ROHINGIYA MUSLIMS:WHERE IS UMMAH, IF THERE'S ONE THERE?

by Dr Raja M Khan

According to a statement issued from the Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Mr Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the world largest Muslim organization has finally decided to despatch a fact-finding mission to Myanmar (Burma). The mission will find out the substantiation of the reports about the persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State of Myanmar.

Pakistan: New Generation Looks for Change

Pakistan: New Generation Looks for Change

by Dr Mahboob A Khawaja

 

Allah does not change the condition of people unless first they change themselves.”  (Al-Qura’an, Surah Al-Raad). 

The challenge of time is clear that the new educated and creative generation of the young Pakistanis should take initiatives to clean the filthy political mess and evolve new pubic institutions, new political systems to set-in a new culture of change and development to facilitate ANEW BEGINNING – ANEW FUTURE.

A Threatened Global Catastrophe

A THREATENED GLOBAL CATASTROPHE

by John Scales Avery

Possibly as early as this autumn, Israel may start a large-scale war in the Middle East and elsewhere by bombing Iran. The consequences are unforeseeable, but there are several ways in which the conflict could escalate into a nuclear war, particularly if the US supports the Israeli attack, and if Pakistan, Russia and China become involved.

The “Zero-Influence” Policy!

Clinton’s motorcade was pelted with shoes (a cultural expression of ultimate disrespect), tomatoes and rotten eggs. The following day similar anti-US demonstrations were held outside the US Consulate in Alexandria. Among the many placards carried by the demonstrators, one read “America’s Zero-Influence in Egypt,” and another said “Egypt is not Pakistan.”worse.

by Dr. Haider Mehdi

“Washington’s view is that only Washington, no one else, has a sphere of influence, and Washington’s sphere of influence is the entire world.” Paul Craig Roberts, “War On All Fronts” 
Recently, Egyptian political activists, nearly half-a-million of them, gathered outside the hotel in Cairo where Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, was staying, to protest against her visit to Egypt. This huge and impressive gathering’s agenda was to tell Secretary Clinton: “You are not welcome in Cairo” and “America: do not interfere in the internal affairs of Egypt.” 


Later, Clinton’s motorcade was pelted with shoes (a cultural expression of ultimate disrespect), tomatoes and rotten eggs. The following day similar anti-US demonstrations were held outside the US Consulate in Alexandria. Among the many placards carried by the demonstrators, one read “America’s Zero-Influence in Egypt,” and another said “Egypt is not Pakistan.”


It is amusing that Egyptian political activists used Pakistan’s analogy in expressing their rage and anger to the extent of US interference in the internal affairs of a nation. Notwithstanding the emotions and the hurt involved by this analogy with Pakistan, there is a fundamental element of truth and political correctness in the perceptual outlook of the Egyptian demonstrators. After all, the facts are that Pakistan has been virtually a US “satellite” state and stigmatized as an American “client” nation for over six decades. Pakistanis need not to be emotionally disturbed over the public insults hurled at them in a foreign country and carried all over the world by the international media. We have no one else to blame but ourselves.


Let us remind ourselves that Egypt’s January 2011 revolution was inspired at the grass-roots level and the July 2012 protests in Cairo and Alexandria are a continuum of the same public political expression to democratize the country and get rid of foreign influence and external intervention in their affairs. For Pakistan and its masses, there are lessons to be learned from the Egyptian public uprising against their own ruling class and its intrinsic links with foreign powers, most specifically the US and its allies in Western Europe.


For its future survival and national solidarity, Pakistan will have to adopt a “Zero-Influence” policy in regards to US interference and intervention in its domestic and foreign affairs. Such a political discourse will not get off the ground unless a massive grass-roots public movement and uprising is set into nation-wide political action. Behind closed doors, US meddling in Pakistan’s internal affairs is reaching dangerous proportions, threatening Pakistan’s existence as a nation.


Muhammed Abdul Hameed, a Pakistani columnist who posts his Urdu articles on a blog, in a recent write up entitled “Who is behind all this and why?,” contends that Asfandar Yar, the ANP leader, travelled to Washington on an American invitation for a three-week top-secret mission prior to the 2007 elections. 


The American agenda was to bring him on board to carve out a new country by joining the Khyber province and tribal areas (Fata) and later include the “Pashto” speaking areas from Afghanistan in this new “Pakhtun” nation. The ANP leader agreed to the American plans and his government was installed in the NWFP with the explicit purpose of creating a “Pakhtun” state. Though the American -ANP plans failed, Asfandar Yar was able to rename the NWFP as “Pakhtunkhwa.”


Eric Draister, in the profoundly analytical article “Balochistan – crossroads of a proxy US war,” convincingly  argues that the US geo-political interests, world-wide capitalistic objectives, containment of China’s rising financial-industrial power and Russia’s re-emergence as a powerful adversary in global politics are the reasons behind the current unrest in Balochistan: “… unrest in Balochistan centers around forced disappearances, kidnappings, targeted killings, assassinations and terrorism. However, these are merely the tactics of a much broader, more geopolitically complex war in which the United States and its Western allies are engaged… Balochistan is, in fact, a nexus: the point at which diametrically opposing strategic interests converge.”


The US understands Balochistan’s strategic location in the context of its future geo-political interests. It weighs its natural resources and the need to exploit them for its own riches. It is in the interest of the US to destabilize Balochistan and carve a new country in this area for its 21st century doctrine of a New World Order. Draister argues that “The United States views Balochistan, an area that encompasses western Pakistan, eastern Iran, and a piece of southern Afghanistan, as critical to the maintenance of US hegemony in the Middle East and Central and South Asia.” Consequently, in view of the US determination to push for its global agenda, the political stake for Pakistan and its national existence is under serious threat.   


However, both Hameed and Draister, are in agreement that the US has flawed in its comprehension of the extent of “nationalism” at the grass-roots of Pakistani society. They also contend that America has failed in understanding the Pakistani military’s ability, resourcefulness and absolute resolve to safeguard and protect the territorial integrity of the nation.


But “nationalism” and a disciplined army is not enough to safeguard Pakistan’s future survival. What is vital is to translate and convert nationalist sentiments into a powerful and aggressively proactive, versatile, organized and progressive political movement to strike at the heart of this nation’s problematic: the removal of the traditional ruling elite and incumbent political “Mafia” from the seats of political power in the country. It is they who facilitate American influence and it is they who are responsible for the disastrous political course on which this nation is being pushed.


A new generation of leadership is required in this nation to keep it out of harm’s way. A leadership that can mobilize the entire nation towards a distinctively constructive political discourse: a democratic, social-welfare focused state, free of foreign influence, self-resilient, independent and above all morally-ethically informed to manage themselves and their state apparatus for national-political decision-making – short of that, we are likely to fail in a viable state-building process.


As a beginning to a people’s mass mobilization movement, Imran Khan’s PTI’s late September plans for a hundred-thousand people’s peace march to Wazirstan is an auspicious initiative. Let the American-Nato atrocities against the peaceful and innocent citizens of Pakistan be exposed. Let the entire world know that the US-West’s so-called “terrorism war” is a hoax – a pretext for the US-West’s selfish, inhumane, immoral-unethical approach to global politics.


Hopefully, the PTI’s march will be ostensibly organized to prove to the Americans and their allies that a substantial percentage of Pakistanis believe them to be unsound in their global policies and want them to be gone from this part of the world –permanently.


Never mind the Egyptian insult – it is time to learn a few lessons from them!
Let us find political solutions to Balochistan’s political problematics ourselves – and soon.
Let us start with a US “Zero-Influence” policy!

Source     Title image

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An American Motto

A man prays during a vigil for victims behind a theater where a gunman opened fire in Aurora, Colorado, USA.

FREE, ARMED AND STUPID

An Analysis  by Lawrence Davidson

PART I – GUN VIOLENCE EPIDEMIC CONTINUES

Well here we go again. Late in the evening of July 20th “a masked gunman entered a Colorado movie theater playing the new Batman movie and “opened fire…killing at least 12 people and wounding 50.” The gunman was not a large anthropomorphized bat but rather a young white male, and he “was armed with a rifle, a shotgun and two handguns” all of which he had legally obtained.

Can US turn a blind eye to Pakistan's sacrifices in the war on terror?

PAKISTAN'S ROLE IN WAR AGAINST TERROR

by ICIRR China

Visa-vis the United States, Pakistan's role in its fight against terrorism,  is  continuously being maligned by the mainstream media in the west. Their main charge; its "labor does not contribute". In other words "ITS NOT DOING ENOUGH", and should, therefore "DO MORE".

The Pakistan/American Option Strategy

“In a joint statement Pakistan & Russia have announced that for the benefit of the security and stability in the region, they will synchronize and execute their ‘American option’ to simultaneously close for good southern & northern supply routes to Afghanistan.” After all friends in need are friends indeed.

by Colonel Eugene Khrushchev

Every country has its own peculiarities, but in international affairs, Pakistan stands out as the one and only state that, despite the perennial turmoil in internal affairs and lack of powerful Beltway lobby, has excelled splendidly in exploiting US ‘smart power’ ambitions .  

War On All Fronts

WASHINGTON SETTING THE STAGE FOR WAR

by Paul Craig Roberts

The Russian government has finally caught on that its political opposition is being financed by the US taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy and other CIA/State Department fronts in an attempt to subvert the Russian government and install an American puppet state in the geographically largest country on earth, the one country with a nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter Washington’s aggression.

Small Men

The constitution makes Pakistan an Islamic state. The constitution reflects the will of the people. It is the social contract in writing. Was this our social contract? If you don’t like it change it or make it work by being true to your ideology that has become your justification for existence and is the much-touted ‘spirit of your constitution’.

by Humayun Gauhar

We have proved the adage, “Give a small man power and he will show you how small he is.” Small men with soiled halos hovering above their dyed heads infest every state institution. All suffer from public perceptions of impropriety and transgression. All engender distrust.  They defy description. They challenge belief. Is this what we made Pakistan for, to hand it over to small, soiled men of questionable integrity while we wallow in misery? No, we did not. It’s about time we did something about it. If we can win liberty and change the course of history by making a country, we can certainly put it right.  

III. Naser Oric is threatening to reveal the truth about Srebrenica

People and Places

References

II. Naser ORIC is threatening to reveal truth about Srebrenica

Naser Orić (born March 3, 1967) is a former Bosniak military officer who commanded the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina forces in the Srebrenica enclave in Eastern Bosnia surrounded by Serb forces, during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In 2006, he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment by the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Netherlands for failing to prevent the deaths of five and the mistreatment of eleven Bosnian Serb detainees during the period from late 1992 to early 1993 on the basis of superior criminal responsibility. He was acquitted on the other charges of wanton destruction and causing damage to civilian infrastructure beyond the realm of military necessity. On July 3, 2008, the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY reversed the Trial Chamber's conviction and acquitted Orić of all charges brought against him.

NATO'S SINISTER ORCHESTRATION DURING THE WAR TO SECURE HEGEMONY IN THE BALKANS

According to the “Press” Republic of Serbia, Oric several times threatened to publicly disclose the truth about Srebrenica, which was sent to 17 addresses in the event something happens to him.

I. People and Places in the Bosnian war

People and Places

A Bosnian special forces soldier returns fire in downtown Sarajevo as he and civilians come under fire from Serbian snipers, on April 6, 1992. The Serbs were shooting from the roof of a hotel at a peace demonstration of some of 30,000 people as fighting between Bosnian and Serb fighters escalated in the capital of Bosnia-Hercegovina. (Mike Persson/AFP/Getty Images)

by peopleus

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the Bosnian War, a long, complex, and ugly conflict that followed the fall of communism in Europe. In 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina joined several republics of the former Yugoslavia and declared independence, which triggered a civil war that lasted four years. Bosnia's population was a multiethnic mix of Muslim Bosniaks (44%), Orthodox Serbs (31%), and Catholic Croats (17%). The Bosnian Serbs, well-armed and backed by neighboring Serbia, laid siege to the city of Sarajevo in early April 1992. 

India and China plan strategic encirclement of each others' territories....

DESPITE RHETORIC, SINO-INDIAN RELATIONS MIRED DEEP IN ENCIRCLING AND CONTAINING THE OTHER

by Daniel Thorp

The conclusion of the Rio+20 Summit in Brazil in June saw only a disappointing outcome, despite it being labelled a "once-in-a-generation chance" to direct the global economy in a sustainable direction and the much positive talk from various world leaders. However, while discussions concerning the global economy took place, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, held talks on the sidelines concerning their bilateral relationship, with both urging strengthened cooperation between the Asian giants.

Stilling a stormy relationship

With the word "sorry," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently opened the door for the United States to continue to supply its forces in Afghanistan through Pakistan.  Getting to this word took months of effort on both sides but "sorry" may not be enough to keep the relationship on an even keel for too long. It will need a sustained effort on both sides. The auguries are not good.

by Shuja Nawaz

With the word "sorry," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently opened the door for the United States to continue to supply its forces in Afghanistan through Pakistan.  Getting to this word took months of effort on both sides but "sorry" may not be enough to keep the relationship on an even keel for too long. It will need a sustained effort on both sides. The auguries are not good.

Why Pakistan Must Disengage from the US!

TIME TO "DISENGAGE" FROM THE US-LED WESTERN ALLIANCE

by Dr. Haider Mehdi

“The facts have changed, now we must change too.”
George Monbiot – author of The Corporate Takeover of Britain

This is a Pakistan foreign policy specific article.

It is not a historical coincidence that the US has been engaged in over 100 military conflicts, foreign invasions, covert overthrows, destabilizations and overt interventions in the affairs of other nations during latter half of the 20^th century and in the first decade of the current era. It has been the result of an ideological project to subjugate the Third World to the military-political-economic-financial domination of US-Western capitalism and to exploit other nations’ resources for their own enrichment.

Islamophobia: A Bipartisan Project [2 of 2]

LIBERAL ISLAMOPHOBES

THE "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

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by Deepa Kumar

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The events of 9/11 brought this legal apparatus in line with the foreign policy establishment. Barely had the ashes settled from the Twin Towers when loud proclamations that “Islamic terrorists” represented existential threats to the United States began to echo in the public sphere. From then on, US policy was geared towards “keeping Americans safe” from Muslim “evildoers.” The “clash of civilizations” rhetoric became the ideological basis for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as domestic attacks on Muslims and Arabs.

Islamophobia: A Bipartisan Project [1 of 2]

THE ROOTS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA EXPANDED MUCH BEFORE 9/11

by Deepa Kumar

Deep in the Times article, another shocking revelation that hasn’t received as much attention as the “kill list” is the Obama administration’s effort to erase the deaths of some innocent victims by categorizing “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” This excludes them from the civilian casualties count, allowing the administration to claim that civilian casualties have been minimal. All Muslim men in “combat zones” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen have been presumed to be terrorists, and therefore worthy of death, simply for being of “military age.”

Arafat: Murder most foul

Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shake hands on the White House lawn (1993). They both made speeches during that event proclaiming Jerusalem as the eternal capital of their respective lands. This meant the peace agreement was bound to fail because neither side would ever give up Jerusalem to the other side. Later events proved that the 1993 peace agreement was from the very beginning infested with vested interests, resultantly the peace in the Palestine and for that matter of the whole Middle East still hangs in the balance.

WHO KILLED YASSER ARAFAT

by Eric Margolis

The ghost of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is rising from his grave to haunt Israel and the Americans.


A devastating investigation by Qatar’s al-Jazeera has found mounting evidence that Arafat’s death in 2004 was caused by the poisonous radioactive substance Polonium 210. Arafat’s widow, Suha, is now calling for his body to be exhumed and sent to the Swiss scientific institute in Lausanne that recently discovered traces of Polonium in Arafat’s clothing and personal effects.

Syria: With friends like that who needs enemies?

SYRIA : WITH FRIENDS LIKE THAT WHO NEEDS ENEMIES? .

Dr Sahib Mustaqim Bleher

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Today, 6 July, Paris is hosting a third meeting of the so-called "Friends of Syria" group, another coalition of the willing and coerced, as part of the ongoing propaganda war to aid the reshaping of the Middle East in the interest of American imperialism - a project begun with 9/11 and the conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Friends Not, Masters [2 of 2]

by Humayun Gauhar

We are better than the whore who claimed she was raped because her client’s cheque ‘for services rendered’ bounced. Our cheque has finally been honoured. Bravo!

I moved the comma forward by one word in the title of President Ayub Khan’s autobiography, ‘Friends, Not Masters’ to ‘Friends Not, Masters’ to change its meaning 180 degrees to reflect our abject surrender to America. Enslavement is our humiliating reality.