politics
Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, U.P., and now Orissa? The Times of India reports:
Chairperson of the state [Orissa] commission for women (SCW), Namita Panda, with cameramen and police in tow, on Friday chased girls and boys sitting in a city park ...
Taken unawares by this attack on their privacy, many couples fled from the park by jumping over drains and barbed wire fences to escape the cameramen clicking away pictures of the "errant lovers".
Some of them had their dresses torn as they tried to negotiate the fencing, while others hid their faces in bushes and walls to avoid being caught on camera. Many college students, who were in their uniform, pleaded with Panda not to print heir [sic] pictures even as they meekly swallowed her homilies.
"This is obnoxious. I just cannot imagine how these young boys and girls can be involved in such nasty and abhorrent activities in the open," Panda said.
A nightmarish scenario of life under Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice? Does it really matter if there is nothing in the Indian Penal Code that prohibits young men and women from Ikhtilat, as there is in Sharia law? When a ranking State official and the police could intimidate these youngsters, and chase them out of a public park funded by the tax-payer's money, who cares if the color of this dystopia is saffron or green?
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hit & run
Islam is touted as an egalitarian religion by several eminent intellectuals on the Left. I have personally heard from some of these fellows who claim this honor for the religion. On economic equality, look for the Gini Index for household wealth or income distribution for Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates? How long did you search the web? An hour, two, three? Okey, give up. I couldn't find any data on wealth or income distribution measures for these countries. The same goes for Libya, Oman, Quatar ... I wonder why. According to a UNDP report, Iran scores 43.0, Malaysia 49.2, and Nigeria 43.7. A Gini Index less than 30.0 signals a fairly equal distribution. With the sole exception of Bosnia, I could not find a single Islamic country that could be characterized as economically egalitarian.
How about a socially egalitarian Islam? Here are a couple of excerpts from the current Islamic Penal Law of Iran:
Article 300.
The blood money for the first- or second-degree murder of a Muslim woman is half of that of a murdered Muslim man.
Article 487.
Section 6. Blood money for the aborted fetus which has taken in the human spirit shall be paid in full if it is male, one-half if it is female, and three-quarters if its gender is in doubt.
According the International Religious Freedom Report on Saudi Arabia [2006]:
Islamic law considers Hindus to be polytheists; identification with polytheism is used to justify discrimination against Hindus, inter alia, in calculating accidental death or injury compensation. Christians and Jews, who are classified as "People of the Book," are also discriminated against, but to a lesser extent than Hindus. For example, according to the country's "Hanbali" interpretation of Shari'a, once fault is determined by a court, a Muslim male receives 100 percent of the amount of compensation determined, a male Jew or Christian receives 50 percent, and all others (including Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs) receive 1/16 of the amount a male Muslim may receive.
Women's testimony is worth only half that of men, and a non-Muslim woman's testimony is worth less than that of a Muslim woman.
Islamic societies, it seems, have a legally recognized hierarchy: α - Muslims, γ — Christians and Jews, ε — Everyone else. Within each of these "castes", men are superior to women, I suppose. Altogether, Islam has six castes, the alphas, the betas, the gammas, the deltas, the epsilons, and the zetas.
Egalitarian? You be the judge!
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hit & run
A Twist of Word and Mind: A NEW FREEDOM FOR THE FUTURE Rambodoc, writing on "morphological freedom", defined as “an extended right to your own life, including your body” by a Swedish organization called Eudoxa, asks rhetorically why a man or woman would want to alter his structure for overtly trivial reasons. Vaginoplasty and tattooing are just two examples of this sort of morphological alteration. While upholding the individual’s personal choice and freedom of expression in these matters, he paints a future that is
fraught with potentially more complex and controversial issues like using genetic engineering and cloning to create a new type of human being that may be peculiarly enhanced. For example, a mother may be able to select a baby who is genetically engineered to see in the dark. Or one who will be free of certain deadly diseases.
I intended to write on these subjects as they relate to individual rights, but it's appropriate that someone on the front line of fire — Rambodoc is a surgeon based in Kolkata, India — should have taken the lead.
There are two different underlying questions that are raised by the doctor. The first has to do with an individual’s rights over his/her body. Body piercing, tattooing, plastic surgery, organ trade, sex for money, suicide, etc. belong here. Should the right to choose any of these for oneself be absolute and inalienable, or does the State/society have some say on this matter? To me the answer is fairly straight forward. The individual should be free to choose, provided the choice does not involve [threat of] physical violence to another.
The second question — exemplified by “the EU Commission’s directive on children’s right to be born with unmodified genes ” — is more complicated. It involves the reproductive rights of the parents, the woman's inalienable right to her body, and fetal rights, if any. Fetal rights — whenever and whatever rights that accrue to the fetus — are perhaps the most confounding of these. Closely related is the question of the State’s interest in the fetus, and whether it supersedes the parents' right to select its future. I personally lean on the side of the parents. Their reproductive rights are absolute, unless the State can establish gross negligence and dereliction of "duty of care", beyond any doubt.
A while ago I had a discussion on abortion with a brilliant economist from the University of Chicago, who had unfortunately sold part of his brain to Christian evangelists of the Ted Haggard variety! My position was — and continues to be — that the woman had absolute rights over her body, the fetus had no rights independent of the mother, and therefore, strongly pro-choice. I conceded him a caveat, though. Although the woman has no obligation to the fetus that has no rights of its own, she does have an obligation to herself to take complete responsibility for her choice.
Let me illustrate what I mean with the example that I constructed for my colleague. Imagine an E.T. [extra terrestrial with no recognized rights] on the banks of a flooded river. The water is rising rapidly, and if the E.T. did not cross over to the safe hills on the other side, he would surely die. A lone boatwoman comes along — no other boat anywhere in sight that could conceivably come to the rescue of the E.T. — and takes the E.T. aboard, committing to ferry him across. No contract or consideration here, but only an intent and commitment on the part of the boatwoman. Midway she changes her mind, and throws the E.T. overboard. Has she committed a crime?
I argue that the presumption here ought to be that neither the boatwoman’s decision to take the E.T. aboard, nor her subsequent decision to throw him overboard were made lightly. No third person has the right to judge her, unless every reasonable person can be absolutely certain that she has made these decisions without weighty consideration. That is, neither the State, nor a court of law may second guess the intent or commitment of the boatwoman, unless there can be no reasonable doubt whatsoever about malintent or malfeasance. My position on in vitro surgery, chemical use/abuse during pregnancy, and reprogenetics, is the same as the one that I hold on abortion.
Lest I be accused of plagiarism, I must attribute some of the phrases that I have used in the above paragraph to the recent judgment (2-25-08) in an unrelated case, Government of Andhra Pradesh & Ors v. Smt. P. Laxmi Devi, issued by J. H.K. Sema and J. Markandey Katju of the Supreme Court of India. Quoting James Bradley Thayer (1831-1902), Professor of Law of Harvard University, the Justices concur [para 40, 42] with
the finding, for example, that as early as 1811 the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania had concluded: "For weighty reasons, it has been assumed as a principle in constitutional construction by the Supreme Court of the United States, by this Court, and every other Court of reputation in the United States, that an Act of the legislature is not to be declared void unless the violation of the Constitution is so manifest as to leave no room for reasonable doubt" vide Commonwealth ex. Rel. O'Hara vs. Smith 4 Binn. 117 (Pg.1811) ...
... Thayer also warned that exercise of the power of judicial review "is always attended with a serious evil", namely, that of depriving people of "the political experience and the moral education and stimulus that comes from fighting the question out in the ordinary way, and correcting their own errors" and with the tendency "to dwarf the political capacity of the people and to deaden its sense of moral responsibility".
Justices Sema and Katju go on to refer [para 56] to the observation by the Constitution Bench decision of the Supreme Court of India in M.H. Quareshi vs. State of Bihar AIR 1958 SC 731 (vide para 15):
"The Court must presume that the legislature understands and correctly appreciates the needs of its own people, that its laws are directed to problems made manifest by experience and that its discriminations are based on adequate grounds..."
If politicians could be presumed to correctly appreciate and act on the needs of the people, unless the violation of the trust placed on them is "so manifest as to leave no room for reasonable doubt", how could we presume anything to the contrary about the parents correctly appreciating and acting on the needs of their children?
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hit & run
Failed by religious law: Pragna Patel, writing in Guardian on the controversial advocacy of Sharia in the United Kingdom by the Archibishop of Canterbury:
The idea that civil law should to a greater degree, accommodate cultural and religious difference in family matters is equally vulnerable to challenge. Such accommodation is problematic because in many instances it would necessarily involve shoring up patriarchal and caste power, resulting in the violation of fundamental human rights, especially the right of choice and autonomy for women and girls in particular.
It is true, as Ayesha Khan pointed out earlier this week in the Guardian, that most minority (not just Muslim) women, harbour a strong instinct to fight for their rights. This is precisely why any move to limit their rights by institutionalising discriminatory value systems within the wider legal system will be dangerous. Those who need our help the most are those who are the most powerless to determine their choices.
The mark of civilization is pushing the envelope on individual rights and equality before law, not accommodating obscurantist beliefs and discriminatory values in the name of religious freedom and multiculturalism.
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hit & run
Contrary to popular misconception, the communists are not beneath anyone in male chauvinism of the worst kind. From a transcript of the 1973 meeting between Chairman Mao Zedong and the U.S. envoy Henry Kissinger, released by the State Department (link via USA Today):
Chairman Mao: The trade between our two countries at present is very pitiful. It is gradually increasing. You know China is a very poor country. We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. (Laughter)
Dr. Kissinger: There are no quotas for those or tariffs.
Chairman Mao: So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands. (Laughter)
Prime Minister Chou: Of course, on a voluntary basis.
Chairmain Mao: Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens. (Laughter)
...
Chairman Mao: Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million. (Laughter, particularly among the women.)
Dr. Kissinger: The Chairman is improving his offer.
Chairman Mao: By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children and our children are too many. (Laughter)
Dr. Kissinger: It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it.
Chairman Mao: You can set up a committee to study the issue. That is how your visit to China is settling the population question. (Laughter)
Dr. Kissinger: We will study utilization and allocation.
Chairman Mao: If we ask them to go I think they would be willing.
Prime Minister Chou: Not necessarily.
Chairman Mao: That’s because of their feudal ideas, big nation chauvinism.
Dr. Kissinger: We are certainly willing to receive them.
...
Mao: You know, the Chinese have a scheme to harm the United States, that is, to send ten million women to the United States and impair its interests by increasing its population.
Kissinger: The chairman has fixed the idea so much in my mind that I’ll certainly use it at my next press conference. (Laughter)
Sickening!
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people
According to the most recent Census, there are 34 million widows in India, and more than half of them are less than 50 years of age. A UNIFEM supported survey of 255 widows in Vrindavan, conducted by the Guild of Service in 2002, reports:
A whopping 39 per cent of the widows interviewed had married below 12 years and 47 per cent between the ages of 12 and 17. Thirty per cent of them had become widows by the age of 24. Two had become widows by the time they were 12. They were married when just 7 and 9 years old respectively.
If we extrapolated from this sample, a third of the 34 million Indian widows — 10 million — would have been widowed by the age of 24, approximately the age when most women in the developed nations even begin to contemplate serious relationships.
That the Widows Remarriage Act of 1856 was no match for the Laws of Manu, is underscored by the fact that 60% of surveyed women have been widows for more than 20 years. More disturbing, 90% of the women were against remarriage. Only 13%, however, said they did not believe in remarriage. 70% attributed their reluctance to remarry to social and religious taboos.
The Hindu woman is not only commanded, but also brainwashed into believing that she could not love more than one man. If she did, she'd be unfaithful, flouting the pathivratha dharma [duties of a chaste wife to her husband]. That holds, even if the man she might have loved once is now a mere shadow on her mind. She must wait patiently until she's reunited with her man in the next birth. Then, in every birth after birth, for eternity. No such prognosis or restraint for her man, though.
All of this, of course, is nothing but horse manure. A woman, just as a man, can love more than once, more than one man, whether her ex is dead or alive. Sita, my maternal grand aunt, was only twelve when she got married. Within a year of the marriage, before it was even consummated, her husband (an undeserved label, really) had died, leaving her a child widow. In the heartless and cruel culture that considered a barely thirteen as an inauspicious widow to be cast into a dungeon, Sita refused to accept that her life was over. She declined to have her head shaved, dress in bland brown, or stay indoors. Unable to bear the community's ire, my grandfather packed her off to Saradha Vidyalaya, a boarding school in Madras (now, Chennai) for young widows, started by Sister Subbalakshmi in the 1920's.
Savithri, the Headmistress of the school, and a divorcee who had lost her twelve year old son recently, developed a special liking for Sita, and took her into her own home. She would live with my grand aunt until her death, and I would have the honor of meeting this remarkable lady several times. Sita was fairly well versed in classical music, and with the active encouragement of her foster mother, became a singer for the All India Radio. There she met another AIR artist, a progressive man from the neighboring state of Kerala. They fell in love, and after a year, they were married (civil marriage, of course). My grand aunt passed away in 1978, and was survived by her daughter, and grand children.
My paternal grand aunt, Soundarya, was not so fortunate. Widowed when she was 23, and childless, she returned to my grandfather's household, with a shaven head and a brown sari wrapped around her. She was wealthy with her dead husband's property, but every penny of it was squandered away by my grandfather, a compulsive gambler and a philanderer. After my grandfather passed away, she was forced to lead what can only be described as a nomadic life, shuttling between the homes of her nephews and nieces.
I have been a personal witness to all the unprintable abuse that were heaped on Soundarya. During rare moments of respite, she'd ask my mother, "Mythili, you are an educated woman. Men in their fifties and sixties marry, often taking women young enough to be their grand daughters, as their second and third wife. Tell me, how is it fair that women should languish in the life of the dead?".
The Shankaracharya of Joshimat [one of the six high priests of Hinduism] explains:
... it [remarriage] is forbidden by the shastras [the scriptures]. Widows are like sadhus and for society to recognize their new status as ascetics they wear white clothes and have their hair shorn. As ascetics they are not invited for happy occasions. They are supposed to dedicate their lives to God.
Supposed to? What gives this man the right to suppose anything for another woman? If love could blossom again for Sita, so it could for Soundarya. And, each one of the 34 million widows of India, can be a Valentine again for someone today, after having been one for someone else yesterday. Let no shastras or their hallowed custodians interrupt her life and loves.
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politics
It's official, folks. Suzie Wong, behind the Great Firewall of China in Shanghai, cannot read my blog. That's what the Website Test results say. Here they are:
Website Test Results
Tested From: Shanghai, China
Tested At: 2008-02-07
21:59:35 (GMT -05:00)
URL Tested: http://therationalfool.blogspot.com
Resolved As: 72.14.207.191
Status: couldn't connect to host
Not that all of Google Blooger sites are blocked. A redirect through my personal website is also blocked.
Website Test Results
Tested From: Shanghai, China
Tested At: 2008-02-07
22:04:46 (GMT -05:00)
URL Tested: http://www.rationalfool.com
Resolved As: 64.202.189.170
Status: couldn't connect to host
When tested from, Seattle, WA, both sites are accessible. That the People's Republic of China has chosen to block my blog does not come as a surprise to me. Not after what I have written about The Chinese Way of Life, The Shichang Price of Facts, Cultural Devolution, Off the People, by the People, for the People, When Curry Meets Tofu..., etc., etc.
I don't believe that my web site has been decorated with this honor after one of the members of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China read my posts, and decided that I am a rabid anti-communist. It'd be highly egotistic of me to think so. More likely, the story behind the blocking of my blog is along the lines of what researchers Earl Barr, a graduate student at UC Davis, and Jed Crandall, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico say. According to them,
The "Great Firewall of China," used by the government of the People's Republic of China to block users from reaching content it finds objectionable, is actually a "panopticon" that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users are being watched, rather than a true firewall, according to researchers at UC Davis and the University of New Mexico.
Barr and Randall's work follows what a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge, England, found out about how the Chinese system of internet censorship works. They discovered that "when a banned word [is seen] in data traveling across the network, it sends a series of three "reset" commands to both the source and the destination. These "resets" effectively break the connection."
Currently, Barr and Randall are developing an automated tool, "called ConceptDoppler, to act as a weather report on changes in Internet censorship in China." A quick read of the first list of blacklisted words and phrases discovered by the ConceptDoppler indicates that if you had any post that mentioned any phrase with "Tibetan" or "Falun Gong", your blog would have only a ghost of a chance escaping the jaws of the Chinese Checkers and landing in Suzie Wong's browser. My ten favorite banned words and phrases, however, are:
- 10
Block
There, my blog is now definitely blocked!
- 9
Democracy or dictatorship
Of course, a dictatorship cannot be expected to allow that choice, can it?
- 8
Civil rights movement
In a classless society, the vanguard and the proletariat shall remain separate and unequal!
- 7
News blackout
How can any self-respecting dictatorship allow news of the news blackout?
- 6
Hitler
And you think the communists don't know that Hitler is an euphemism for Mao!
- 5
Hunger strike
Gandhigiri is for the Indi-bhai, not for the Chini-bhai!
- 4
Sexual massage
I never thought that sexual massage can be done over the Internet.
- 3
Voice of America
Dollars, ni hao. Free speech, bu ni hao.
- 2
The right to strike
May be in that evil Empire, but not in our worker's paradise, no sir!
- 1
Dictatorship organs
Dictatorship organs!! That takes the cake, of course. What can be more subversive than an unflattering description of the organs of the Dicktators?
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hit & run
Yara, an American business woman from Utah, "believed that life in Saudi Arabia was becoming more liberal". She was wrong, she found out the hard way. Yara, a mother of three, was arrested from a Starbucks cafe and thrown into the Malaz prison in Riyadh by a few unidentified extremists from Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Times Online reports:
“They took me into a filthy bathroom, full of water and dirt. They made me take off my clothes and squat and they threw my clothes in this slush and made me put them back on,” she said. Eventually she was taken before a judge.
“He said 'You are sinful and you are going to burn in hell'. I told him I was sorry. I was very submissive. I had given up. I felt hopeless,” she said.
What was Yara's sin? With power out in her office, she took a break, and was having coffee with her colleagues, all men. Of Jordanian descent, she is married to a prominent businessman in Saudi Arabia, Hakim, who used his political connections to secure her release. None of the male colleagues seen with Yara was arrested or charged.
Yara, it is reported, wears an abaya and headscarf, like most Saudi women. She should have known that casual contact with unrelated men is strictly prohibited under Sharia:
The law prohibits men and women mixing [Ikhtilat] without necessity. When men and women are together the natural sexual attractiveness could lead them into temptation. When mixing is unavoidable for societal necessity, certain etiquette have been prescribed by the law to guide male-female interaction. Awrat must be covered as prescribed by the law, satr al awrat (24:31). The regulations of hijab for women must be followed. Men and women who are strangers to one another have to lower their gaze, ghadh al basar(24:31), and not look at each other fixedly and for a prolonged time. Both genders must have haya (28: 23-25). If a man and woman talk to one another they must be serious, jidiyyat al takhatub (33:32) and not engage in frivolous talk that could lead to temptation. An atmosphere of solemnity, wiqaar, must be maintained during the whole period of interaction (24:31).
--- Professor Dr. Omar Hassan Kasule Sr. Human Sexuality and the Shariat
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hit & run
Counterterrorism Blog: Jihadists, Islamists, and "Extremists" - what's in a name? Jeffrey Imms questions the wisdom behind the reluctance to identify the main source of threat to U.S. security — political Islam. Both in the recent annual threat assessment from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the President's State of the Union address, this reluctance is evident. Instead of "Islamic terrorism" or "Jihad", the preference is to use vague terms such as extremists or criminals.
I have written earlier on the official policy in the United Kingdom against the use of the word Muslim, Jihad, Islamist, etc. while referring to terrorist incidents, even when there was overwhelming evidence pointing to the involvement of Muslims. India, a country that is faced with Islamic terrorism as much as the U.S. or the U.K., if not more, is also under the spell of this insane political correctness. Its political leadership is bone-headed in its refusal to associate terrorism with Islam. In his address to a conference of the State Chief Ministers on internal security, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh didn't shy of identifying the recent jail break in Chattisgarh, and the sporadic violence in the so called "Red Corridor", with Left-Wing extremism. He was coy, however, when he spoke on Islamic terrorism:
While Left Wing Extremism may be restricted in its scope to some regions, the larger problem of terrorism affects merely all States equally... In the current year, we have had high profile terror attacks in Hyderabad, Rajasthan, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Terrorists are able to use a wide range of materials and are able to organize coordinated strikes. They are able to network across States and even international boundaries. Intelligence agencies warn of further intensification of violent activities by terrorist groups. While the actual perpetrators of terrorist violence may belong to a few known organizations, we need to guard against their attempts to recruit local sympathisers and local support. [emphasis mine]
Not once did Prime Minister Singh utter the word Islam or Muslim during his entire speech, even though an overwhelming majority of the civilian loss of life during the year was at the hands of the Islamic terrorists! India, to date, has not solved a single high-profile act of terrorism that was mentioned in the Prime Minister's speech. Writing in the Indian Express, columnist Shekhar Gupta opines:
Ask the police forces in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Hyderabad, the counter-terror veterans in the intelligence agencies and even the army, and the answer will stare you in the face. After the attacks they faced in the first flush of the Mumbai rail attacks for ‘targeting’ Muslims and the hurry in which they were forced to call off the searches and interrogations have put the fear of God in the minds of security men... This is reverse-communalisation of the fight against terror and the responsibility for this lies not so much with the security machinery, or the Union home ministry which controls it, as it does with this peculiar minority-ist politics the Congress has fallen prey to.
How does one "guard against their attempts to recruit local sympathisers and local support", if neither the recruiters, nor their potential local sympathizers can be identified, thereby narrowing the pool? A law-abiding, but poor Muslim taxi driver, is approached by a terrorist with, "I'll offer you ten times your monthly wages for this one trip to carry the explosives to the city market. As a Muslim, it's your duty to help us in our fight against the infidels. Don't worry, though, our leader will make sure that there will be no police search or interrogation of Muslims. He has every local political leader in his pocket. If you refuse, however, there'll be hell to pay." What do you think the the poor fellow's most likely response will be? I am afraid, this story is not entirely hypothetical or fictional.
Mr. Imms concludes:
When the United States begins treating the Jihadist threat like the United Kingdom does, we can be certain that we are losing the ideological war against the enemy. After all, we can't even state their name.
Add to that list, India, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, ...
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politics
China sentences rights activist to four years in prison
Beijing - A court in eastern China's Hangzhou city on Tuesday sentenced a rights activist and freelance writer to four years in prison for subversion, his lawyer said.
Take action! Call for China to release human rights activist
Hu Jia, a Beijing-based advocate for AIDS sufferers as well as the environment and human rights, was arrested on 27 December and later charged with "inciting subversion of state power."... Hu's wife, Zeng Jinyan, also an outspoken human rights advocate, and their two-month-old daughter remain under house arrest in Beijing.
Woman Writer Released, but Crackdown Continues
The Vietnamese government released the award-winning writer Tran Khai Thanh Thuy from prison yesterday, but continues to hold dozens of other peaceful activists in prison or under house arrest, Human Rights Watch said today.
| Rank | Country | Score |
| 149 | Gambia | 54,00 |
| - | Yemen | 54,00 |
| 151 | Belarus | 57,00 |
| 152 | Libya | 62,50 |
| 153 | Syria | 63,00 |
| 154 | Iraq | 66,83 |
| 155 | Vietnam | 67,25 |
| 156 | Laos | 67,50 |
| 157 | Pakistan | 70,33 |
| 158 | Uzbekistan | 71,00 |
| 159 | Nepal | 73,50 |
| 160 | Ethiopia | 75,00 |
| 161 | Saudi Arabia | 76,00 |
| 162 | Iran | 90,88 |
| 163 | China | 94,00 |
| 164 | Burma | 94,75 |
| 165 | Cuba | 95,00 |
| 166 | Eritrea | 97,50 |
| 167 | Turkmenistan | 98,50 |
| 168 | North Korea | 109,00 |
Take a careful look at the bottom 20 of the Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2008 published by the Reporters Sans Frontières. If you are in doubt about the predominant political and religious character of these countries, consult Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia. The map below gives you a starker picture. As you can see, the state of press freedom is abysmal in much of the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia.
RSF's press freedom index is based on the responses to a questionnaire that focuses exclusively on the state of the press and related media, including cyber media. It does not include any data on state suppression of individual rights or discriminatory laws. From a casual scanning of the countries in the bottom heap, I don't believe that the composition will materially change if, for example, discriminatory laws against women or ethnic groups were weighed in.
 Religion to me is a non-separable collection of ideas that have neither logical nor empirical support. With this definition, I have held in several of my earlier posts that Communism is a religion, much as Islam is. Both claim to be founded on incontrovertible truths. States are inseparable from these religions, and necessarily totalitarian. Challenges to their authority are not taken lightly. Those who dare are convicted for blasphemy, and extreme punishments await them. Little wonder that, where these two religions are in the minority as in India, they have been drawn closer together to fight off liberal ideas.
The world cannot forever remain a silent spectator to the suppression of individual rights and inequality before law. The destabilizing effects of Apartheid and Nazism were not confined to South Africa and Germany. Spillovers into other regions of the world could not be avoided, until these religions were discarded into the ash heap of history. It's now the turn of Communism and Islam to follow them.
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hit & run
The Supreme Court of the Islamic Republic of Iran has upheld the death sentence for two Iranian sisters, Zohreh and Azar, for adultery. The court has confirmed a lower penal court's order that the two women be stoned to death. The sisters were earlier convicted of "illegal relations" with strangers, and received 99 lashes as punishment.
Adultery ranks with murder, rape, armed robbery, and serious drug trafficking under Sharia, the world's most arcane and draconian moral code. All these are capital crimes punishable by death, adultery by stoning. Sharia is instituted as the legal system in almost all Islamic States. In its cruelty and inhumanity, this system is as abhorrent as Apartheid and Nazism. It should have no place in the civilized world, and by association, Iran should have no place in the community of nations, if it continued to be governed by Sharia.
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people
Troy, my friend and neighbor, died yesterday.
A life-long educator, Troy taught me a number of things. He taught me that age, color of the skin, even the character of one's political and social views, need not stand in the way of friendship. As long as we agree to disagree in a civil manner. Better still, laugh about the meaninglessness of everything. Troy taught me that one was never too busy to stop and say hello to a friend. He taught me that rain or shine, a laugh would surely brighten my day, and that of those around me.
In his late seventies, with a pace-maker, diabetes, over-weight, and a host of other problems, Troy would never fail to drive in his golf-cart towards me, if he found me working in the yard. He'd then engage me in a conversation that touched on everything from linguistics to terrorism. "I am a rotten scoundrel; I don't believe in going to the church," he would declare in his booming voice, "but you, you are worse. You deny the good lord".
Here are a couple of verses from the ancient philosophy of the Lokayatas/Caravakas, that I am sure Troy would have liked:
While life is yours, live joyously;
None can escape Death's searching eye.
When once this frame of ours they burn,
How shall it ever again return?
The pleasure which arises to men from contact with sensible objects,
Is to be relinquished as accompanied by pain - such is the reasoning of fools;
The berries of paddy, rich with the finest white grains,
What man, seeking his true interest, would fling away because covered with husk and dust?
Troy did not want a funeral or a memorial service for him. He'd be buried in his family plot. Farewell, Troy, I'll miss you dearly. Yard work will never be the same without you around.
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politics
The life of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, a young journalism student in his twenties, is in danger of being extinguished. Why? He is accused of showing disrespect to the words of a dead man, long silenced by the hot winds of Arabia. What did Pervez actually do? Kim Sengupta, writing in the Independent, reports:
... [Pervez] downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.
Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter...
Where? Afghanistan. When Mullah Omar led the Talibans to blast off the heads of women buried up to their necks in a soccer field? No, under the watch of the suave Hamid Karzai, the democratically elected President of civilized Afghaniztan.
Upon conviction, a Sharia court ordered the execution of Pervez. The Afghan Senate, then, passed a resolution, confirming the sentence.
Aminuddin Muzafari, the first secretary of the houses of parliament, said: "People should realise that as we are representatives of an Islamic country therefore we can never tolerate insults to reverences of Islamic religion."
There, we have it from yet another Islamic State. Not from some crazy, fringe group of fundamentalists, but the State itself. One may not criticize, dispute, or, negate anything that is written in the Koran. It's blasphemy, punishable by death, under the Islamic law.
Imagine, if other major religions had such an iron grip over the people of the nations in which they are predominant. The world would have been bereft of Dan Brown, Richard Dawkins, Jodie Foster, and Martin Scorsese, long time ago. M. Karunanidhi, Deepa Mehta, and Ravi Shastri, would have been beheaded for insulting Rama, Sita, and the cow. It's time for the world, especially the regions where Islam has a significant presence, to wake up and smell the danger to the civilization from this so-called religion of peace.
Update:Under criticism and pressure from the British Government and the international community, the Afghan Senate has withdrawn its resolution confirming Pervez's execution.
More than 38,000 readers of The Independent have now joined the campaign to save Sayed Pervez Kambaksh - and yesterday's breakthrough shows the impact this petition has had. But the student's fate is by no means decided. So add your voice to the campaign by urging the Foreign Office to put all possible pressure on the Afghan government to spare his life. Sign our e-petition at www.independent.co.uk/petition
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hit & run
Dear Readers:
I apologize for the rather unusual (?) hiatus in my posting. The year began with a firm resolution that I should write at least two articles per week. It was not meant to be. Forces beyond my control conspired to intervene, and all I could write was a solitary piece for the entire month. Much of the blame lay at the door of a crippling flu, followed by acute laryngitis.
Now, flu, I can understand, but laryngitis? What does it have to do with writing? If I couldn't speak, I should be able to channel all that energy into writing, right? Wrong. At least, that seems to be the way my genes express themselves. I have a question for the docs and the neuro-scientists among my readers — I know that there are at least three. When we formulate our thoughts into words, are the vocal muscles stimulated, even if we didn't speak the words? Well, it looks like the parts of the brain that I use to write my blog posts refuse to function, if they did not receive any feedback from the larynx.
I have started recovering parts of my speech — I can articulate reasonably well, my preference for chocolate, and abhorrence for Himesh Reshammiya's remixes. That should be adequate for prolonging my life. Actually, people around me may have reason to think that if I recovered any more of my vocal faculties, it might interfere with the attempts to prolong their own lives!
After the Lives of Others, Phillip Noyce's Catch a Fire is another impressive movie that I saw recently. Set in the Apartheid era in South Africa, it is based on the true story of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke). Patrick was a law abiding, family man, until when he is tranformed into a foot soldier for the African National Congress, by the brutality of the regime, epitomized so well by the cruel head of the South African Police (SAP) unit, Colonel Nic Vos (Tim Robbins). To me, Catch a Fire, as the Lives of Others, is yet another affirmation that no State can indefinitely deny individual freedom and equality before law.
On Monday, NASA will beam into space, the Beatles' song, "Across the Universe".
The occasion is a string of anniversaries: NASA's 50th year in space, the founding 45 years ago of NASA's Deep Space Network of antennae, and not least, the 40th anniversary of the recording of "Across the Universe." Feb. 4 has apparently been declared "Across the Universe Day," and the general public is invited to play the song at the same time (7 pm EST) that it is being beamed into space.
Here's a sampling from the lyrics for the song:
... Sounds of laughter, shades of love, are ringing through my opened ears,
Inciting and inviting me.
Limitless undying love, which shines around me like a million suns,
And calls me on and on across the universe.
Jai guru deva, Om.
Nothing's gonna change my world, ...
What a tribute to John Lennon's gang of four!
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