The Tory landslide is good news for Britain for 3 different reasons
1) It buries Corbyn and his clique. The problem Remainers had with casting a tactical vote for the Liberals was that, in a hung parliament, Corbyn would have survived as a vital power-broker in blocking no deal. Thus, to kill Corbyn and rescue the Labor Party from virtue signalling middle class cretins, well off Remainers as well as the Northern working class had to hold their nose and vote for bumbling Bo Jo.
2) If buries the DUP and the Liberals- both are historical anachronisms and should just fuck off and die already. It also means the Scottish Labor and Tory parties are going to become increasingly independent. Hopefully, it would be in the interest of England and Wales to reduce Scottish representation at Westminster in return for fiscal independence for Scotland. Assuming England and Wales go down a Free Trade route, the pressure would be on Europe because it would be difficult for them to refuse membership to an independent Scotland- in other words there is a bargaining chip of a negative kind here.
3) Bumbling Bo Jo will have to be a roi faineant because Tory knives are already out for him. They are a ruthless bunch. One bumble too many and he will be out on his arse. He is seen as a cartoonish figure whose great utility lay in his being able to kill off another cartoonish figure- Nigel Farage. There's enough dirt on him to get him to go quietly so he really is an ideal figure head.
I was Remain but- like the rest of the country, have had to accept that Brexit is here to stay. Bo Jo has a good majority and has a better hand to play with Europe thanks to his ruthless stab in the back of the unlovable DUP.
Friday, 13 December 2019
David Schraub on Trump's Executive Order re. Anti Semitism
President Trump's executive order on anti-semitism has, predictably, not been welcomed by Liberals.
David Schraub, a Law Professor, writes in the Atlantic-
Consider the recent 'Kosher supermarket shooting'. It appears that the perpetrators belonged to the Black Hebrew Israelite Movement, which is characterized by a belief that blacks “are the true descendants of biblical Jews,” with some even considering mainstream Judaism an “imposter religion.” These two nutters may have identified as Jews. From the legal point of view, they weren't Jews but Jew haters.
The Liberal Jews tried to direct their cognitive dissonance into an anti Trumpian channel by pretending to be outraged by his remarks- like the guy chooses his words carefully or bothers to cloak his meaning in obfuscating language. But this strategy backfired. Trump is going the extra mile to show he is genuinely both pro-Zionist and a defender of American Jews who must no longer be subjected to harassment and hate speech by people who do disguise their true beliefs by pretending to care for the Palestinians as opposed to merely wishing to see Jews wiped off the face of the earth.
Look at what has happened to Corbyn. He has been crushed in the recent election. One of his own MPs roundly denounced his nasty, racist, policies as being one of the factors behind the collapse of Labour's 'Red Wall'- i.e. the loss of its safe seats. British voters have shown that ordinary people understand that 'Anti-Zionism' is 'Anti-Semitism' and 'Anti-Semitism' has always been the thin edge of the wedge of the Totalitarian incompetence of both the far Left and the far Right.
America permits dual-citizenship and 'dual loyalty' is not a problem if it is to an ally. The President is himself saying that the good American supports Israel and the good American Jew should do so all the more. On the other hand, there are anti-Semites (who proudly identify themselves as such if they feel it safe to do so) who rant and rave about ZOG- the Zionist Occupying Government- and an accusation of dual-loyalty by one such is evidence of a hate crime. By contrast, saying 'So and so is putting Israel's interests above the American National Interest' is not anti-Semitic because, more often than not, the person he is speaking of is a Gentile.
The plain fact of the matter is that you could get a PhD from that program without knowing a word of Arabic. This made you unemployable though, no doubt, you could explain LGBTQ subtexts in the Egyptian Cinema of the Sixties to your clients in between refilling their coffee cups and taking their orders.
Title VI money isn't that substantial. Harvard's MidEast Department found Obama's Title VI provisions too strict and opted out of the program. Thus, there is little real threat to 'intellectual freedom' on- at least- wealthier Campuses.
Anti-Zionist virtue signalling is a public nuisance. It is a factor in Labour's worst election result since 1935 in the UK. It does not help Muslims or Palestinians. It harms them.
Ziad Mughal, a British Muslim, who has fought both Islamo-phobia as well as Radicalization, said 'I cannot stand back and keep quiet when Corbyn turns up to divisive groups who risk increasing hostility between British Muslims and Jews and who build and enhance grievances. As someone who has worked on countering extremism for over two decades, I have seen where unchecked grievances lead to.'
David Schraub, a Law Professor, writes in the Atlantic-
What are Jews? Members of a religious group? A race or an ethnicity? A nation? Some mixture of them all, or something else entirely?The law is not concerned with self-definitions which are imperative, not extensional or protocol bound. Christians may well debate who is or isn't a true Christian. Some zealots may say that the Pope has ceased to be Catholic. However, the Law uses Kripkean 'buck stopped' rigid designators which are objective and protocol bound.
Consider the recent 'Kosher supermarket shooting'. It appears that the perpetrators belonged to the Black Hebrew Israelite Movement, which is characterized by a belief that blacks “are the true descendants of biblical Jews,” with some even considering mainstream Judaism an “imposter religion.” These two nutters may have identified as Jews. From the legal point of view, they weren't Jews but Jew haters.
As a debate among the Jews, this question may be academically interesting or, depending on your point of view, incredibly tedious. But as a legal question, it matters a great deal.Nonsense. The thing is easily done. There may be 'hard cases' but that doesn't mean there will be bad law.
American antidiscrimination law covers certain protected categories. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in programs receiving federal support on the basis of “race, color, or national origin,” but—unlike many other antidiscrimination provisions—not religion.Religion is a matter of self-definition. I myself am Chief Rabbi of my own sect of Judaism. We trace our origin to Schlemiel who accidentally jizzed on a passing Maharishi on his way back to Annamalai University after completing a scholar exchange program with Technion.
So, Trump is merely formalizing something which already exists.
So if Jews are deemed “just” a religious group, then they are not covered by Title VI. Publicly funded programs, under this view, could discriminate against Jews with impunity.
But the federal government—starting in the George W. Bush administration, and more formally during the Obama administration—began to settle on a more tailored answer. Title VI does not cover religion-based discrimination. But when discrimination against Jews—or Muslims or Sikhs, for that matter—is based on “the group’s actual or perceived ancestry or ethnic characteristics,” or “actual or perceived citizenship or residency in a country whose residents share a dominant religion or a distinct religious identity,” the government found, then that discrimination falls under Title VI’s purview. Anti-Semitic discrimination is unlawful under Title VI to the extent that it targets Jews as a racial or national group.
This seemed appropriate. After all, anti-Semites very often envision and target Jews as a racial or national group. Secular Jews are by no means immunized from anti-Semitic attacks. And Jews have vigorously resisted the Protestant-oriented insistence that Jewishness is reducible to a religious identity. An antidiscrimination regime that is blind to this aspect of Jewish identity and to this manifestation of anti-Semitic hatred would be wholly unequipped to protect Jews.
This week, the Trump administration announced a new executive order that, more or less, entrenches the rule already adopted by the Obama and Bush administrations. It also breaks new ground by officially instructing all government agencies tasked with enforcing antidiscrimination law to “consider” the nonbinding International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism, including its illustrative examples.
The announcement set off a firestorm of criticism in thevirtue signalling shithead portion of the
Jewish community,most of which focused on attacking the idea that Jews could be included as a “nationality” (thus receiving national-origin-based protections). These critics perceived the order as implicitly denying the Americanness of American Jews: What would it mean for the federal government—led by Donald Trump, no less—to separate Jews into their own nation?Nothing at all. These fuckers were getting their panties in a twist for no good reason.
But the emphatic denials by some Jewish commentators that Jews should ever be conceived as a national grouping risk unraveling the entire basis for affording Jews Title VI protection in the first place—not just under the Trump administration’s view, but in the view of every recent administration. Only some notion of legally cognizable Jewish nationhood (or race) brings Jews under Title VI’s ambit. And if any use of national-origin-based protections implies that the covered group is not truly “American,” then huge swaths of antidiscrimination law should be repealed—at great danger to the increasing number of Americans who still face discrimination based on their national ancestry.In other words, if we want to appease these virtue signallers we would, sooner or later, be obliged to cut off our own heads and shove it up our poopers.
America permits dual citizenship. All Trump is saying is 'support Israel, support Netanyahu'. Since America supports both, there is nothing wrong at all in Trump saying this. He may similarly say to Pakistani-Americans, 'support Imran Khan. Send money to bail out that country.' By contrast, India does not permit dual citizenship. An Indian origin American can have no dual loyalty on taking American citizenship. She can't vote for Modi even if Trump tells her to.
The furious responses from many Jews reflected, in part, simmering anger at a particular form of anti-Semitism characteristic of the Trump administration and elements of the broader conservative movement. President Trump has regularly and repeatedly suggested that America is not the country of American Jews. Israel is “your country,” he says, and Netanyahu is “your prime minister.”
The impeachment investigation has likewise seen several prominent Jewish figures have not just their patriotism but their very loyalty to America questioned—most notably Alexander Vindman.The context is the dirty fighting involved in an impeachment hearing. Vindman's testimony is damaging to the President. Thus, his allies try to paint him as serving some sinister foreign power. But this backfired immediately.
Just a few days ago, Trump proffered a cavalcade of anti-Semitic stereotypes in a speech before the Israeli American Council, lambasting American Jews for their insufficient love of both him and Israel, calling Jews “not nice people” who would nonetheless be compelled to vote Republican in order to protect their wealth.This is wholly misleading. He was talking to a bunch of property developers- like himself. These guys boast of their own ruthlessness. To say 'you are an evil bastard who will skin your own grandmother to earn a couple of bucks' is to pay your interlocutor the highest praise. It is a different matter that once one is rich one has to pretend to be Liberal and to care deeply about the poor Palestinians and so forth. However, this is hypocrisy merely. Trump is saying 'I trust you guys because you are ruthless bastards. Posture all you like, I know you'll back my party. That's why I'm not going to try to punish you. Now I've laid my cards on the table, you too can trust me the way I trust you.'
This is crazy shit. Jews don't really believe Trump is telling his son-in-law to fuck off to Jerusalem. What he is saying is that Jewish Americans should identify with Israel in the manner that Trump's America identifies with and supports Netanyahu's vision of Israel.
With nerves already rubbed raw, a news report about an executive order that even hinted at dividing “Jewish” from “American” was the last straw. It was perceived as a doubling-down, another way of telling American Jews, “This is not your country.”
In part, the frenzied reaction can be laid at the feet of The New York Times—its initial article badly misrepresented the content of the prospective executive order and the context of Title VI. And in part, the hostile reaction of the Jewish public is reflective of a separate conversation occurring in the American Jewish community. Many Jews have grown frustrated at what they perceive as weak or uneven policing of Trumpist anti-Semitism—anti-Semitism that frequently seems to question whether Jews are patriotic or loyal Americans—even as most Jews have firmly laid the blame for rising anti-Semitism at the Republican Party’s doorstep. That they had just witnessed yet another round of tepid “critiques” of Trump’s anti-Semitic remarks before the IAC had Jews particularly attuned to this problem.The real problem is that Liberal Jews are witnessing the hijacking of the Democratic party grassroots by militant anti-Semites. They may call themselves anti-Zionists but it is Jews that they hate. This is not 'the Socialism of Fools', it is the Liberalism of hate-mongers.
The Liberal Jews tried to direct their cognitive dissonance into an anti Trumpian channel by pretending to be outraged by his remarks- like the guy chooses his words carefully or bothers to cloak his meaning in obfuscating language. But this strategy backfired. Trump is going the extra mile to show he is genuinely both pro-Zionist and a defender of American Jews who must no longer be subjected to harassment and hate speech by people who do disguise their true beliefs by pretending to care for the Palestinians as opposed to merely wishing to see Jews wiped off the face of the earth.
This worry is so very old that it died in its sleep in the Sixties. The Godfather movies aggressively promoted 'hyphenated identity'. So does rap and hip-hop and so forth. There is nothing more American than being 'hyphenated'. Which American President does not play up his Irish roots- if he has any?
So that’s part of the story, and in some ways the literal content of the executive order is irrelevant to it. But some deeper and more substantive anxieties are at work here.
One is the very old worry that promoting any sort of “hyphenated identity” ultimately gives succor to racists and bigots of all stripes.
To be accepted as American, Jews and other minority groups must simply be American—no ifs, ands, or buts.Because Obama wasn't elected President just coz his granny was Kenyan. The truth of the matter is that to be an American today is to gleefully appropriate Yiddish and Italian phrases while also, more cautiously, seeking to encroach on African American linguistic territory.
The fear is that the executive order, insofar as it encodes Jewish difference into American law, may enable anti-Semitic hatred.How? The fact is anti-Semitic hatred we will always have with us because Jews are numerically over-represented in every useful and admirable type of vocation or profession. I fucking hate Jews only slightly less than I hate Iyengars.
It is not that this risk is illusory. It is true, as Ian F. Haney Lopez wrote years ago, that “to acknowledge race is to leave open the possibility—indeed the certainty—that this acknowledgment will at times be turned to racism’s service,” and that applies with equal force to the acknowledgment that Jews view themselves and are viewed by others as having a distinct national origin.Lord Jesus Christ certainly had a 'distinct national origin'. By contrast, Jewish Americans, unlike WASPs, come from different countries in Europe and elsewhere.
But Jews are being baited into taking a very dangerous position here—insisting that we must withdraw from the protection of antidiscrimination law, because it might obliquely confirm the anti-Semite’s suspicion that the Jew is different.Who is doing the baiting? Is it the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan? No. Of course not! Don't be silly. It is merely the 'circular firing squad' of the Left-Liberals up to its usual time-wasting antics.
This outlook is a position Jews—and progressives generally—should be very wary of endorsing. It is the kissing cousin of conservative color blindness, which insists that any and all public usages of race—even those that are tailored to undermining discrimination and ingrained inequality—actually function solely to entrench racism. It is the illusory promise of assimilation, the vain belief that if we duck our heads low enough, anti-Semites will forget who we are. It is a viewpoint that ultimately threatens the entire project of antidiscrimination law—a project that cannot function without some notion of who it is protecting and why.Nonsense. This is not a viewpoint and it does not threaten anything. It is a nuisance simply.
Antidiscrimination law has to name categories, and in doing so it acknowledges certain identities as demarcating social differences. Some on the right have sought to use this unavoidable feature of antidiscrimination law as means of declaring war on the entire apparatus—anti-racism rendered as racism. But acknowledging diverse identities does not justify inequality or subordination, and recognizing American diversity need not entail denigrating American minorities.It is preferable to recognize nothing save that pseudo intellectual shitheads causing a public nuisance must be compelled to pick up their own feces and dispose of it in a hygenic manner.
and the Zombie Apocalypse and the Spanish Inquisition
Right now, amid the resurgence of neo-Nazis and the rise of the alt-right,
serious antidiscrimination protections are particularly necessary.We are speaking of a nuisance which must be curbed. Why pretend that one is battling to prevent Nazi Vampires from Outer Space taking over the Republic?
The response of the law cannot be to carve out an exemption for anti-Semitic discrimination so long as it takes on a racialized or nationalist character. Indeed, several groups—perhaps most notably Mexican Americans—have seen their Americanness challenged in an even more direct and vicious fashion by the Trump administration than have the Jews.Wow! Families being split up and deported face challenges similar, if somewhat more difficult, from Jews who are perfectly safe! Why not say that Melania Trump's right of abode in America has been undermined by her husband's cruel policies? Barron Trump may be separated from his family at any moment. Will the poor lad survive in an ICE detention camp?
Yet to respond to that challenge by withdrawing the national-origin-based protections Mexican Americans are entitled to under the law, on the spurious hope that doing so would dissipate the racist belief that they aren’t real Americans, would be a catastrophically shortsighted response. Heightened discriminatory hatred requires more robust antidiscrimination law, not less.This is silly. Some Mexican Americans have been illegally deported. This wasn't because anti-discrimination law wasn't robust enough. It was because they were poor and their due process rights were denied by a shambolic INS apparatus.
But another concern is at play in the response to the executive order: the worry that the Trump administration will take real fears of anti-Semitism and weaponize them by leveling bad-faith allegations to silence or suppress speech—particularly speech centered on Israel.The vast majority of speech centered on Israel is 'bad faith'. Moreover, the thing is a nuisance. Curb it by all means. We do not speak of laws against dogs fouling the pavement as 'weaponizing' anything. Scoop up your dog's poop. Don't talk worthless shite about Israel. This makes everybody better off.
Jews may need more robust antidiscrimination protections, but the Trump administration can hardly be trusted to implement them.Jews don't need anything they can't supply for themselves. That is why Jews still exist. Where Jews have relied on Tzars or Commissars, they have been decimated.
This issue largely concerns the more legitimately controversial aspect of the executive order: its misappropriation of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism for use in assigning civil liability. The definition was not designed to fulfill this role, and indeed its own drafters have been vocal in opposing its use for this purpose.The intention of the drafter of a statement which is used for some other purpose by a third party are wholly irrelevant. What is at issue is whether public funds can be given to an entity where anti-Zionist propaganda is carried out. The answer is- no. We have an Executive order. This may be challenged in the Courts but it may well be a matter of 'political question'. Peter Beinart writes 'So according to Trump, ‘denying the Jewish people self-determination’ is now bigotry, which loses a college government funds. Denying Palestinians the right to self-determination, by contrast, is US + Israeli policy.” This is perfectly fair. It is US- and Egyptian and Israeli policy to deny 'self-determination' to the Palestinians because, left to their own devices, they will fuck up even more massively than they already have. Stupid kids on campuses may think that Palestine could be a wonderful knowledge-economy like Israel if only the Israeli Army left the Arabs alone. The facts are quite different. There is no point in pretending that the Palestinians- like other peoples in the region- are not the authors of their own misfortunes. 'Grievance Studies' may experience a chilling effect but the best thing for the students defrauded by its Credentialized Ponzi Scheme would be for the thing to be frozen off like a wart.
While the order does not explicitly mention either Israel or the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, there is again ample reason for concern here.Ample? How so? Will Nazi Vampires from Outer Space launch an invasion if this Order explicitly mentioned Israel. The plain fact is, BDS failed. Israel's GDP has doubled and its FDI has tripled since the inception of the Sanctions movement. The thing is a nuisance simply. Israeli academics, unlike Arab or Indian academics, are good at what they do. We need access to their research. By contrast, if Grievance Studies disappeared nothing but a wart on the lovely face of Sophia will have been eradicated.
Trump’s repeated indulgences in anti-Semitic themes—from dual-loyalty charges to Soros-based conspiracy mongering—give lie to any serious belief that his administration can be trusted to keep Jews safe.And yet Jews are safe. That is the truth. One may lie about Trump being secretly a Nazi, but that lie does not give the lie to anything because it is itself untrue. Administrations don't keep Jews safe. Jews do. Sadly, a lot of them talk worthless virtue signalling shite but the Jews will pull together if an actual threat materializes.
That the same administration that has cried about “free speech on campus” when it comes to protecting the rights of racist provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos is suddenly a lot more invested in student safety when it might help suppress pro-Palestinian protests provokes fears that it primarily sees the charge of anti-Semitism as a tool to bludgeon wayward Democrats.What is wrong with that? Wayward Democrats are the guys whose 'circular firing squad' is making them unelectable. Curb the nuisance and the Democrats can go back to defending the working population instead of virtue signalling in a futile manner.
Look at what has happened to Corbyn. He has been crushed in the recent election. One of his own MPs roundly denounced his nasty, racist, policies as being one of the factors behind the collapse of Labour's 'Red Wall'- i.e. the loss of its safe seats. British voters have shown that ordinary people understand that 'Anti-Zionism' is 'Anti-Semitism' and 'Anti-Semitism' has always been the thin edge of the wedge of the Totalitarian incompetence of both the far Left and the far Right.
There is no mystery here. American Christians must still be allowed to trash-talk Hindus and Buddhists and Confucians and so forth. The presence of Russian or Russian American students on US campuses must not come in the way of good old Kremlin bashing.
There is one mystery in all this that I haven’t wrapped my head around: Whether or not Jewish is a national identity, Israeli obviously is. So if the goal is to target BDS, to the extent that BDS activism obstructs Israeli or Israeli American students’ equal access to educational opportunities in the U.S. on account of their national origin, wouldn’t that invite a perfectly straightforward Title VI application without the need to bank-shot it through Jews-as-a-nation?
At any event, neither fights over free speech nor the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tend to bring out anyone’s better angels. Hypocrisy abounds. Many averred free-speech warriors have been quite willing to sanction explicit and de jure censorship on campus aimed at suppressing pro-Palestinian speech; many of those indulging in naked harassment or discrimination of Jewish students have learned to yell “Free speech!” as if it provides a catchall dispensation—especially if they drape their conduct in the cloak of “criticism of Israel.”What is being described is a nuisance which ought to be curbed. It is foolish to pretend that students benefit from having their attention drawn to this topic. Far better that they learn how to rede and rite gud same as wot I kan.
Ideally, the uncontroversial truth would be that anti-Israel conduct is neither necessarily anti-Semitic nor necessarily not anti-Semitic—it depends on the details of the case.But it is still a nuisance. If I shit on the sidewalk, it may be that I am genuinely protesting the persecution of Iyers by Iyengars rather than hoping to cause you to slip upon my excreta and thus fracture your own stink-bone. What is important is not my intention but that the nuisance of turds on the pavement by effectually curbed.
To declare all anti-Israel sentiment intrinsically anti-Semitic would be as absurd as to insist that none of it is, or to proclaim that otherwise anti-Semitic conduct is cleansed of its character because it styles itself as “anti-Israel.”But the thing is still a nuisance.
It is also the case that the First Amendment protects anti-Semitic speech—whether in an “anti-Israel” guise or not. In a sense, the IHRA definition shouldn’t matter to the free-speech debate, because if we’re talking about speech qua speech, both anti-Semitic speech and non-anti-Semitic speech are equally entitled to constitutional protection. “I hate Jews” is as protected as “I hate Zionists” is as protected as “I hate Dodgers fans.”But you should not get the tax payers money for preaching hatred.
The legal question is when conduct—anything from vandalizing a Hillel to assaulting a student to refusing to write a letter of recommendation—ought to be attributed to an anti-Semitic motive. If a man on campus assaults me on the street, he’s a criminal. Is he an anti-Semitic criminal? If he takes a swing while yelling “I hate Dodgers fans,” then he probably isn’t. If he does it while yelling “I hate Jews,” then he definitely is. What if he punches me while screaming “I hate Zionists”? This is the core of the dilemma.Where is the dilemma? This is purely a legal matter. The prosecutor demonstrates that the man was anti-Semitic because he believed Dodgers fans were disproportionately Jewish. Alternatively, the Defense proves that the man was not anti Semitic because he was a Rabbi associated with Neturei Karta who believes that Jews should not return to the Holy Land till the Messiah appears.
But resolving it doesn’t change the fact that all three statements—were they simply uttered in the town square or written in a blog post—are equally protected speech.In America, yes. They are of the nature of a nuisance which it has not been thought worthwhile to curb- just as, till recently, dogs were allowed to shit on the pavement.
This is certainly a matter which the Courts can clarify. On the other hand, it may be decided that executive privilege obtains and the doctrine of political question applies. The fact is, if the Order is acted upon then there will be increasing certainty in this regard. If it isn't, why bother with it?
The trouble with the IHRA definition is that, while it nominally respects these distinctions, it is far too flimsy to work as a tool of law enforcement. Originally designed for monitoring and data-collection purposes, the IHRA definition is a political document in the truest sense: vague to the point of incoherency, and riddled with so much imprecision and hedging that it could justify labeling anything or nothing anti-Semitic.
The definition itself sets a cloudy tone right at the outset, stating that “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” “A certain perception”—well, what perception is that?The perception that it is right to be against Jews. What is cloudy about that?
It “may” take the form of “hatred toward Jews”—what other forms “may” it take?Disapproval. Resentment. The determination to have nothing to do with them. I don't hate people who pick their nose and then eat their own boogers. But I give them a wide berth.
Later, the document gives a set of contemporary “examples” of anti-Semitism—including things like dual-loyalty accusations or Holocaust denial—but clarifies that these examples only “could, taking into account the overall context,” possibly be thought of as anti-Semitism—offering no guidance as to when they “could” or “could not” be deemed anti-Semitic.No such guidance is required. In some countries Holocaust denial is illegal. In others the thing may be little known. A citizen of India or China has little knowledge or interest in European history. An Indian may say 'I can't believe any such thing happened'. That would not be 'anti-Semitic'. It wouldn't even be particularly ignorant. The fact is, most Indians have no reason to be aware of this particular atrocity.
America permits dual-citizenship and 'dual loyalty' is not a problem if it is to an ally. The President is himself saying that the good American supports Israel and the good American Jew should do so all the more. On the other hand, there are anti-Semites (who proudly identify themselves as such if they feel it safe to do so) who rant and rave about ZOG- the Zionist Occupying Government- and an accusation of dual-loyalty by one such is evidence of a hate crime. By contrast, saying 'So and so is putting Israel's interests above the American National Interest' is not anti-Semitic because, more often than not, the person he is speaking of is a Gentile.
And while some of the examples seem to cover extreme forms of vitriolic criticism of Israel (such as comparing Israel to Nazi Germany), the definition confirms that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”In other words, it is perfectly reasonable.
If the IHRA were to be operationalized as a legal tool, at the very least it would require nuance, sensitivity, and care to put into practice.This is true of any policy proposal couched in ordinary language. Every legal tool must be used with nuance, sensitivity and care. My writ of habeas corpus demanding the corpse of Margaret Thatcher for necrophiliac purposes was not sound in law.
The Trump administration has not, to put it mildly, earned the benefit of the doubt in performing such a delicate task.It won't be performing a delicate task. University authorities will curb a nuisance on campus. Some virtue signalling shitheads will challenge this in court. It is the Judiciary which will perform the delicate task or else declare it unconstitutional.
It has no principled interest in academic freedom; it is still seeking to meddle in academic programming with an ill-conceived investigation into what it terms the “balance” of Middle Eastern–studies programming at Duke and the University of North Carolina—as if federal bureaucrats have any business micromanaging the curricular offerings of American universities.Federal bureaucrats have no business micromanaging anything save Public Sector projects and what happens to tax dollars awarded to non Public Sector organization under the provisions of particular Statutes. In the case of the Duke-North Carolina Mid East studies program, federal money was being wasted on things not covered under Title VI. A Palestinian activist complained this was 'micro-management'. She was lying. If I refuse to pay for something under a contract because of a material breach, I am not 'micro-managing' the supply of the thing in question. It is up to the other contracting party to either correct the breach of find some other sucker.
The plain fact of the matter is that you could get a PhD from that program without knowing a word of Arabic. This made you unemployable though, no doubt, you could explain LGBTQ subtexts in the Egyptian Cinema of the Sixties to your clients in between refilling their coffee cups and taking their orders.
Title VI money isn't that substantial. Harvard's MidEast Department found Obama's Title VI provisions too strict and opted out of the program. Thus, there is little real threat to 'intellectual freedom' on- at least- wealthier Campuses.
Even if the IHRA guidelines do not on their face bar lawful and protected anti-Israel activity (and—for what it’s worth—I don’t think they do), they are written in language that is so broad and so vague that relying on them for use in legal-enforcement actions is almost guaranteed to have a chilling effect.Or the opposite. Anti-Zionism is very well funded and virtue signallers abound in the legal community.
If a student posts a graphic image of a Palestinian child killed by Israel Defense Forces fire, is that tantamount to invoking a blood libel?No. It is an indictment of the Palestinian authorities who turn their own kids into cannon fodder so as to enrich themselves from foreign donations.
If a campus organization is primarily focused on Palestinian rights, does that demonstrate a double standard against Israel?Yes. Such organizations are not concerned with getting Palestinians to play nice with each other. They merely seek to demonize Israel.
The simple fear that the government might decide that it is or that it does is enough to produce a chilling effect, even if the new guidelines spark no new enforcement actions.Since the 'simple fear' of harming the life-chances of Palestinian kids did not factor, why should we worry about any chilling or heating effect? I don't go into a pub full of beefy Rugby players and tell them their sport is like totally gay. Why? The likelihood of getting my head kicked in has a chilling effect. That is a good thing. Rugby players really are all gay and, after they had finished with me, I would be too. This would entail getting a new wardrobe and hiring an interior decorator and so forth. At this point in my life, I simply can't afford the expense.
The IHRA's drafters wanted to minimize criticism that they would themselves receive. That's why they wanted to pass the buck to someone else to do the hard work. Yet, their definition- though appearing novel when it first came out- has stood the test of time.
This is all good reason to follow the advice of the IHRA’s own drafters and not enlist the IHRA definition for a task it cannot hope to fulfill.
Anti-Zionist virtue signalling is a public nuisance. It is a factor in Labour's worst election result since 1935 in the UK. It does not help Muslims or Palestinians. It harms them.
Ziad Mughal, a British Muslim, who has fought both Islamo-phobia as well as Radicalization, said 'I cannot stand back and keep quiet when Corbyn turns up to divisive groups who risk increasing hostility between British Muslims and Jews and who build and enhance grievances. As someone who has worked on countering extremism for over two decades, I have seen where unchecked grievances lead to.'
But qualms about the utility of the IHRA are only part of the picture. The bigger fear is that the Trump administration will abuse anti-Semitism claims to suppress free speech whether the IHRA definition sanctions it or not.Why stop there? Why not speak of the even bigger fear that Trump will use his small hands to interfere with your pussy cat? That thing sitting on his hat is probably a ginger cat. How long before Moggy turns into your own toupee and gets its claws into your brain? I already find myself trying to lick my unmentionables. Is there a cat sitting on my head? If so, it can only be Trump's fault. I don't blame the Jews in the slightest- though the Protocols of the Elders of Zion explicitly reference the subversion of my neighbor's cat for some malign purpose.
On that score, the uncomfortable truth is this: Giving more robust antidiscrimination protections means giving Trump more robust tools he can abuse.Very true. Look how Trump is abusing Civil Rights legislation to install cats upon the balding heads of people my age! Increasing the amount of any type of anti-discrimination is just playing into the paws of my neighbor's cat.
Withdrawing those tools from the Trump administration to prevent their abuse means withdrawing those tools from even where they could be used to combat genuine anti-Semitism. Reducing the number of false positives means accepting more false negatives.Why stop there? Why not withdraw all legislation for the duration of Trump's administration or, indeed, the administration of anybody we don't like?
For Jews who are genuinely fearful of rising anti-Semitism but have felt burned by the way this administration has manipulated the concept for nakedly political and partisan ends, there is no easy resolution to this tension.Why? Because they are meshugannah. However, anti-psychotic medication provides an easy resolution to their tension.
The difficult challenge they now face is to communicate these concerns and express their anger in a way that doesn’t risk inadvertently overthrowing decades of hard-won civil-rights progress.This is not a difficult challenge at all. All they have to do is to strip naked and run naked through the streets shouting 'Nazi Vampires from Outer Space are trying to affix cats to our skulls so as to take over our bodies!' Speaking personally, I have found this a healthful recreation. Also it gets me off Jury duty.
Indeed. Jews have every reason- including all the ones that motivate me- for running naked through the streets screaming incoherently. So do we all.
Jews have every reason to be suspicious of the way in which the Trump administration will use a putative fight against anti-Semitism to squelch liberal speech on campus and drive further wedges between Jews and other minority groups (who certainly aren’t the beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s sudden affinity for academic safe spaces).
But it’s necessary to contest such abuses without adopting the uncompromising position that any form of anti-Semitic conduct, so long as it styles itself as “anti-Israel” in character, is outside the ambit of antidiscrimination law.Most forms of anti-Semitic conduct- quite rightly- are outside the ambit of anti-discrimination law. Sodomizing a Netanyahu blow up doll you bought on Ebay is not covered.
Jewish students should not have to accept being barred from academic spaces or excluded from academic opportunities because of the assumption that their Jewishness converts them into agents of the Israeli government. Nor should Jews be forced to issue humiliating disclaimers disavowing the conduct of the Israeli government every time they want to act publicly under a Jewish banner.The same applies to non-Jews- like Chelsea Clinton at a Christchurch shooting vigil- being harassed by Campus Lefties.
At root, the problem is that the Trump administration cannot be trusted to judge what is anti-Semitic and what is not.But it can be trusted with the Nuclear button. Wow! Anti-Semitism is not a big problem for the USA because American Jews aren't weak or cowardly. If some crazy militia targets them, Mossad will kill the nutters if the FBI proves helpless.
But the fight against anti-Semitism requires judgment—there is no way to avoid it.Nonsense! Fighting Hitler did not require judgment. It required killing as many of his minions as you could.
Jews can be mistrustful of what the Trump administration has in store for us,Gas Chambers? No. The Trump administration is planning something far worse- viz. Trump taking the lead role in a Broadway revival of Yentl.
or suspect that Trump does not have our best interests at heart when he purports to fight anti-Semitism for us.The fucker is gonna force you to watch him sing 'Papa can you hear me?'. That's in no one's best interest.
But we must nonetheless preserve a real and serious corpus of law protecting Jews from anti-Semitic discrimination, even if the Trump administration tries to use these tools for its own illiberal agenda.No. Everybody- Jewish or Gentile, deserves to be protected from the fucking nuisance that is Campus or Workplace anti-Zionism. However, we must a preserve a real and serious corpus of law granting an exemption to me personally getting busy with my Benjamin Netanyahu blow up doll while singing 'Papa can you hear me.'.
Thursday, 12 December 2019
Da Vinci's Vulture
A Mother joyously teaching her Babe to Draw & Paint
Is yet Christ's Madonna's Tachyonic Sin of Taint
& tho' the Logos limn but Da Vinci's Vulture
An Apocalypse grim- our Zombie Culture
Envoi-
Prince! Thy shadow, Ayaz, no longer shelters- because
Wednesday, 11 December 2019
Jayati Ghosh raping India's soul
This is the text of my deleted comment on Jayati Ghosh's latest vomit served up by Project Syndicate.
Jayati Ghosh and her husband were in favor under the Congress administration. They are unhappy with the new regime. It is understandable that they will have partisan feelings of anger and indignation. Yet, Ghosh is supposed to be an academic economist. She should not show a reckless disregard for the truth.
Every paragraph of this screed contains a material, intentional, falsification. There is no appearance of mob rule in India- though, it is true, that Ghosh's students are behaving very badly because they are peeved at a hike in hostel fees. Indian democracy is stronger than ever. Why? Because the vice like grip of dynastic, casteist, parties has been broken. It was they who instrumentalized mob violence.
In 2016, the Supreme Court stated that Kashmir had no 'vestige of autonomy'. It never had. The Indian Army had protected it from Pakistani invasion and it had acceded unconditionally many decades ago. Nehru jailed Sheikh Abdullah, the Kashmiri leader, for a decade. Indira Gandhi kept him in jail till he did a deal and formed a Government. He too was a dynast handing power to his son who anointed his son. Because the Valley is troubled by terrorism, it is vital that the police answer to the Center not to local, corrupt and criminalized, leaders. The Valley ethnically cleansed its Hindus in the Nineties. It is still unsafe for them to return. The militants in the Valley kill and chase away non Kashmiri Muslim migrant workers. As a result, the Valley is in the economic doldrums kept alive by grants from the Center.
Jayati does not mention recent TV footage showing a Kashmiri cricketer saying he could arrange for 20 days of stone pelting in return for one crore Rupees. Another man, who specialized in arson, demanded a similar amount for setting schools on fire. This is the 'dark picture' which must be changed by catching and jailing the terrorists and disrupting their networks. So far, India has prevailed and Pakistan's Imran Khan is gnashing his teeth in disappointment that no 'river of blood' has flowed there.
The Supreme Court is not giving this matter urgent action because prima facie the Govt's action is good in law. By contrast the petitions presented to it are defective in law.
Indira Gandhi, in the Eighties, promised the Assamese she would deport illegal migrants. The rights of Tribal and other indigenous people must be protected. The alternative is genocide. The BJP has sufficient organizational and administrative power to make good on Indira's promise. This is because they aren't a bunch of dynastic cretins.
India has a serious problem of illegal migration which has changed the demographics of border districts. Its detention camp is tiny compared to those of America. Ghosh says it is xenophobic to deport illegal migrants. She must think the UK and the US where she studied and taught were terribly xenophobic because they had detention centers for people of her ethnicity who remained in those countries illegally. Ghosh, who must have learned some Hindi after living so long in Delhi, misquotes Amit Shah. Perhaps she is thinking of Mamta's 2005 Parliamentary speech against 'termites' who voted Communist. At that time Mamta wanted to throw them into the Bay of Bengal. She is known for her abusive language. By contrast, Amit Shah's Hindi is chaste. We can see for ourselves what he says in his speeches on You Tube. He is a smart guy who knows very well that the Election Commission will hold him to account if he uses wrong language.
Ghosh has been blinded by her partisanship. She is not accusing the Supreme Court of 'instigating' everything. Yet the Judiciary is independent and acts according to the Constitution to enforce the laws of the land. She may not like it, but it is very irresponsible of her to depict the Indian Judiciary in such contemptible terms to her students.
It is not unconstitutional to recognize a plain fact. Non-Muslims have suffered terrible persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Their share of the population has dropped considerably. Muslims originating from those regions may be economic migrants, it can't be that they are in fear of persecution on the basis of religion. It is entirely constitutional to grant citizenship to non-Muslims from countries where their share of the population has plummeted and where they are subject to intolerable violence and discrimination. It is not constitutional to ignore the law of the land and permit illegal, purely economic, migrants to be granted voting and other rights to which they have no legal entitlement.
Ghosh repeats the old canard that the BJP is a high caste outfit. Indians don't believe her because they can see for themselves that the President is a Dalit and the Head of Government an OBC. The Govt. passed legislation to get around the Supreme Court's decision re. misuse of the anti-Dalit atrocity act. The dynastic, casteist, parties hate the BJP because it alone wants to rid India of the blight of hereditary privilege.
Extra judicial killing reached a peak in the Nineties under a Congress government. However it was Jyoti Basu , the communist leader, who first licensed such killing by police and paramilitaries against his challengers on the left- the notorious Naxalites.
The BJP, unlike the dynastic cretins and the gerontocrats of the Left, believes in private enterprise and the rule of Law. It wants to rid India of the nexus between the corrupt politician, the terrorist and the gangster which also extends to the police. That is why people vote for the BJP. By contrast, nobody wants the failed 'development economics' that Ghosh and her husband have been peddling for many decades. Ghosh's anger is understandable. She has wasted her life and destroyed the life-chances of her students. She backed the wrong horse. But telling lies about 'the rape of India's soul' is not going to help her retrieve her reputation. The plain fact is she and her ilk have been spewing hate at the RSS and the BJP for three decades now. They cried wolf again and again, but no wolf appeared. Now they are saying it is the soul that is being raped- in other words, the crime was imaginary. They are very angry with the Supreme Court for not taking imaginary crimes into account. Yet what else can Judges do? They studied Law, not some soi disant 'development economics' which developed nothing but a penchant for incoherent rage.
Jayati Ghosh and her husband were in favor under the Congress administration. They are unhappy with the new regime. It is understandable that they will have partisan feelings of anger and indignation. Yet, Ghosh is supposed to be an academic economist. She should not show a reckless disregard for the truth.
Every paragraph of this screed contains a material, intentional, falsification. There is no appearance of mob rule in India- though, it is true, that Ghosh's students are behaving very badly because they are peeved at a hike in hostel fees. Indian democracy is stronger than ever. Why? Because the vice like grip of dynastic, casteist, parties has been broken. It was they who instrumentalized mob violence.
In 2016, the Supreme Court stated that Kashmir had no 'vestige of autonomy'. It never had. The Indian Army had protected it from Pakistani invasion and it had acceded unconditionally many decades ago. Nehru jailed Sheikh Abdullah, the Kashmiri leader, for a decade. Indira Gandhi kept him in jail till he did a deal and formed a Government. He too was a dynast handing power to his son who anointed his son. Because the Valley is troubled by terrorism, it is vital that the police answer to the Center not to local, corrupt and criminalized, leaders. The Valley ethnically cleansed its Hindus in the Nineties. It is still unsafe for them to return. The militants in the Valley kill and chase away non Kashmiri Muslim migrant workers. As a result, the Valley is in the economic doldrums kept alive by grants from the Center.
Jayati does not mention recent TV footage showing a Kashmiri cricketer saying he could arrange for 20 days of stone pelting in return for one crore Rupees. Another man, who specialized in arson, demanded a similar amount for setting schools on fire. This is the 'dark picture' which must be changed by catching and jailing the terrorists and disrupting their networks. So far, India has prevailed and Pakistan's Imran Khan is gnashing his teeth in disappointment that no 'river of blood' has flowed there.
The Supreme Court is not giving this matter urgent action because prima facie the Govt's action is good in law. By contrast the petitions presented to it are defective in law.
Indira Gandhi, in the Eighties, promised the Assamese she would deport illegal migrants. The rights of Tribal and other indigenous people must be protected. The alternative is genocide. The BJP has sufficient organizational and administrative power to make good on Indira's promise. This is because they aren't a bunch of dynastic cretins.
India has a serious problem of illegal migration which has changed the demographics of border districts. Its detention camp is tiny compared to those of America. Ghosh says it is xenophobic to deport illegal migrants. She must think the UK and the US where she studied and taught were terribly xenophobic because they had detention centers for people of her ethnicity who remained in those countries illegally. Ghosh, who must have learned some Hindi after living so long in Delhi, misquotes Amit Shah. Perhaps she is thinking of Mamta's 2005 Parliamentary speech against 'termites' who voted Communist. At that time Mamta wanted to throw them into the Bay of Bengal. She is known for her abusive language. By contrast, Amit Shah's Hindi is chaste. We can see for ourselves what he says in his speeches on You Tube. He is a smart guy who knows very well that the Election Commission will hold him to account if he uses wrong language.
Ghosh has been blinded by her partisanship. She is not accusing the Supreme Court of 'instigating' everything. Yet the Judiciary is independent and acts according to the Constitution to enforce the laws of the land. She may not like it, but it is very irresponsible of her to depict the Indian Judiciary in such contemptible terms to her students.
It is not unconstitutional to recognize a plain fact. Non-Muslims have suffered terrible persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Their share of the population has dropped considerably. Muslims originating from those regions may be economic migrants, it can't be that they are in fear of persecution on the basis of religion. It is entirely constitutional to grant citizenship to non-Muslims from countries where their share of the population has plummeted and where they are subject to intolerable violence and discrimination. It is not constitutional to ignore the law of the land and permit illegal, purely economic, migrants to be granted voting and other rights to which they have no legal entitlement.
Ghosh repeats the old canard that the BJP is a high caste outfit. Indians don't believe her because they can see for themselves that the President is a Dalit and the Head of Government an OBC. The Govt. passed legislation to get around the Supreme Court's decision re. misuse of the anti-Dalit atrocity act. The dynastic, casteist, parties hate the BJP because it alone wants to rid India of the blight of hereditary privilege.
Extra judicial killing reached a peak in the Nineties under a Congress government. However it was Jyoti Basu , the communist leader, who first licensed such killing by police and paramilitaries against his challengers on the left- the notorious Naxalites.
The BJP, unlike the dynastic cretins and the gerontocrats of the Left, believes in private enterprise and the rule of Law. It wants to rid India of the nexus between the corrupt politician, the terrorist and the gangster which also extends to the police. That is why people vote for the BJP. By contrast, nobody wants the failed 'development economics' that Ghosh and her husband have been peddling for many decades. Ghosh's anger is understandable. She has wasted her life and destroyed the life-chances of her students. She backed the wrong horse. But telling lies about 'the rape of India's soul' is not going to help her retrieve her reputation. The plain fact is she and her ilk have been spewing hate at the RSS and the BJP for three decades now. They cried wolf again and again, but no wolf appeared. Now they are saying it is the soul that is being raped- in other words, the crime was imaginary. They are very angry with the Supreme Court for not taking imaginary crimes into account. Yet what else can Judges do? They studied Law, not some soi disant 'development economics' which developed nothing but a penchant for incoherent rage.
Suhil Srivastava & why Hindus want to be castrated
Caravan Magazine has a article about Sushil Srivastava, a professor of medieval and modern history at Allahabad University, whose 1990 book, The Disputed Mosque: A Historical Inquiry, contributed to the Left strategy on the Ram Janmabhoomi issue.
Consider the following 2 excerpts-
Prof J.R.I Cole describes an attempt by the Muslims to grab a Hindu temple- the Hanumangarh temple- in 1855.
Speaking for myself- a South Indian Hindu of the vilest stripe- I regularly importune my Muslim neighbor to castrate me. She replies that she would need an atomic microscope to locate my genitals. I have pleaded poverty- where I'm supposed to get funds for any such instrument? Thankfully, Jeremy Corbyn has promised to supply all Muslims with atomic microscopes to locate and crush the testicles of Hindu gentlemen like myself. Hope he wins the election tomorrow by a landslide!
Srivastava was inspired to work on the book while studying historical land-revenue records from the erstwhile princely state of Awadh for his doctoral research. “During my research, in the early days of 1986, I began to feel very deeply that communalism in north India had worsened to a large extent, and that this was directly tied to my profession,” he told me. “The Vishva Hindu Parishad had announced, in 1978, that it would capture a number of mosques that it said were built on the sites of demolished temples. I felt that with so many popular, but baseless, myths giving rise to communal hatred, I should work to popularise the truth of these historical distortions.”The distortion Srivastava introduced was to pretend there was no rivalry between Hindus and Muslims. Everything was the fault of Whitey and the VHP. Genuine History was all about how everyone used to cuddle and kiss till Imperialists or Fascists or Neo-Liberals turned up and misled by them.
Srivastava points out in The Disputed Mosque that Awadh’s Hindus and Muslims lived in relative harmony, with religious differences “either undermined or overlooked,” and the ruling classes celebrating all religious festivals. Although there was sometimes conflict between the Shias and Sunnis, and between Vaishnavite and Shaivite Hindu sects, he writes, “Religious conflicts between Hindus and Muslims were generally unknown.”In 1989, the University of California press published 'Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism in Iran and Iraq- Religion and State in Awadh, 1722-1859- by Prof. J. R. I. Cole.
Consider the following 2 excerpts-
A second issue was the attitude of Shi‘i clerics, government officials, and laypersons toward Hindus. The clerical attitude can be easily summarized. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi harbored an almost violent animosity toward Hindus, arguing that the Awadh government should take stern measures against them. He divided unbelievers into three kinds, those (harbi ) against whom Muslims must make war, those (dhimmi ) who have accepted Muslim rule and pay a poll-tax, and those (musta'min ) whom their Muslim rulers have temporarily granted security of life.[8] He insisted that Imami Shi‘ism accepted only Jews and Christians as protected minorities (dhimmis ), and even they could only achieve this status if they observed the ordinances governing it. He differed with Sunni schools that considered Hindus a protected minority.
He wrote that Muslims could only grant infidels personal security (aman ) in a country they ruled for one year, lamenting that the government had long treated as grantees of personal security the Hindus of northern India, who openly followed their idolatrous religion, drinking wine, and sometimes even mating with Sayyid women. He complained that the irreligious Sunni Mughal rulers of India neither made war against the Hindus nor forced them to accept Islam. Legally, nonetheless, the lives and property of Hindus could be licitly taken by Muslims. Nasirabadi shared this rather bloodthirsty attitude with other Muslim clerics, of course. The Sunni Naqshbandi thinker Shah Valiyu'llah (1703-62) wanted the Mughals to ban Hinduism.[9]
On the other hand, Shi‘is and the Shi‘i government, although they often exploited Hindus, seldom violently persecuted them. Violence most often broke out between the two communities during the Shi‘i mourning month of Muharram, as in Jaunpur in 1776 or Lucknow in 1807.[14] Some Awadh governments showed less tolerance of Hindus than others, those of Nasiru'd-Din Haydar (1827-37) and Amjad ‘Ali Shah (1842-47) being the most anti-Hindu. In 1829 the king forced a Brahmin boy to go through with circumcision even after his family changed their minds about having him convert to Shi‘ism. He told the outraged resident that he had a divine right to dispose of his subjects as he wished. Ricketts angrily retorted that the British Government recognized no such right. When, three months later, Hindus provoked violence by defiling a mosque in Rikabganj, the king vindictively sent troops into the area, who plundered, ripped nose-rings off the faces of Hindu women, and destroyed all forty-seven Hindu temples in that quarter, putting to flight its entire population of three thousand. When rioting threatened to spread to other quarters, the British resident intervened with the king, who reluctantly sent criers through the city warning that he would punish anyone found molesting a Hindu or insulting his temples.[15]The Hindus had good reason to hate the Shia aristocracy. Boys from Hindu Rajput families were gelded and used as eunuchs by the Muslim nobility. Srivastava may think that being turned into a eunuch is a case of loving and affectionate treatment. He may resent the British for putting an end to this delightful practice. However, other Hindus may disagree with him.
Most Awadh governments considered order more important than keeping Hindus in their places. When, in November 1840, some Hindus defiled a zamindar's mosque with pig's blood, his sons rounded up a crowd of angry Muslims to exact revenge. On 3; December, at the order of the heir apparent, Amjad ‘Ali Mirza, the chief of police took the ringleaders to Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi, who ruled that the blasphemer should be apprehended and punished after conviction, but forbade vigilante action. The mob refused to listen to the mujtahid or the police chief. On 4 December two hundred Muslims killed cows, profaned temples, and damaged shops in Yahyaganj and ‘Ayshbagh. British administrator Colonel Sleeman saw such perils of com-
munal violence as an argument for the Indian need of British government, but he exaggerated their frequency and severity.[16]
The last three Awadh rulers initiated programs that enhanced the prestige and the power of the Usuli ulama in north Indian society. Proclerical Shi‘is remembered the twenty years before British annexation as a golden age. Sunni and Hindu writers, on the other hand, deplored the "sectarian narrow-mindedness and crooked religious policy" of such clericalist rulers as Amjad ‘Ali Shah (1842-47).[17] As was seen in chapter 8, Amjad ‘Ali Shah enacted anti-Hindu policies, founding Shi‘i shops to drive Hindu merchants out of business, and rewarding Hindu officials who adopted Imami Shi‘ism. The provision of government welfare monies to only the Shi‘i poor encouraged thousands of Hindus to convert to Shi‘ism in the 1840s, according to clerical sources. Awadh's fiercely Usuli governments showed little understanding of their Hindu subjects, allowing communal resentments to fester, a policy that culminated in a major battle over a religious edifice in Faizabad, discussed later.
Although the Shi‘i ulama may have preached government violence against Hindus, they disapproved of mob action. The growth of a formal Shi‘i establishment and its intermeshing with state institutions like the judiciary · made it possible at times for the mujtahids to enact highly discriminatory policies toward Hindus, whom they viewed as idolaters. The ulama practiced exclusionary closure by urging Shi‘is to treat Hindus as ritually impure (reciprocating Hindu treatment of Muslims), making Shi‘is almost a caste. They used jobs and welfare money to convert Hindu civil servants and urban poor. Since the Usulis had campaigned so hard against Sufism, few Shi‘i pits existed to mediate among Hindu and Shi‘i disciples, and the ulama strove mightily to stop Shi‘is from patronizing Hindu holy men. The Usuli destruction of mediating groups between Muslims and Hindus aided the growth of communalism, of religion-based group identities hostile to one another.
Prof J.R.I Cole describes an attempt by the Muslims to grab a Hindu temple- the Hanumangarh temple- in 1855.
The 1855 dispute began when a Sunni zealot named Shah Ghulam Husayn started a campaign against the Hindu temple establishment in Faizabad dedicated to the Ramayana's monkey-god, Hanuman. The Muslim crusaders claimed that the site had originally supported a mosque subsequently supplanted by the Hanumangarhi. Shah Ghulam Husayn's followers clashed in July 1855 with thousands of Hindus, ending in a massacre of the zealots in a mosque at Ayodhya, a suburb of Faizabad. The news of, this military defeat inflicted on Muslims by Hindu holy men and their supporters (among them large landholders and their peasants from the Hindu countryside) inflamed Sunni and Shi‘i passions throughout North India. Sayyid ‘Ali Deoghatavi, Faizabad's Imami prayer leader, visited the mosque during the investigations ordered by the government. The issue split the Shi‘i population between those very religiously committed and the secular officials; Faizabad Shi‘i administrators like Mirza Acla ‘Ali took measures against Sunni mobs to keep the peace.[59]So, this is the real story about why Oudh had to be annexed by the Brits. Premchand's 'Shatranj ke Khilari' glosses over the truth of the matter. A small minority was behaving as though it could overpower the Hindu majority and turn their temples into mosques. But Muslim military power had declined. It was merely a fantasy. Prof. Shrivastava is, I suppose, a Kayastha- like Premchand. He is telling us a fairy story.
Vajid ‘Ali Shah enjoyed Hindu festivals and plays about Krishna, but as an Usuli he believed in Shi‘i rule and superiority. Furious about the killing of Muslims by Hindus at the mosque, he nevertheless wanted Sunni ringleaders apprehended as troublemakers. His officials in Faizabad sought to defuse the situation. The governor of Sultanpur and Faizabad, Agha ‘Ali Khan, attempted to pacify the Muslims under his jurisdiction, while the Hindu Raja Man Singh controlled Hindus.[60]
The governor's conciliatory approach provoked resentment in Lucknow among Muslim militants, including Chief Mujtahid Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi. On 24 August 1855 he conducted Holy Day prayers at the Great Imambarah in the presence of the heir apparent, the chief minister, and multitudes of notables close to the court. At the end of the service he denounced the governor, Agha ‘Ali Khan, and all those he said had taken bribes to side with the Hindus. The officers of state greeted this outburst with embarrassed silence. A Sunni delegation then sought a ruling. from him, asking if he accounted the slain Sunnis martyrs, and whether individual Muslims should avenge their deaths. Sayyid Muhammad cautiously replied that the Muslim state had a duty to put an end to the wickedness of the infidels.[61] He steadfastly refused to encourage mob action, insisting that the Shi‘i state had a duty to intervene on the Muslim side. The implication, that if the king refused to act, nothing could be done, angered Sunni vigilantes eager to set out independently.
On 30 August, Outram, the resident, met with Chief Minister ‘Ali Naqi Khan. The Awadh government endeavored to avoid taking a decision bound to offend Muslims or Hindus or the British by putting the whole matter in the chief mujtahid's lap. It proposed that the commission of inquiry headed by Agha ‘Ali Khan be disbanded and replaced by Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi. The chief minister also insisted that the evidence for the existence of a mosque at the Hanumangarhi was good. The resident took strong exception to both points, blaming Shah Ghulam Husayn and his followers for provoking the violence. He allowed that the chief mujtahid could take part in the investigations, but demanded that the final decision be made by the king. He further objected to Nasirabadi's rulings urging retaliation against the Hindus. ‘Ali Naqi Khan explained that given the way the questioners framed their inquiries, no other answer could have been given.[62]
On the same day, the government investigative commission announced its conclusion that no mosque existed at the Hanumangarhi, at least in the past twenty-five to thirty years, and most probably never had. Western descriptions of the temple thirty years earlier bear out the first part of this conclusion.[63] In Lucknow pandemonium broke loose, with Muslim vigilante groups forming. A certain militant, Mawlavi Amir ‘Ali Amethavi, among the Sunni ulama calling for holy war, had earlier been brought to the capital from Amethi to meet with Vajid ‘Ali Shah. The king, aware of the appeal for his Sunni military men of the mawlavi's brand of communalist militancy, wished to pacify him, offering him a robe of honor and pledging to send Rs. 15,000 to Mecca on his behalf. He may also have promised him that a mosque would be built at the side of the temple. In a flash of lower-middle-class pride, the mawlavi told, the king that he was not a revenue collector, to accept a robe of honor.[64]
When news of the commission's findings broke, Mawlavi Amir ‘Ali left for his qasabah base again with two hundred men, in protest. Court emissaries failed to convince him to return to the capital, but he did agree to wait one month to see if the mosque was restored at the Hanumangarhi. Outram, meanwhile, worried that Vajid ‘Ali Shah's Muslim troops, approving of the mawlavi's cause, might well refuse to fight him. Vajid ‘Ali's own proposal for compromise involved building a small mosque onto the side of the temple to the monkey-god, with its own door entering from the side, thus preserving the building's sanctity for Hindus while meeting Muslim demands. But the Hindu Vairagis, or holy men, at the temple rejected the proposal out of hand. In the meantime the king began pressuring prominent ulama to support the government in the face of the challenge posed to it by the holy-war movement.[65]
The Sunni warriors thought that the king considered Hindus a protected minority (dhimmi ) in Shi‘i law and that he held holy war (jihad ) forbidden during the Occultation. Vajid ‘Ali may have held the first belief, but the Usuli ulama did not. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali denied protected-minority status to Hindus, as idolaters. Rather, the Mughal, Hanafi tradition sometimes extended protection to Hindus. The Imamis did hold that in the absence of the sinless Imam no one could lead an offensive war. From Buyid times, however, Shi‘is recognized the possibility of defensive holy war, and Usulis in Iraq and Iran emphasized defensive jihad in the nineteenth century in response to the Russian threat to lran. Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi permitted holy war in the time of the Occultation whenever the lands of Islam were attacked. No such grave situation existed in Faizabad, however, so that Shi‘is did not phrase their calls for retaliation against the Hindus in the idiom of holy war.[66]
The Awadh government elicited a more specific ruling from Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi, asking:
Q. What is your guidance concerning those who go to Faizabad to fight the Hindus? For they desire to take revenge on them for their uncivilized behavior with the mosque and the Qur'an. According to the Law is it permissible for them to go there and fight, and will this be rewarded? Or is it forbidden?
A. Without the participation and aid of the customary-law ruler or the Islamic-law ruler, such actions are in no wise permissible. God knows best.[67]
The customary-law (‘urf ) ruler was, clearly, the king, whereas the ruler in Islamic law was the Imam (which in itself provides a clue as to how the Imami clerics really perceived their Shi‘i government).
But in a later ruling Sayyid Muhammad went beyond this terse answer, replying: "Under these circumstances the order for waging the Jehad does not apply; but the sovereign has the right to build the Musjid [mosque]—and the Hindu Ryots ought not to disobey."[68] Nasirabadi sympathized with the grievances of the jihad movement, but he wished to obviate such vigilante tactics by putting pressure on the ruler to intervene against the Hindus himself.
The resident had objected to Sayyid Muhammad's call for the king to make Hindus pay blood money for Muslims killed at the Ayodhya mosque. But he attempted to make use of his later rulings by pressuring ‘Ali Naqi Khan, in view of the chief mujtahid's prohibition on a holy war, to declare the mawlavi and his followers traitors deserving death. The chief minister warned that premature military action would cause needless bloodshed. On the other hand, Outram took strong exception to Sayyid Muhammad's call for the government to build the mosque. Vajid ‘Ali Shah denied any intention of forcibly building a mosque at the temple site, but called ridiculous Hindu claims to whatever ground their monkey-god had trod.[69]
With the arrival of October the resident handed the king a warning that he would be held personally responsible if he attempted to build a mosque next to the temple or if he allowed Muslims to attack Hindus. Dalhousie and Outram were warning him that his kingdom would be annexed unless he crushed the holy-war movement. Vajid ‘Ali Shah received the communication with emotion, pledging to do his duty. Outram speculated that the king had been relying on the British to quell any Hindu uprising. The chief minister had certainly asked for British help in fighting Amir ‘Ali, but was rebuffed. Although the volunteers in the mawlavi's militia tended to be lower middle class and laborers, he received financial assistance from influential families, so that the movement began to pose a threat to Awadh's stability.[70]
September, coinciding with the mourning month of Muharram, had brought fresh communal violence. To demonstrate their dissatisfaction, Muslims in Lucknow left fifteen replicas of Imam Husayn's tomb unburied. Sunnis and Shi‘is quarreled over greater Sunni willingness to employ Muharram symbols for protest. In Zaydpur the powerful Shi‘i Sayyids insisted on burying their cenotaphs, clashing with followers of Amethavi, who did not want them interred until the mosque was built at Ayodhya. In Sihala, the campaigners' base, the mawlavi's men attacked Hindus, breaking into temples to destroy their idols. Alarmed, Vajid ‘Ali belatedly agreed to order Hindu troops in Faizabad to guard the Hanumangarhi.[71]
Mawlavi Amir ‘Ali moved gradually through small towns on the way to Faizabad. Vajid ‘Ali Shah threatened his governors and revenue officials with severe sanctions should they support the mawlavi , with some success. He knew that his Shi‘i troops at Daryabad could be depended upon to fight the campaigners if it came to that.[72] Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi's commitment to law and order waivered when he saw that the king intended to bow to British pressure in neither punishing the Hindus involved in the massacre at the Ayodhya mosque (which the resident saw as self-defense) nor building a mosque at the temple site. Outram reported that Amir ‘Ali was said to be "urged on by the High Priest, who is reported to have replied insolently to the Minister's remonstrances."[73]
A turning point came on about 20 October, when a group of Sunni ulama supportive of the government went to Daryabad to debate Mawlavi Amir ‘Ali. They included several employees of the Awadh government, such as Mufti Muhammad Yusuf Farangi-Mahalli and Mufti Sacdu.llah Moradabadi. Independent members of the Farangi-Mahall family adamantly backed the holy war, creating a split in the ranks of the Sunni ulama. The pro-government clerics successfully debated the mawlavi , undermining his support both among lay followers and in the king's army.
The lower-middle-class nature of the holy-war movement contributed to the unfolding tragedy. Many of the mawlavi's followers had given up their shops or service to follow him and now threatened to murder him if he did not proceed to Faizabad soon. When negotiations finally broke down on November 7, the holy warriors met the government's Shi‘i regulars, reinforced reluctantly by the private armies of Shi‘i tacalluqdars such as the Mahmudabads, and were mown down.[74]
The Hanumangarhi dispute involved several levels of social closure. Social class and religious identity played a part, since the holy-war movement was spearheaded by lower-middle-class Sunni clerics and their followers, who had sold their shops or given up their service to join it and so had a total commitment to its sectarian goals. The resentments of these Sunnis against the wealthy Hindu rajas and merchants who supported the Hanu-mangarhi was fueled by Sunni loss of power in Shi‘i Awadh and by growing Hindu political influence.[75] Amethavi's sectarian movement, in addition, attracted the support of Sunni ulama and notables not closely connected with the Awadh court, echoing the appeal thirty years earlier of Sayyid Ahmad Rai-Barelavi to some of the same, out of power, groups.
The conflict caused a split within the ruling Shi‘i establishment. The Usuli ulama and their followers supported Amethavi's demands even while deploring his vigilante tactics. The central officers of the state in Lucknow and Faizabad, on the other hand, sought compromise. Barred from that course by British support for the Hindus, they acquiesced in the resident's demand that they destroy Amethavi's movement. The British showed "evenhandedness" in affirming Hindu rights, partially out of a hard-nosed political calculation of the consequences of a major Hindu-Muslim clash in Awadh. Convinced that the majority Hindus might well win or provoke a major conflict that would draw in British forces, they forced the Muslim government to give up its privileges. Hindus sensed British support for their position, which may have made them more assertive and intransigent.[76]
Before 1853, the mosque was known as either the Jami Masjid or the Sita-Rasoi Masjid. The name “Babri Masjid” came to be used only after communal violence first broke out that year.This is not true. A European missionary notes, in 1767, that though constructed by Aurangazeb who razed the Temple previously on the site, some referred to the mosque as having been built by Babur.
The violence, Srivastava writes, was the product of British colonial policy, as the East India Company consolidated its hold over northern India.Did British colonial policy destroy temples to raise mosques? Had the Hanumangarhi temple been destroyed in 1855, would Srivastava blame the Brits?
After anti-British riots in Bareilly, in 1816, under the leadership of the Pathans, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, the governor general, was made “alive to the possible effect that an appeal to Muslim religious susceptibilities might have on British authority in the north.”Was the man a cretin? Did he not know that Muslims might jihad his white ass? The fact of the matter is, the Muslim ulema were behaving as if Muslims had greater military power. This was a fantasy simply. That is why Muslim power melted away in Northern India over the course of eighteenth and nineteenth century.
The 'Mughal Empire' was a small area around Delhi. The Emperor was a puppet first of the Marathas and then from 1803, a vassal of the British. But the Nawabs of Oudh were equally under the thumb of the British though, no doubt, they could continue castrating Hindu boys so as to feel like big men.
In order to prevent an anti-British alliance by driving a wedge between the Shia nawabs of Awadh and the Sunni Mughal rulers, Hastings encouraged Awadh to secede from the Mughal Empire, in 1819.
(At the coronation ceremony, the nawab was serenaded by “God Save the King.”) Through a treaty concluded that year, Ayodhya was transferred to a British resident, who would have control over administrative and revenue matters. “It is clear that the general intent of British policy in Avadh was to keep the population divided,” Srivastava writes.But who divided the population? It was the Usuli Ulema and the fanatical Sunni mullahs.
“This was achieved largely by encouraging the Hindu reaction against Muslims.”Because Hindus have to be encouraged to react to having their little boys enslaved and castrated. Those Brits sure were mean! Why couldn't they let such charming customs continue to flourish? One answer is that not all Hindus are as sweet natured as Srivastava. Sooner or later, the majority of the Province would have turned on their tormentors and annihilated the whole lot of them.
A key plank to this strategy was to encourage the growth of Hindu revivalism and fundamentalism.Very true! European missionaries and British officials were constantly pressurising Hindus to kill the mleccha and re-establish their independence. They also demanded that Hindus put an end to cow slaughter. Prior to the arrival of the White man, not only were Hindus and Muslims living very happily with each other- after the Hindus were castrated- but Hindus were constantly chopping up their cows to serve kebabs to all and sundry.
“I am convinced that before the second half of the nineteenth century the idea that the Mughal emperors had desecrated Hindu holy places was quite unknown,” Srivastava writes.Why is he convinced of such an absurdity? Is the man unable to read English? J.R.I Cole's book was available for him to read. What was the matter with the fellow?
This idea, which he says cannot be substantiated through historical evidence, was first perpetuated by British writers in the 1830s, based on little other than local legends and speculation.Wikipedia states-
The European Jesuit missionary Joseph Tiefenthaler, who lived and worked in India for 38 years (1743–1785) and wrote numerous works about India, visited Ayodhya in 1767. Johann Bernoulli translated his work Descriptio Indiae (in Latin) into French, published in 1788. According to this account, Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) had demolished the Ramkot fortress, including the house that was considered as the birthplace of Rama by Hindus. A mosque with three domes was constructed in its place. However, he also noted, "others say that it was constructed by 'Babor' [Babur]".Srivastava is extraordinarily ignorant- even by the low standards of Indian Leftist historians.
It was against this background that the communal violence of 1853–55 took place, with Hindu monks claiming that the Babri Masjid used to be a temple, and Muslim clerics claiming that the nearby Hanuman Garhi temple used to be a mosque. Amid the violence, the Hindus took over the government land adjacent to the mosque, calling it the Ram Chabutra. The British refused to intervene in the violence and exploited these divisions to annex Awadh in 1856.Srivastava & Caravan magazine refused to look up Wikipedia and thus published worthless shite.
In return for their loyalty during the 1857 mutiny, the British showered the Hindu zamindars and akharas—monastic orders—of Ayodhya with gifts, Srivastava writes.And Srivastava, we know, is a good and accurate historian.
After hastily demarcating a boundary between the Ram Chabutra and the mosque, in 1859, the colonial authorities turned a blind eye to the Hindu land grab and the akharas’ activities. In 1934, the colonial government allowed the Hindus to demolish the dome of the mosque, although it later fined the community and used the funds to reconstruct the dome.So it didn't really allow the Hindus to do anything. What happened after the 1935 Govt of India Act? Hindus refused to let Muslims worship there. Only Friday prayers were offered there, that too under heavy police protection.
The evidence was under the mosque.
Using Buddhist and Jain texts as well as accounts by travellers, Srivastava pieces together a history of Ayodhya, as a city that had a number of shrines of all major Indian religions. He notes that the first archaeological survey of the city, by Alexander Cunningham in 1862–63, found ruins of Buddhist structures—also seen by the Chinese travellers Faxian and Xuanzang—but no evidence of a demolished temple.
Hindu pilgrimages to Ayodhya as the birthplace of Ram, he writes, were a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning in the seventeenth century.Nonsense. Many Hindu families have hereditary pandeys at Ayodhya. They know they have been coming on pilgrimage there for thousands of years.
The first English traveller to the city, the merchant William Finch, who visited during the reign of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, does not mention a Ram Janmabhoomi temple in his memoirs either.He does mention pilgrims coming to 'Ramachandra's house' where their hereditary pandeys updated their genealogical records.
Combing through Babur’s memoirs, Srivastava finds mention of the emperor stopping at the confluence of two rivers north of Ayodhya on 28 March 1528. There is no accounting of Babur’s whereabouts between 2 April and 8 September that year. “This is because the pages giving an account of Babur’s activities on these days are missing,” he writes. “The myth has developed because of this absence of information.” It was a number of “British scholars and administrators” writing in the nineteenth century—such as John Leyden, William Erskine, HM Elliot, Patrick Carnegie and WC Benet—who chose to fill in the gaps and perpetuate the myth that Babur visited Ayodhya on 28 March 1528 and demolished the Ram temple on the advice of local fakirs.Srivastava, it seems, can take a hint.
“My experience of collecting data on Babri Masjid–Ramjanambhoomi was an unforgettable one,” Srivastava writes in the preface. “While my students were interested in what I had to say, my academic friends and teachers, with only a few exceptions, were unsympathetic.”
In 1998, he was teaching modern history at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda. At the time, Anandiben Patel, the future chief minister of Gujarat, was the state’s education minister. Srivastava told me that she sent him a message, through the Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Madhu Srivastav, that he should leave Gujarat. Once Anil Kane took over as the vice-chancellor at MSU that year, he called Srivastava to his office. “He asked me, ‘Why did you write such a book? Leave, or your legs will be broken.’” Srivastava soon took up a job at Allahabad University.
I first met Srivastava in September 2018, when he was living in the university’s faculty residence. He did not have a copy of The Disputed Mosque and asked me to get him one from Delhi. However, procuring a copy proved immensely difficult. I checked the libraries at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Indian Council of Historical Research, Allahabad University and Aligarh Muslim University, as well as the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, but while all of them had once had the book, they could not find a copy. Not only had the book disappeared, there seemed to be an attempt to confuse potential readers. In the references to his book Ayodhyã Revisited, the retired police officer and VHP sympathiser Kunal Kishore incorrectly refers to Srivastava’s book as The Disputed Shrine.
After a week of searching, Saleha Rasheed, another professor at Allahabad University, found a photocopy of the Hindi translation. (A 1991 English edition can be borrowed from the Internet Archive website.) When I presented the photocopy to Srivastava, though, he did not seem pleased. Over two decades of living in fear had taken their toll.
Srivastava told me that he had decided to move out of the faculty residence, to a Dalit neighbourhood fifteen kilometres outside the city, where he could talk more freely. I met him at his new house two months later. He was still afraid for his life, but nonetheless carrying on with his fearless academic work. He was writing a new book, which he could not finish before his death, on how the British constructed a colonial identity for India and imposed it on Indian culture and religion, and how that colonial identity has brought contemporary India to a point where religious minorities cannot see a future for themselves in the largest democracy in the world.People like Srivastava thought they would be rewarded by the dynasty. Instead they lived in fear of having their legs broken. Their scholarship may have been lame but their genuine enthusiasm for getting castrated for being Hindu never abated. Without great souls like Srivastava, the Hindus of North India can never dream of becoming the eunuchs of Muslim landlords. This is a heartbreaking outcome for the soi disant 'largest democracy in the world'.
Speaking for myself- a South Indian Hindu of the vilest stripe- I regularly importune my Muslim neighbor to castrate me. She replies that she would need an atomic microscope to locate my genitals. I have pleaded poverty- where I'm supposed to get funds for any such instrument? Thankfully, Jeremy Corbyn has promised to supply all Muslims with atomic microscopes to locate and crush the testicles of Hindu gentlemen like myself. Hope he wins the election tomorrow by a landslide!
Tuesday, 10 December 2019
Appadurai demands Merkel invade India!
Prof Arjun Appadurai has lived in the West since the late Sixties. He hates India. He writes in the Wire-
Why does this cretinous Anthropologist want India to be declared Hostis humani generis- the enemy of mankind?
He says it is because of some rapes and murders and proposed changes in Immigration and Nationality Law.
The fact is, India has a lower rape and murder statistics than Appadurai's America. It does not deport people on anything like the scale that America does. Compared to Trump's attitude to Muslims, Modi is a pussy cat. India's recent CAB and NCR bills are exceptionally mild compared to draconian American law on migration and nationality. Yet Appadurai is not biting the hand that feeds him. He is waging war on India which he left long ago because it was poor and under developed.
American citizen, Siddhartha Varadarajan, is happy to publish Appadurai. But Varadarajan lives in India. Why do Indians want to read hate filled, anti-national, screeds written by brown people who have the protection of the US State Department?
If Nixon could not intimidate India in 1971- when we had no nukes- does this worthless shithead think Merkel and Trudeau can threaten India? Macron has nukes but he is now Modi's best friend.
Appadurai may hate the fact that the country he chose back in the late Sixties is declining in power and influence. It can't tell China or Turkey what to do. Indeed, it is now out of the 'regime change business'. That is why this idiot is appealing to Trudeau and Merkel.
At the time of Partition and subsequently, Indian Government offices sharply distinguished between Muslims who could potentially chose Pakistan and Hindus who faced death if they did so. People with homes in India but who were Muslims were denied visas to India. They could go to Karachi and then try their luck at the border. This was the official policy of the Indian High Commission under Krishna Menon and the Indian Consul General in New York. The Custodian of Enemy Property harassed many Muslims- like the father in Rushdie's Satanic Verses- till they emigrated to Pakistan. This was under the Congress regime.
Appadurai says that the Supreme Court is Fascist because he doesn't like its Ayodhya ruling. He won't like its ruling re Article 370 either. So he demands that Trudeau and Merkel declare war on India. Otherwise he will hold his breath till he explodes and then Trudeau and Merkel will feel very very sorry for having ignored that fat fuck.
No wonder Appadurai is consumed by hate. He had aspirations but chose the wrong subject. Other Indians became billionaires because they used their brains. Appadurai didn't and so 'Globalisation' has rendered him a nasty little wanker spewing hate at his country of origin.
Appadurai wants the West to do 'regime change' in India like it did in Iraq. Merkel should invade Poland as the first step in getting to India to do 'regime change'.
The few remaining leaders in the world who can claim to have any commitment to human decency (Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, for example), should be calling for a change of regime, and the International Criminal Court should issue a major call for investigation and punishment. The UN should bar India’s representatives from any participation in UN deliberations until they are held accountable for the new bar that India has set for in internal violence.
Why does this cretinous Anthropologist want India to be declared Hostis humani generis- the enemy of mankind?
He says it is because of some rapes and murders and proposed changes in Immigration and Nationality Law.
The fact is, India has a lower rape and murder statistics than Appadurai's America. It does not deport people on anything like the scale that America does. Compared to Trump's attitude to Muslims, Modi is a pussy cat. India's recent CAB and NCR bills are exceptionally mild compared to draconian American law on migration and nationality. Yet Appadurai is not biting the hand that feeds him. He is waging war on India which he left long ago because it was poor and under developed.
American citizen, Siddhartha Varadarajan, is happy to publish Appadurai. But Varadarajan lives in India. Why do Indians want to read hate filled, anti-national, screeds written by brown people who have the protection of the US State Department?
But none of these things is likely to happen, because India is regarded as too democratic to fail.It is too strong to attack.
If global institutions and other nations condemn India, what will do they do about Israel, Brazil, the Philippines, China, Turkey and many other statocracies? India has long benefited from this default view of its vibrant democracy, and it continues to do so.Appadurai is a cretin. Nixon threatened to 'nuke Calcutta' while he was studying in the States. Did he denounce Nixon and refuse to live in a country run by that maniac? No. He kept quiet and got good marks and licked every white arse presented to him till he got 'intellectual affirmative action' and was co-opted by the Establishment.
If Nixon could not intimidate India in 1971- when we had no nukes- does this worthless shithead think Merkel and Trudeau can threaten India? Macron has nukes but he is now Modi's best friend.
Appadurai may hate the fact that the country he chose back in the late Sixties is declining in power and influence. It can't tell China or Turkey what to do. Indeed, it is now out of the 'regime change business'. That is why this idiot is appealing to Trudeau and Merkel.
I have remarked before that India is not only following a global swing to the authoritarian right, it is an innovator.Appadurai immigrated to Nixon's America from Socialist India. He rose in Reagan's America. He did not emigrate when Dubya or Trump came to power. What evidence is there that he has any great dislike for the right, 'authoritarian or otherwise'?
The innovation which is now being tried out in India is the successful closing of the gap between procedural fascism and substantive fascism.There was never any such gap. Fascism was a reaction to Bolshevism which did not bother with any legal window-dressing whatsoever. On the other hand, American and Swedish eugenic laws were copied by the Germans and Italians. The notion that citizenship was qualified by ethnic origin was American. It was not previously an aspect of European political thinking.
At the time of Partition and subsequently, Indian Government offices sharply distinguished between Muslims who could potentially chose Pakistan and Hindus who faced death if they did so. People with homes in India but who were Muslims were denied visas to India. They could go to Karachi and then try their luck at the border. This was the official policy of the Indian High Commission under Krishna Menon and the Indian Consul General in New York. The Custodian of Enemy Property harassed many Muslims- like the father in Rushdie's Satanic Verses- till they emigrated to Pakistan. This was under the Congress regime.
Procedural fascism is exemplified by the scrapping of Article 370 of the constitution in Kashmir, the National Register of Citizens process in Assam, the CAB and the recent Supreme Court ruling on Ayodhya.Nonsense! Fascism is about a One Party State under a supreme Leader. Only the Congress Party meets this description- indeed, it has dynastic Leadership. Sonia Gandhi's father was an actual Fascist. Govind Vallabh Pant said in 1938, 'Italy has its Il Duce, Germany has its Fuhrer, India has Mahatma Gandhi' who anointed Nehru and whose daughter, Indira, suspended the Constitution and jailed the Opposition. Her son took over from her and, after her assassination, her elder daughter-in-law took over the party. They younger daughter-in-law and her son, are with the BJP.
Appadurai says that the Supreme Court is Fascist because he doesn't like its Ayodhya ruling. He won't like its ruling re Article 370 either. So he demands that Trudeau and Merkel declare war on India. Otherwise he will hold his breath till he explodes and then Trudeau and Merkel will feel very very sorry for having ignored that fat fuck.
In each case, the executive, the judiciary and the legislature have made fascism far more respectable than it ever was in India, at the highest formal levels.Fuck would this cretin know about what is 'respectable' in India? He left long ago. Why did this guy not protest Clinton's massive deportation of Mexicans? Obama wasn't really the 'deporter in chief' but Operation Pegasus- targeting migrants who had been naturalized by error- was an Obama initiative.
At the same time, the spate of rapes, murders, burnings, lynching, and other humiliations of women, Dalits, Muslims and children throughout India have raised substantive fascism to an unimaginable public level.But these happened under Congress and Communist rule. The Marichjhapi massacre of Dalits was the work of the CPI (M).
What is the source of the new compact between procedural (formal) fascism and substantive fascism, or to put it more simply, between the highest authorities in the land and the killers and lynch mobs that produce everyday brutality in India’ cities, villages and neighbourhoods?There is no such compact. Congress became criminalized as did the Communist and Caste based parties. The RSS did not become criminalized. That is why the BJP is the default national party.
One answer is impunity. If anyone in India today says or does anything which follows the BJP line on citizenship, security, patriotism, patriarchalism, or journalism or the BJP line on cows, statues, space travel, or women’s place in society, they can rape, maim or lynch selected others anywhere at anytime.Really? Is that what is happening in Appadurai's ancestral Tamil Nadu? What about Mumbai, where he studied? Who is the Shiv Sena's partner there? Is it Congress or the BJP? What is wrong with this cretin? Does he think dynastic outfits, like the Sena, the NCP and Congress aren't fascist because the hereditary principle is Monarchical? The BJP, because it is meritocratic, must be Fascist because it isn't Communist and all non-Communists are either Monarchical or Fascists.
Impunity means the right to brutalise others with the near guarantee of no legal consequence.Appadurai has raped and killed trillions of imaginary people. That is why he has a 'near guarantee' of not being punished by the law. This means he is a Fascist. He is already urging Merkel to invade India. She could make a start by overrunning Poland.
A dysfunctional Justice system. Cases drag on decade after decade. That is why people cheer the cops for extra-judicial killing.
Others have used the word impunity to describe the worst of India’s current civic order and public life. But where does this culture of impunity come from?
First, from the utter cynicism of the top leadership of the BJP and their minions in all official institutions, at all levels.But a lot of BJP politicians were from other parties and will go to other parties if they are denied a seat. Cynicism is a feature of all political parties. Only the RSS is not cynical.
The second source is the extraordinary corruption generated by the alliance between corporate interests and politicians, indeed an old story in India but now characterised by a level of official indifference which is unprecedented: the scale of disappeared debts in the Indian banking system is one symptom of the new corruption.This is a holdover from the UPA.
The third factor is the thorough criminalisation of the legislature, at all levels, with thugs, rapists and killers increasingly and proudly deliberating on how to shape the law of the land.Criminalization began in the Seventies. The RSS alone was untainted. That is why the BJP is now in power.
The fourth force is social media, which allows for a new and sickening form of proliferation of pornography, in which poor men consume images of rape, murder and mayhem because it brings them “sukoon” (calm, peace), as one recent report shows us.Appadurai's own oeuvre is a form of mental masturbation- conjuring up images of Fascists and Nazis in tight fitting uniforms so as to jizz again and again.
This last remarkable story, in which a poor proletarian male from North India says of the easy availability of documentary rape porn in Uttar Pradesh, that it brings men like himself some peace or calm, gives us a clue to the most terrifying source of the current links between formal and substantive fascism in India. It is what we may call the syndrome of aspirational hatred.Appadurai is spreading hatred of India. He is demanding that Trudeau and Merkel bring about 'regime change' in India. His 'apirational hatred' is fed by a masturbatory fantasy involving Fascists in highly polished leather riding boots. He was probably stroking himself as he dictated this shite.
Normally, we associate the word aspiration with social and economic mobility, hope and legitimate social improvement for oneself or one’s kin.Appadurai left India for Nixon's America because he aspired to be better off than those who he left behind. Sadly, many Indians who remained in India have grown richer and more powerful than he and his ilk. Their kids and grandkids can afford to study at the sort of place he himself needed a scholarship to attend. This stupid fuckwit is an 'Anthropologist'. Thus as India develops he loses obligatory passage point status. As a matter of fact, everybody now thinks of Social Anthropology, as an academic credential, as on a par with Basket Weaving.
No wonder Appadurai is consumed by hate. He had aspirations but chose the wrong subject. Other Indians became billionaires because they used their brains. Appadurai didn't and so 'Globalisation' has rendered him a nasty little wanker spewing hate at his country of origin.
But the Indian ruling party and the state elite have installed fear, anger, scapegoating and exclusion as the highest principles of civic and political life.Appadurai is doing nothing in this article save 'install fear, anger, scapegoating and exclusion' as the 'highest principles' of his own academic subject.
Thus, aspiration itself has been redirected away from better jobs,Appadurai can't get a better job because his brains rotted away in a worthless University Department
more economic security and greater social respectability towards a darker form of the revolution of rising expectations, in which the new role models are Muslim-hunting cabinet members, corrupt and sexually predatory saint-politicians and encounter-wise policemen.Not to mention worthless Professors spewing hate at India and demanding that Merkel and Trudeau bring about 'regime change' there.
When poor and marginalised men, or jobless or badly employed youth,or stupid Professors whose brains have turned to mush because of their incessant mental masturbation
or slum-confined casual labourers are motivated, mobilised and seduced by leaders of this type, who also offer them dreams of national and ethnic purity, they follow these examples in their own worlds, and hunt, maim and kill those to whom they feel superior.Appadurai can't kill anybody. He vainly appeals to Merkel and Trudeau to do the killing he gets wet dreams about for him. Yet, he feels superior to the ordinary run of Indians who didn't emigrate to Nixon's America and licked every Departmental arse available till they got tenure.
Since they are guaranteed impunity (except in exceptional circumstances), the normal restraints of prudence, sanity and humanity are easily shed, especially when there is so little to lose.Appadurai has no intellectual reputation to lose. Siddhartha Varadarajan, good American citizen that he is, is letting Appadurai jizz all over a page of the Wire. Why? Coz Fascism is bad, okay.
Aspirational hatred is hatred as imitation of one’s betters, and in India’s case, today’s most powerful betters are the worst of the worst.There are few sad fuck losers who are hoping to get a Professorship in some Department still controlled by the gerontocratic Left. Appadurai offers them a mimetic target. If you want to get ahead, aspire to hate. Then people will think you are merely psycho, not unutterably stupid.
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