Dear Friend,
Two months after the police brutality at Jamia Millia Islamia, a new video has emerged showing paramilitary and police personnel beating up students in the library on December 15. The 48-second video, which appears to be CCTV footage, shows some seven to eight paramilitary and police personnel entering the Old Reading Hall and beating up students with batons. The paramilitary and police are also seen covering their faces with handkerchiefs.
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CCTV Footage Exposes Police Brutality in Jamia Millia
Islamia University
by Countercurrents Collective
Two months after the police brutality at Jamia Millia Islamia, a new video has emerged showing paramilitary and police personnel beating up students in the library on December 15. The 48-second video, which appears to be CCTV footage, shows some seven to eight paramilitary and police personnel entering the Old Reading Hall and beating up students with batons. The paramilitary and police are also seen covering their faces with handkerchiefs.
Supreme Follies By The Supreme Court Of India – Judiciary In A Morass
by Shobha Aggarwal
Death of an infant at the Shaheen Bagh protest site, Delhi has been taken ‘note’ of by the Supreme Court of India. The Court has taken up the matter with the cause title of the case
(initiated suo motu) being: “In re To Stop Involvement Of Children And Infants In Demonstrations And Agitations In View Of Death Of An Infant On 30.01.2020 At Shaheen Bagh New Delhi”. The title itself betrays the bias inherent in the judges’ minds.
Mistrial Is Another Blow To US Coup In Venezuela
Co-Written by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Last week, we along with Adrienne Pine and David Paul were unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Trump administration for our protection of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC from April 10 to May 16, 2019. The jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision and so we remain innocent of the charge of interfering with the protective functions of the US Department of State. The judge declared a mistrial. It was a partial victory and we greatly appreciate the jurors who were able to see through the cloud of misinformation in the courtroom and vote to
acquit us.
Pakistan puts press freedom at the core of struggle for new world order
by Dr James M Dorsey
Sweeping new regulations restricting social media in Pakistan put freedom of expression and the media at the heart of the struggle to counter both civilizationalist and authoritarian aspects of an emerging new world order.
Debate centering army in Pakistan politics
by Countercurrents Collective
Old debate centering army in Pakistan politics has reemerged following remarks by the country’s Prime Minister Imran Khan. A report in Pakistan’s leading daily The Dawn said: “Opposition parties have taken exception to the reported remarks of Prime Minister Imran Khan that the army knows who is corrupt in the country, terming the statement ‘irresponsible’.”
Ripe Time For Tamil
Voters To Elect Young And Committed Leaders To The Causes Of The Tamils
by Kumarathasan Rasingam
It is election year for Sri Lanka. A general election has to be held before August 5th 2020 for a new Government to rule the polarized and divided country of majority Sinhalese and minorities with Tamils and Sinhalese politically pitted against each other for the last 72 years.
Corporate Occupations: The UN Business “Black List” and Israel’s Settlements
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
Last week, the United Nations Human Rights office revealed a database of some 112 businesses connected with Israeli settlements, 94 of which are Israeli. The report was a response to a 2016 UNHRC resolution (31/36) calling for a “database for all businesses engaged in
specific activities related to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory.” US companies include Airbnb, Trip Advisor, Expedia, Motorola and General Mills. The UK’s Greenkote and France’s Alstom also feature in the list.
Mikhail Bakunin, in that charming anarchist tradition, regarded the state as an evil to be done away with. Such collective formations were criminal, oppressive, eviscerating to the individual. The corporation might be regarded as a similar collective, adopting and aping elements of the state with, in some cases, greater latitude to achieve its object. At times, they collude with states to advance their interests, which rarely deviate from the profit motive; in other cases, they seek to overthrow state regimes in favour of more compliant ones.
For that reason, bringing corporate behaviour within the realm of human rights can be a tad tricky. You can take corporate managers to witness grave abuses, but you can’t make them feel. The cynicism in this field is so profound that it produces such views as those of Milton Friedman, who suggested with monetarist glee that corporations are only burdened by one task in the field of social responsibility: using their “resources and engage in activities designed to increase [their] profits so long as it stays in the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.”
In his New York Times Magazine piece from 1970, he took issue with those businessmen who spoke of having a “social conscience”, or sought to achieve “social” ends, be it limiting pollution, ensuring secure employment or eliminating discrimination.
Friedman’s piece was as much a distillation of a business condition as a philosophy. Invariably, the corporate condition is one-dimensional and bound to the aims of maximising share dividends and gaining market share. Every other goal tends to be subordinated to that end.
Publishing the names of various companies reaping in proceeds from occupied Palestinian lands while supporting their structural integrity would hardly shock a follower of Friedman. The follower would argue that such companies have only one moral, ethical purpose in mind, something which would preclude advancing a human rights agenda, or greater accommodation with Palestinians. But a company operating on such soil cannot entirely escape the orbit of ethical implications. The dispute hinges on the implicit assumption on Israel’s part that such businesses are, supposedly, legitimate in their operations; the counter to that is that the United Nations, and most of its members, see the settlements as illegal in international law.
Last week, the United Nations Human Rights office revealed a database of some 112 businesses connected with Israeli settlements, 94 of which are Israeli. The report was a response to a 2016 UNHRC resolution (31/36) calling for a “database for all businesses engaged in specific activities related to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory.” US companies include Airbnb, Trip Advisor, Expedia, Motorola and General Mills. The UK’s Greenkote and France’s Alstom also feature in the list. The special rapporteur Michael Lynk saw them as essential components of economic activity within the settlements. “Without these investments, wineries, factories, corporate supply and purchase agreements, banking operations and support services, many of the settlements would not be financially and operationally sustainable. And without the settlements, the five-decade-long Israeli occupation would lose its colonial raison d’être.”
Lynk felt that publishing details of those businesses did constitute some measure of rebuke, however small. “While the release of the database will not, by itself, bring an end to the illegal settlements and their serious impact upon human rights, it does signal that sustained defiance by an occupying power will not go unanswered.”
One notable qualifier on the list has gone unnoticed. In a statement from the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, the point was made that identifying the companies had not been a judicial or quasi-judicial exercise. The settlements were illegal, but the report did not furnish a “legal characterization of the activities in question, or of business enterprises’ involvement in them.” One senses that an opportunity might have gone begging there.
The response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one deviation and re-attribution. The UN Human Rights Council, he charged, “is a biased and uninfluential body.” Rather than dealing with human rights “this body is trying to blacken Israel’s name. We reject any such attempt in the strongest terms and with disgust.”
Despite dismissing the Human Rights Council as uninfluential, Netanyahu took the matter seriously enough to suspend ties with the UN Commissioner for Human Rights. The basis for doing so had nothing to do with addressing any criteria of human rights, but whether companies would be protected in conducting their business. Commissioner Michelle Bachelet’s office, Foreign Minister Israel Katz accused, had fallen into the service of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.
In a statement on the issue, Katz was keen to take a principled stance. The Human Rights Council was ignorant of human rights. “Since its establishment, the Council has not taken a single meaningful step towards the preservation of human rights, but has rather served to protect some of the most discriminatory regimes in the world.” The Commissioner had “wasted an opportunity to preserve the dignity of the UN ad salvage what was left of the Council and the Commission’s integrity.”
President Reuven Rivlin, as if to prove the point made by special rapporteur Lynk, read out the names of those Israeli companies that had made the list in an address from his Jerusalem residence, calling them “patriots who contribute to Israeli society, to economy and to peace.”
Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan even went so far as to claim that such lists violated the rights of those subjects living under occupation. In the language befitting a colonial governor’s reproach to an independence activist, Erdan suggested that the UN publication “will hurt the livelihoods of thousands of Palestinians who coexist and cooperate with Israelis on a daily basis in Judea and Samaria.”
Had Netanyahu simply claimed to be a Friedmanite, that might have made some brutal, if shallow sense. But as occupations, territorial consolidation and Israeli identity remain ideological and religious matters, ethics becomes a matter of observance and abuse. Occupations and matters of conquest tend to be disturbingly moral pursuits, pursued fanatically and with lethal resolve. Best keep corporations on your side, if that is the case.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Afghan troops say Taliban are brothers and war is “not really our fight.”
by Nicolas J S Davies
The world is waiting anxiously to see whether the U.S. and Afghan governments and the Taliban will agree to a one-week truce that could set the stage for a “permanent and comprehensive” ceasefire and a withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign occupation forces from Afghanistan. Could the talks be for real this time, or will they turn out to be just another smokescreen for President Trump’s addiction to mass murder and celebrity whack-a-mole?
The world is waiting anxiously to see whether the U.S. and Afghan governments and the Taliban will agree to a one-week truce that could set the stage for a “permanent and comprehensive” ceasefire and a withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign occupation forces from Afghanistan. Could the talks be for real this time, or will they turn out to be just another smokescreen for President Trump’s addiction to mass murder and celebrity whack-a-mole?
If the ceasefire really happens, nobody will be happier than the Afghans fighting and dying on the front lines of a war that one described to a BBC reporter as “not really our fight.” Afghan government troops and police who are suffering the worst casualties on the front lines of this war told the BBC they are not fighting out of hatred for the Taliban or loyalty to the U.S.-backed government, but out of poverty, desperation and self-preservation. In this respect, they are caught in the same excruciating predicament as millions of other people across the greater Middle East wherever the United States has turned people’s homes and communities into American “battlefields.”
In Afghanistan, U.S.-trained special operations forces conduct “hunt and kill” night raids and offensive operations in Taliban-held territory, backed by devastating U.S. airpower that kills largely uncounted numbers of resistance fighters and civilians. The U.S. dropped a post-2001 record 7,423 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan in 2019.
But as BBC reporter Nanamou Steffensen explained (listen here, from 11:40 to 16:50), it is lightly-armed rank-and-file Afghan soldiers and police at checkpoints and small defensive outposts across the country, not the U.S.-backed elite special operations forces, who suffer the most appalling level of casualties. President Ghani revealed in January 2019 that over 45,000 Afghan troops had been killed since he took office in September 2014, and by all accounts 2019 was even deadlier.
Steffensen travelled around Afghanistan talking to Afghan soldiers and police at the checkpoints and small outposts that are the vulnerable front line of the U.S. war against the Taliban. The troops Steffensen spoke to told her they only enlisted in the army or police because they couldn’t find any other work, and that they received only one month’s training in the use of an AK-47 and an RPG before being sent to the front lines. Most are dressed only in t-shirts and slippers or traditional Afghan clothing, although a few sport bits and pieces of body armor. They live in constant fear, “expecting to be overrun at any moment.” One policeman told Steffensen, “They don’t care about us. That’s why so many of us die. It’s up to us to fight or get killed, that’s all.”
In an astonishingly cynical interview, Afghanistan’s national police chief, General Khoshal Sadat, confirmed the troops’ views of the low value placed on their lives by the corrupt U.S.-backed government. General Sadat is a graduate of military colleges in the U.K. and U.S. who was court-martialed under President Karzai in 2014 for illegally detaining people and betraying his country to the U.S. and U.K. President Ghani promoted him to head the national police in 2019. Steffensen asked Sadat about the effect of high casualties on morale and recruitment. “When you look at recruitment,” Sadat told her, “I always think about the Afghan families and how many children they have. The good thing is there is never a shortage of fighting-age males who will be able to join the force.”
In the final interview in Steffensen’s report, a policeman at a checkpoint for vehicles approaching Wardak town from Taliban-held territory questioned the very purpose of the war. He told her, “We Muslims are all brothers. We don’t have a problem with each other.” “Then why are you fighting?” she asked him. He hesitated, laughed nervously and shook his head in a resigned manner. “You know why. I know why. It’s not really our fight,” he said.
So why are we all fighting?
The attitudes of the Afghan troops Steffensen interviewed are shared by people fighting on both sides of America’s wars. Across the “arc of instability” that now stretches five thousand miles from Afghanistan to Mali and beyond, U.S. “regime change” and “counterterrorism” wars have turned millions of people’s homes and communities into American “battlefields.” Like the Afghan recruits Steffensen spoke to, desperate people have joined armed groups on all sides, but for reasons that have little to do with ideology, religion or the sinister motivations assumed by Western politicians and pundits.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice discontinued the State Department’s annual report on global terrorism in 2005, after it revealed that the first three years of the U.S.’s militarized “War on Terror” had predictably resulted in a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance, the exact opposite of its stated goals. Rice’s response to the report’s revelations was to try to suppress public awareness of the most obvious result of the U.S.’s lawless and destabilizing wars.
Fifteen years later, the U.S. and its ever-proliferating enemies remain trapped in a cycle of violence and chaos in which acts of barbarism by one side only fuel new expansions and escalations of violence by the other side, with no end in sight. Researchers have explored how the chaotic violence and chaos of America’s wars transform formerly neutral civilians in country after country into armed combatants. Consistently across many different war zones, they have found that the main reason people join armed groups is to protect themselves, their family or their community, and that fighters therefore gravitate to the strongest armed groups to gain the most protection, with little regard for ideology.
In 2015, the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), interviewed 250 combatants from Bosnia, Palestine (Gaza), Libya and Somalia, and published the results in a report titled The People’s Perspectives: Civilians in Armed Conflict. The researchers found that, “The most common motivation for involvement, described by interviewees in all four case studies, was the protection of self or family.”
In 2017, the UN Development Program (UNDP) conducted a similar survey of 500 people who joined Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab and other armed groups in Africa. The UNDP’s report was titled Journey To Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping-Point for Recruitment. Its findings confirmed those of other studies, and the combatants’ responses on the precise “tipping-point” for recruitment were especially enlightening.
“A striking 71%,” the report found, “pointed to ‘government action’, including ‘killing of a family member or friend’ or ‘arrest of a family member or friend’, as the incident that prompted them to join.” The UNDP concluded, “State security-actor conduct is revealed as a prominent accelerant of recruitment, rather than the reverse.”
The U.S. government is so corrupted by powerful military-industrial interests that it clearly has no interest in learning from these studies, any more than from its own long experience of illegal and catastrophic war-making. To routinely declare that “all options are on the table,” including the use of military force, is a violation of the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat as well as the use of force against other nations precisely because such vague, open-ended threats so predictably lead to war.
But the more clearly the American public understands the falsehood and the moral, legal and political bankruptcy of the justifications for our country’s disastrous wars, the more clearly we can challenge the absurd claims of warmongering politicians whose policies offer the world only more death, destruction and chaos. Trump’s blundering, murderous Iran policy is only the latest example, and, despite its catastrophic results, U.S. militarism remains tragically bipartisan, with a few honorable exceptions.
When the U.S. stops killing people and bombing their homes, and the world starts helping people to support and protect themselves and their families without joining U.S.-backed armed forces or the armed groups they are fighting, then and only then will the raging conflicts that U.S. militarism has ignited across the world begin to subside.
Afghanistan is not the United States’ longest war. That tragic distinction belongs to the American Indian Wars, which lasted from the founding of the country until the last Apache warriors were captured in 1924. But the U.S. war in Afghanistan is the longest of a series of anachronistic and predictably unwinnable neoimperial wars the U.S. has fought since 1945.
As an Afghan taxi driver in Vancouver told me in 2009, “We defeated the Persian Empire in the 18th century. We defeated the British in the 19th century. We defeated the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Now, with NATO, we are fighting 28 countries, but we will defeat them too.” I never doubted him for a minute. But why would America’s leaders, in their delusions of empire and obsession with budget-busting weapons technology, ever listen to an Afghan taxi driver?
Nicolas J S Davies is a freelance writer, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Nature, Bonbibi, American cetologist in the Sundarbans
by Zeenat Khan
In Bengal, both Hindus and the Muslims have a tradition of living in communal harmony. The rough terrains of the Sundarbans unify people of various religions and beliefs. The syncretic culture is based on Bonbibi myth and worshipped across religions. In debating modernity versus syncretism, the entity of Bonbibi appears to be a myth to many. But even as an old time story, at the backdrop of today’s political climate in India, believing in such a myth can bring different communities with different religious beliefs closer.
Bad, bad banks — simply terrible
by Sally Dugman
The banking industry is a giant racket to make money. Here is my experience of the wrong.
The banking industry is a giant racket to make money. Here is my experience of the wrong.
I had no credit rating at all. So I went off to Bank of Boston (which became Bank of America). With me was all of my verifiable paperwork that I had with me, I proved that I had 120 to 130 thousands of dollars to purchase a modest home.
That didn’t matter. I had to take out a 5 thousand dollar loan and pay interest on it to get a bank credit rating.
So I did so. So I am paying a bank to gets credit rating by paying the bank when my funds are on their own sufficient to prove a rating.
Then I went to a friend, who was a bank president in Pennsylvania. He knew my integrity and gave me a credit card so that I could get the damned rating.
Yet his bank sold all of their credit cards to Chase Manhattan Bank and I made people at the Chase bank angry because the bank made no money in interest off of me. It was because I always put money in my account to pay bills that I would accrue on my card.
So the bank people took bad care of me. They declared me dead and I had a way out. I could go to my bank, Bank of America, to prove my existence and send my proof to Chase Manhattan Bank. So I went through this rigamarole at my bank and sent my paperwork to Chase,
It was to no avail, although I followed instructions devised by Chase. In short I was declared dead and the $250 in my account at Chase was sent to the Massachusetts government by Chase. How dare they!?
I am now a nonperson in terms of credit and credit cards. So is a friend messed over whose house greatly devalued in the 2008 global financial crash. Her house was devalued, but she still had to pay mortgage payments at the former rate of worth for her home. Yup, the banks keep slopping up that money one way or another. And we, the people, are messed over on account. The banks, after all, have to keep getting their profits at all costs.
Sally Dugman lives in MA, USA.
Vibrant ‘Education System’ for doing Social Science in India
by Badre Alam Khan
To celebrate 100 years of Jamia, several programmes, seminars and conferences, Cultural activities and Qualies are scheduled to be held in the upcoming months. In this respect, on 16th Feb 2020, JTA ‘Multidisciplinary International Conference’ has organized an inaugural meeting to celebrate and commemorate 100 years of JMI. On the said occasion keynote speech was addressed by an eminent Gandhian leaning scholar and noted political theorist Prof. Bhikhu Parekh.
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