfering in a country’s internal politics to oust governments it doesn’t like, you’ll also find Sokwanele’s sister organizations: Zubr in Belarus, Khmara in Georgia, Pora in the Ukraine. All translate into the same English phrase: enough is enough.
Zvakwana, “an underground movement that aims to …. undermine” the Mugabe government, is another Optor offspring. (Sokwanele, “specialize(s) in anonymous acts of civil disobedience.”) (1) Both groups receive generous financing from Western sources. (2) While the original, Otpor, was largely a youth-oriented anarchist-leaning movement, at least one member of Sokwanele is “A conservative white businessman expressing a passion for freedom, tradition, polite manners and the British Royals.” (3) That, in Bond’s view, counts as the independent left.
Not surprisingly, the Bond-recommended Sokwanele Web site links to Zvakwana’s Web site. Members of Zvakwana say their movement is homegrown and free of foreign control (4), but free from foreign control doesn’t mean free from foreign funding. The US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, signed into law by US President George W. Bush in December 2001, empowers the president under the US Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to “support democratic institutions, the free press and independent media” in Zimbabwe – which is to say, groups like Sokwanele and Zvakwana.
Movements, political parties and media elsewhere have knowingly accepted funding from Western governments, their agencies and pro-imperialist foundations, while proclaiming their complete independence. (5) Members of these groups may genuinely believe they remain aloof from their backer’s aims (and in the West it is often the very groups that claim not to take sides that are the favored recipients of this lucre), but self-deception is an insidious thing – and the promise of oodles of cash is hard to resist.
There’s no doubt Sokwanele and Zvakwana are well-financed. Their Web sites alone betray a level of funding and organization that goes well beyond what the meager self-financing of truly independent grassroots movements — even in the far more affluent West – are able to scrape together.
If Zvakwana denies its links to the US, other elements of the Western-backed anti-Mugabe apparatus are less secretive. Studio 7, an anti-ZANU-PF radio program carries programming by the Voice of America, an agency whose existence can hardly be said to be left-oriented or independent. Studio 7 is carried on SW Radio Africa, a shortwave radio station operating from the UK, also endorsed by the Bond-recommended Sokwanele. The station is funded by “international pro-democracy groups” (6) (i.e., US ruling class foundations and Western governments.)
Groups like Sokwanele, Zvakwane and SW Radio Africa – and the arguments of individuals like Bond who promote them as the independent left – should be examined with a fair degree of skepticism. Are they really “independent”? If not, and they’re bound up with the foreign policy apparatus of imperialist countries, are they really left, or do they simply talk left, to hide a fundamentally pro-imperialist orientation?
1. “Grass-Roots Effort Aims to Upend Mugabe in Zimbabwe,” The New York Times, (March 28, 2005)
2. Los Angeles Times (July 8, 2005)
3. Ibid.
4. New York Times (March 27, 2005)
5. See Frances Stonor Saunders, “The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters,” New Press, April 2000; and “The Economics and Politics or the World Social Forum,” Aspects of India’s Economy, No. 35, September 2003, http://www.rupe-india.org/35/contents.html
6. Globe and Mail (March 26, 2005)
Robert Mugabe is Still the Better "Devil"
Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe is Still the Better "Devil"
By Peter Okema Otika
April 26, 2002
Posted: October 19, 2004
The question of Zimbabwe is not about lack of Western form of democracy or human rights. Rather, it is about whether Zimbabweans and Africans at large should correct injustices done to them by their former European colonizers.
The world should not judge President Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe as a nation from the bias and fabricated reports of British and American media. We should not forget that Mugabe liberated Zimbabwe from colonialism. Do not also forget that he is an elected president and is ruling on the mandate and the trust of the very Zimbabwean people the media claim he is suppressing.
As former US ambassador to the United Nations and first black mayor of Atlanta city Andrew Young said in an interview with the Zimbabwean Herald on June 6, 2001, demonizing Mugabe is betraying Africa's cause. Whoever is trying to accuse Mugabe should first look at Mugabe's political and economic records. Mugabe is an international statesman, true Pan-Africanist and a dedicated anti-imperialist who stood tough against forces of Western imperialism in Africa. The truth is, this is why Britain and US hate Mugabe. Mugabe is still a darling and remains the only most outstanding continental African liberation fighter. This is why very few African leaders are willing to raise a finger against Mugabe and can also explain the reason why sensible ones have kept mum.
Britain has no moral credibility to denounce Mugabe. It should be remembered that Britain has been the world's trouble causer using colonialism as the major tool. The blood and sweat of people from other nations citizens around the world has for centuries serviced the economy of Britain as Britain colonized, enslaved and siphoned resources from them. Britain heavily benefited from the slave trade and other unscrupulous business activities like dealing in animal and mineral resources in Africa.
To add pain to injuries, Britain went a head and grabbed lands in Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, United States and the Caribbean islands. Now Britain shamelessly wants to deceive the whole world that she is morally better off than Mugabe who is fighting back so that his fellow African people can reclaim the land that had been forcefully taken away from them. What a stupid shame!
I am a great advocate for democracy and human rights in Africa. If Britain wants to talk about human rights, she should first start by apologizing and compensating all peoples and nations she has exploited. Britain should know that the time for such hypocrisy has run out and it is now time to face reality and truth. Stop meddling in the affairs of other nations. Leave Zimbabwe alone. Leave Northern Ireland alone because you are fueling chaos instead of solving the conflicts.
In Zimbabwe 70% of the land is owned by white people who comprise less than 1% of the total population. Mugabe is not grabbing land for his own greed. It is his people who want their land back. I wonder why some people want to turn things that are clear and portray it in colors as a form of injustice. Is recovering someone's property from a thief a form of injustice to the owner of the property or rather justice served to the plaintiff? The native Zimbabweans don't eat ballot boxes and they cannot comfortably vote without having a roof to live under. Give them back their land and let them decide who should be their leaders.
It is time we Africans stand strong and decide our destinies. We should divert from the imperialistic mentality of letting America or Britain decide who heads our countries or who gets kicked out of power. We should put our priorities first and for this case, the land first and elections later. You remember recently when Tony Blair, because of the mad cow disease, put off election in Britain in order to solve the mad cow tragedy? This is what Zimbabwe should do. Get the landless natives resettled and mobilize them to vote their leaders. If Mugabe is voted back to power for his land redistribution policy, that's good for him. This will not be because he will have rigged the election but rather because his manifesto has appealed to the electorate. For the need for getting back their ancestral land, many native Zimbabweans will no doubt vote Mugabe to remain in power as long as he wants. Monies from foreign backed opposition may entice locals but it will also not be a surprise to see that they eat the monies and instead vote the devil they know well. In Uganda they say, eat the money but vote the candidate of your choice.
Opposition parties in Zimbabwe like the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) could be very good at using Western media to propagate their propaganda against Mugabe. But what the local native Zimbabweans will vote for is whether they want 1% of the population control 70% of their land or whether they want to take back the lands that were grabbed away from them years ago. Some members of the opposition are working to put food in their individual stomachs or serve the interest of their white sponsors. But Mugabe is putting a roof on every homeless and a meal on the tables of all deprived Zimbabweans. This is what a good leader does and this is why US President George Bush recently gave back each American a tax return because he believes that would help them pick up with life and improve the economy.
Today Britain, European Union and the Bush administration are busy persecuting Mugabe's supporters around the world by freezing their financial accounts or locating where their children are going to school so that they can terminate their sources of finances. They believe that freezing their accounts and frustrating their supporters will bring down Mugabe. If this is what they are employing against Mugabe, then what is wrong in Mugabe taking back the lands from whites that have become powerful in Zimbabwe after grabbing lands from natives who owned the land?
Many critics have argued that taking white settlers land is racism. But this is missing the crux of the matter. Getting back the land is not racism and those who are confusing it should know they are the ones who are racist. It is purely justice being served in an attempt to correct the atrocities white colonialists perpetuated on Africans. Whether the settlers were whites, blacks, Chinese or any other race, the natives still would have wanted their lands back. No one including myself should in his or her normal senses condone lawlessness, tyranny and human rights abuse. But when a double standard is being openly played in disguise of a quest for cosmetic Western democracy, people should be careful. Mugabe was not a "dictator" in the eyes of Britain and USA before he started implementing his land redistribution program. But now he is a dictator because he is taking away land from the white people? Wasn't the same Britain the one that praised Mugabe all through the 1980s? Tell me if I am wrong. If this is what Western democracy is all about then I think Zimbabweans should rather do without it.
During his last years' visit to Africa, first African American US Secretary of State General Colin Powell intentionally skipped Zimbabwe, citing Zimbabwe, Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo as "trouble spots" in southern Africa. Ironically Powell visited Uganda and Kenya among others, which he described as "vibrant democracies." This is the worse form of hypocrisy I have ever seen. How could Powell call Uganda a vibrant democracy when election had just been rigged and it was even US embassy in Kampala that had just helped Uganda opposition leader Kiiza Besigye escape from Yoweri Museveni's persecution and come to the US? Museveni has been the worse aggressor Africa has ever seen. He has fought all his neighbors except Tanzania. He has muzzled opposition in the country, abused human rights especially in the north and east of the country where an estimated 500,000 have been killed or disappeared. Today, Museveni has holed up over 500,000 ethnic Acholi people in concentration camps in northern Uganda with very deplorable human conditions. Unlike Mugabe who has let his party compete with other parties, Museveni has constitutionally outlawed all other political parties and is ruling Uganda using his militarized one party dictatorship. If this is democracy in the face of Colin Powell and Americans, then I think America's democracy is as good as the dictatorship in Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The same Powell shamelessly went to Kenya and also called Kenya a "vibrant" democracy. Powell knows very well that just like Mugabe, president Arap Moi of Kenya has been in power since the 1980s and has remained in power by liquidating his opponents. Is this because Moi is not repossessing native African lands from white British settlers? Powell, think about the 40 acres and a mule that white America promised your ancestors centuries ago before you castigate Mugabe. At least if the white people cannot compensate Africans for slavery, Africans should remain owners of their lands. What else do Africans have to own anyways? What else shall Africans control other than their own lands? No doubt then that Kenyan demonstrators in Nairobi called him " a house slave" meaning Powel is serving the interest of his master.
The situation in Zimbabwe was a time bomb that was temporally defused when Mugabe ascended to power in 1980. But this bomb has been rekindled to full proportion. Similar situation is eminent in Kenya for lands along the Kenya highlands and also in Namibia where also a very little population of white people control over 90% of fertile lands. Now President Sam Njoma of Namibia is still referred to by the West as a true democratic leader. Wait when he starts to redistribute land to poor land-less black whether he will still be a friend to the West. Regardless, Kenyans and Namibians will soon or later ask for their lands too and they should be given back what was taken away from them. They say what goes up must come down.
So just like America and Britain have strongly supported the 1999 Pakistani military coup leader and dictator General Pervez Musharraf during the American war against terror in Afghanistan, Africans should stand strong and defend their interests. Britain is fighting for her interest in Zimbabwe and native Zimbabweans should also fight for what is good for them. You may like it or hate it. But this is the new reality that Britain and the US should come to terms with. As for now my friends, Mugabe is still by far a better devil for Zimbabweans.
By Peter Okema Otika
April 26, 2002
Posted: October 19, 2004
The question of Zimbabwe is not about lack of Western form of democracy or human rights. Rather, it is about whether Zimbabweans and Africans at large should correct injustices done to them by their former European colonizers.
The world should not judge President Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe as a nation from the bias and fabricated reports of British and American media. We should not forget that Mugabe liberated Zimbabwe from colonialism. Do not also forget that he is an elected president and is ruling on the mandate and the trust of the very Zimbabwean people the media claim he is suppressing.
As former US ambassador to the United Nations and first black mayor of Atlanta city Andrew Young said in an interview with the Zimbabwean Herald on June 6, 2001, demonizing Mugabe is betraying Africa's cause. Whoever is trying to accuse Mugabe should first look at Mugabe's political and economic records. Mugabe is an international statesman, true Pan-Africanist and a dedicated anti-imperialist who stood tough against forces of Western imperialism in Africa. The truth is, this is why Britain and US hate Mugabe. Mugabe is still a darling and remains the only most outstanding continental African liberation fighter. This is why very few African leaders are willing to raise a finger against Mugabe and can also explain the reason why sensible ones have kept mum.
Britain has no moral credibility to denounce Mugabe. It should be remembered that Britain has been the world's trouble causer using colonialism as the major tool. The blood and sweat of people from other nations citizens around the world has for centuries serviced the economy of Britain as Britain colonized, enslaved and siphoned resources from them. Britain heavily benefited from the slave trade and other unscrupulous business activities like dealing in animal and mineral resources in Africa.
To add pain to injuries, Britain went a head and grabbed lands in Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, United States and the Caribbean islands. Now Britain shamelessly wants to deceive the whole world that she is morally better off than Mugabe who is fighting back so that his fellow African people can reclaim the land that had been forcefully taken away from them. What a stupid shame!
I am a great advocate for democracy and human rights in Africa. If Britain wants to talk about human rights, she should first start by apologizing and compensating all peoples and nations she has exploited. Britain should know that the time for such hypocrisy has run out and it is now time to face reality and truth. Stop meddling in the affairs of other nations. Leave Zimbabwe alone. Leave Northern Ireland alone because you are fueling chaos instead of solving the conflicts.
In Zimbabwe 70% of the land is owned by white people who comprise less than 1% of the total population. Mugabe is not grabbing land for his own greed. It is his people who want their land back. I wonder why some people want to turn things that are clear and portray it in colors as a form of injustice. Is recovering someone's property from a thief a form of injustice to the owner of the property or rather justice served to the plaintiff? The native Zimbabweans don't eat ballot boxes and they cannot comfortably vote without having a roof to live under. Give them back their land and let them decide who should be their leaders.
It is time we Africans stand strong and decide our destinies. We should divert from the imperialistic mentality of letting America or Britain decide who heads our countries or who gets kicked out of power. We should put our priorities first and for this case, the land first and elections later. You remember recently when Tony Blair, because of the mad cow disease, put off election in Britain in order to solve the mad cow tragedy? This is what Zimbabwe should do. Get the landless natives resettled and mobilize them to vote their leaders. If Mugabe is voted back to power for his land redistribution policy, that's good for him. This will not be because he will have rigged the election but rather because his manifesto has appealed to the electorate. For the need for getting back their ancestral land, many native Zimbabweans will no doubt vote Mugabe to remain in power as long as he wants. Monies from foreign backed opposition may entice locals but it will also not be a surprise to see that they eat the monies and instead vote the devil they know well. In Uganda they say, eat the money but vote the candidate of your choice.
Opposition parties in Zimbabwe like the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) could be very good at using Western media to propagate their propaganda against Mugabe. But what the local native Zimbabweans will vote for is whether they want 1% of the population control 70% of their land or whether they want to take back the lands that were grabbed away from them years ago. Some members of the opposition are working to put food in their individual stomachs or serve the interest of their white sponsors. But Mugabe is putting a roof on every homeless and a meal on the tables of all deprived Zimbabweans. This is what a good leader does and this is why US President George Bush recently gave back each American a tax return because he believes that would help them pick up with life and improve the economy.
Today Britain, European Union and the Bush administration are busy persecuting Mugabe's supporters around the world by freezing their financial accounts or locating where their children are going to school so that they can terminate their sources of finances. They believe that freezing their accounts and frustrating their supporters will bring down Mugabe. If this is what they are employing against Mugabe, then what is wrong in Mugabe taking back the lands from whites that have become powerful in Zimbabwe after grabbing lands from natives who owned the land?
Many critics have argued that taking white settlers land is racism. But this is missing the crux of the matter. Getting back the land is not racism and those who are confusing it should know they are the ones who are racist. It is purely justice being served in an attempt to correct the atrocities white colonialists perpetuated on Africans. Whether the settlers were whites, blacks, Chinese or any other race, the natives still would have wanted their lands back. No one including myself should in his or her normal senses condone lawlessness, tyranny and human rights abuse. But when a double standard is being openly played in disguise of a quest for cosmetic Western democracy, people should be careful. Mugabe was not a "dictator" in the eyes of Britain and USA before he started implementing his land redistribution program. But now he is a dictator because he is taking away land from the white people? Wasn't the same Britain the one that praised Mugabe all through the 1980s? Tell me if I am wrong. If this is what Western democracy is all about then I think Zimbabweans should rather do without it.
During his last years' visit to Africa, first African American US Secretary of State General Colin Powell intentionally skipped Zimbabwe, citing Zimbabwe, Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo as "trouble spots" in southern Africa. Ironically Powell visited Uganda and Kenya among others, which he described as "vibrant democracies." This is the worse form of hypocrisy I have ever seen. How could Powell call Uganda a vibrant democracy when election had just been rigged and it was even US embassy in Kampala that had just helped Uganda opposition leader Kiiza Besigye escape from Yoweri Museveni's persecution and come to the US? Museveni has been the worse aggressor Africa has ever seen. He has fought all his neighbors except Tanzania. He has muzzled opposition in the country, abused human rights especially in the north and east of the country where an estimated 500,000 have been killed or disappeared. Today, Museveni has holed up over 500,000 ethnic Acholi people in concentration camps in northern Uganda with very deplorable human conditions. Unlike Mugabe who has let his party compete with other parties, Museveni has constitutionally outlawed all other political parties and is ruling Uganda using his militarized one party dictatorship. If this is democracy in the face of Colin Powell and Americans, then I think America's democracy is as good as the dictatorship in Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The same Powell shamelessly went to Kenya and also called Kenya a "vibrant" democracy. Powell knows very well that just like Mugabe, president Arap Moi of Kenya has been in power since the 1980s and has remained in power by liquidating his opponents. Is this because Moi is not repossessing native African lands from white British settlers? Powell, think about the 40 acres and a mule that white America promised your ancestors centuries ago before you castigate Mugabe. At least if the white people cannot compensate Africans for slavery, Africans should remain owners of their lands. What else do Africans have to own anyways? What else shall Africans control other than their own lands? No doubt then that Kenyan demonstrators in Nairobi called him " a house slave" meaning Powel is serving the interest of his master.
The situation in Zimbabwe was a time bomb that was temporally defused when Mugabe ascended to power in 1980. But this bomb has been rekindled to full proportion. Similar situation is eminent in Kenya for lands along the Kenya highlands and also in Namibia where also a very little population of white people control over 90% of fertile lands. Now President Sam Njoma of Namibia is still referred to by the West as a true democratic leader. Wait when he starts to redistribute land to poor land-less black whether he will still be a friend to the West. Regardless, Kenyans and Namibians will soon or later ask for their lands too and they should be given back what was taken away from them. They say what goes up must come down.
So just like America and Britain have strongly supported the 1999 Pakistani military coup leader and dictator General Pervez Musharraf during the American war against terror in Afghanistan, Africans should stand strong and defend their interests. Britain is fighting for her interest in Zimbabwe and native Zimbabweans should also fight for what is good for them. You may like it or hate it. But this is the new reality that Britain and the US should come to terms with. As for now my friends, Mugabe is still by far a better devil for Zimbabweans.
comments from another blog...
comments from another blog....
The black thugs of Mugabe are chasing whites off their farms again. Whites have bought their land over and over and that black Hitler - Mugabe wants them out while the West shamefully sits by and does nothing. Mugabe is brain dead and needs to be evicted by white Imperialist forces as the Africans will do nothing in order to reclaim their dignity. The whites deserve better than constant threats and turmoil. I have no sympathy for blacks in Zimbabwe but I do have sympathy for the suffering whites.
Posted by: Nicholas Folkes | Tuesday, 08 April 2008 at 11:20
May we repent and restore proper rule, having learned our lessons, so help us God.
Posted by: David Ben-Ariel | Tuesday, 08 April 2008 at 15:19
The black thugs of Mugabe are chasing whites off their farms again. Whites have bought their land over and over and that black Hitler - Mugabe wants them out while the West shamefully sits by and does nothing. Mugabe is brain dead and needs to be evicted by white Imperialist forces as the Africans will do nothing in order to reclaim their dignity. The whites deserve better than constant threats and turmoil. I have no sympathy for blacks in Zimbabwe but I do have sympathy for the suffering whites.
Posted by: Nicholas Folkes | Tuesday, 08 April 2008 at 11:20
May we repent and restore proper rule, having learned our lessons, so help us God.
Posted by: David Ben-Ariel | Tuesday, 08 April 2008 at 15:19
... and the US faithfully follows England in matters of imperialism...
Bush attacks Zimbabwe with sanctions
By Monica Moorehead
March 20, 2003
The Bush administration has issued an executive order imposing economic sanctions upon President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and 76 officials representing his government. The sanctions, which began on March 7, prohibit any U.S. corporations from making business deals with Zimbabwe and also freeze any assets these Zimbabwean officials may have in U.S. banking institutions. The U.S. action follows a similar edict carried out by the European Union last year.
In a statement justifying the sanctions, President George W. Bush remarked, "Over the course of more than two years, the government of Zimbabwe has systematically undermined that nation's democratic institutions, employing violence, intimidation and repressive means including legislation to stifle opposition to its rule."
Like so many of Bush's utterances, this turns reality upside down. The Bush ad min istration is doing everything in its power to undermine and destabilize Zim ba bwe because Mugabe has taken a strong stance against U.S. and British imperialist designs on that country and region.
The U.S. and British governments are working overtime attempting to replace Mugabe with a regime that will be more loyal to the aims and objectives of imperialism. The imperialists are filling the coffers of Zimbabwean oppositionist forces in hopes they can carry out a successful coup.
By Monica Moorehead
March 20, 2003
The Bush administration has issued an executive order imposing economic sanctions upon President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and 76 officials representing his government. The sanctions, which began on March 7, prohibit any U.S. corporations from making business deals with Zimbabwe and also freeze any assets these Zimbabwean officials may have in U.S. banking institutions. The U.S. action follows a similar edict carried out by the European Union last year.
In a statement justifying the sanctions, President George W. Bush remarked, "Over the course of more than two years, the government of Zimbabwe has systematically undermined that nation's democratic institutions, employing violence, intimidation and repressive means including legislation to stifle opposition to its rule."
Like so many of Bush's utterances, this turns reality upside down. The Bush ad min istration is doing everything in its power to undermine and destabilize Zim ba bwe because Mugabe has taken a strong stance against U.S. and British imperialist designs on that country and region.
The U.S. and British governments are working overtime attempting to replace Mugabe with a regime that will be more loyal to the aims and objectives of imperialism. The imperialists are filling the coffers of Zimbabwean oppositionist forces in hopes they can carry out a successful coup.
Why the Brits hate Mugabe
Racist, colonial fantasies of superiority and white privilege are alive and well among the English. The recent news coverage and rabid hatred of Mugabe shines a bright light on their inner deamons. White-washed (no pun intended) as a human rights exercise the roots of this hatred are a reaction to his audacity in attempting address and remove white privilege in his country.
____________________________________
The reason whites hate Mugabe.
#1802094382 - 19/11/07 10:44 PM
Do you want to know the real reason Whites governments and their followers hate Mugabe? Let me walk you through the real reason they hate our Legend. Whites governments world wide have always worked as a team to accomplish slavery, genocides in Africa, America, Australia, New Zealand, India and elsewhere. Just like yesterday they worked as a team to accomplish those sad and inhuman crimes, just like today they still work as a team to further their selfish, illegal, criminal and oppressive goals in Zimbabwe, against the people of Zimbabwe.
From UK to the USA via France, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the EU, you hear the same message about Mugabe and the same tone about Mugabe. The reason you hear that same message and tone it is because they work as a team to maintain their illegally and criminally acquired supremacy in the world.
If you stop relying on their propaganda on TV’s, radios, news papers, magazines and the internet about human right, and take your time to do some research on the internet and other source of information that they have no influence on, and by observing events as they pass by, you will discover that these governments hates Africans deeply and are the only cause of the past and current problems of the African people, and they are actually happy when we are starving.
So why are they giving the false impression about human right violation in Zimbabwe when they are the masters of human right violation in the world. There is no government in the world that violates human right like whites governments do.
Racial discrimination, racial attacks, racial oppression, racial invasions and racial exploitations are the pillars of their progress, yet they want to give the impression to the African people who paid heavily and ruthlessly in their hands for centuries and up to today that they care about our Zimbabweans brothers’ human right.
It is a mockery that the meaning of oppression and human right violation dare to accuse a man that has dedicated all his life to fight against human right violation and oppression.
They, white’s government and their followers are not honest enough to tell the African people that we hate Mugabe because he did justice by liberating the land our kin and kith use to illegal occupy.
How can they talk about human right when they do not condemn the human right violation against us when our land were stolen and are still occupied by their kith and kin?
You and I know whites governments do not care about browns “blacks”, they are the reason we are in this situation of poverty, disease and desperation in many part of Africa. So why are they not ashamed to talk about human right in Zimbabwe?
The answer is, if they dare to act openly, they will not be able to advance their criminal cause by even an inch.
So to achieve their traditional goal of domination, neo-colonialism and oppression, they play with your emotion about human right in Zimbabwe.
Did they tell you that they are the one who almost collapsed Zimbabwe economy with their illegal sanction, declared and undeclared and economic sabotage?
Did they tell you that it is them who want regime change in Zimbabwe and not the Zimbabwean people?
No, they would not because they know the African people will get so angry and cut all ties with them and ban them by law never to even look at us ever again.
So I am calling on you African people, to stand with your own people, whether in the Zimbabwe, Brazil or the USA, because our enemy is one and he is the devil with a long history of enslaving our people.
We must help Zimbabwe where we can, we must form our united state of Africa and we must work for justice.
Viva President Mugabe, Viva Zimbabwe, Viva Africa and to hell with the devils
Our Racist Demonology
Mugabe's Crimes Pale Next to What Black Small Farmers Endure in the Name of Development
by George Monbiot
The most evil man on earth, after Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, is Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. That, at least, is the view of most of the western world's press.
Yesterday Mugabe insisted that 2,900 white farmers will have to leave their land. He claims to be redistributing their property to landless peasants, but many of the farms he has seized have been handed instead to army officers and party loyalists. Twelve white farmers have been killed and many others beaten. He stole the elections in March through ballot-rigging and the intimidation of his political rivals.
His assault on white-owned farms has been cited by the Daily Telegraph as the principal reason for the current famine. Now, the paper maintains, he is using "food aid as a political weapon". As a candidate for the post of World's Third Most Evil Man, he appears to possess all the right credentials.
There is no doubt that Mugabe is a ruthless man, or that his policies are contributing to the further impoverishment of the Zimbabweans. But to suggest that his land seizures are largely responsible for the nation's hunger is fanciful.
Though the 4,500 white farmers there own two-thirds of of the best land, many of them grow not food but tobacco. Seventy per cent of the nation's maize - its primary staple crop - is grown by black peasant farmers hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites.
The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is merely one small scene in the tragedy now playing all over the world. Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave their land, with devastating consequences for food security.
For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of a last visit to the graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are dismissed by most of the press as the necessary casualties of development.
Ten years ago, I investigated the expropriations being funded and organized in Africa by another member of the Commonwealth. Canada had paid for the ploughing and planting with wheat of the Basotu Plains in Tanzania.
Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that crop, rather than maize or beans or cassava, Canada could secure contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world leaders in wheat technology.
The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the Barabaig tribe. Those who tried to return to their lands were beaten by the project's workers, imprisoned and tortured with electric shocks. The women were gang-raped.
For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When I raised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told me: "I won't shed a tear for anybody if it means development." The rich world's press took much the same attitude: only the Guardian carried the story.
Now yet another member of the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom, is funding a much bigger scheme in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Some 20 million people will be dispossessed. Again this atrocity has been ignored by most of the media.
These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects. Mugabe is a monster because he has usurped the natural order.
Throughout the coverage of Zimbabwe there is an undercurrent of racism and of regret that Britain ever let Rhodesia go. Some of the articles in the Telegraph may as well have been headlined "The plucky men and women holding darkest Africa at bay". Readers are led to conclude that Ian Smith was right all along: the only people who know how to run Africa are the whites.
But, through the IMF, the World Bank and the bilateral aid programs, with their extraordinary conditions, the whites do run Africa, and a right hash they are making of it.
Over the past 10 years, according to the UN's latest human development report, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than a dollar a day has risen from 242 million to 300 million. The more rigorously Africa's governments apply the policies demanded by the whites, the poorer their people become.
Just like Mugabe, the rich world has also been using "food aid as a political weapon". The United States has just succeeded in forcing Zimbabwe and Zambia, both suffering from the southern African famine, to accept GM maize as food relief.
Both nations had fiercely resisted GM crops, partly because they feared that the technology would grant multinational companies control over the foodchain, leaving their people still more vulnerable to hunger. But the US, seizing the opportunity for its biotech firms, told them that they must either accept this consignment or starve.
Malawi has also been obliged to take GM maize from the US, partly because of the loss of its own strategic grain reserve. In 1999, the IMF and the European Union instructed Malawi to privatize the reserve.
The private body was not capitalized, so it had to borrow from commercial banks to buy grain. Predictably enough, by 2001 it found that it couldn't service its debt. The IMF told it to sell most of the reserve.
The private body sold it all, and Malawi ran out of stored grain just as its crops failed. The IMF, having learnt nothing from this catastrophe, continues to prevent that country from helping its farmers, subsidizing food or stabilizing prices.
The same agency also forces weak nations to open their borders to subsidized food from abroad, destroying their own farming industries. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents state spending on land reform.
Land distribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms are up to 10 times as productive as large ones, as they tend to be cultivated more intensively. Small farmers are more likely to supply local people with staple crops than western supermarkets with mangetout.
The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies that supply them. Indeed, it was Britain's refusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform program in Zimbabwe that created the political opportunities Mugabe has so ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to the black population but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.
The president of Zimbabwe is a very minor devil in the hellish politics of land and food. The sainted Nelson Mandela has arguably done just as much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to the IMF as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid.
Let us condemn Mugabe's attacks upon Zimbabwe's whites by all means, but only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war that the rich world wages against the poor.
_____________________________________
We Share the Blame for Zimbabwe
Posted April 20, 2000
Britain’s Debt to its People Runs into Billions
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th April 2000
The British establishment is poorly qualified to lecture Robert Mugabe about racism. The government’s condemnation of the murders of two white Zimbabwean farmers contrasts oddly with the blandishments with which it greeted Vladimir Putin, the killer of thousands of Chechens. Just as it revealed that Zimbabwe’s white refugees are welcome, for “reasons of ancestry”, to settle here permanently, it announced that it would expel 3,000 Kosovan Albanians. While the newspapers devoted hundreds of column inches to the horrible killings of the two white farmers, they scarcely mentioned the equally horrible killing of the black foreman who worked for one of them. The dispute between London and Harare is a dispute between racists.
Like Jack Straw and William Hague, Mugabe is using racism as a cheap - and not very effective - means of winning votes. But while he has made life miserable for Zimbabwe’s white population, he has also compromised the survival of millions of blacks. For he is destroying the very cause he claims to espouse: Robert Mugabe has become the enemy of land reform.
The recent land seizures mirror the thefts which first enabled the whites to control so much of Zimbabwe’s economy. In the 1890s, Cecil Rhodes and the settlers he led first cheated and then forcibly dispossessed the Shona and the Ndebele. The whites stole their land, their cattle and, through taxation, their labour. When they rebelled against these impositions, the blacks were cruelly suppressed and their leaders were hanged. From 1930 onwards, blacks were forbidden to own land outside the barren and crowded “reserves”. Even the cities were secured by the settlers: native people were confined to rented property in peripheral townships.
Today, though the laws have changed, the distribution of land has scarcely altered. Zimbabwe’s 4,500 white farmers occupy 70 per cent of the best land, while some seven million blacks still inhabit the old reserves. Some of the white farmers claim that if this dispensation were to change, Zimbabwe would starve, but any visit to a British supermarket shows that this is nonsense. Much of Zimbabwe’s most fertile land is used to grow not necessities for the hungry, but luxuries for the sated: mange tout, radicchio, french beans and tobacco. Redistribution would enable the poor both to support themselves and to produce staple crops for the landless: all over the Third World it is smallholders who keep their own countries fed.
Land reform in Zimbabwe, in other words, is an urgent necessity. But by manipulating the distribution programme to secure his own survival, Mugabe is keeping his people hungry. He is, however, not solely to blame for its failures.
The 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, which oversaw the transition to majority rule in Zimbabwe, ensured that the Zimbabwean government could use local currency only to buy land from farmers who were willing to sell. If it were to expropriate their property, it would have to compensate them with scarce and precious foreign exchange. The agreement bound the country to a programme of land reform, in other words, whose comprehensive implementation would have cost billions. Having hinted that we would pay for it, our government handed over only a fraction of the money required - £44 million - to make it happen.
Had a sterner settlement been struck, in other words, or had Britain been more generous, there might not have been a land distribution problem in Zimbabwe today. Our meanness, compounded perhaps by an unwillingness to undermine the white economic hegemony, perpetuated Zimbabwe’s racial segregation. Mugabe, unable to oversee a full and fair redistribution, acquired an excuse to turn land into a gift, to be deployed as political imperatives demanded. When the Lancaster House Agreement expired, he changed the constitution to allow the government to make compulsory purchases in Zimbabwe dollars, but he used the new power to reward his friends and purchase his enemies.
So Robert Mugabe is right about one thing: Britain does have a moral obligation to pay for a comprehensive land reform programme in Zimbabwe, to absolve not only the theft of land and labour by British-born farmers, but also to correct the inequitable settlement of 1979. And the foreign office minister, Peter Hain, is right to suggest that any money we hand over should bypass Mugabe’s regime. But he is wrong to imagine that he can implement “a programme of genuine land reform” with “some millions of pounds.” Our debt to the people of Zimbabwe runs into billions.
If we fail to recognise that Britain sits at the heart of this problem, then we condemn Zimbabwe’s poor to decades of manipulation, segregation and starvation. If our politics are to be distinguished from Mr Mugabe’s, then we must extend to Zimbabwe’s blacks the munificence we have offered the whites.
____________________________________
The reason whites hate Mugabe.
#1802094382 - 19/11/07 10:44 PM
Do you want to know the real reason Whites governments and their followers hate Mugabe? Let me walk you through the real reason they hate our Legend. Whites governments world wide have always worked as a team to accomplish slavery, genocides in Africa, America, Australia, New Zealand, India and elsewhere. Just like yesterday they worked as a team to accomplish those sad and inhuman crimes, just like today they still work as a team to further their selfish, illegal, criminal and oppressive goals in Zimbabwe, against the people of Zimbabwe.
From UK to the USA via France, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the EU, you hear the same message about Mugabe and the same tone about Mugabe. The reason you hear that same message and tone it is because they work as a team to maintain their illegally and criminally acquired supremacy in the world.
If you stop relying on their propaganda on TV’s, radios, news papers, magazines and the internet about human right, and take your time to do some research on the internet and other source of information that they have no influence on, and by observing events as they pass by, you will discover that these governments hates Africans deeply and are the only cause of the past and current problems of the African people, and they are actually happy when we are starving.
So why are they giving the false impression about human right violation in Zimbabwe when they are the masters of human right violation in the world. There is no government in the world that violates human right like whites governments do.
Racial discrimination, racial attacks, racial oppression, racial invasions and racial exploitations are the pillars of their progress, yet they want to give the impression to the African people who paid heavily and ruthlessly in their hands for centuries and up to today that they care about our Zimbabweans brothers’ human right.
It is a mockery that the meaning of oppression and human right violation dare to accuse a man that has dedicated all his life to fight against human right violation and oppression.
They, white’s government and their followers are not honest enough to tell the African people that we hate Mugabe because he did justice by liberating the land our kin and kith use to illegal occupy.
How can they talk about human right when they do not condemn the human right violation against us when our land were stolen and are still occupied by their kith and kin?
You and I know whites governments do not care about browns “blacks”, they are the reason we are in this situation of poverty, disease and desperation in many part of Africa. So why are they not ashamed to talk about human right in Zimbabwe?
The answer is, if they dare to act openly, they will not be able to advance their criminal cause by even an inch.
So to achieve their traditional goal of domination, neo-colonialism and oppression, they play with your emotion about human right in Zimbabwe.
Did they tell you that they are the one who almost collapsed Zimbabwe economy with their illegal sanction, declared and undeclared and economic sabotage?
Did they tell you that it is them who want regime change in Zimbabwe and not the Zimbabwean people?
No, they would not because they know the African people will get so angry and cut all ties with them and ban them by law never to even look at us ever again.
So I am calling on you African people, to stand with your own people, whether in the Zimbabwe, Brazil or the USA, because our enemy is one and he is the devil with a long history of enslaving our people.
We must help Zimbabwe where we can, we must form our united state of Africa and we must work for justice.
Viva President Mugabe, Viva Zimbabwe, Viva Africa and to hell with the devils
Our Racist Demonology
Mugabe's Crimes Pale Next to What Black Small Farmers Endure in the Name of Development
by George Monbiot
The most evil man on earth, after Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, is Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. That, at least, is the view of most of the western world's press.
Yesterday Mugabe insisted that 2,900 white farmers will have to leave their land. He claims to be redistributing their property to landless peasants, but many of the farms he has seized have been handed instead to army officers and party loyalists. Twelve white farmers have been killed and many others beaten. He stole the elections in March through ballot-rigging and the intimidation of his political rivals.
His assault on white-owned farms has been cited by the Daily Telegraph as the principal reason for the current famine. Now, the paper maintains, he is using "food aid as a political weapon". As a candidate for the post of World's Third Most Evil Man, he appears to possess all the right credentials.
There is no doubt that Mugabe is a ruthless man, or that his policies are contributing to the further impoverishment of the Zimbabweans. But to suggest that his land seizures are largely responsible for the nation's hunger is fanciful.
Though the 4,500 white farmers there own two-thirds of of the best land, many of them grow not food but tobacco. Seventy per cent of the nation's maize - its primary staple crop - is grown by black peasant farmers hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites.
The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is merely one small scene in the tragedy now playing all over the world. Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave their land, with devastating consequences for food security.
For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of a last visit to the graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are dismissed by most of the press as the necessary casualties of development.
Ten years ago, I investigated the expropriations being funded and organized in Africa by another member of the Commonwealth. Canada had paid for the ploughing and planting with wheat of the Basotu Plains in Tanzania.
Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that crop, rather than maize or beans or cassava, Canada could secure contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world leaders in wheat technology.
The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the Barabaig tribe. Those who tried to return to their lands were beaten by the project's workers, imprisoned and tortured with electric shocks. The women were gang-raped.
For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When I raised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told me: "I won't shed a tear for anybody if it means development." The rich world's press took much the same attitude: only the Guardian carried the story.
Now yet another member of the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom, is funding a much bigger scheme in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Some 20 million people will be dispossessed. Again this atrocity has been ignored by most of the media.
These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects. Mugabe is a monster because he has usurped the natural order.
Throughout the coverage of Zimbabwe there is an undercurrent of racism and of regret that Britain ever let Rhodesia go. Some of the articles in the Telegraph may as well have been headlined "The plucky men and women holding darkest Africa at bay". Readers are led to conclude that Ian Smith was right all along: the only people who know how to run Africa are the whites.
But, through the IMF, the World Bank and the bilateral aid programs, with their extraordinary conditions, the whites do run Africa, and a right hash they are making of it.
Over the past 10 years, according to the UN's latest human development report, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than a dollar a day has risen from 242 million to 300 million. The more rigorously Africa's governments apply the policies demanded by the whites, the poorer their people become.
Just like Mugabe, the rich world has also been using "food aid as a political weapon". The United States has just succeeded in forcing Zimbabwe and Zambia, both suffering from the southern African famine, to accept GM maize as food relief.
Both nations had fiercely resisted GM crops, partly because they feared that the technology would grant multinational companies control over the foodchain, leaving their people still more vulnerable to hunger. But the US, seizing the opportunity for its biotech firms, told them that they must either accept this consignment or starve.
Malawi has also been obliged to take GM maize from the US, partly because of the loss of its own strategic grain reserve. In 1999, the IMF and the European Union instructed Malawi to privatize the reserve.
The private body was not capitalized, so it had to borrow from commercial banks to buy grain. Predictably enough, by 2001 it found that it couldn't service its debt. The IMF told it to sell most of the reserve.
The private body sold it all, and Malawi ran out of stored grain just as its crops failed. The IMF, having learnt nothing from this catastrophe, continues to prevent that country from helping its farmers, subsidizing food or stabilizing prices.
The same agency also forces weak nations to open their borders to subsidized food from abroad, destroying their own farming industries. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents state spending on land reform.
Land distribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms are up to 10 times as productive as large ones, as they tend to be cultivated more intensively. Small farmers are more likely to supply local people with staple crops than western supermarkets with mangetout.
The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies that supply them. Indeed, it was Britain's refusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform program in Zimbabwe that created the political opportunities Mugabe has so ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to the black population but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.
The president of Zimbabwe is a very minor devil in the hellish politics of land and food. The sainted Nelson Mandela has arguably done just as much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to the IMF as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid.
Let us condemn Mugabe's attacks upon Zimbabwe's whites by all means, but only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war that the rich world wages against the poor.
_____________________________________
We Share the Blame for Zimbabwe
Posted April 20, 2000
Britain’s Debt to its People Runs into Billions
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th April 2000
The British establishment is poorly qualified to lecture Robert Mugabe about racism. The government’s condemnation of the murders of two white Zimbabwean farmers contrasts oddly with the blandishments with which it greeted Vladimir Putin, the killer of thousands of Chechens. Just as it revealed that Zimbabwe’s white refugees are welcome, for “reasons of ancestry”, to settle here permanently, it announced that it would expel 3,000 Kosovan Albanians. While the newspapers devoted hundreds of column inches to the horrible killings of the two white farmers, they scarcely mentioned the equally horrible killing of the black foreman who worked for one of them. The dispute between London and Harare is a dispute between racists.
Like Jack Straw and William Hague, Mugabe is using racism as a cheap - and not very effective - means of winning votes. But while he has made life miserable for Zimbabwe’s white population, he has also compromised the survival of millions of blacks. For he is destroying the very cause he claims to espouse: Robert Mugabe has become the enemy of land reform.
The recent land seizures mirror the thefts which first enabled the whites to control so much of Zimbabwe’s economy. In the 1890s, Cecil Rhodes and the settlers he led first cheated and then forcibly dispossessed the Shona and the Ndebele. The whites stole their land, their cattle and, through taxation, their labour. When they rebelled against these impositions, the blacks were cruelly suppressed and their leaders were hanged. From 1930 onwards, blacks were forbidden to own land outside the barren and crowded “reserves”. Even the cities were secured by the settlers: native people were confined to rented property in peripheral townships.
Today, though the laws have changed, the distribution of land has scarcely altered. Zimbabwe’s 4,500 white farmers occupy 70 per cent of the best land, while some seven million blacks still inhabit the old reserves. Some of the white farmers claim that if this dispensation were to change, Zimbabwe would starve, but any visit to a British supermarket shows that this is nonsense. Much of Zimbabwe’s most fertile land is used to grow not necessities for the hungry, but luxuries for the sated: mange tout, radicchio, french beans and tobacco. Redistribution would enable the poor both to support themselves and to produce staple crops for the landless: all over the Third World it is smallholders who keep their own countries fed.
Land reform in Zimbabwe, in other words, is an urgent necessity. But by manipulating the distribution programme to secure his own survival, Mugabe is keeping his people hungry. He is, however, not solely to blame for its failures.
The 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, which oversaw the transition to majority rule in Zimbabwe, ensured that the Zimbabwean government could use local currency only to buy land from farmers who were willing to sell. If it were to expropriate their property, it would have to compensate them with scarce and precious foreign exchange. The agreement bound the country to a programme of land reform, in other words, whose comprehensive implementation would have cost billions. Having hinted that we would pay for it, our government handed over only a fraction of the money required - £44 million - to make it happen.
Had a sterner settlement been struck, in other words, or had Britain been more generous, there might not have been a land distribution problem in Zimbabwe today. Our meanness, compounded perhaps by an unwillingness to undermine the white economic hegemony, perpetuated Zimbabwe’s racial segregation. Mugabe, unable to oversee a full and fair redistribution, acquired an excuse to turn land into a gift, to be deployed as political imperatives demanded. When the Lancaster House Agreement expired, he changed the constitution to allow the government to make compulsory purchases in Zimbabwe dollars, but he used the new power to reward his friends and purchase his enemies.
So Robert Mugabe is right about one thing: Britain does have a moral obligation to pay for a comprehensive land reform programme in Zimbabwe, to absolve not only the theft of land and labour by British-born farmers, but also to correct the inequitable settlement of 1979. And the foreign office minister, Peter Hain, is right to suggest that any money we hand over should bypass Mugabe’s regime. But he is wrong to imagine that he can implement “a programme of genuine land reform” with “some millions of pounds.” Our debt to the people of Zimbabwe runs into billions.
If we fail to recognise that Britain sits at the heart of this problem, then we condemn Zimbabwe’s poor to decades of manipulation, segregation and starvation. If our politics are to be distinguished from Mr Mugabe’s, then we must extend to Zimbabwe’s blacks the munificence we have offered the whites.
BILL MOYERS on Journalists
Journalists As Truth-Tellers
by BILL MOYERS
from the Nation Magazine
Editor's Note: Bill Moyers delivered these remarks in Washington, DC April 3 at the fifth annual Ridenhour Prize awards ceremony, sponsored by The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation. Moyers received the Courage Prize; author James D. Scurlock, received the Book Prize, and former Navy JAG officer Matthew Diaz received the Prize for Truth-Telling. The text of his speech appears here as part of the ongoing Moral Compass series, highlighting the spoken word.
Thank you very much, Sissy Farenthold, for those very generous words, spoken like one Texan to another--extravagantly. Thank you for the spirit of kinship. I could swear that I sensed our good Molly Ivins standing there beside you.
I am as surprised to be here as I am grateful. I never thought of myself as courageous, and still don't. Ron Ridenhour was courageous. To get the story out, he had to defy the whole might and power of the United States government, including its war machine. I was then publisher of Newsday, having left the White House some two years earlier. Our editor Bill McIlwain played the My Lai story big, as he should, much to the chagrin of the owner who couldn't believe Americans were capable of such atrocities. Our readers couldn't believe it either. Some of them picketed outside my office for days, their signs accusing the paper of being anti-American for publishing repugnant news about our troops. Some things never change.
A few years later, I gave the commencement at a nearby university, and when I finished the speech, a woman who had just been graduated came up to me and said, "Mr. Moyers, you've been in both government and journalism; that makes everything you say twice as hard to believe." She was on to something.
After my government experience, it took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what is important for the journalist is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality. Over the last forty years, I would find that reality in assignment after assignment, from covering famine in Africa and war in Central America to inner-city families trapped in urban ghettos and middle-class families struggling to survive in an era of downsizing across the heartland. I also had to learn one of journalism's basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.
Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take all of the slings and arrows directed at you by the powers that be--corporate and political and sometimes journalistic--there is no use even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government's lies and contradictions, "I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested." Journalism 101.
So it wasn't courage I counted on; it was exhilaration and good luck. When the road forked, I somehow stumbled into the right path, thanks to mentors like Eric Sevareid, Fred Friendly, Walter Cronkite and scores of producers, researchers and editors who lifted me to see further than one can see unless one is standing on the shoulders of others.
The quintessential lesson of my life came from another Texan named John Henry Faulk. He was a graduate, as am I, of the University of Texas. He served in the Merchant Marines, the American Red Cross and the U.S. Army during World War II, and came home to become a celebrated raconteur and popular national radio host whose career was shattered when right-wingers inspired by Joseph McCarthy smeared him as a communist. He lost his sponsors and was fired. But he fought back with a lawsuit that lasted five years and cost him every penny he owned. Financial help from Edward R. Murrow and a few others helped him to hang on. In the end, John Henry Faulk won, and his courage helped to end the Hollywood era of blacklisting. You should read his book, Fear on Trial, and see the movie starring George C. Scott. John Henry's courage was contagious.
Before his death I produced a documentary about him, and during our interview he told me the story of how he and his friend, Boots Cooper, were playing in the chicken house there in central Texas when they were about twelve years old. They spotted a chicken snake in the top tier of the nest, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it, "All of our frontier courage drained out of our heels. Actually, it trickled down our overall legs. And Boots and I made a new door through the hen house." His momma came out to see what all of the fuss was about, and she said to Boots and John Henry, "Don't you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can't hurt you." Rubbing his forehead and his behind at the same time, Boots said, "Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know, but they can scare you so bad you'll hurt yourself."
John Henry Faulk never forgot that lesson. I'm always ashamed when I do. Temptation to co-option is the original sin of journalism, and we're always finding fig leaves to cover it: economics, ideology, awe of authority, secrecy, the claims of empire. In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq we were reminded of what the late great reporter A.J. Liebling meant when he said the press is "the weak slat under the bed of democracy." The slat broke after the invasion and some strange bedfellows fell to the floor: establishment journalists, neo-con polemicists, beltway pundits, right-wing warmongers flying the skull and bones of the "balanced and fair brigade," administration flacks whose classified leaks were manufactured lies--all romping on the same mattress in the foreplay to disaster.
Five years, thousands of casualties, and hundreds of billion dollars later, most of the media co-conspirators caught in flagrante delicto are still prominent, still celebrated, and still holding forth with no more contrition than a weathercaster who made a wrong prediction as to the next day's temperature. The biblical injunction, "Go and sin no more," is the one we most frequently forget in the press. Collectively, we don't seem to learn that all it takes to transform an ordinary politician and a braying ass into the modern incarnation of Zeus and the oracle of Delphi is an oath on the Bible, a flag in the lapel, and the invocation of national security.
There are, fortunately, always exceptions to whatever our latest dismal collective performance yields. America produces some world-class journalism, including coverage of the Iraq War by men and women as brave as Ernie Pyle. But I still wish we had a professional Hippocratic Oath of our own that might stir us in the night when we stray from our mission. And yes, I believe journalism has a mission.
Walter Lippman was prescient on this long before most of you were born. Lippman, who became the ultimate Washington insider--someone to whom I regularly leaked--acknowledged that while the press may be a weak reed to lean on, it is the indispensable support for freedom. He wrote, "The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism. Everywhere men and women are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly, they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. All the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster must come to any people denied an assured access to the facts."
So for all the blunders for which we are culpable; for all the disillusionment that has set in among journalists with every fresh report of job cuts and disappearing news space; for all the barons and buccaneers turning the press into a karaoke of power; for all the desecration visited on broadcast journalism by the corporate networks; for all the nonsense to which so many aspiring young journalists are consigned; and for all the fears about the eroding quality of the craft, I still answer emphatically when young people ask me, "Should I go into journalism today?" Sometimes it is difficult to urge them on, especially when serious questions are being asked about how loyal our society is to the reality as well as to the idea of an independent and free press. But I almost always answer, "Yes, if you have a fire in your belly, you can still make a difference."
I remind them of how often investigative reporting has played a crucial role in making the crooked straight. I remind them how news bureaus abroad are a form of national security that can tell us what our government won't. I remind them that as America grows more diverse, it's essential to have reporters, editors, producers and writers who reflect these new rising voices and concerns. And I remind them that facts can still drive the argument and tug us in the direction of greater equality and a more democratic society. Journalism still matters.
But I also tell them there is something more important than journalism, and that is the truth. They aren't necessarily one and the same because the truth is often obscured in the news. In his new novel, The Appeal, John Grisham tells us more about corporate, political and legal jihads than most newspapers or network news ever will; more about Wall Street shenanigans than all the cable business channels combined; more about Manchurian candidates than you will ever hear on the Sunday morning talk shows.
For that matter, you will learn more about who wins and who loses in the real business of politics, which is governance, from the public interest truth-tellers of Washington than you will from an established press tethered to official sources. The Government Accountability Project, POGO, the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Center for Responsible Politics, the National Security Archive, CREW, the Center for Public Integrity, just to name a few--and from whistleblowers of all sorts who never went to journalism school, never flashed a press pass, and never attended a gridiron dinner.
Ron Ridenhour was not a journalist when he came upon the truth of My Lai. He was in the Army. He later became a pioneering investigative reporter and--this is the irony--had trouble making a living in a calling where truth-telling can be a liability to the bottom line. Matthew Diaz and James Scurlock, whom you honored today, are truth-tellers without a license, reminding us that the most important credential of all is a conscience that cannot be purchased or silenced.
So I tell inquisitive and inquiring young people: "Journalism still makes a difference, but the truth matters more. And if you can't get to the truth through journalism, there are other ways to go."
To The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation, to the Ridenhour judges and to all of you, thank you again for this moment and, above all, for the courage of your own convictions.
by BILL MOYERS
from the Nation Magazine
Editor's Note: Bill Moyers delivered these remarks in Washington, DC April 3 at the fifth annual Ridenhour Prize awards ceremony, sponsored by The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation. Moyers received the Courage Prize; author James D. Scurlock, received the Book Prize, and former Navy JAG officer Matthew Diaz received the Prize for Truth-Telling. The text of his speech appears here as part of the ongoing Moral Compass series, highlighting the spoken word.
Thank you very much, Sissy Farenthold, for those very generous words, spoken like one Texan to another--extravagantly. Thank you for the spirit of kinship. I could swear that I sensed our good Molly Ivins standing there beside you.
I am as surprised to be here as I am grateful. I never thought of myself as courageous, and still don't. Ron Ridenhour was courageous. To get the story out, he had to defy the whole might and power of the United States government, including its war machine. I was then publisher of Newsday, having left the White House some two years earlier. Our editor Bill McIlwain played the My Lai story big, as he should, much to the chagrin of the owner who couldn't believe Americans were capable of such atrocities. Our readers couldn't believe it either. Some of them picketed outside my office for days, their signs accusing the paper of being anti-American for publishing repugnant news about our troops. Some things never change.
A few years later, I gave the commencement at a nearby university, and when I finished the speech, a woman who had just been graduated came up to me and said, "Mr. Moyers, you've been in both government and journalism; that makes everything you say twice as hard to believe." She was on to something.
After my government experience, it took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what is important for the journalist is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality. Over the last forty years, I would find that reality in assignment after assignment, from covering famine in Africa and war in Central America to inner-city families trapped in urban ghettos and middle-class families struggling to survive in an era of downsizing across the heartland. I also had to learn one of journalism's basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.
Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take all of the slings and arrows directed at you by the powers that be--corporate and political and sometimes journalistic--there is no use even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government's lies and contradictions, "I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested." Journalism 101.
So it wasn't courage I counted on; it was exhilaration and good luck. When the road forked, I somehow stumbled into the right path, thanks to mentors like Eric Sevareid, Fred Friendly, Walter Cronkite and scores of producers, researchers and editors who lifted me to see further than one can see unless one is standing on the shoulders of others.
The quintessential lesson of my life came from another Texan named John Henry Faulk. He was a graduate, as am I, of the University of Texas. He served in the Merchant Marines, the American Red Cross and the U.S. Army during World War II, and came home to become a celebrated raconteur and popular national radio host whose career was shattered when right-wingers inspired by Joseph McCarthy smeared him as a communist. He lost his sponsors and was fired. But he fought back with a lawsuit that lasted five years and cost him every penny he owned. Financial help from Edward R. Murrow and a few others helped him to hang on. In the end, John Henry Faulk won, and his courage helped to end the Hollywood era of blacklisting. You should read his book, Fear on Trial, and see the movie starring George C. Scott. John Henry's courage was contagious.
Before his death I produced a documentary about him, and during our interview he told me the story of how he and his friend, Boots Cooper, were playing in the chicken house there in central Texas when they were about twelve years old. They spotted a chicken snake in the top tier of the nest, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it, "All of our frontier courage drained out of our heels. Actually, it trickled down our overall legs. And Boots and I made a new door through the hen house." His momma came out to see what all of the fuss was about, and she said to Boots and John Henry, "Don't you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can't hurt you." Rubbing his forehead and his behind at the same time, Boots said, "Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know, but they can scare you so bad you'll hurt yourself."
John Henry Faulk never forgot that lesson. I'm always ashamed when I do. Temptation to co-option is the original sin of journalism, and we're always finding fig leaves to cover it: economics, ideology, awe of authority, secrecy, the claims of empire. In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq we were reminded of what the late great reporter A.J. Liebling meant when he said the press is "the weak slat under the bed of democracy." The slat broke after the invasion and some strange bedfellows fell to the floor: establishment journalists, neo-con polemicists, beltway pundits, right-wing warmongers flying the skull and bones of the "balanced and fair brigade," administration flacks whose classified leaks were manufactured lies--all romping on the same mattress in the foreplay to disaster.
Five years, thousands of casualties, and hundreds of billion dollars later, most of the media co-conspirators caught in flagrante delicto are still prominent, still celebrated, and still holding forth with no more contrition than a weathercaster who made a wrong prediction as to the next day's temperature. The biblical injunction, "Go and sin no more," is the one we most frequently forget in the press. Collectively, we don't seem to learn that all it takes to transform an ordinary politician and a braying ass into the modern incarnation of Zeus and the oracle of Delphi is an oath on the Bible, a flag in the lapel, and the invocation of national security.
There are, fortunately, always exceptions to whatever our latest dismal collective performance yields. America produces some world-class journalism, including coverage of the Iraq War by men and women as brave as Ernie Pyle. But I still wish we had a professional Hippocratic Oath of our own that might stir us in the night when we stray from our mission. And yes, I believe journalism has a mission.
Walter Lippman was prescient on this long before most of you were born. Lippman, who became the ultimate Washington insider--someone to whom I regularly leaked--acknowledged that while the press may be a weak reed to lean on, it is the indispensable support for freedom. He wrote, "The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism. Everywhere men and women are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly, they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. All the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster must come to any people denied an assured access to the facts."
So for all the blunders for which we are culpable; for all the disillusionment that has set in among journalists with every fresh report of job cuts and disappearing news space; for all the barons and buccaneers turning the press into a karaoke of power; for all the desecration visited on broadcast journalism by the corporate networks; for all the nonsense to which so many aspiring young journalists are consigned; and for all the fears about the eroding quality of the craft, I still answer emphatically when young people ask me, "Should I go into journalism today?" Sometimes it is difficult to urge them on, especially when serious questions are being asked about how loyal our society is to the reality as well as to the idea of an independent and free press. But I almost always answer, "Yes, if you have a fire in your belly, you can still make a difference."
I remind them of how often investigative reporting has played a crucial role in making the crooked straight. I remind them how news bureaus abroad are a form of national security that can tell us what our government won't. I remind them that as America grows more diverse, it's essential to have reporters, editors, producers and writers who reflect these new rising voices and concerns. And I remind them that facts can still drive the argument and tug us in the direction of greater equality and a more democratic society. Journalism still matters.
But I also tell them there is something more important than journalism, and that is the truth. They aren't necessarily one and the same because the truth is often obscured in the news. In his new novel, The Appeal, John Grisham tells us more about corporate, political and legal jihads than most newspapers or network news ever will; more about Wall Street shenanigans than all the cable business channels combined; more about Manchurian candidates than you will ever hear on the Sunday morning talk shows.
For that matter, you will learn more about who wins and who loses in the real business of politics, which is governance, from the public interest truth-tellers of Washington than you will from an established press tethered to official sources. The Government Accountability Project, POGO, the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Center for Responsible Politics, the National Security Archive, CREW, the Center for Public Integrity, just to name a few--and from whistleblowers of all sorts who never went to journalism school, never flashed a press pass, and never attended a gridiron dinner.
Ron Ridenhour was not a journalist when he came upon the truth of My Lai. He was in the Army. He later became a pioneering investigative reporter and--this is the irony--had trouble making a living in a calling where truth-telling can be a liability to the bottom line. Matthew Diaz and James Scurlock, whom you honored today, are truth-tellers without a license, reminding us that the most important credential of all is a conscience that cannot be purchased or silenced.
So I tell inquisitive and inquiring young people: "Journalism still makes a difference, but the truth matters more. And if you can't get to the truth through journalism, there are other ways to go."
To The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation, to the Ridenhour judges and to all of you, thank you again for this moment and, above all, for the courage of your own convictions.
Friday, March 28, 2008
NPR
So it would appear that the dismantling of the public airwaves begun in the 80’s by the republicans is finally bearing fruit.With the number of "announcements" from the likes of ADM and GE increasing is it any wonder that it has come to this?
__________
NPR: National Pentagon Radio?
By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
Posted on March 27, 2008,
While the Iraqi government continued its large-scale military assault in Basra, the NPR reporter's voice from Iraq was unequivocal on the morning of March 27: "There is no doubt that this operation needed to happen."
Such flat-out statements, uttered with journalistic tones and without attribution, are routine for the U.S. media establishment. In the War Made Easy documentary film, I put it this way: "If you're pro-war, you're objective. But if you're anti-war, you're biased. And often, a news anchor will get no flak at all for making statements that are supportive of a war and wouldn't dream of making a statement that's against a war."
So it goes at NPR News, where -- on Morning Edition as well as the evening program All Things Considered -- the sense and sensibilities tend to be neatly aligned with the outlooks of official Washington. The critical aspects of reporting largely amount to complaints about policy shortcomings that are tactical; the underlying and shared assumptions are imperial. Washington's prerogatives are evident when the media window on the world is tinted red-white-and-blue.
Earlier in the week -- a few days into the sixth year of the Iraq war -- All Things Considered aired a discussion with a familiar guest.
"To talk about the state of the war and how the U.S. military changes tactics to deal with it," said longtime anchor Robert Siegel, "we turn now to retired Gen. Robert Scales, who's talked with us many times over the course of the conflict."
This is the sort of introduction that elevates a guest to truly expert status -- conveying to the listeners that expertise and wisdom, not just opinions, are being sought.
Siegel asked about the progression of assaults on U.S. troops over the years: "How have the attacks and the countermeasures to them evolved?"
Naturally, Gen. Scales responded with the language of a military man. "The enemy has built ever-larger explosives," he said. "They've found clever ways to hide their IEDs, their roadside bombs, and even more diabolical means for detonating these devices."
We'd expect a retired American general to speak in such categorical terms -- referring to "the enemy" and declaring in a matter-of-fact tone that attacks on U.S. troops became even more "diabolical." But what about an American journalist?
Well, if the American journalist is careful to function with independence instead of deference to the Pentagon, then the journalist's assumptions will sound different than the outlooks of a high-ranking U.S. military officer.
In this case, an independent reporter might even be willing to ask a pointed question along these lines: You just used the word "diabolical" to describe attacks on the U.S. military by Iraqis, but would that ever be an appropriate adjective to use to describe attacks on Iraqis by the U.S. military?
In sharp contrast, what happened during the All Things Considered discussion on March 24 was a conversation of shared sensibilities. The retired U.S. Army general discussed the war effort in terms notably similar to those of the ostensibly independent journalist -- who, along the way, made the phrase "the enemy" his own in a followup question.
It wouldn't be fair to judge an entire news program on the basis of a couple of segments. But I'm a frequent listener of All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Such cozy proximity of world views, blanketing the war maker and the war reporter, is symptomatic of what ails NPR's war coverage -- especially from Washington.
Of course there are exceptions. Occasional news reports stray from the narrow baseline. But the essence of the propaganda function is repetition, and the exceptional does not undermine that function.
To add insult to injury, NPR calls itself public radio. It's supposed to be willing to go where commercial networks fear to tread. But overall, when it comes to politics and war, the range of perspectives on National Public Radio isn't any wider than what we encounter on the avowedly commercial networks.
__________
NPR: National Pentagon Radio?
By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
Posted on March 27, 2008,
While the Iraqi government continued its large-scale military assault in Basra, the NPR reporter's voice from Iraq was unequivocal on the morning of March 27: "There is no doubt that this operation needed to happen."
Such flat-out statements, uttered with journalistic tones and without attribution, are routine for the U.S. media establishment. In the War Made Easy documentary film, I put it this way: "If you're pro-war, you're objective. But if you're anti-war, you're biased. And often, a news anchor will get no flak at all for making statements that are supportive of a war and wouldn't dream of making a statement that's against a war."
So it goes at NPR News, where -- on Morning Edition as well as the evening program All Things Considered -- the sense and sensibilities tend to be neatly aligned with the outlooks of official Washington. The critical aspects of reporting largely amount to complaints about policy shortcomings that are tactical; the underlying and shared assumptions are imperial. Washington's prerogatives are evident when the media window on the world is tinted red-white-and-blue.
Earlier in the week -- a few days into the sixth year of the Iraq war -- All Things Considered aired a discussion with a familiar guest.
"To talk about the state of the war and how the U.S. military changes tactics to deal with it," said longtime anchor Robert Siegel, "we turn now to retired Gen. Robert Scales, who's talked with us many times over the course of the conflict."
This is the sort of introduction that elevates a guest to truly expert status -- conveying to the listeners that expertise and wisdom, not just opinions, are being sought.
Siegel asked about the progression of assaults on U.S. troops over the years: "How have the attacks and the countermeasures to them evolved?"
Naturally, Gen. Scales responded with the language of a military man. "The enemy has built ever-larger explosives," he said. "They've found clever ways to hide their IEDs, their roadside bombs, and even more diabolical means for detonating these devices."
We'd expect a retired American general to speak in such categorical terms -- referring to "the enemy" and declaring in a matter-of-fact tone that attacks on U.S. troops became even more "diabolical." But what about an American journalist?
Well, if the American journalist is careful to function with independence instead of deference to the Pentagon, then the journalist's assumptions will sound different than the outlooks of a high-ranking U.S. military officer.
In this case, an independent reporter might even be willing to ask a pointed question along these lines: You just used the word "diabolical" to describe attacks on the U.S. military by Iraqis, but would that ever be an appropriate adjective to use to describe attacks on Iraqis by the U.S. military?
In sharp contrast, what happened during the All Things Considered discussion on March 24 was a conversation of shared sensibilities. The retired U.S. Army general discussed the war effort in terms notably similar to those of the ostensibly independent journalist -- who, along the way, made the phrase "the enemy" his own in a followup question.
It wouldn't be fair to judge an entire news program on the basis of a couple of segments. But I'm a frequent listener of All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Such cozy proximity of world views, blanketing the war maker and the war reporter, is symptomatic of what ails NPR's war coverage -- especially from Washington.
Of course there are exceptions. Occasional news reports stray from the narrow baseline. But the essence of the propaganda function is repetition, and the exceptional does not undermine that function.
To add insult to injury, NPR calls itself public radio. It's supposed to be willing to go where commercial networks fear to tread. But overall, when it comes to politics and war, the range of perspectives on National Public Radio isn't any wider than what we encounter on the avowedly commercial networks.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Our Man in Islamabad
Its indicative of how far we have come from the lies and obfuscations spread by the Washington Posts regional reporters (Pamela Constable for example), that today even Mr. Novak, one of the most reptilian of American journalists can clearly see the truth.
____________________
By Robert D. Novak
Thursday, February 21, 2008; A15
Overwhelming repudiation of President Pervez Musharraf by Pakistan's voters did not immediately dilute the Bush administration's support for him. On the contrary, the first election returns were barely in Monday night when the U.S. government began pressing victorious opposition leaders not to impeach the former military strongman.
Publicly, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said that Musharraf "is still the president of Pakistan" and expressed hope that "whoever winds up in charge of the new government would be able to work with him."
Privately, U.S. diplomats pushed hard against any effort to dislodge the retired army general who had just suffered a public rejection, unprecedented in Pakistan's 60 years, from the office he retained last year through nefarious means.
The United States again guessed wrong in pinning its hopes on an authoritarian, anti-democratic foreign leader. Musharraf follows the pattern of South Korea's Syngman Rhee, the shah of Iran and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, all of whom went into exile after public rejection. But Musharraf remains our man in Islamabad, counted on by Washington to battle Islamist terrorists -- including Osama bin Laden -- despite his inconstant efforts.
Foggy Bottom's stubborn policymakers are frozen in an irrelevant mind-set, dating to their effort last year to broker a partnership between Musharraf, as president, and Benazir Bhutto, as prime minister. In her memoir, "Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West," which she worked on before her assassination in December, Bhutto detailed Musharraf's perfidy in reneging on power-sharing agreements made with her in two meetings last year. Instead, Musharraf engineered his election as president by a lame-duck parliament, purged the judiciary, imposed martial law and refused to resign from the army until virtually forced to do so by Washington.
Since Bhutto's murder, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher has antagonized Pakistan's opposition leaders by insisting that Musharraf was committed to a "good" election while in fact the voting rolls were being rigged. Minimal Election Day fraud can be attributed to Musharraf's weakness rather than his strength. The army refused to provide the cooperation needed to really steal votes. According to Pakistani sources, the high command was alarmed that Musharraf's unpopularity had undermined public esteem for the military.
These changes apparently escaped the notice of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, which on election eve reported to Washington that Musharraf's Pakistan Muslim League-Q would do well enough to force a coalition government. Vote-rigging probably cost the opposition 25 seats, mainly in Baluchistan -- not enough to prevent a substantial majority by opposition parties that could overturn Musharraf's policies.
Officials of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) say that while Musharraf deserves to be impeached, they would not move against him if he shows any humility. But the retired general has not departed from his habitual arrogance, even at the moment of humiliation.
In "Reconciliation" (concluded shortly before her death and published this week), Bhutto was careful to avoid an anti-American posture but still detailed Washington's long record of support for military regimes that overturned democratically elected leaders in Pakistan. I must report that my late partner, Rowland Evans, and I followed that line of reasoning as necessary to enlist Pakistan as an ally against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
This government outlook has persisted in the war against Islamist terrorism, though it has been increasingly clear that Musharraf would not vigorously pursue that conflict. I was impressed when I talked to Bhutto in New York last summer to find her committed against the extremists inside Pakistan in a way Musharraf never has been. "The core of my being as a Muslim," she wrote in her memoir, "rejects those using Islam to justify acts of terror to pervert, manipulate, and exploit religion for their own political agenda."
Those sentiments reflect how much Benazir Bhutto will be missed.
Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who has succeeded her as PPP leader, will not take the prime minister's post. Whoever does head the new Pakistani government cannot be counted on to pursue the risky course that Bhutto promised of closing madrassas and fighting al-Qaeda in tribal lands. No Pakistani expects help from Musharraf, who has been repudiated by the public and is not backed by the army now that he has removed his uniform. Only the State Department still takes him seriously.
____________________
By Robert D. Novak
Thursday, February 21, 2008; A15
Overwhelming repudiation of President Pervez Musharraf by Pakistan's voters did not immediately dilute the Bush administration's support for him. On the contrary, the first election returns were barely in Monday night when the U.S. government began pressing victorious opposition leaders not to impeach the former military strongman.
Publicly, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said that Musharraf "is still the president of Pakistan" and expressed hope that "whoever winds up in charge of the new government would be able to work with him."
Privately, U.S. diplomats pushed hard against any effort to dislodge the retired army general who had just suffered a public rejection, unprecedented in Pakistan's 60 years, from the office he retained last year through nefarious means.
The United States again guessed wrong in pinning its hopes on an authoritarian, anti-democratic foreign leader. Musharraf follows the pattern of South Korea's Syngman Rhee, the shah of Iran and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, all of whom went into exile after public rejection. But Musharraf remains our man in Islamabad, counted on by Washington to battle Islamist terrorists -- including Osama bin Laden -- despite his inconstant efforts.
Foggy Bottom's stubborn policymakers are frozen in an irrelevant mind-set, dating to their effort last year to broker a partnership between Musharraf, as president, and Benazir Bhutto, as prime minister. In her memoir, "Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West," which she worked on before her assassination in December, Bhutto detailed Musharraf's perfidy in reneging on power-sharing agreements made with her in two meetings last year. Instead, Musharraf engineered his election as president by a lame-duck parliament, purged the judiciary, imposed martial law and refused to resign from the army until virtually forced to do so by Washington.
Since Bhutto's murder, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher has antagonized Pakistan's opposition leaders by insisting that Musharraf was committed to a "good" election while in fact the voting rolls were being rigged. Minimal Election Day fraud can be attributed to Musharraf's weakness rather than his strength. The army refused to provide the cooperation needed to really steal votes. According to Pakistani sources, the high command was alarmed that Musharraf's unpopularity had undermined public esteem for the military.
These changes apparently escaped the notice of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, which on election eve reported to Washington that Musharraf's Pakistan Muslim League-Q would do well enough to force a coalition government. Vote-rigging probably cost the opposition 25 seats, mainly in Baluchistan -- not enough to prevent a substantial majority by opposition parties that could overturn Musharraf's policies.
Officials of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) say that while Musharraf deserves to be impeached, they would not move against him if he shows any humility. But the retired general has not departed from his habitual arrogance, even at the moment of humiliation.
In "Reconciliation" (concluded shortly before her death and published this week), Bhutto was careful to avoid an anti-American posture but still detailed Washington's long record of support for military regimes that overturned democratically elected leaders in Pakistan. I must report that my late partner, Rowland Evans, and I followed that line of reasoning as necessary to enlist Pakistan as an ally against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
This government outlook has persisted in the war against Islamist terrorism, though it has been increasingly clear that Musharraf would not vigorously pursue that conflict. I was impressed when I talked to Bhutto in New York last summer to find her committed against the extremists inside Pakistan in a way Musharraf never has been. "The core of my being as a Muslim," she wrote in her memoir, "rejects those using Islam to justify acts of terror to pervert, manipulate, and exploit religion for their own political agenda."
Those sentiments reflect how much Benazir Bhutto will be missed.
Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who has succeeded her as PPP leader, will not take the prime minister's post. Whoever does head the new Pakistani government cannot be counted on to pursue the risky course that Bhutto promised of closing madrassas and fighting al-Qaeda in tribal lands. No Pakistani expects help from Musharraf, who has been repudiated by the public and is not backed by the army now that he has removed his uniform. Only the State Department still takes him seriously.
Monday, November 26, 2007
The Archbisop of Cant
Rowan Williams suggested American leadership had broken down: "We have only
one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is
trying to accumulate influence and control. That's not working."
He contrasted it unfavourably with how the British Empire governed
India. "It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy
and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or
wrongly, that's what the British Empire did — in India, for example.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2937068.ece
one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is
trying to accumulate influence and control. That's not working."
He contrasted it unfavourably with how the British Empire governed
India. "It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy
and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or
wrongly, that's what the British Empire did — in India, for example.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Deniall Ferguson - Demogague
Denial Ferguson has another puff piece on Demagoguery.
Its quite admirable how this pompous ass can get absolute tripe published by the best newspapers. Deniall is a right wing apologist for the erswhile British Empire, peddling himself to gullible Americans as an expert who can help them with their own imperialist adventures.
In this article he states that “The ancient Greek word "demagogos" means simply a spokesman for the people or, more pejoratively, a leader of the mob. Modern usage implies rhetorical gifts and the ability to arouse an audience, usually with the promise of radical measures. It is to the baser impulses of the public that a demagogue usually appeals -- hence the tendency to identify and denounce enemies of the people.”
Here is the Wikipedia definition:
“Demagogy (from Greek demos, "people", and agogos, "leading") refers to a political strategy for obtaining and gaining political power by appealing to the popular prejudices, fears, and expectations of the public — typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalistic or populist themes.
The term is commonly used as a political pejorative: political opponents are described as "demagogues", while politicians approved of are "men of the people", or "statesmen".”
And the wiki article has this quote by H. L. Mencken, who defined a demagogue as "one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."
So this in an interesting word that is being used to demonize those you disagree with. Demagogue. For Deniall Ferguson, GWB, TB, Ronald Regan (remember the Big Lie technique?) Margaret Thatcher, or that great fascist, Winston Churchill, don’t fall into this category, but anyone who denounces British / American imperialism is clearly a one. It’s this kind of simple minded propaganda that failed the Brits again and again as their empire unraveled.
_______________________
The New Demagogues
By Niall Ferguson
Washington Post
Sunday, December 3, 2006
"We are confronting the devil -- and we will hit a home run off the devil!"
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was at it again last week, demonizing his archenemy in front of throngs of loyal supporters in downtown Caracas. Forget his opponent in today's presidential elections -- that's not the "devil" he has in mind. Instead, following the example of another great Latin American demagogue, Fidel Castro, Chavez directs his rhetorical fire against the United States and President Bush.
The world over, demagogues are back, yelling their slogans and thumping their tubs.
In Latin America, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Mexico's Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have joined Chvvez in heaping opprobrium on the diabolical gringo imperialists. In the Middle East, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrallah denounce the demonic Yankee crusaders and their Zionist confederates with equal fervor. Others have different targets, but their language is no less inflammatory. In Germany, Udo Pastoers of the xenophobic National Democratic Party won a regional election after calling Europe "a cultural space for white people." In South Africa, former deputy president Jacob Zuma belts out "Mshini Wami," an anti-apartheid anthem that includes the line, "Bring me my machine gun."
Their rhetoric may seem overblown, but no one should underestimate the threat these new demagogues pose -- especially to the United States. Irrelevant in Latin America, impotent in the Middle East, ignored in Africa and isolated in Europe, Washington may be facing its biggest foreign policy crisis since the late 1970s, when the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan rocked Jimmy Carter's presidency. And this new generation of rabble-rousers is seizing the moment. The more unpopular the United States becomes, the easier it is for them to win votes by bad-mouthing Uncle Sam.
We have been here before, and it wasn't pretty. When an elected president expresses skepticism about the Holocaust and threatens to wipe the state of Israel from the map, it is not hyperbole to draw comparisons with that most disastrous of demagogues, Adolf Hitler. Like Hitler, Ahmadinejad knows that anti-Semitism is one of the aces in the demagogue's deck, a tried-and-true means of inspiring hatred and suspicion of others -- and of staying in power himself. Hitler also frequently expressed his contempt for the United States, which he dismissed as "a decayed country," racially and culturally inferior to Germany -- and, of course, ruled by Jews. Read Ahmadinejad's latest letter to "the American people," released last week, for a reprise of that theme.
And today, the conditions for truly dangerous demagogues to emerge are almost ideal.
The classic breeding grounds for demagogy are war and revolution. It is no coincidence that Ahmadinejad is a veteran of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the war between Iran and Iraq. In a new mood of "realism," the United States would now like Iran to help prevent its neighbor Iraq from collapsing into civil war. Fat chance. Ahmadinejad is bidding for Iranian hegemony in the Middle East. The last thing he needs is to be seen bailing out the Great Satan.
Severe economic volatility can also create a popular appetite for rousing rhetoric. It is significant that economic growth has been so much more variable in Latin America and the Middle East over the past 20 years than it has been in the United States. When people are buffeted by wild fluctuations in income, prices and job security, they are more likely to lose confidence in the political status quo and to heed the words of messianic leaders such as Ch?vez and Morales.
Also relevant is the level of average income. Today, per capita incomes in poorer Latin American countries and most of the Middle East are similar to those of Central Europe between the wars. (That's important, because studies suggest that a democracy's chances of survival are much higher when per capita income is above $6,000.) Illiteracy rates are probably higher than they were in Central Europe. Urbanization rates certainly are. It's an ideal environment for demagogy: masses of people, stuck between the grinding poverty of agrarian societies and the affluence of today's richest countries, living in crowded cities with lousy schools. In such settings, the center seldom holds for long. Soon the maverick speechmaker is strutting in presidential regalia.
That helps explain why so many demagogues swept to power in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s and '30s. Hitler was only one of a host of dictators who combined fiery rhetoric with colored shirts, shiny boots -- and an utter disregard for civil liberties, especially those of ethnic minorities. And that's the critical point.
History's lesson is that personal freedom is all too often the demagogue's first victim, especially when popular sentiment is whipped up against some internal or foreign enemy.
The ancient Greek word "demagogos" means simply a spokesman for the people or, more pejoratively, a leader of the mob. Modern usage implies rhetorical gifts and the ability to arouse an audience, usually with the promise of radical measures. It is to the baser impulses of the public that a demagogue usually appeals -- hence the tendency to identify and denounce enemies of the people.
Demagogy is as old as democracy, but not all democracies produce demagogues. The best known of the ancient Greek demagogues was Alcibiades, who sold his fellow Athenians the (bad) idea of conquering Sicily. The Roman Republic produced Marcus Tullius Cicero, whose devastating Philippics sought to thwart the ambitions of Julius Caesar's friend and Cleopatra's lover Mark Antony. (Cicero called Antony a "madman" who wanted a "bloodbath" in Rome.)
The term took on a new significance in the 17th century. If the English Civil War had its demagogue, it was the Puritan parliamentarian John Pym, Charles I's most vehement critic in the House of Commons -- though it was the plainspoken man of action Oliver Cromwell who emerged as dictator.
Not all revolutions produce demagogues. The American Revolution owed more to lawyerly draftsmen and amateur soldiers than to masters of rhetoric. In France, though, intemperate speechifying was the essence of the revolution. Demagogues such as Georges Danton -- nicknamed "Jove the thunderer" and one of the leaders of the Reign of Terror -- gave firebrand oratory a bad name for the better part of a century.
From the 1880s on, the widening of franchises to include poorer, less educated voters combined with a major economic slowdown to produce a new kind of demagogue: not so much a warmonger or a revolutionary as a vote-winner. The defining moment was William Ewart Gladstone's 1878 Midlothian campaign, when the British Liberal leader made a series of inspirational stump speeches aimed not just at local voters but at the nation.
But as the boom years of the industrial age gave way to deflation and depression, demagogues turned against liberalism. On the left and right alike, from socialists to anti-Semites, radical politicians discovered that the best way to mobilize new voters was to blame economic volatility on enemies of the people. In Austria, the anti-Semite Karl Lueger blamed the troubles of the Viennese petty bourgeoisie after the stock market crash of 1873 on the city's supposedly all-powerful Jews. In Russia, radical socialists such as Leon Trotsky fulminated with equal vehemence against czarism and capitalism. In every case, the demagogue pointed an accusatory finger, blaming this or that group for the sufferings of the masses. Success meant power for the demagogue, and persecution for his targets.
Small wonder, then, that the years between World Wars I and II proved to be the zenith of demagogic politics. After 1914, the world was swept first by war, then by revolutions and finally by the worst depression in economic history. Hitler was of course the arch-demagogue, a hate-filled monster and false Messiah who promised the German people redemption after years of humiliation. But in Italy, Benito Mussolini also strutted and stormed; Oswald Mosley, the renegade socialist who founded the British Union of Fascists, tried the same tricks in England. Central Europe resounded to the diatribes of a horde of similar rabble-rousers. In Poland, National Democrat leader Roman Dmowski prophesied an "international pogrom of the Jews." In Romania, the founder of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Corneliu Codreanu, pledged to "destroy the Jews before they can destroy us." Hitler was very far from the only demagogue in the 1930s to scapegoat the Jews. When he took Europe to war, he found willing collaborators all over the continent.
The good news about demagogues is that they often find it harder to deliver on election pledges than to deliver election speeches. In September, Morales's deputy, Vice President ?lvaro Garc?a Linera, called on Bolivia's indigenous people to defend Morales's government "with your chest, with your hand, with your Mauser" in response to opposition in the eastern city of Santa Cruz. Such language belies the reality that the Morales government has been forced to modify its plan to nationalize the country's energy sector (though last week it did succeed in pushing through a radical land reform bill). Economic instability and backwardness may bring demagogues to power. But they also constrain them once they get there.
Still, the fact that Chavez and Ahmadinejad sit on top of 6 percent and 11 percent of proven global oil reserves must give us pause. Perhaps the greatest strategic weakness of the interwar demagogues was their lack of fuel. That, indeed, was one of their motives for conquering what Hitler called "living space" from neighboring countries.
Today's demagogues, by contrast, rule oil-rich countries. This may reduce their need to acquire territory. But with oil prices stuck above $60 a barrel, it also guarantees them large payments from oil-importing countries such as the United States and gives them the means to back up their words with action. And you don't need to know a lot of history to know that hot air plus petroleum is a potentially explosive combination.
Its quite admirable how this pompous ass can get absolute tripe published by the best newspapers. Deniall is a right wing apologist for the erswhile British Empire, peddling himself to gullible Americans as an expert who can help them with their own imperialist adventures.
In this article he states that “The ancient Greek word "demagogos" means simply a spokesman for the people or, more pejoratively, a leader of the mob. Modern usage implies rhetorical gifts and the ability to arouse an audience, usually with the promise of radical measures. It is to the baser impulses of the public that a demagogue usually appeals -- hence the tendency to identify and denounce enemies of the people.”
Here is the Wikipedia definition:
“Demagogy (from Greek demos, "people", and agogos, "leading") refers to a political strategy for obtaining and gaining political power by appealing to the popular prejudices, fears, and expectations of the public — typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalistic or populist themes.
The term is commonly used as a political pejorative: political opponents are described as "demagogues", while politicians approved of are "men of the people", or "statesmen".”
And the wiki article has this quote by H. L. Mencken, who defined a demagogue as "one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."
So this in an interesting word that is being used to demonize those you disagree with. Demagogue. For Deniall Ferguson, GWB, TB, Ronald Regan (remember the Big Lie technique?) Margaret Thatcher, or that great fascist, Winston Churchill, don’t fall into this category, but anyone who denounces British / American imperialism is clearly a one. It’s this kind of simple minded propaganda that failed the Brits again and again as their empire unraveled.
_______________________
The New Demagogues
By Niall Ferguson
Washington Post
Sunday, December 3, 2006
"We are confronting the devil -- and we will hit a home run off the devil!"
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was at it again last week, demonizing his archenemy in front of throngs of loyal supporters in downtown Caracas. Forget his opponent in today's presidential elections -- that's not the "devil" he has in mind. Instead, following the example of another great Latin American demagogue, Fidel Castro, Chavez directs his rhetorical fire against the United States and President Bush.
The world over, demagogues are back, yelling their slogans and thumping their tubs.
In Latin America, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Mexico's Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have joined Chvvez in heaping opprobrium on the diabolical gringo imperialists. In the Middle East, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrallah denounce the demonic Yankee crusaders and their Zionist confederates with equal fervor. Others have different targets, but their language is no less inflammatory. In Germany, Udo Pastoers of the xenophobic National Democratic Party won a regional election after calling Europe "a cultural space for white people." In South Africa, former deputy president Jacob Zuma belts out "Mshini Wami," an anti-apartheid anthem that includes the line, "Bring me my machine gun."
Their rhetoric may seem overblown, but no one should underestimate the threat these new demagogues pose -- especially to the United States. Irrelevant in Latin America, impotent in the Middle East, ignored in Africa and isolated in Europe, Washington may be facing its biggest foreign policy crisis since the late 1970s, when the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan rocked Jimmy Carter's presidency. And this new generation of rabble-rousers is seizing the moment. The more unpopular the United States becomes, the easier it is for them to win votes by bad-mouthing Uncle Sam.
We have been here before, and it wasn't pretty. When an elected president expresses skepticism about the Holocaust and threatens to wipe the state of Israel from the map, it is not hyperbole to draw comparisons with that most disastrous of demagogues, Adolf Hitler. Like Hitler, Ahmadinejad knows that anti-Semitism is one of the aces in the demagogue's deck, a tried-and-true means of inspiring hatred and suspicion of others -- and of staying in power himself. Hitler also frequently expressed his contempt for the United States, which he dismissed as "a decayed country," racially and culturally inferior to Germany -- and, of course, ruled by Jews. Read Ahmadinejad's latest letter to "the American people," released last week, for a reprise of that theme.
And today, the conditions for truly dangerous demagogues to emerge are almost ideal.
The classic breeding grounds for demagogy are war and revolution. It is no coincidence that Ahmadinejad is a veteran of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the war between Iran and Iraq. In a new mood of "realism," the United States would now like Iran to help prevent its neighbor Iraq from collapsing into civil war. Fat chance. Ahmadinejad is bidding for Iranian hegemony in the Middle East. The last thing he needs is to be seen bailing out the Great Satan.
Severe economic volatility can also create a popular appetite for rousing rhetoric. It is significant that economic growth has been so much more variable in Latin America and the Middle East over the past 20 years than it has been in the United States. When people are buffeted by wild fluctuations in income, prices and job security, they are more likely to lose confidence in the political status quo and to heed the words of messianic leaders such as Ch?vez and Morales.
Also relevant is the level of average income. Today, per capita incomes in poorer Latin American countries and most of the Middle East are similar to those of Central Europe between the wars. (That's important, because studies suggest that a democracy's chances of survival are much higher when per capita income is above $6,000.) Illiteracy rates are probably higher than they were in Central Europe. Urbanization rates certainly are. It's an ideal environment for demagogy: masses of people, stuck between the grinding poverty of agrarian societies and the affluence of today's richest countries, living in crowded cities with lousy schools. In such settings, the center seldom holds for long. Soon the maverick speechmaker is strutting in presidential regalia.
That helps explain why so many demagogues swept to power in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s and '30s. Hitler was only one of a host of dictators who combined fiery rhetoric with colored shirts, shiny boots -- and an utter disregard for civil liberties, especially those of ethnic minorities. And that's the critical point.
History's lesson is that personal freedom is all too often the demagogue's first victim, especially when popular sentiment is whipped up against some internal or foreign enemy.
The ancient Greek word "demagogos" means simply a spokesman for the people or, more pejoratively, a leader of the mob. Modern usage implies rhetorical gifts and the ability to arouse an audience, usually with the promise of radical measures. It is to the baser impulses of the public that a demagogue usually appeals -- hence the tendency to identify and denounce enemies of the people.
Demagogy is as old as democracy, but not all democracies produce demagogues. The best known of the ancient Greek demagogues was Alcibiades, who sold his fellow Athenians the (bad) idea of conquering Sicily. The Roman Republic produced Marcus Tullius Cicero, whose devastating Philippics sought to thwart the ambitions of Julius Caesar's friend and Cleopatra's lover Mark Antony. (Cicero called Antony a "madman" who wanted a "bloodbath" in Rome.)
The term took on a new significance in the 17th century. If the English Civil War had its demagogue, it was the Puritan parliamentarian John Pym, Charles I's most vehement critic in the House of Commons -- though it was the plainspoken man of action Oliver Cromwell who emerged as dictator.
Not all revolutions produce demagogues. The American Revolution owed more to lawyerly draftsmen and amateur soldiers than to masters of rhetoric. In France, though, intemperate speechifying was the essence of the revolution. Demagogues such as Georges Danton -- nicknamed "Jove the thunderer" and one of the leaders of the Reign of Terror -- gave firebrand oratory a bad name for the better part of a century.
From the 1880s on, the widening of franchises to include poorer, less educated voters combined with a major economic slowdown to produce a new kind of demagogue: not so much a warmonger or a revolutionary as a vote-winner. The defining moment was William Ewart Gladstone's 1878 Midlothian campaign, when the British Liberal leader made a series of inspirational stump speeches aimed not just at local voters but at the nation.
But as the boom years of the industrial age gave way to deflation and depression, demagogues turned against liberalism. On the left and right alike, from socialists to anti-Semites, radical politicians discovered that the best way to mobilize new voters was to blame economic volatility on enemies of the people. In Austria, the anti-Semite Karl Lueger blamed the troubles of the Viennese petty bourgeoisie after the stock market crash of 1873 on the city's supposedly all-powerful Jews. In Russia, radical socialists such as Leon Trotsky fulminated with equal vehemence against czarism and capitalism. In every case, the demagogue pointed an accusatory finger, blaming this or that group for the sufferings of the masses. Success meant power for the demagogue, and persecution for his targets.
Small wonder, then, that the years between World Wars I and II proved to be the zenith of demagogic politics. After 1914, the world was swept first by war, then by revolutions and finally by the worst depression in economic history. Hitler was of course the arch-demagogue, a hate-filled monster and false Messiah who promised the German people redemption after years of humiliation. But in Italy, Benito Mussolini also strutted and stormed; Oswald Mosley, the renegade socialist who founded the British Union of Fascists, tried the same tricks in England. Central Europe resounded to the diatribes of a horde of similar rabble-rousers. In Poland, National Democrat leader Roman Dmowski prophesied an "international pogrom of the Jews." In Romania, the founder of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Corneliu Codreanu, pledged to "destroy the Jews before they can destroy us." Hitler was very far from the only demagogue in the 1930s to scapegoat the Jews. When he took Europe to war, he found willing collaborators all over the continent.
The good news about demagogues is that they often find it harder to deliver on election pledges than to deliver election speeches. In September, Morales's deputy, Vice President ?lvaro Garc?a Linera, called on Bolivia's indigenous people to defend Morales's government "with your chest, with your hand, with your Mauser" in response to opposition in the eastern city of Santa Cruz. Such language belies the reality that the Morales government has been forced to modify its plan to nationalize the country's energy sector (though last week it did succeed in pushing through a radical land reform bill). Economic instability and backwardness may bring demagogues to power. But they also constrain them once they get there.
Still, the fact that Chavez and Ahmadinejad sit on top of 6 percent and 11 percent of proven global oil reserves must give us pause. Perhaps the greatest strategic weakness of the interwar demagogues was their lack of fuel. That, indeed, was one of their motives for conquering what Hitler called "living space" from neighboring countries.
Today's demagogues, by contrast, rule oil-rich countries. This may reduce their need to acquire territory. But with oil prices stuck above $60 a barrel, it also guarantees them large payments from oil-importing countries such as the United States and gives them the means to back up their words with action. And you don't need to know a lot of history to know that hot air plus petroleum is a potentially explosive combination.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Crabby Leftists and frat boys
"I thought I was talking to an uneducated man, maybe from a tribal community, I mean, that's how it seemed to me.
"In our earnestness, we were trying to help women around the world."
- Linda Stein (crabby feminist)How patronizing can you get?
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Musharraf's record and the "peace treaty"
One step forward, two back
October 13, 2006
The Dawn (Pakistan)
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
SOME had feared — while others had hoped — that General Pervez Musharraf’s coup of October 12, 1999, would bring the revolution of Kemal Ataturk to a Pakistan in the iron grip of mullahs. But years later, a definitive truth has emerged. Like the other insecure governments before it, both military and civilian, the present regime also has a single-point agenda — to stay in power at all costs. It, therefore, does whatever it must and Pakistan moves further away from any prospect of acquiring modern values, and of building and strengthening democratic institutions.
The requirements for survival of the present regime are clear. On the one hand, the army leadership knows that its critical dependence upon the West requires that it be perceived abroad as a liberal regime pitted against radical Islamists. On the other hand, and in actual fact, to safeguard and extend its grip on power, it must preserve the status quo.
The staged conflicts between General Musharraf and the mullahs are, therefore, a regular part of Pakistani politics. This September, nearly seven years later, the religious parties needed no demonstration of muscle power for winning two major victories in less than a fortnight; just a few noisy threats sufficed. From experience they knew that the Pakistan army and its sagacious leader — of “enlightened moderation” fame — would stick to their predictable pattern of dealing with the Islamists. In a nutshell: provoke a fight, get the excitement going, let diplomatic missions in Islamabad make their notes and CNN and BBC get their clips — and then beat a retreat. At the end of it all, the mullahs would get what they want, but so would the general.
Examples abound. On April 21, 2000, General Musharraf announced a new administrative procedure for registration of cases under the blasphemy law. This law, under which the minimum penalty is death, has frequently been used to harass personal and political opponents. To reduce such occurrences, Musharraf’s modified procedure would have required the local district magistrate’s approval for the registration of a blasphemy case. It would have been an improvement, albeit a modest one. But 25 days later, on May 16, 2000, under the watchful glare of the mullahs, Musharraf hastily climbed down: “As it was the unanimous demand of the ulema, mashaikh and the people...I have decided to do away with the procedural change in the registration of FIR under the blasphemy law.”
Another example. In October 2004, as a new system for issuing machine readable passports was being installed, Musharraf’s government declared that henceforth it would not be necessary for passport holders to specify their religion. As expected, this was denounced by the Islamic parties as a grand conspiracy aimed at secularising Pakistan and destroying its Islamic character. But even before the mullahs actually took to the streets, the government lost nerve and announced its volte-face on March 24, 2005. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said the decision to revive the religion column was made else, “Qadianis and apostates would be able to pose as Muslims and perform pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.”
But even these climbdowns, significant as they are, are less dramatic than the astonishing recent retreat over reforming the Hudood Ordinance, a grotesque imposition of General Ziaul Haq’s government, unparalleled both for its cruelty and irrationality.
Enacted into the law in 1979, it was conceived as part of a more comprehensive process for converting Pakistan into a theocracy governed by Shariah laws. These laws prescribe death by stoning for married Muslims who are found guilty of extra-marital sex (for unmarried couples or non-Muslims, the penalty is 100 lashes). The law is exact in stating how the death penalty is to be administered: “Such of the witnesses who deposed against the convict as may be available shall start stoning him and, while stoning is being carried on, he may be shot dead, whereupon stoning and shooting shall be stopped.”
Rape is still more problematic. A woman who fails to prove that she has been raped is automatically charged with fornication and adultery. Under the Hudood law, she is considered guilty unless she can prove her innocence. Proof of innocence requires that the rape victim must produce “at least four Muslim adult male witnesses, about whom the court is satisfied” who saw the actual act of penetration. Inability to do so may result in her being jailed, or perhaps even sentenced to death for adultery.
General Musharraf, and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, proposed amending the Hudood Ordinance. They sent a draft for parliamentary discussion in early September, 2006. As expected, it outraged the fundamentalists of the MMA, the main Islamic parliamentary opposition, whose members tore up copies of the proposed amendments on the floor of the National Assembly and threatened to resign en masse. The government cowered abjectly and withdrew.
Musharraf’s government proved no more enlightened, or more moderate or more resolute, and behaved no differently from the more than half a dozen previous civilian administrations, including two under Benazir Bhutto and several ‘technocrat’ regimes. No one made a serious effort to confront or reform these laws. But the pattern is broader than deference to the mullahs. General Musharraf has been willing to use the iron fist in other circumstances. Two examples stand out: Waziristan and Balochistan. Each offers instruction.
In 2002, presumably on Washington’s instructions, the Pakistan army established military bases in South Waziristan which had become a refuge for Taliban and Al Qaeda fleeing Afghanistan. It unleashed artillery and US-supplied Cobra gunships. By 2005, heavy fighting had spread to North Waziristan and the army was bogged down.
The generals, safely removed from combat areas, and busy in building their personal empires, ascribed the resistance to “a few hundred foreign militants and terrorists”. But the army was taking losses (how serious is suggested by the fact that casualty figures were not revealed) and soldiers rarely ventured from their forts. Reportedly, local clerics refused to conduct funeral prayers for soldiers killed in action.
In 2004, the army made peace with the militants of South Waziristan. It conceded the territory to them, which made the militants immensely stronger. A similar “peace treaty” was signed on September 5, 2006, in the town of Miramshah in North Waziristan, now firmly in the grip of the Pakistani Taliban.
The Miramshah treaty met all the demands made by the militants: the release of all jailed militants; dismantling of army checkpoints; return of seized weapons and vehicles; the right of the Taliban to display weapons (except heavy weapons); and residence rights for fellow fighters from other Islamic countries. As for “foreign militants” — who Musharraf had blamed exclusively for the resistance, the militants were nonchalant: we will let you know if we find any! The financial compensation demanded by the Taliban for loss of property and life has not been revealed, but some officials have remarked that it is “astronomical”. In turn they promised to cease their attacks on civil and military installations, and to give the army a safe passage out.
While the army has extricated itself, the locals have been left to pay the price. The militants have closed girls’ schools and are enforcing harsh Shariah laws in both North and South Waziristan. Barbers have been told “shave and die”. Taliban vigilante groups patrol the streets of Miramshah. They check such things as the length of beards, whether the “shalwars” are worn at an appropriate height above the ankles and the attendance of individuals in the mosques.
And then there is Balochistan. In 1999, when the army seized power, there was no visible separatist movement in Balochistan, which makes up nearly 44 per cent of Pakistan’s land mass and is the repository of its gas and oil resources. Now there is a full-blown insurgency built upon Baloch grievances, most of which arise from a perception of being ruled from Islamabad and of being denied a fair share of the benefits of the natural resources extracted from their land.
The army has spurned negotiations. Force is the only answer: “They won’t know what hit them,” boasted Musharraf, after threatening to crush the insurgency. The army has used everything it can, including its American-supplied F-16 jet fighters. The crisis worsened when the charismatic 79-year old Baloch chieftain and former governor of Balochistan, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, was killed by army bombs. Musharraf outraged the Baloch by calling it “a great victory”. Reconciliation in Balochistan now seems a distant dream.
Musharraf and his generals are determined to stay in power. They will protect the source of their power — the army. They will accommodate those they must — the Americans. They will pander to the mullahs. They will crush those who threaten their power and privilege, and ignore the rest. No price is too high for them. They are the reason why Pakistan fails.
The writer is a professor at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
October 13, 2006
The Dawn (Pakistan)
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
SOME had feared — while others had hoped — that General Pervez Musharraf’s coup of October 12, 1999, would bring the revolution of Kemal Ataturk to a Pakistan in the iron grip of mullahs. But years later, a definitive truth has emerged. Like the other insecure governments before it, both military and civilian, the present regime also has a single-point agenda — to stay in power at all costs. It, therefore, does whatever it must and Pakistan moves further away from any prospect of acquiring modern values, and of building and strengthening democratic institutions.
The requirements for survival of the present regime are clear. On the one hand, the army leadership knows that its critical dependence upon the West requires that it be perceived abroad as a liberal regime pitted against radical Islamists. On the other hand, and in actual fact, to safeguard and extend its grip on power, it must preserve the status quo.
The staged conflicts between General Musharraf and the mullahs are, therefore, a regular part of Pakistani politics. This September, nearly seven years later, the religious parties needed no demonstration of muscle power for winning two major victories in less than a fortnight; just a few noisy threats sufficed. From experience they knew that the Pakistan army and its sagacious leader — of “enlightened moderation” fame — would stick to their predictable pattern of dealing with the Islamists. In a nutshell: provoke a fight, get the excitement going, let diplomatic missions in Islamabad make their notes and CNN and BBC get their clips — and then beat a retreat. At the end of it all, the mullahs would get what they want, but so would the general.
Examples abound. On April 21, 2000, General Musharraf announced a new administrative procedure for registration of cases under the blasphemy law. This law, under which the minimum penalty is death, has frequently been used to harass personal and political opponents. To reduce such occurrences, Musharraf’s modified procedure would have required the local district magistrate’s approval for the registration of a blasphemy case. It would have been an improvement, albeit a modest one. But 25 days later, on May 16, 2000, under the watchful glare of the mullahs, Musharraf hastily climbed down: “As it was the unanimous demand of the ulema, mashaikh and the people...I have decided to do away with the procedural change in the registration of FIR under the blasphemy law.”
Another example. In October 2004, as a new system for issuing machine readable passports was being installed, Musharraf’s government declared that henceforth it would not be necessary for passport holders to specify their religion. As expected, this was denounced by the Islamic parties as a grand conspiracy aimed at secularising Pakistan and destroying its Islamic character. But even before the mullahs actually took to the streets, the government lost nerve and announced its volte-face on March 24, 2005. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said the decision to revive the religion column was made else, “Qadianis and apostates would be able to pose as Muslims and perform pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.”
But even these climbdowns, significant as they are, are less dramatic than the astonishing recent retreat over reforming the Hudood Ordinance, a grotesque imposition of General Ziaul Haq’s government, unparalleled both for its cruelty and irrationality.
Enacted into the law in 1979, it was conceived as part of a more comprehensive process for converting Pakistan into a theocracy governed by Shariah laws. These laws prescribe death by stoning for married Muslims who are found guilty of extra-marital sex (for unmarried couples or non-Muslims, the penalty is 100 lashes). The law is exact in stating how the death penalty is to be administered: “Such of the witnesses who deposed against the convict as may be available shall start stoning him and, while stoning is being carried on, he may be shot dead, whereupon stoning and shooting shall be stopped.”
Rape is still more problematic. A woman who fails to prove that she has been raped is automatically charged with fornication and adultery. Under the Hudood law, she is considered guilty unless she can prove her innocence. Proof of innocence requires that the rape victim must produce “at least four Muslim adult male witnesses, about whom the court is satisfied” who saw the actual act of penetration. Inability to do so may result in her being jailed, or perhaps even sentenced to death for adultery.
General Musharraf, and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, proposed amending the Hudood Ordinance. They sent a draft for parliamentary discussion in early September, 2006. As expected, it outraged the fundamentalists of the MMA, the main Islamic parliamentary opposition, whose members tore up copies of the proposed amendments on the floor of the National Assembly and threatened to resign en masse. The government cowered abjectly and withdrew.
Musharraf’s government proved no more enlightened, or more moderate or more resolute, and behaved no differently from the more than half a dozen previous civilian administrations, including two under Benazir Bhutto and several ‘technocrat’ regimes. No one made a serious effort to confront or reform these laws. But the pattern is broader than deference to the mullahs. General Musharraf has been willing to use the iron fist in other circumstances. Two examples stand out: Waziristan and Balochistan. Each offers instruction.
In 2002, presumably on Washington’s instructions, the Pakistan army established military bases in South Waziristan which had become a refuge for Taliban and Al Qaeda fleeing Afghanistan. It unleashed artillery and US-supplied Cobra gunships. By 2005, heavy fighting had spread to North Waziristan and the army was bogged down.
The generals, safely removed from combat areas, and busy in building their personal empires, ascribed the resistance to “a few hundred foreign militants and terrorists”. But the army was taking losses (how serious is suggested by the fact that casualty figures were not revealed) and soldiers rarely ventured from their forts. Reportedly, local clerics refused to conduct funeral prayers for soldiers killed in action.
In 2004, the army made peace with the militants of South Waziristan. It conceded the territory to them, which made the militants immensely stronger. A similar “peace treaty” was signed on September 5, 2006, in the town of Miramshah in North Waziristan, now firmly in the grip of the Pakistani Taliban.
The Miramshah treaty met all the demands made by the militants: the release of all jailed militants; dismantling of army checkpoints; return of seized weapons and vehicles; the right of the Taliban to display weapons (except heavy weapons); and residence rights for fellow fighters from other Islamic countries. As for “foreign militants” — who Musharraf had blamed exclusively for the resistance, the militants were nonchalant: we will let you know if we find any! The financial compensation demanded by the Taliban for loss of property and life has not been revealed, but some officials have remarked that it is “astronomical”. In turn they promised to cease their attacks on civil and military installations, and to give the army a safe passage out.
While the army has extricated itself, the locals have been left to pay the price. The militants have closed girls’ schools and are enforcing harsh Shariah laws in both North and South Waziristan. Barbers have been told “shave and die”. Taliban vigilante groups patrol the streets of Miramshah. They check such things as the length of beards, whether the “shalwars” are worn at an appropriate height above the ankles and the attendance of individuals in the mosques.
And then there is Balochistan. In 1999, when the army seized power, there was no visible separatist movement in Balochistan, which makes up nearly 44 per cent of Pakistan’s land mass and is the repository of its gas and oil resources. Now there is a full-blown insurgency built upon Baloch grievances, most of which arise from a perception of being ruled from Islamabad and of being denied a fair share of the benefits of the natural resources extracted from their land.
The army has spurned negotiations. Force is the only answer: “They won’t know what hit them,” boasted Musharraf, after threatening to crush the insurgency. The army has used everything it can, including its American-supplied F-16 jet fighters. The crisis worsened when the charismatic 79-year old Baloch chieftain and former governor of Balochistan, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, was killed by army bombs. Musharraf outraged the Baloch by calling it “a great victory”. Reconciliation in Balochistan now seems a distant dream.
Musharraf and his generals are determined to stay in power. They will protect the source of their power — the army. They will accommodate those they must — the Americans. They will pander to the mullahs. They will crush those who threaten their power and privilege, and ignore the rest. No price is too high for them. They are the reason why Pakistan fails.
The writer is a professor at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
Europe's growing Problem
Europe and the Islamic World’s relations are becoming increasingly strained as incident after incident exposes the inherent contradictions between an inflexible religious fundamentalism and liberal democracy.
The European view is summarized in an October 11 article from the New York Times and the Islamic view presented in the report in a Pakistani newspaper.
_________________________________________
Across Europe, Worries on Islam Spread to Center
New York Times
October 11, 2006
By DAN BILEFSKY and IAN FISHER
BRUSSELS, Oct. 10 — Europe appears to be crossing an invisible line regarding its Muslim minorities: more people in the political mainstream are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values.
“You saw what happened with the pope,” said Patrick Gonman, 43, the owner of Raga, a funky wine bar in downtown Antwerp, 25 miles from here. “He said Islam is an aggressive religion. And the next day they kill a nun somewhere and make his point.
“Rationality is gone.”
Mr. Gonman is hardly an extremist. In fact, he organized a protest last week in which 20 bars and restaurants closed on the night when a far-right party with an anti-Muslim message held a rally nearby.
His worry is shared by centrists across Europe angry at terror attacks in the name of religion on a continent that has largely abandoned it, and disturbed that any criticism of Islam or Muslim immigration provokes threats of violence.
For years those who raised their voices were mostly on the far right. Now those normally seen as moderates — ordinary people as well as politicians — are asking whether once unquestioned values of tolerance and multiculturalism should have limits.
Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain, a prominent Labor politician, seemed to sum up the moment when he wrote last week that he felt uncomfortable addressing women whose faces were covered with a veil. The veil, he wrote, is a “visible statement of separation and difference.”
When Pope Benedict XVI made the speech last month that included a quotation calling aspects of Islam “evil and inhuman,” it seemed to unleash such feelings. Muslims berated him for stigmatizing their culture, while non-Muslims applauded him for bravely speaking a hard truth.
The line between open criticism of another group or religion and bigotry can be a thin one, and many Muslims worry that it is being crossed more and more.
Whatever the motivations, “the reality is that views on both sides are becoming more extreme,” said Imam Wahid Pedersen, a prominent Dane who is a convert to Islam. “It has become politically correct to attack Islam, and this is making it hard for moderates on both sides to remain reasonable.” Mr. Pedersen fears that onetime moderates are baiting Muslims, the very people they say should integrate into Europe.
The worries about extremism are real. The Belgian far-right party, Vlaams Belang, took 20.5 percent of the vote in city elections last Sunday, five percentage points higher than in 2000. In Antwerp, its base, though, its performance improved barely, suggesting to some experts that its power might be peaking.
In Austria this month, right-wing parties also polled well, on a campaign promise that had rarely been made openly: that Austria should start to deport its immigrants. Vlaams Belang, too, has suggested “repatriation” for immigrants who do not made greater efforts to integrate.
The idea is unthinkable to mainstream leaders, but many Muslims still fear that the day — or at least a debate on the topic — may be a terror attack away.
“I think the time will come,” said Amir Shafe, 34, a Pakistani who earns a good living selling clothes at a market in Antwerp. He deplores terrorism and said he himself did not sense hostility in Belgium. But he said, “We are now thinking of going back to our country, before that time comes.”
Many experts note that there is a deep and troubled history between Islam and Europe, with the Crusaders and the Ottoman Empire jostling each other for centuries and bloodily defining the boundaries of Christianity and Islam. A sense of guilt over Europe’s colonial past and then World War II, when intolerance exploded into mass murder, allowed a large migration to occur without any uncomfortable debates over the real differences between migrant and host.
Then the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jolted Europe into new awareness and worry.
The subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Moroccan stand as examples of the extreme. But many Europeans — even those who generally support immigration — have begun talking more bluntly about cultural differences, specifically about Muslims’ deep religious beliefs and social values, which are far more conservative than those of most Europeans on issues like women’s rights and homosexuality.
“A lot of people, progressive ones — we are not talking about nationalists or the extreme right — are saying, ‘Now we have this religion, it plays a role and it challenges our assumptions about what we learned in the 60’s and 70’s,’ ” said Joost Lagendik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the Green Left Party, who is active on Muslim issues.
“So there is this fear,” he said, “that we are being transported back in a time machine where we have to explain to our immigrants that there is equality between men and women, and gays should be treated properly. Now there is the idea we have to do it again.”
Now Europeans are discussing the limits of tolerance, the right with increasing stridency and the left with trepidation.
Austrians in their recent election complained about public schools in Vienna being nearly full with Muslim students and blamed the successive governments that allowed it to happen.
Some Dutch Muslims have expressed support for insurgents in Iraq over Dutch peacekeepers there, on the theory that their prime loyalty is to a Muslim country under invasion.
So strong is the fear that Dutch values of tolerance are under siege that the government last winter introduced a primer on those values for prospective newcomers to Dutch life: a DVD briefly showing topless women and two men kissing. The film does not explicitly mention Muslims, but its target audience is as clear as its message: embrace our culture or leave.
Perhaps most wrenching has been the issue of free speech and expression, and the growing fear that any criticism of Islam could provoke violence.
In France last month, a high school teacher went into hiding after receiving death threats for writing an article calling the Prophet Muhammad “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass murderer of Jews and a polygamist.” In Germany a Mozart opera with a scene of Muhammad’s severed head was canceled because of security fears.
With each incident, mainstream leaders are speaking more plainly. “Self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practice violence in the name of Islam,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in criticizing the opera’s cancellation. “It makes no sense to retreat.”
The backlash is revealing itself in other ways. Last month the British home secretary, John Reid, called on Muslim parents to keep a close watch on their children. “There’s no nice way of saying this,” he told a Muslim group in East London. “These fanatics are looking to groom and brainwash children, including your children, for suicide bombing, grooming them to kill themselves to murder others.”
Many Muslims say this new mood is suddenly imposing expectations that never existed before that Muslims be exactly like their European hosts.
Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Lebanese-born activist here in Belgium, said that for years Europeans had emphasized “citizenship and human rights,” the notion that Muslim immigrants had the responsibility to obey the law but could otherwise live with their traditions.
“Then someone comes and says it’s different than that,” said Mr. Jahjah, who opposes assimilation. “You have to dump your culture and religion. It’s a different deal now.”
Lianne Duinberke, 34, who works at a market in the racially mixed northern section of Antwerp, said: “Before I was very eager to tell people I was married to a Muslim. Now I hesitate.” She has been with her husband, a Tunisian, for 12 years, and they have three children.
Many Europeans, she said, have not been accepting of Muslims, especially since 9/11. On the other hand, she said, Muslims truly are different culturally: No amount of explanation about free speech could convince her husband that the publication of cartoons lampooning Muhammad in a Danish newspaper was in any way justified.
When asked if she was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of Muslim immigration in Europe , she found it hard to answer. She finally gave a defeated smile. “I am trying to be optimistic,” she said. “But if you see the global problems before the people, then you really can’t be.”
Dan Bilefsky reported from Brussels, and Ian Fisher from Rome. Contributing were Sarah Lyall and Alan Cowell from London, Mark Landler from Frankfurt, Peter Kiefer from Rome, Renwick McLean from Madrid and Maia de la Baume from Paris.
___________________________________________________________
Islam, Muslims and Europe
The News (Pakistan)
October 6, 2006
By Dr Muzaffar Iqbal
As we entered the mosque of Córdoba I realised its isolation from its historical environ that once housed almost eighty thousand shops and workshops of artisans; there was nothing left of the marvellous public baths and inns which once surrounded the mosque. The multitudes of citizens, merchants, and mules passing over the bridge over the Great River (Guadalquiver) into the centre of the city were nowhere to be seen. Instead, there were throngs of tourists. In spite of this, the mosque still opens doorways to the numerous connections it once had with Islamic spirituality and sciences and practical arts.
Now, however, one has to use one's imagination to understand these intricate connections, because even the interior of this monumental mosque is not what it used to be; the presence of a "dark church structure that was built between the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and arbitrarily placed at the centre of the light forest of pillars like a giant black spider", as Titus Burchardt once remarked, makes it extremely difficult to clearly distinguish the features of the mosque which once looked like a broad grove of palm trees.
The mosque also stands today without the fabulous royal city, Madinat al-Zahrah, which once provided the backdrop to the city of Cordoba. The famous library of al-Hakam II, with its 400,000 volumes -- many of them containing annotations about their authors in his own hand -- is also gone. The mosque now lacks the traditional courtyard with fountains where the faithful once performed ablution before prayers. But some things still remain, and among them are the prayer niche and the marvellous array of columns and arches with their hypnotic symmetry.
Throngs of tourists take pictures and drift slowly toward the front part of the mosque, through hundreds of pillars, linked by horseshoe-shaped arches. The upper arches are heavier than the lower ones and the abutments of both increases in size with the height of the pillars. The pillars are reminiscent of palm branches, which the Arab rulers of al-Andalus missed in their new land. As we move toward the famed prayer niche the darkness of the interior of the building increases. Once, the area near the prayer niche was the brightest in the mosque.
As we arrive at the seven-sided prayer niche, its many intricate features become obvious. So many aspects of traditional Islamic sciences, arts, and architectural motifs are built into that small area that one can still see a whole civilisation reflected in the prayer niche of the mosque. There is a unique space inside the niche, where the word of God was once recited, a space that evokes awe and reminds one of the mysterious niche of light passage in the celebrated 'Light Verse' of the Holy Quran (24:35).
The fluted shell-like vault, designed to create extraordinary acoustics for the transmission of the recitation of the Holy Quran to the far corners of the mosque, and the horseshoe shaped arch that seems to breathe "as if expanding with a surfeit of inner beatitude, while the rectangular frame enclosing it acts as a counterbalance. The radiating energy and the perfect stillness from an unsurpassable equilibrium."
Today, the mosque of Cordoba stands as a symbol of something far greater than Islamic architecture. This extraordinary mosque, which has remained an enduring source of inspiration and reflection for countless poets and writers (including Iqbal whose poem on the mosque is a masterpiece), today stands as a symbol of Europe's dilemma which it has unwittingly created for itself: what to do with Islam and Muslims. As if to present an immediate example of European intolerance, a Spanish guard rushes toward my fourteen-year-old son as he stands in a corner to offer two rakah prayers.
The Spanish guard incessantly argues that this is not a mosque. I point toward the prayer niche, the beautiful columns, and the entire layout of the marvellous structure where once hundreds of men, women and children prayed, but he sees nothing but the artificially placed dark spider-like building of the Church in the middle of the mosque. "It is a church," he insists.
Our arguments become heated; many other guards rush toward us. I insist on our inalienable right to pray in a building that was constructed for that purpose; they insist that it is not allowed. "Who does not allow it?" I ask. "The authorities." "Can I talk to the authorities?" "No, they are not available".
Finally, they physically stop the prayer and surround us wherever we go inside the mosque. They cannot throw us out of the building, but that is exactly what is on their minds. One more move on our part, and they will have the excuse needed to take that ultimate step.
This episode is a reflection in miniature of the situation of Muslims in Europe today. Some twenty millions of men, women, and children living in this self-proclaimed centre of the civilised world are facing a slow and steady build-up of intolerance, mass hysteria, and state laws which may cut-short their precarious lives built on dreams, hopes, and sheer hard labour over three generations.
Islam and Muslims in Europe have become a dilemma for Europe, which it does not quite know how to deal. After the reconquest of Spain, summary executions, forced conversions, and mass deportations were chosen as the solution to eliminate Muslim presence from this part of Europe. Today, the sheer number of Muslims makes this an impossibility. Yet, state after state, Europe is passing laws that are making it harder for Muslims to practice their religion. The extent of intolerance is such that even a little piece of cloth on the head is considered a threat. Where would this situation lead to?
When the German-born Pope Benedict XVI, known as Joseph Alois Ratzinger prior to his assumption of the highest office of the Catholic Church, insisted that Turkey must not aspire to become a member of the European Union, his reasoning was that Turkey belongs to the Islamic world, whereas Europe belongs to Christianity. This reasoning was based on a historical situation that, in the Pope's mind, is inviolable. Absurd as it may seem, the Pope seems to believe that the earth is divided into religious zones which cannot change. One is reminded of Musailmah the Liar, who once wrote to the Prophet of Islam that "God has divided the world into two; one half belongs to you, the other to me". The Prophet's response was to remind him that the earth belongs to God alone, He gives dominion over it to whomsoever He chooses, and woe unto the liars.
Historical as well as contemporary realities are somewhat different from the pope's version of Europe. Muslim presence in Europe is not new. It is true that the wave of conquest that brought Islam to much of the old world stopped just inside the doorsteps of Europe, but Muslims have remained inside that threshold for centuries. Albania is a European country, with a population of 3.1 million out of which 2.2 million are Muslim. Muslim presence in Spain was violently cut short in the fifteenth century, but it has left permanent reminders of Islam and Muslims in that beautiful land. This may be history the pope does not want to recall, but what can be done about some twenty million Muslims now living in Europe? This situation is increasingly gaining centre-stage in Europe as state after state confronts its Muslim population with repressive laws.
For Muslims, the current situation is unprecedented in their long history; they have always gone to new lands as conquerors and rulers. For the first time in history, some twenty million Muslims are now living in non-Muslim societies as minorities, struggling to have basic rights. They arrived as immigrants from colonized lands, they worked hard to establish themselves, and their second and third generations have known no home other than Europe. They speak local languages, been educated in state institutions and despite everything, most have kept their faith, and that is the real issue.
Most western European countries insist on "integration". This insistence is in direct conflict with their own claims of being civilised and enlightened societies, for what they are actually asking is for some of their citizens to become invisible members of a society in which every other group is visible; even those who belong to the fringes of society have rights to be visible, but not Muslims. Hence the little piece of cloth on a woman's head becomes a great issue.
France and Germany are two frontline states struggling to "integrate" their Muslim citizens into mainstream society. Both countries are insisting on total integration. This could be considered another name for religious cleansing, for "integration" in this context means loss of identity as members of the Muslim community. By insisting on "integration" these states are actually demanding that millions of their citizens give up a large part of their religious beliefs and practices. This is a sophisticated form of inquisition.
Under the disguise of fighting extremism and terrorism, these European states have invented their own form of terrorism. An elaborate system of espionage, infiltration into the community, and visible and invisible control of mosques and mosque-committees has been devised to ensure that Muslim communities remain under state surveillance. In France, where every tenth person is a Muslim, the state has actually succeeded in controlling the appointment of imams and, through them, the Friday khutbas, Sunday school curriculum, and many other aspects of community life.
For European Muslims, the present situation demands that they learn to survive in a hostile environment. Their communities are composed of diverse racial and cultural elements, with a great deal of internal disharmony, and certain voices from within are actually calling for a "European Islam"--just the kind of thing the state wants to see. These sinister elements are attempting to mould Islam to fit Europe
No Muslim country has paid much attention to the plight of European Muslims. Beyond the violent, irrational, and short-term street demonstrations against cartoons or the pope's recent speech, there is little understanding of the real issues involved. One does not expect any government in the Muslim world to take a stand on this issue, but at least non-governmental institutions, so-called Islamic political parties, and the media should take up this issue at national and international levels. It is an issue concerned with human rights; an issue which warrants greater attention than what it has received so far.
It can be argued that the plight of European Muslims is an internal matter of those states and thus cannot be taken up at any international forum. This argument is false for two reasons. Europe (and the United States) has never respected the boundaries set by this international code, as countless interventions--even regime changes--testify. Second, and more importantly, Muslims cannot remain aloof from the situation of their brethren and sisters in faith because to do so itself compromises their religious duties; both the Holy Quran and Sunnah require them to actively participate in each other's lives.
Muslim communities in Europe need support against the tyranny of their own states; their plight is not the internal issue of these states but a human rights issue. They face a situation which has far-reaching consequences for the entire Muslim world.
The European view is summarized in an October 11 article from the New York Times and the Islamic view presented in the report in a Pakistani newspaper.
_________________________________________
Across Europe, Worries on Islam Spread to Center
New York Times
October 11, 2006
By DAN BILEFSKY and IAN FISHER
BRUSSELS, Oct. 10 — Europe appears to be crossing an invisible line regarding its Muslim minorities: more people in the political mainstream are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values.
“You saw what happened with the pope,” said Patrick Gonman, 43, the owner of Raga, a funky wine bar in downtown Antwerp, 25 miles from here. “He said Islam is an aggressive religion. And the next day they kill a nun somewhere and make his point.
“Rationality is gone.”
Mr. Gonman is hardly an extremist. In fact, he organized a protest last week in which 20 bars and restaurants closed on the night when a far-right party with an anti-Muslim message held a rally nearby.
His worry is shared by centrists across Europe angry at terror attacks in the name of religion on a continent that has largely abandoned it, and disturbed that any criticism of Islam or Muslim immigration provokes threats of violence.
For years those who raised their voices were mostly on the far right. Now those normally seen as moderates — ordinary people as well as politicians — are asking whether once unquestioned values of tolerance and multiculturalism should have limits.
Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain, a prominent Labor politician, seemed to sum up the moment when he wrote last week that he felt uncomfortable addressing women whose faces were covered with a veil. The veil, he wrote, is a “visible statement of separation and difference.”
When Pope Benedict XVI made the speech last month that included a quotation calling aspects of Islam “evil and inhuman,” it seemed to unleash such feelings. Muslims berated him for stigmatizing their culture, while non-Muslims applauded him for bravely speaking a hard truth.
The line between open criticism of another group or religion and bigotry can be a thin one, and many Muslims worry that it is being crossed more and more.
Whatever the motivations, “the reality is that views on both sides are becoming more extreme,” said Imam Wahid Pedersen, a prominent Dane who is a convert to Islam. “It has become politically correct to attack Islam, and this is making it hard for moderates on both sides to remain reasonable.” Mr. Pedersen fears that onetime moderates are baiting Muslims, the very people they say should integrate into Europe.
The worries about extremism are real. The Belgian far-right party, Vlaams Belang, took 20.5 percent of the vote in city elections last Sunday, five percentage points higher than in 2000. In Antwerp, its base, though, its performance improved barely, suggesting to some experts that its power might be peaking.
In Austria this month, right-wing parties also polled well, on a campaign promise that had rarely been made openly: that Austria should start to deport its immigrants. Vlaams Belang, too, has suggested “repatriation” for immigrants who do not made greater efforts to integrate.
The idea is unthinkable to mainstream leaders, but many Muslims still fear that the day — or at least a debate on the topic — may be a terror attack away.
“I think the time will come,” said Amir Shafe, 34, a Pakistani who earns a good living selling clothes at a market in Antwerp. He deplores terrorism and said he himself did not sense hostility in Belgium. But he said, “We are now thinking of going back to our country, before that time comes.”
Many experts note that there is a deep and troubled history between Islam and Europe, with the Crusaders and the Ottoman Empire jostling each other for centuries and bloodily defining the boundaries of Christianity and Islam. A sense of guilt over Europe’s colonial past and then World War II, when intolerance exploded into mass murder, allowed a large migration to occur without any uncomfortable debates over the real differences between migrant and host.
Then the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jolted Europe into new awareness and worry.
The subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Moroccan stand as examples of the extreme. But many Europeans — even those who generally support immigration — have begun talking more bluntly about cultural differences, specifically about Muslims’ deep religious beliefs and social values, which are far more conservative than those of most Europeans on issues like women’s rights and homosexuality.
“A lot of people, progressive ones — we are not talking about nationalists or the extreme right — are saying, ‘Now we have this religion, it plays a role and it challenges our assumptions about what we learned in the 60’s and 70’s,’ ” said Joost Lagendik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the Green Left Party, who is active on Muslim issues.
“So there is this fear,” he said, “that we are being transported back in a time machine where we have to explain to our immigrants that there is equality between men and women, and gays should be treated properly. Now there is the idea we have to do it again.”
Now Europeans are discussing the limits of tolerance, the right with increasing stridency and the left with trepidation.
Austrians in their recent election complained about public schools in Vienna being nearly full with Muslim students and blamed the successive governments that allowed it to happen.
Some Dutch Muslims have expressed support for insurgents in Iraq over Dutch peacekeepers there, on the theory that their prime loyalty is to a Muslim country under invasion.
So strong is the fear that Dutch values of tolerance are under siege that the government last winter introduced a primer on those values for prospective newcomers to Dutch life: a DVD briefly showing topless women and two men kissing. The film does not explicitly mention Muslims, but its target audience is as clear as its message: embrace our culture or leave.
Perhaps most wrenching has been the issue of free speech and expression, and the growing fear that any criticism of Islam could provoke violence.
In France last month, a high school teacher went into hiding after receiving death threats for writing an article calling the Prophet Muhammad “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass murderer of Jews and a polygamist.” In Germany a Mozart opera with a scene of Muhammad’s severed head was canceled because of security fears.
With each incident, mainstream leaders are speaking more plainly. “Self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practice violence in the name of Islam,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in criticizing the opera’s cancellation. “It makes no sense to retreat.”
The backlash is revealing itself in other ways. Last month the British home secretary, John Reid, called on Muslim parents to keep a close watch on their children. “There’s no nice way of saying this,” he told a Muslim group in East London. “These fanatics are looking to groom and brainwash children, including your children, for suicide bombing, grooming them to kill themselves to murder others.”
Many Muslims say this new mood is suddenly imposing expectations that never existed before that Muslims be exactly like their European hosts.
Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Lebanese-born activist here in Belgium, said that for years Europeans had emphasized “citizenship and human rights,” the notion that Muslim immigrants had the responsibility to obey the law but could otherwise live with their traditions.
“Then someone comes and says it’s different than that,” said Mr. Jahjah, who opposes assimilation. “You have to dump your culture and religion. It’s a different deal now.”
Lianne Duinberke, 34, who works at a market in the racially mixed northern section of Antwerp, said: “Before I was very eager to tell people I was married to a Muslim. Now I hesitate.” She has been with her husband, a Tunisian, for 12 years, and they have three children.
Many Europeans, she said, have not been accepting of Muslims, especially since 9/11. On the other hand, she said, Muslims truly are different culturally: No amount of explanation about free speech could convince her husband that the publication of cartoons lampooning Muhammad in a Danish newspaper was in any way justified.
When asked if she was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of Muslim immigration in Europe , she found it hard to answer. She finally gave a defeated smile. “I am trying to be optimistic,” she said. “But if you see the global problems before the people, then you really can’t be.”
Dan Bilefsky reported from Brussels, and Ian Fisher from Rome. Contributing were Sarah Lyall and Alan Cowell from London, Mark Landler from Frankfurt, Peter Kiefer from Rome, Renwick McLean from Madrid and Maia de la Baume from Paris.
___________________________________________________________
Islam, Muslims and Europe
The News (Pakistan)
October 6, 2006
By Dr Muzaffar Iqbal
As we entered the mosque of Córdoba I realised its isolation from its historical environ that once housed almost eighty thousand shops and workshops of artisans; there was nothing left of the marvellous public baths and inns which once surrounded the mosque. The multitudes of citizens, merchants, and mules passing over the bridge over the Great River (Guadalquiver) into the centre of the city were nowhere to be seen. Instead, there were throngs of tourists. In spite of this, the mosque still opens doorways to the numerous connections it once had with Islamic spirituality and sciences and practical arts.
Now, however, one has to use one's imagination to understand these intricate connections, because even the interior of this monumental mosque is not what it used to be; the presence of a "dark church structure that was built between the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and arbitrarily placed at the centre of the light forest of pillars like a giant black spider", as Titus Burchardt once remarked, makes it extremely difficult to clearly distinguish the features of the mosque which once looked like a broad grove of palm trees.
The mosque also stands today without the fabulous royal city, Madinat al-Zahrah, which once provided the backdrop to the city of Cordoba. The famous library of al-Hakam II, with its 400,000 volumes -- many of them containing annotations about their authors in his own hand -- is also gone. The mosque now lacks the traditional courtyard with fountains where the faithful once performed ablution before prayers. But some things still remain, and among them are the prayer niche and the marvellous array of columns and arches with their hypnotic symmetry.
Throngs of tourists take pictures and drift slowly toward the front part of the mosque, through hundreds of pillars, linked by horseshoe-shaped arches. The upper arches are heavier than the lower ones and the abutments of both increases in size with the height of the pillars. The pillars are reminiscent of palm branches, which the Arab rulers of al-Andalus missed in their new land. As we move toward the famed prayer niche the darkness of the interior of the building increases. Once, the area near the prayer niche was the brightest in the mosque.
As we arrive at the seven-sided prayer niche, its many intricate features become obvious. So many aspects of traditional Islamic sciences, arts, and architectural motifs are built into that small area that one can still see a whole civilisation reflected in the prayer niche of the mosque. There is a unique space inside the niche, where the word of God was once recited, a space that evokes awe and reminds one of the mysterious niche of light passage in the celebrated 'Light Verse' of the Holy Quran (24:35).
The fluted shell-like vault, designed to create extraordinary acoustics for the transmission of the recitation of the Holy Quran to the far corners of the mosque, and the horseshoe shaped arch that seems to breathe "as if expanding with a surfeit of inner beatitude, while the rectangular frame enclosing it acts as a counterbalance. The radiating energy and the perfect stillness from an unsurpassable equilibrium."
Today, the mosque of Cordoba stands as a symbol of something far greater than Islamic architecture. This extraordinary mosque, which has remained an enduring source of inspiration and reflection for countless poets and writers (including Iqbal whose poem on the mosque is a masterpiece), today stands as a symbol of Europe's dilemma which it has unwittingly created for itself: what to do with Islam and Muslims. As if to present an immediate example of European intolerance, a Spanish guard rushes toward my fourteen-year-old son as he stands in a corner to offer two rakah prayers.
The Spanish guard incessantly argues that this is not a mosque. I point toward the prayer niche, the beautiful columns, and the entire layout of the marvellous structure where once hundreds of men, women and children prayed, but he sees nothing but the artificially placed dark spider-like building of the Church in the middle of the mosque. "It is a church," he insists.
Our arguments become heated; many other guards rush toward us. I insist on our inalienable right to pray in a building that was constructed for that purpose; they insist that it is not allowed. "Who does not allow it?" I ask. "The authorities." "Can I talk to the authorities?" "No, they are not available".
Finally, they physically stop the prayer and surround us wherever we go inside the mosque. They cannot throw us out of the building, but that is exactly what is on their minds. One more move on our part, and they will have the excuse needed to take that ultimate step.
This episode is a reflection in miniature of the situation of Muslims in Europe today. Some twenty millions of men, women, and children living in this self-proclaimed centre of the civilised world are facing a slow and steady build-up of intolerance, mass hysteria, and state laws which may cut-short their precarious lives built on dreams, hopes, and sheer hard labour over three generations.
Islam and Muslims in Europe have become a dilemma for Europe, which it does not quite know how to deal. After the reconquest of Spain, summary executions, forced conversions, and mass deportations were chosen as the solution to eliminate Muslim presence from this part of Europe. Today, the sheer number of Muslims makes this an impossibility. Yet, state after state, Europe is passing laws that are making it harder for Muslims to practice their religion. The extent of intolerance is such that even a little piece of cloth on the head is considered a threat. Where would this situation lead to?
When the German-born Pope Benedict XVI, known as Joseph Alois Ratzinger prior to his assumption of the highest office of the Catholic Church, insisted that Turkey must not aspire to become a member of the European Union, his reasoning was that Turkey belongs to the Islamic world, whereas Europe belongs to Christianity. This reasoning was based on a historical situation that, in the Pope's mind, is inviolable. Absurd as it may seem, the Pope seems to believe that the earth is divided into religious zones which cannot change. One is reminded of Musailmah the Liar, who once wrote to the Prophet of Islam that "God has divided the world into two; one half belongs to you, the other to me". The Prophet's response was to remind him that the earth belongs to God alone, He gives dominion over it to whomsoever He chooses, and woe unto the liars.
Historical as well as contemporary realities are somewhat different from the pope's version of Europe. Muslim presence in Europe is not new. It is true that the wave of conquest that brought Islam to much of the old world stopped just inside the doorsteps of Europe, but Muslims have remained inside that threshold for centuries. Albania is a European country, with a population of 3.1 million out of which 2.2 million are Muslim. Muslim presence in Spain was violently cut short in the fifteenth century, but it has left permanent reminders of Islam and Muslims in that beautiful land. This may be history the pope does not want to recall, but what can be done about some twenty million Muslims now living in Europe? This situation is increasingly gaining centre-stage in Europe as state after state confronts its Muslim population with repressive laws.
For Muslims, the current situation is unprecedented in their long history; they have always gone to new lands as conquerors and rulers. For the first time in history, some twenty million Muslims are now living in non-Muslim societies as minorities, struggling to have basic rights. They arrived as immigrants from colonized lands, they worked hard to establish themselves, and their second and third generations have known no home other than Europe. They speak local languages, been educated in state institutions and despite everything, most have kept their faith, and that is the real issue.
Most western European countries insist on "integration". This insistence is in direct conflict with their own claims of being civilised and enlightened societies, for what they are actually asking is for some of their citizens to become invisible members of a society in which every other group is visible; even those who belong to the fringes of society have rights to be visible, but not Muslims. Hence the little piece of cloth on a woman's head becomes a great issue.
France and Germany are two frontline states struggling to "integrate" their Muslim citizens into mainstream society. Both countries are insisting on total integration. This could be considered another name for religious cleansing, for "integration" in this context means loss of identity as members of the Muslim community. By insisting on "integration" these states are actually demanding that millions of their citizens give up a large part of their religious beliefs and practices. This is a sophisticated form of inquisition.
Under the disguise of fighting extremism and terrorism, these European states have invented their own form of terrorism. An elaborate system of espionage, infiltration into the community, and visible and invisible control of mosques and mosque-committees has been devised to ensure that Muslim communities remain under state surveillance. In France, where every tenth person is a Muslim, the state has actually succeeded in controlling the appointment of imams and, through them, the Friday khutbas, Sunday school curriculum, and many other aspects of community life.
For European Muslims, the present situation demands that they learn to survive in a hostile environment. Their communities are composed of diverse racial and cultural elements, with a great deal of internal disharmony, and certain voices from within are actually calling for a "European Islam"--just the kind of thing the state wants to see. These sinister elements are attempting to mould Islam to fit Europe
No Muslim country has paid much attention to the plight of European Muslims. Beyond the violent, irrational, and short-term street demonstrations against cartoons or the pope's recent speech, there is little understanding of the real issues involved. One does not expect any government in the Muslim world to take a stand on this issue, but at least non-governmental institutions, so-called Islamic political parties, and the media should take up this issue at national and international levels. It is an issue concerned with human rights; an issue which warrants greater attention than what it has received so far.
It can be argued that the plight of European Muslims is an internal matter of those states and thus cannot be taken up at any international forum. This argument is false for two reasons. Europe (and the United States) has never respected the boundaries set by this international code, as countless interventions--even regime changes--testify. Second, and more importantly, Muslims cannot remain aloof from the situation of their brethren and sisters in faith because to do so itself compromises their religious duties; both the Holy Quran and Sunnah require them to actively participate in each other's lives.
Muslim communities in Europe need support against the tyranny of their own states; their plight is not the internal issue of these states but a human rights issue. They face a situation which has far-reaching consequences for the entire Muslim world.
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