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The Jewish Intellectual Who Predicted America’s Social Collapse

The great American sociologist Philip Rieff (1922–2006) stands as one of the 20th century’s keenest intellectuals and cultural commentators. His work was stunning in its intellectual breadth and depth. Rieff did sociology on a grand scale—sociology as prophecy—diagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. Although he wasn’t a Christian, his work remains one of the greatest gifts—even if a complicated and challenging one—to Christians living today. (Tim Keller often lists Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic as one of his essential “big books” on culture.)

Rieff began his academic career in the 1950s and 60s by focusing on the work of Sigmund Freud. According to Rieff, Freud’s exploration of neurosis was really an exploration of authority, as Western man was realizing the idea of divine authority is an illusion. God doesn’t exist; therefore, he isn’t a legitimate authority. Freud recognized that as belief in God faded, psychological neuroses multiplied. Instead of correcting this by pointing persons back to God, however, Freud sought to heal by teaching his patients to accept this loss of authority as a positive development.

Thus the therapeutic culture was born. In place of theology, Freud and his progeny left us with sociology. Rieff warned that the tradeoff would not be a fruitful one.

Religion in Our Blood

Though Rieff rose to prominence as a public intellectual in the 1970s, he suddenly withdrew from the public eye for more than three decades. In fact, it wasn’t until the year of his death—2006—that he re-entered the public square with the publication of his magnum opus, My Life Among the Deathworks.

Deathworks is a devastating critique of modern culture, focusing on our vain Western attempts to reorganize society without a sacred center. According to Rieff, a patently irreligious view of society—which the Western world desires—isn’t only foolish and destructive, but impossible. We can no more live without a religious framework than we can communicate without a linguistic framework or breathe without a pulmonary framework. Religion is in our blood, and the more we deny it, the sicker our society becomes. As Rieff surveyed the 21st-century Western world, he perceived the sickness had become nearly fatal.

Cultural Works of Death

To expose the problems of modern society, Rieff outlines Western history according to three cultural “worlds,” each representing a time period (not a separate sphere of existence). The first was the pagan world, enchanted by its many gods. Following this was the second cultural world, one dominated by monotheism. This era has only recently given way to the third cultural world, our present age, in which many wish to do away with the gods altogether.

As Rieff saw it, human civilizations have always understood social order to be underlain by sacred order. The latter always and necessarily funds the former by providing a world of meaning and a code of permissions and prohibitions. Sacred order translates its truths into the tangible realities of the social order. Thus culture makers and cultural products served as middlemen between sacred order and social order, between God and society.

But the spirit of our third cultural world seeks to undo all of this.

Within this three-world conception of history, Rieff placed Christianity in the second cultural world. Christian monotheism provided the sacred foundation on which Western society was built, and gave individuals a place to stand. Virtue wasn’t just taught explicitly but reinforced implicitly through cultural institutions—in such a way that it shaped the instinctual desires of each successive generation. Most importantly perhaps, the underlying sacred order provided a powerful means of opposing social and cultural decadence.

The third cultural world, however, defines itself by its desire to sever this sacred/social connection. Whereas each of the first two worlds sought to construct identity vertically from above, our third world rejects the vertical in favor of constructing identity horizontally from below. Rieff knew the result of this rejection would be nihilism: “Where there is nothing sacred, there is nothing” (Deathworks, 12). 

Rieff pulls no punches in describing the cultural fruits of this project, describing them as deathworks. Instead of causing society to flourish (via works of life), modern cultural products function as subversive agents of destruction (works of death), undermining the very culture from which they arose. Rieff indicts an array of cultural elites—but especially Freud, Joyce, Picasso, and Mapplethorpe—for their role in poisoning society. “The guiding elites of our third world,” he observes, “are virtuosi of de-creation, of fictions where once commanding truths were” (4). Wishing to forget religion and rebuild society (irreligiously) from the ground up, these elites carefully construct a contemporary tower of Babel.

Enslaved to Desire

Of course, the attempt to construct a religionless society is as absurd as the attempt to reach God with a physical tower. As Reiff notes, “Culture and sacred order are inseparable. . . . No culture has ever preserved itself where there is not a registration of sacred order” (13). Yet our third world continues its production of deathworks as a “final assault [on] the sacred orders, of which their arts are some expression.” Deathworks, then, are “battles in the war against second culture” (7). In Rieff’s eyes, the third world is now busy with self-congratulatory festivities in honor its apparent rout.

One of the front lines of the contemporary battle is the notion of truth. The third-world perspective abolishes truth, leaving only desire. Yet desire proves to be as fierce an authority as any god—and jealous to boot. Nature, after all, abhors a vacuum. So the throne on which God once sat doesn’t remain empty; it’s simply filled with the more erratic god of desire.

The chief desire in our American third-world culture is sexual, and this desire demands freedom of exercise. You may now believe or disbelieve in the existence of God (yawn), but you must never question the dogma of absolute sexual freedom, nor restrict its public exercise.

Onward to a Fourth World

Christians who resonate with Rieff’s grim assessment may be tempted to go back, attempting to retrieve the lost Christendom of a previous age. But Rieff pushes us forward to envision a fourth world. We cannot ignore the deathworks our third cultural world has created, but we can work towards a world in which sacred order once again underlies social order. And if Rieff is right, the time for such change may be sooner than we think. The third cultural world seems powerful now, but its foundations are weak and already starting to crumble. A world founded on material desire, after all, may promise much, but our society requires much more (see Rieff’s The Crisis of the Officer Class, 6). 

Even amid a crumbling third-cultural world, we must recognize that the fourth world will not enact itself; it awaits a people who will speak and act responsibly. Responsibility in a time such as this will involve a return to seemingly defunct notions of truth and virtue. And this will become increasingly possible as our culture undergoes a “radical disenchantment” with the permissiveness of third-world culture (Crisis, 169). It seemed so liberating to fire God from his post and live without limits! But a world without boundaries is a frightening—not a freeing—place. We must recover the beauty of the “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.”

When we read the events of our own time with Rieff-like eyes, we’re able to recognize many cultural products of our time as deathworks, and their authors as subversive agents undermining social order. But while Rieff generally takes aim at the creative class, we can expand our vision to include not only elite artists but also more ubiquitous culture-makers—popular entertainers, media outlets, corporate giants, and Supreme Court justices. As one example, we might point to the Supreme Court majorities who created “rights” to abortion and same-sex marriage out of thin air; those decisions are social deathworks in the deepest sense.

And yet, as helpful as Rieff is in identifying the cultural deathworks of contemporary society, his prescription for overcoming them is deficient. He often glances backward, pointing society to the moral code of a previous era. He also points forward, speaking of a future that ought to follow our corrupt age, a future defined by a virtuous cultural elite. But Rieff could never fully articulate a vision for either. He understood well the poison, but could never fully formulate the antidote.

Where Hope Prevails 

As he looked backward, what Rieff saw dimly was the biblical doctrine of creation. Had he reached for the wealth in that Christian doctrine, he might have grasped the enigma of humanity—of our created goodness and fallen badness—along with the Bible’s rich teaching about human flourishing. Moreover, what Rieff yearned to see in the future can only be found in a fully Christian eschatology, in its powerful and beautiful vision of Christ’s consummation of the kingdom. Only a Christian eschatology, rooted in the atonement of Christ and awaiting his triumphant return, can provide both avision for the future and the power to work toward it. We don’t merely need a heavenly vision; we need divine power to bring heaven down to earth.

This is what Christianity, and Christianity alone, offers. The resurrection of Jesus declares that where death seems to have the final word, the ending is not ultimate. God will restore the earth, and his kingdom will prevail. What he created, what he mourned over as it reveled in deathworks ranged against him, what he pursued and redeemed—this he will restore, from top to bottom. And what finally grounds our hope—a hope that, sadly, seems to have eluded Rieff—is that we’re privy to this finale before the finale. Though we live in the muddy middle of the script, we’ve caught a glimpse of the last scene.

As those who know the end of history’s story, then, Christians can engage in cultural activity with a humble confidence. As dark as it may seem, the realm of culture will one day be raised to life, made to bow in submission to the King. Since Jesus will gain victory and restore the earth, we remain confident. And since it will be his victory, we remain humble.

The 20th-century missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin aptly captured this idea of Christian hope and action, even amid a culture of death:

[A transformed society] is not our goal, great as that is. . . . Our goal is the holy city, the New Jerusalem, a perfect fellowship in which God reigns in every heart, and his children rejoice together in his love and joy. . . . And though we know that we must grow old and die—that our labors, even if they succeed for a time, will in the end be buried in the dust of time—yet we are not dismayed. . . . We know that these things must be. But we know that as surely as Christ was raised from the dead, so surely shall there be a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness. And having this knowledge, we ought as Christians to be the strength of every good movement of political and social effort, because we have no need either of blind optimism or of despair. (Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History, 55)

By Bruce Ashford,  the provost and professor of theology & culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He co-authored the recently-released One Nation Under God: A Christian Hope for American Politics (with Chris Pappalardo) and the author of Every Square Inch: An Introduction to Cultural Engagement for Christians. You can follow him atwww.BruceAshford.net and on Twitter. 
http://flip.it/T_.Fp

How Islam Created Europe



In late antiquity, the religion split the Mediterranean world in two. Now it is remaking the Continent.

Charles Auguste Steuben's painting of the Battle of the Poitiers in 732. The Frankish leader Charles Martel's victory over Muslim invaders is seen as a decisive moment in European history. Wikimedia
Photo by: Wikimedia
Europe was essentially defined by Islam. And Islam is redefining it now.

For centuries in early and middle antiquity, Europe meant the world surrounding the Mediterranean, or Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”), as the Romans famously called it. It included North Africa. Indeed, early in the fifth century A.D., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece. But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves, with the “Middle Sea” a hard border between them rather than a unifying force. Since then, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, “all European history has been a great emigration toward the North.”

After the breakup of the Roman empire, that northward migration saw the Germanic peoples (the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Lombards) forge the rudiments of Western civilization, with the classical legacy of Greece and Rome to be rediscovered only much later. It would take many more centuries for the modern European state system to develop. Slowly, though, feudalism, whose consensual give-and-take worked in the direction of individualism and away from absolutism, gave way to early modern empires and, over time, to nationalism and democracy. Along the way, new freedoms allowed the Enlightenment to take hold. In sum, “the West” emerged in northern Europe (albeit in a very slow and tortuous manner) mainly after Islam had divided the Mediterranean world.

Islam did much more than geographically define Europe, however. Denys Hay, a British historian, explained in a brilliant though obscure book published in 1957, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, that European unity began with the concept (exemplified by the Song of Roland) of a Christendom in “inevitable opposition” to Islam—a concept that culminated in the Crusades. The scholar Edward Said took this point further, writing in his book Orientalism in 1978 that Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and—most crucial—inferior.

In the postcolonial era, Europe’s sense of cultural preeminence was buttressed by the new police states of North Africa and the Levant. With these dictatorships holding their peoples prisoner inside secure borders—borders artificially drawn by European colonial agents—Europeans could lecture Arabs about human rights without worrying about the possibility of messy democratic experiments that could lead to significant migration. Precisely because the Arabs lacked human rights, the Europeans felt at once superior to and secure from them.

Islam is now helping to undo what it once helped to create. A classical geography is organically reasserting itself, as the forces of terrorism and human migration reunite the Mediterranean Basin, including North Africa and the Levant, with Europe. The Continent has absorbed other groups before, of course. In fact, Europe has been dramatically affected by demographic eruptions from the east: In the medieval centuries, vast numbers of Slavs and Magyars migrated into central and eastern Europe from deeper inside Eurasia. But those peoples adopted Christianity and later formed polities, from Poland in the north to Bulgaria in the south, that were able to fit, however bloodily, inside the evolving European state system. As for the Algerian guest workers who emigrated to France and the Turkish and Kurdish guest workers who emigrated to Germany during the Cold War, they represented a more containable forerunner to the current migration.

Today, hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have no desire to be Christian are filtering into economically stagnant European states, threatening to undermine the fragile social peace. Though Europe’s elites have for decades used idealistic rhetoric to deny the forces of religion and ethnicity, those were the very forces that provided European states with their own internal cohesion.

Meanwhile, the new migration, driven by war and state collapse, is erasing the distinction between the imperial centers and their former colonies. Orientalism, through which one culture appropriated and dominated another, is slowly evaporating in a world of cosmopolitan interactions and comparative studies, as Said intuited it might. Europe has responded by artificially reconstructing national-cultural identities on the extreme right and left, to counter the threat from the civilization it once dominated.

Although the idea of an end to history—with all its ethnic and territorial disputes—turns out to have been a fantasy, this realization is no excuse for a retreat into nationalism. The cultural purity that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx is simply impossible in a world of increasing human interactions.

“The West,” if it does have a meaning beyond geography, manifests a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism. Just as in the 19th century there was no going back to feudalism, there is no going back now to nationalism, not without courting disaster. As the great Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen observed, “History does not turn back … All reinstatements, all restorations have always been masquerades.”

The question is thus posed: What, in a civilizational sense, will replace Rome? For while empire, as Said documented, certainly had its evils, its very ability to govern vast multiethnic spaces around the Mediterranean provided a solution of sorts that no longer exists.

Europe must now find some other way to dynamically incorporate the world of Islam without diluting its devotion to the rule-of-law-based system that arose in Europe’s north, a system in which individual rights and agency are uppermost in a hierarchy of needs. If it cannot evolve in the direction of universal values, there will be only the dementia of ideologies and coarse nationalisms to fill the void. This would signal the end of “the West” in Europe.

By Robert D. Kaplan, theatlantic.com
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-islam-created-europe/476388/


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Islamic Revival رساله تجديد الاسلام ‏

An in-depth study of the Qur’an and Islamic religious history reveals startling facts. “Risala-e-Tajdeed-ul-Islam” is a message to develop positive change in the thought and practices of Muslims.
قرآن اور اسلام کے گہرے مطالعه سےحیران کن حقائق کا انکشاف ہوا، "رساله تجديد الاسلام" مسلمانوں کے انداز فکروعمل میں مثبت تبدیلی کا پیغام ہے:

Islamic Extremism is a Product of Western Imperialism

As we struggle to come to terms with the latest terrorist attacks in Brussels, it is important that we understand the causes of such extremism. After all, Islamic extremism was virtually unknown fifty years ago and suicide bombings were inconceivable. And yet today it seems that we are confronted with both on a daily basis. Keep reading >>>>>


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8 Beliefs You Should Have About Money And the 14 you should give up

“Very few people can afford to be poor.”
-- George Bernard Shaw

I talk about the Law of Attraction and what it takes to really become the magnet that activates this Law. Many of us have been unconsciously magnetizing what we don’t want to come to us. I think this is particularly apparent when it comes to money—or the lack of money. So let’s tackle it:
Why aren’t you wealthy?
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/focus-forgiveness/201604/8-beliefs-you-should-have-about-money

Panama Papers: What are they, who is involved and why are they important?

Have they exposed any crimes?
The shadowy financial dealings exposed in the leaks are not in themselves illegal but the ICIJ said the leaks show how "dark money flows through the global financial system, breeding crime and stripping national treasuries of tax revenues".
"Most of the services the offshore industry provides are legal," the report adds. "But the documents show that banks, law firms and other offshore players have often failed to follow legal requirements that they make sure their clients are not involved in criminal enterprises, tax dodging or political corruption.
"In some instances, the files show, offshore middlemen have protected themselves and their clients by concealing suspect transactions or manipulating official records."
Offshore accounts and shell companies are among the methods used to conceal the ownership of assets. Keep reading 》》》 http://m.timesofindia.com/world/us/Panama-Papers-What-are-they-who-is-involved-and-why-are-they-important/articleshow/51682037.cms

India's Pakistan Stragey : Military and political pressure; subversion; Terrorism; Diplomatic Isolation; Media and Ppublic Defamation and Cultural domination


INDIA’S ambitions of achieving Great Power status cannot be fully realised unless Pakistan is strategically neutralised. A conventional military defeat of Pakistan has been a costly and unlikely option ever since the latter acquired a credible nuclear deterrence capability. Pakistan has also built a strategic relationship with China which provides it with the capacity to balance, to a considerable extent, India’s larger military and economic capabilities.

India’s need to bring Pakistan to heel has intensified in the context of the emerging Great Power contest in Asia. Pakistan’s incorporation into an Indian sphere of influence would be a grave setback to China’s future role in South, West and Central Asia and the western Indian Ocean. The prospect of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, while India has no land access to the west and Central Asia, has added a new dimension to India’s determination to neutralise Pakistan. India’s strategic goals, if not its methods, are fully supported by the US and its allies.

India has adopted a complex strategy to wear down Pakistan’s resistance. This strategy encompasses: military and political pressure; subversion; terrorism; diplomatic isolation; media and public defamation and cultural domination.
Explore: Pakistan's guide to engaging with India

Some elements of India’s comprehensive strategy and actions are now public knowledge, such as Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval’s boastful speech recalling how Indian agencies eroded the Kashmiri freedom struggle through corruption and intimidation; forecasting the separation of Balochistan; and expressing glee at the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan’s beheading of Pakistani soldiers in Fata.

India has adopted a complex strategy to wear down Pakistan’s resistance.
India’s strategy has a wide canvas.

1. One element of the strategy is the attempt, pursued in tandem with the West, to neutralise Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence capabilities. Thus, the discriminatory Western restraints on equipment and technology transfers to Pakistan and the vigorous US opposition to Pakistan’s deployment of theatre nuclear weapons and long-range missiles which are designed, respectively, to counter India’s Cold Start doctrine and its second-strike capability.

2. Meanwhile, India maintains military pressure on Pakistan through deployment of advanced weapons systems (ballistic missiles, anti-ballistic missiles etc), expanded offensive deployments, military exercises to refine the capacity for a surprise attack (as envisaged in India’s Cold Start doctrine) and frequent shelling along the Line of Control in Kashmir.

3. Subversion, involving infiltration, sponsorship and support for dissident or disgruntled groups within Pakistan, is a third element of this strategy. The sponsorship of the Baloch Liberation Army and terrorism in Balochistan and Sindh has now been confirmed by the recent capture and confession of the Indian spy. Disaffected groups in Karachi, rural Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkwa have been encouraged for many years to disrupt peace and security.

Substantial proof has been gathered by Islamabad’s agencies of Indian sponsorship of terrorism against Pakistan through the TTP, in collaboration with Kabul’s National Directorate of Security and certain power brokers. Some of this evidence has been shared with the UN but has not evoked any action so far from the world organisation. An Indian link to the Lahore park atrocity, responsibility for which has claimed by an affiliate of the TTP, cannot be ruled out.

Pakistan’s armed forces are one of the few organised institutions left in the country. Not surprisingly, because of their profession and training, their resistance to Indian domination is robust. Tarnishing the reputation and credibility of the Pakistan Army is an important element of the Indian strategy. Through the Indian and Western media, the Pakistan Army is incessantly accused of doing today what it did yesterday — supporting the Afghan Taliban and the Kashmiri jihadi groups.

The reality is clouded by ‘fifty shades of grey’. Despite old relationships, Pakistan’s security establishment is either confronting some of these Jihadi groups or has little influence over them (the Afghan Taliban). The violent sectarian groups in Punjab are known to have enjoyed in recent years the protection of some politicians rather than the security establishment. Notwithstanding this, the Indian-inspired mantra against the army and the ISI is frequently echoed not only by the Western media but even within Pakistan.

At the opposite end of India’s kinetic actions, is the wide and successful use of its “‘soft power’, epitomised by Bollywood. This song and dance culture has been warmly embraced by large segments of Pakistan’s young and moneyed elite. Over time, this can lead to greater acceptance in Pakistan of India’s political and strategic goals.

Since early days, India has attempted to co-opt Pakistani politicians, by fair means and foul. When out of office, some political leaders have had intimate contacts with the Indians. Shamefully, some of them — excluding the ruling party — are known to have expressed the desire for Indian and other foreign intervention in Pakistan’s internal affairs. Even today, the desire of some of Pakistan’s leaders to ‘normalise’ relations with India at any cost is inexplicable.
India has been able to play on the fears and predilections of Pakistan’s politicians to set the tone and pace of the bilateral relationship. Dialogue is held out as a favour to Pakistan. India’s positions on both substance and process keep hardening with each encounter. Concessions continue to be made by Pakistan on process and substance — to no avail or purpose.

It is high time for Pakistan’s National Defence Council, which includes both the civilian and military leadership, to undertake a frank and in-depth review of India’s objectives and policies towards Pakistan and evolve a coherent and consensual strategy to respond to each of the elements of India’s policies aimed against Pakistan.

To those Americans who disingenuously chide Pakistan for being paranoid about India, I would respond as Trotsky did shortly before being assassinated: “Just because I am paranoid, does not mean I am not persecuted.”
By Miunir Akram, a former Pakistan ambassador to the UN.
Courtesy: Dawn.com
http://www.dawn.com/news/1249653
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Guantanamo is being emptied - but its legacy of making the guilty innocent and the innocent guilty will continue

7-guantanamo-get.jpg
Almost half the remaining inmates are Yemeni, but I have to say that I don’t remember many Yemenis in Osama bin Laden’s camps – and I met the man twice in Afghanistan 

They could go on hunger strike. They could talk to the International Red Cross. Their wretched trials could be witnessed by journalists. Their utterly illegal detention – under international law, that is – was known about, and widely condemned as an outrageous and flagrant breech of human rights. But they couldn’t be waterboarded.

The fact that the CIA thugs didn’t get their hands on them – or not as far as we know – must be the one charitable thing to come out of Guantanamo, whence a dozen extra prisoners are to be released, according to the Pentagon. 91 still to go. And oh yes, one of the dozen is a Yemeni who has been on hunger srike since 2007 and has lost half his body weight. So that just shows you. Go on hunger strike, and you get released. 

The Americans don’t want anyone dying on hunger strike;  Tariq Ba Odah has been force-fed daily --strapped down, a rubber tube forced inside his nose and a liquid supplement pumped into his stomach.  Sounds a bit like torture to me.  But that’s how it goes at Guantanamo.  When there’s no rule of law, you’ve got to keep these guys alive. 
No rules, no law. Remember how the bad guys picked up on this? Remember how al-Qaeda and Isis used those orange jumpsuits for their prisoners, how they dressed up their inmates before butchering them?  I can’t recall any US official commenting on that particular theatrical prop. Because this would suggest, wouldn’t it, that a theatrical prop is exactly what it was at Guantanamo - a method of humiliating prisoners, of flaunting their imprisonment.

And then there were the obviously flawed charges - I can think of a bunch of Bosnians locked up to no purpose and then handed back to Bosnia, not to mention an Afghan so old he was obviously senile and let us not forget a few Brits, too – and then a few men who did indeed return to ‘active duty’.  Because the problem is that by putting the ‘guilty’ along with the ‘innocent’ – I use the quotation marks advisedly – you make everyone innocent. 

And this is the point, isn’t it? By including men of violence with men who would never commit violence, you both contaminate the innocent and cleanse the guilty. This is what George Bush did. This is what the Americans did.  No wonder Barack Obama wanted to close Guantanamo. He saw in it something iniquitous:  he saw in it the staining of a whole group of people – mainly Muslim, of course, often brown, even black people – who were imprisoned outside the law. Indeed, the law didn’t even get a look in.

‘Illegal combatants’ was the phrase, I seem to recall.  Illegal – as in ‘non-legal’.  And of course, that’s how Isis and company treated their truly innocent hostages.  They shrewdly understood that the final humiliation was to dress up their victims in the same clothes as the Guantanamo men – to make them equally ‘guilty’, equally bad, equally horrific.  That is George Bush’s legacy to us.

Now let’s go back to Ba Odah, who was taken to Guantanamo in 2002 – that’s fourteen years in prison, for heaven’s sake – but he can’t be sent to his home (Yemen, of course) because of a congressional ban on repatriations to Yemen.  And he’s one of 41 Yemenis who can’t be transferred there.  Incredible! That’s almost half the entire prisoner roll-call in Guantanamo.
Now let me get this right.  When they were sent to the Cuban camp, these were the worst of the worst, the bad guys, the dudes in the black hats.  And now it turns out that the Yemenis were the worst of the worst.  But I have to say that I don’t remember many Yemenis in Osama bin Laden’s camps – and I met the man twice in Afghanistan – so how come there are so many in Guantanamo?

True, there were Egyptians, Algerians, Tunisians, Saudis (bin Laden was one of them) and Moroccans.  But Yemenis?  Well, I guess the Saudis are killing a lot of them right now (the Shia variety, needless to say, for Ba Odah’s faith is commonly believed to be Sunni). 

But then again, we come back to the fact that the Saudis are the principal supporters of the Wahhabi Salafist Sunni faith whose religion is espoused by the Taliban and Isis (and a lot of Gulf states).  And if we’re going to name the bad guys, maybe we should be talking about some ‘folk’ (a Bushism, by the way) who live in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as...  Oh hell no, let’s not go down that road. 

By Robert Fisk @indyvoices

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Wake-up Call to Muslims



Muslims have to work out the solutions to their problems, themsleves:-
(1) Read online or dowlnoad E Book, pdf at https://goo.gl/9S1cpe or
(2) Keep reading at this page (Web link: http://goo.gl/S26GhY ) or
(3) Read in Urdu: http://goo.gl/reWFXA اردو میں پڑھیں

“The War Against Terrorism; is a war of narratives ... there is a dire need to come up with counter-narratives ... the menace of terrorism cannot be dealt with without countering the extremist, militant ideologies.”  >>>>>

جوابی بیانیہ>>>>>


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The "Strategic" Partnership Between India and Iran or The Un-Holy Alliance against Pakistan?




In the worst-case Scenario of war with Pakistan, The Possibility that India might access Iranian Military bases, Thereby encircling and Containing Pakistan, cannot be excluded. [Read full report]
Writes, Jalil Roshandil a well reputed Iranian scholar and researcher. He has been on research penal of many universities in USA, Turkey, and Denmark. He has also been associated with with a well known think tank of University of Iran.
Excerpts:
Iran’s decision to bypass Pakistan and sign an agreement with India was the result of several factors. Of key importance was the old belief that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Iran had simply learned to distrust the West through experiences like the 1953 coup, in which the United States supported the Shah, and even older British and European interventionist policies. In the late 1980s, Pakistan was still seen as a close ally of the despised United States.

Iran and India find themselves coming together not only economically, but also politically. The foreign policies of the two countries have always had commonalities; in particular, both detested Afghanistan’s Taliban and feared the militant Sunni Islam that the Taliban represented. (It is worth remembering that India has more Muslims than either Iran or Pakistan.) Though the Taliban are no
longer in power,Afghanistan remains unstable and a regional concern. Both Iran and India have had difficult dealings with Pakistan as well—it is well known that India blames Pakistan for fanning a secessionist struggle in India’s majority-Muslim state [nore.. its occupied] of Kashmir. One more factor that has helped solder ties between the two countries is Iran’s desire to survive under American pressure and the U.S.-led embargo—in a sense, Iran is still “looking East.”

On the military side, India and Iran agreed  to explore opportunities for joint training and exchange of visits, while declaring that defense cooperation is not aimed against any third country. That the military aspect of the deal will go much further is unlikely. Both India and Iran fear the possible seizure of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal by Islamic fundamentalists—but both Iran and India have their own religious thugs who might attempt to do the same thing. In the worst-case scenario of war with Pakistan, the possibility that India might access Iranian military bases, thereby encircling and containing Pakistan, cannot be excluded. Such a move would fundamentally alter Islamabad’s strategic calculations. Depending on the strength of India-Iran relations, Iran could get access to advanced Indian military technology.

India keeps its Iran option open for two major reasons:

  1. First, relations with Iran are strategically important for India’s relations with Pakistan. 
  2. Second, even a superficially good relationship with Iran can be sold politically to Muslim Indians who might have some sympathy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran For example, discussion will continue on projects in Iran such as the Chahbahar Free Trade Zone port complex,the Chahbahar-Fahraj-Bam railway link, and the Marine Oil Tanking Terminal. 
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India and Iran—one the object of much wooing from Washington, the other a member of President Bush’s “axis of evil” —announced the creation of a “strategic partnership” in 2003. This Special Report explores the new cordiality in relations between New Delhi and Tehran, as well as the ways this partnership may impact upon the interests of other regional players. Christine Fair explains the calculations that make Iran an attractive partner for New Delhi, and concludes that the bilateral relationship is here to stay. Jalil Roshandel offers an Iranian perspective on the relationship. Pakistan, geographically situated between the two, views closer links between its neighbors with considerable alarm, a subject examined by Sunil Dasgupta. P.R. Kumaraswamy asks how this new Indian-Iranian collaboration may influence New Delhi’s economic and strategic ties with Israel. In addition, all four essays address the implications for the United States of the new -

See more at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-strategic-partnership-between-india-and-iran-pdf#sthash.Sv6zZ6s0.dpuf

It is common to brush aside the conspiracy theories. However if one critically examines the plans conceived decades back by scholar or groups with close association with the policy makers in USA and UK and the events on ground bear close semblance, its difficult to reject it out rightly. The governments of Muslim countries should consider these aspects seriously and instead of investing in construction of high rise building and other symbols of luxury, should invest in education, and establish think tanks, with genuine intellectuals, analysts and thinkers. They should constantly review the international plans and conspiracies, suggesting concrete counter measures for the national survival and advancement of peace and stability. 
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