David Walsh writes at WSWS

On April 20, the New York Times published a lengthy article by investigative reporter David Barstow detailing the US Defense Department’s extensive and ongoing program of manipulating news coverage of the Iraq war. The article provides a glimpse into the intimate connections between the government, military and mass media and the means by which they have attempted to package and sell a neo-colonial war to the US population.

Barstow writes that the record indicates a “symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.” Essentially, the US mass media has allowed itself to become little more than a propaganda instrument of American militarism.

According to the April 20 piece, more than 75 retired officers have been coached by government and military officials to ‘spin’ the news about Iraq—or simply lie—on countless network and cable channel news programs and talk shows over the course of the past five years or more. Fox News has led the way in presenting these individuals to the public, but NBC, CNN, CBS and ABC have followed suit. (more…)

Herat Hami

A poem by Wimalaratne Kumaragame (a translation)

Herat Hami who lived in Aliya Watunu Wawe*1
Even someone like me was more important than him
Though Harat Hami cut dead bodies*2
He was twenty, thirty times more decent than me
In the hospital of Aliya Watunu Wawe
He spent his time removing night soil
Though he lived happily with a monthly salary
Whenever I saw him I was moved with sadness

A hard, wiry body, handsome and thin
Not much of age, fresh and young
No wife as yet
I was perplexed by the job he did

Making someone like me sad
Each day he carried my excrement
If someone dies suddenly
Doctor comes
He cut the dead bodies in front of us

None from the farmer, worker or elite caste
Ever did such a job
No known disease of mind he had
He did no harm to any dwellers of the forest

He spread a docile smile
Every word of his spread ahimsa
Every evening he drank burning water
His heart overflowed with kindness

His sister was stabbed
Recalling her my eyes get wet
He did not cry the day his sister died
When she had a fever he wailed with tears in his eyes

When his younger sister died he went with a doctor
Her dead body was cut by Herat Hami
Though the villagers blamed him in harsh words for this
He did not care much about the world’s violent flesh
As he was not born in a rich mansion
He went to the temple at every Poya
He was a member of the newly built stupa
Even more than that he respected Iyyenayaka*3

Translation by Basil Fernando (more…)

I hold no brief for the Taliban. They have enraged the world and brought much shame to Muslims and dare I say the great religion Islam as well. In fact, I detest their version of Islamic codes that they want to impose on the world through coercion.

However, the NATO battle against Taliban is not only barbaric in equal intesnity but it also dehumanizes them.

Mr Ali Khan of Washburn University School of Law sent his piece that is eloquent, and extremely well argued. Ali Khan says that in the name of the “war of terror,” NATO forces are “committing genocide in Afghanistan by systematically hunting down and destroying” the Taliban, in violation of the terms of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide…

These sentences are chilling:

Politicians, the armed forces, the media, and even the general public associate in the West the Taliban with irrational fanatics, intolerant fundamentalists, brutal assassins, beheaders of women, bearded extremists, and terrorists. This luminescent negativity paves the way for aggression, military operations, and genocide. Promoting the predatory doctrine of collective self-defense, killing the Taliban is celebrated as a legal virtue..”

THe West should remember that this will not solve the issue of terrorism or militancy - whatever one may want to name it - in fact such wars cause more pain, create more martyrs and legends and motivate people to resist - theyhave nothing to lose in the first place. And, the history of Afghanistan spells out some clear lessons for the current imperial powers.

Read his full article below. (more…)

Globally, the Tibet issue has been blown beyond belief by the media. I am compelled to ask that over one million civilians are dead in Iraq for no reason - no weapons of mass destruction and no chemical weapon stockpiles have been discovered - there is a stench of corpses and ashes everywhere. A civilisation has been destroyed, ruined. Has anyone inquired about this barbaric conduct of the so-called “civilised” West?

Has anyone questioned why all laws, rights, Geneva conventions are being violated at the Guantanamo Bay; and why there is a genocide of sorts underway in Afghanistan. (more…)

My city Lahore was attacked yet again by the pusillanimous attackers pretending to be brave and honourable. There is no justification and no excuse for this modus operandi. And it should not be tolerated by the state and the people. Any excuse would legitimise this reign of terror..

I am posting this excellent piece by the wise Khalid Hasan (Daily Times) that makes some excellent points on the menace of Jihad and how unholy it is -

 Leaders of Salafi-jihadist organisations hypocritically preach about the benefits of martyrdom, but rarely, if ever, conduct suicide operations themselves, or send their loved ones on such missions. It is a fact that Al Qaeda and associated groups offer no vision for Muslims other than perennial jihad, hardly an appealing prospect

Jihad is now an industry among scholars, including those who masquerade as scholars but are actually in the service of more shadowy outfits, and those who believe that by blowing up people praying in mosques or families out shopping, they will not only serve God but win a point-to-point ticket to the pastures of heaven where seventy-two swooning virgins await their arrival. (more…)

This is an astounding figure. Not to mention the loss of over 1 million civilians, the sectarian blood-baths, the destruction of a civilisation and reduction of a country to rubble..

And, this economic cost is just a little part of this sordid, ugly tale of our times. Naomi Spencer writes:

Stiglitz said the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion for the US alone. Another estimated $6 trillion will be borne by other countries, he said.

…More than a million civilians have been killed in Iraq alone. Some 4.5 million more have been displaced by the violence, with thousands of refugees fleeing the country into Syria, Jordan and elsewhere every day. With $3-5 trillion, the US government has destroyed an entire society. (more…)

This is a poignant song by Cass Dillon and Billy Joel - sometimes such glimmers of hope make one happy in a dark world.

In an article entitled On Raja Paurava and Alexander, Salman Rashid writes:

We do not celebrate Paurava; we name no roads after him and do not teach our children of his lofty character because he shines in our pre-Islamic darkness. But can we today name even one leader possessed of just a shadow of the integrity and character shown by Raja Paurava?

I lament that we in Pakistan, those of us whose ancestors converted to Islam, insist on denying our pre-conversion history. For us, it simply does not exist. We invent tales of imaginary ancestors having arrived in the subcontinent duly converted to the ‘one and only true faith’ from some place in Iran or Central Asia. Pride of place of course goes to all those who subscribe to the yarn of their ancestors’ heroic overland trek direct from Mecca. I know of families who possess genealogical charts connecting them to prophets of yore and, in one case, even to Adam himself! (more…)

Pearapong Khireewong is an extremely talented artist who hails from Southern Thailand and has captured the pathos of the bullets that were sprayed on the local population (more…)

It is disturbing that there is no writ of the government in Swat - otherwise a stunningly beautiful valley. Considering that the army is engaged in a battle with the militants in these areas, the Buddhist relics would be least of government’s priorities.

Yet, they are not unimportant. In fact, it is imperative that the government should protect them as a symbol of our rich past and to send a message to the lunatics who pretend that the cause of [their] Islam would be served. Nonsense - in this day and age and in an overwhelmingly Muslim majority area. What threat they pose and whose ‘eemaan’ is endangered?

It is painful to see how a bunch of extremists are pushing us towards that.

A dynamic and enlightened friend suggests that we should write here, here and UNESCO to register our protest. Notwithstanding the limited chances of any action or corrective measures, at least we would have made the effort!

Please also see my earlier plea[s]:

Death of Pakistani Culture, Our endangered heritage, Saving heritage, Architectural neglect  

Fisk on the long term impact of Iraq tragedy: 

2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq’s historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.

Evidence amassed by archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein’s regime are now using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through the ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures

Read the full article here

Alan Greenspan — the former chief of the US central bank, for years an inscrutable seer on the economy — has outraged the Bush administration by alleging in his new memoir that “the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Read the full text here

It is just too late, Mr Greenspan. After a million people dead, remnants of an ancient civilization and culture wiped out, the sectarian monster unleashed and the world fractured, this little home-truth might be a sensation for the doctored media.

Most of knew the underlying motive for this criminal war..

(having said that - better late than never)

Update: A good editorial from the Daily Times:

When the Administration reacted angrily, Mr Greenspan himself found it “politically inconvenient” to stick to his clear pronouncement, but his “verdict” has gone and mixed with the vortex of opinion complaining about the Bush Administration’s “oil barons” falling on Iraq for its oil. To count just the people at the top, President George W Bush himself, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have close links to the American oil industry, also called the Big Oil.

The revelation contained in a recent UN report on Afghanistan that “more than 80 per cent” of suicide bombers in Afghanistan are recruited and trained in Pakistan may well be perceived by many as an indictment of Islamabad’s failure to effectively tackle the menace of Taliban insurgents operating in Afghanistan from inside Pakistani territory as well as the issue of safe havens for militants in parts of the tribal areas. The report, based on interviews with attackers who failed to carry out their suicide missions, also said that most of them were poor, young and uneducated and that suicide attacks in that country for the first eight months of 2007 were up 69 per cent compared to the same period last year. This only tends to reinforce the view that the best way — of course it is more long term in nature — to prevent suicide attacks from happening, in or outside Pakistan, is to have in place policies that effectively reduce the incidence of poverty and at the same time seek to achieve universal literacy.

An individual who has to his credit some level of formal schooling has more chances of getting a job and earning a decent livelihood than one who has no such education. Furthermore, the kind of education being imparted in many of the country’s madressahs is so out of tune with the practical demands of the job market that enrolment in such institutions is not a good alternative to a mainstream school. Besides, many madressahs retain links with extremist/banned organisations and tend to provide the kind of environment and ‘teaching’ that allow easy indoctrination and recruitment of would-be suicide bombers. This means that madressah reform, since long a neglected matter in this country, needs to be taken up with some seriousness, so that the potential of these institutions to produce intolerant brainwashed automatons, who are more likely to go on to become suicide attackers, is diminished.

The UN report also correctly notes the role played by Afghan refugee camps and how networks operating inside Afghanistan use their links in the camps to win over young impressionable minds to their cause. Here too, there should be a mechanism that prevents access to the camp population inside Pakistan by members of extremist organisations. Unfortunately, grinding poverty and lack of education can provide an ideal breeding ground for individuals to be brainwashed into believing that the best course of action is one that guarantees them entrance into heaven and what better than to take part in an operation that allows that, while at the same time killing the infidels. One wonders what became of the millions of dollars in US aid as well as domestic funding by the Pakistan government for socio-economic development of FATA.

 Source The News

The current controversy on Rushdie’s knighthood has several dimensions. Amid the knee-jerk reactions alluding to the grand-conspiracy-against-Islam, it brings out various layers and levels of literature’s role and position in societies and now in the globalized world.

I was once a fan of Rushdie and avidly devoured his books with great admiration. From Grimus to The Moor’s Last Sigh, I marveled at his playfulness with the english language and its idiom which undoubtedly he has enriched. The collection of essays titled Imaginary Homelands was a combination of disparate but original writings. Somewhere during this process came the ridiculous Satanic Verses which other than its blasphemous content and brazen disrespect for a vast majority of Muslims was a bad piece of writing!

The decline of Rushdie as a writer, finally, was confirmed by the trashy “Ground Beneath Her Feet“. Thereafter, one read strange, ignorant pieces of his non-fiction in the Western mainstream media that needed his stature to find a rationale for the imperial projects in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Shalimar the Clown, his recent novel was even worse as it proved to be bereft of subtlety and re-invoked all the crappy, soul-destroying images and cliches of our times. In a non-serious piece, published in the Friday Times (Pakistan) in December 2005, I wrote:

Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Shalimar the Clown, is enough to add to one’s misery. I finished browsing it; what else can you do with such stuff posing as quality fiction? As if the name of the central character “Shalimar” was not enough to offend a native reader such as I, the heroine “India Ophuls” changing her name to “Kashmira” was the ultimate illustration of cheap exoticism and a hackneyed dive into passé magical realism. Alas, Rushdie has started believing in his own mantra and the twisting of historical narrative. It simply does not work now. He is more of a bard for the ascendancy of the global tide against Islamism and perhaps he should stick to that. Better if he were to provide some intellectual depth to Fox News, or even better, if he started writing scripts for his young wife’s tele-plays. Shalimar successfully completes the trilogy of Rushdie’s worst novels, the other two being The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury . Aijaz Ahmad, a US-based academic, argued a long time ago that Rushdie and Naipul were avatars of ‘oriental’ consciousness. Small wonder that they are reviewed, exalted and globally hyped.

Much to my delight, a friend – an aspiring critic – sent me the review by Theo Tait of the London Review of Books: Noting what Rushdie’s style produces in the novel, Tait writes that it “ .. . is a cross between a piece of magic realism which displays all the worst vices of the style, and the contemporary international thriller. It is passionate, well-informed and sometimes interesting; but also hackneyed, simplistic and often very, very silly…”

Today, I read this brilliant article published in the Guardian written by a noted academic, Priyamvada Gopal that essentially is a lament of all that Rushdie and his new writings stand for:

Sir Salman, on the other hand, is partly the creation of the fatwa that played its role in strengthening the self-fulfilling “clash of civilisations” that both Bush and Osama bin Laden find so handy. Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of “freedom” and “liberation”. The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicious trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.

Vociferously supporting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on “humane” grounds, condemning criticism of the war on terror as “petulant anti-Americanism” and above all, aligning tyranny and violence solely with Islam, Rushdie has abdicated his own understanding of the novelist’s task as “giving the lie to official facts”. Now he recalls his own creation Baal, the talented poet who becomes a giggling hack coralled into attacking his ruler’s enemies. Denuded of texture and complexity, it is no accident that this fiction since the early 90s has disappeared into a critical wasteland. The mutation of this relevant and stentorian writer into a pallid chorister is a tragic allegory of our benighted times, of the kind he once narrated so vividly.

In any case, Ali Eteraz is right when he states that what’s there is a colonial siege of the minds in this whole issue. 

 And, please also see a sensible editorial by the Pakistani newspaper DAWN here.

This dubious honour is yet another endeavour to reward the constructed clash of civilizations. The fact that Rushdie has accepted it, further confirms his degeneration as another script writer of this “theory”. Meanwhile, the protests in Iran and Pakistan only reinforce this vicious cycle of neo-orientalism .

Shameful indeed.

I had posted a poem on Iraq - Halaku, when you will come to Baghdad this time; and today reading the piece by Simon Jenkins brought back that hollow feeling of irreparable loss and destruction of Iraqi civilization, ostensibly, by the ‘civilized’ world.

Full story here >>

HUR left this poem on my blog in response to my post on Bangladesh and Bengali art. This is a moving poem with tender moments - much like the water colour strokes. Yet, it has a strong after-effect. Here it is: Click here >>

I feel privileged these days. There are such interesting and thoughtful friends in the blogosphere who are adding more poetry to my life. Mystic sent me Hasan Abidi’s poem in Urdu along with a competent translation.

Halaku ab jo tum Baghdad aaoge (Halaku, when you will come to Baghdad this time) is a powerful poem that invokes the historical characters of Halaku, Arabian nights and other tales to tell a sad story of present day Iraq.

The reference here is the invasion of Baghdad by Halaku Khan in 1258 that resulted in the death of over a million people and the destruction of this great city. History will treat the recent plunder of Baghdad in the same manner!

Read the poem and its translation here.

 Adnan has also posted this poem and written some powerful words in the introduction.