How the US media distorts reality

A FEW weeks ago, a vociferous pro-Israel demonstration was held in Washington, at roughly the same moment that the siege of Jenin was taking place. All of the speakers were prominent public figures, including several senators, leaders of major Jewish organizations, and other celebrities, each of whom expressed unfailing solidarity with everything Israel was doing.

The administration was represented by Paul Wolfowitz, the number two man at the department of defence, an extreme right-wing hawk who has been speaking about “ending” countries like Iraq ever since last September. Also known as a rigorous hard-line supporter of Israel, in his speech he did what everyone else did — celebrated Israel and expressed total unconditional support for it — but unexpectedly referred also in passing to “the sufferings of the Palestinians.” Because of that phrase, he was booed so loudly and so long that he was unable to continue his speech, leaving the platform in a kind of disgrace.

The moral of this incident is that public American Jewish support for Israel today simply does not tolerate any allowance for the existence of an actual Palestinian people, except in the context of terrorism, violence, evil and fanaticism. Moreover, this refusal to see, much less hear anything about, the existence of “another side” far exceeds the fanaticism of anti-Arab sentiment among Israelis, who are of course on the front line of the struggle in Palestine.

To judge by the recent anti-war demonstration of 60,000 people in Tel Aviv, the increasing number of military reservists who refuse service in the occupied territories, the sustained protest of (admitted only a few) intellectuals and groups, and some of the polls that show a majority of the Israelis willing to withdraw in return for peace with the Palestinians, there is at least a dynamic of political activity among Israeli Jews. But not so in the United States.

Two weeks ago the weekly magazine New York which has a circulation of about a million copies ran a dossier entitled “Crisis for American Jews,” whose theme was that “in New York, as in Israel, [it is] an issue of survival.” I won’t try to summarize the main points of this extraordinary claim except to say that it painted such a picture of anguish about “what is most precious in my life, the state of Israel” according to one of the prominent New Yorkers quoted in the magazine, that you would think that the existence of this most prosperous and powerful of all minorities in the United States was actually being threatened.

One of the other people quoted even went as far as to suggest that American Jews are on the brink of a second holocaust. Certainly, as the author of one of the articles said, most American Jews support what Israel did on the West Bank, enthusiastically; one American Jew said, for instance, that his son is now in the Israeli army and that he is “armed, dangerous and killing as many Palestinians as possible.” Guilt at being well-off in America plays a role in this kind of delusional thinking, but mostly it is the result of an extraordinary self-isolation in fantasy and myth that comes from education and unreflective nationalism of a kind unique in the world.

Ever since the intifada broke out almost two years ago, the American media and the major Jewish organizations have been running all kinds of attacks on Islamic education in the Arab world, Pakistan and even in the US. These have accused Islamic authorities, as well as Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, of teaching youngsters hatred of America and Israel, the virtues of suicide bombing, unlimited praise for jihad.

Little has been said, however, of the results of what American Jews have been taught about the conflict in Palestine: that it was given to the Jews by God, that it was empty, that it was liberated from Britain, that the natives ran away because their leaders told them to, that in effect the Palestinians don’t exist except recently as terrorists, that all Arabs are anti-Semitic and want to kill the Jews.

Nowhere in all this incitement to hatred does the reality of a Palestinian people exist, and more to the point, there is no connection made between Palestinian animosity and enmity towards Israel and what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians since 1948. It’s as if an entire history of dispossession, the destruction of a society, the 35-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of massacres, bombardments, expulsions, land expropriations, killings, sieges, humiliations, years of collective punishment and assassinations that have gone on for decades were as nothing, since Israel has been victimized by Palestinian rage, hostility and gratuitous anti-semitism.

It simply does not occur to most American supporters of Israel to see Israel as the actual author of specific actions done in the name of the Jewish people by the Jewish state, and to connect in consequence those actions to Palestinian feelings of anger and revenge.

The problem at bottom is that as human beings the Palestinians do not exist, that is, as human beings with history, traditions, society, sufferings and ambitions like all other people. Why this should be so for most but by no means all American Jewish supporters of Israel is something worth looking into. It goes back to the knowledge that there was an indigenous people in Palestine — all the Zionist leaders knew it and spoke about it — but the fact that might prevent colonization could never be admitted. Hence the collective Zionist practice of either denying the fact or, more specially in the US where the realities are not so available for actual verification, lying about it by producing a counter-reality.

For decades it has been decreed to schoolchildren that there were no Palestinians when the Zionist pioneers arrived and so those miscellaneous people who throw stones and fight occupation are simply a collection of terrorists who deserve killing. The Palestinians, in short, do not deserve anything like a narrative or collective actuality, and so they must be transmuted and dissolved into essentially negative images. This is entirely the result of a distorted education, doled out to millions of youngsters who grow up without any awareness at all that the Palestinian people have been totally dehumanized to serve a political-ideological end, namely to keep support high for Israel.

What is so astonishing is that notions of co-existence between peoples play no part in this kind of distortion. Whereas the American Jews want to be recognized as Jews and Americans in America, they are unwilling to accord a similar status as Arabs and the Palestinians to another people that has been oppressed by Israel since the beginning.

Only if one were to live in the US for years would one be aware of the depth of the problem which far transcends ordinary politics. The intellectual suppression of the Palestinians that has occurred because of Zionist education has produced an unreflecting, dangerously skewed sense of reality in which whatever Israel does it does as a victim: according to the various articles I have quoted above, American Jews in crisis by extension therefore feel the same thing as the most right-wing of Israeli Jews, that they are at risk and their survival is at stake.

This has nothing to do with the reality obviously enough, but rather with a kind of hallucinatory state that overrides history and facts with a supremely unthinking narcissism. A recent defence of what Wolfowitz said in his speech didn’t even refer to the Palestinians he was referring to, but defended President Bush’s Middle East policy.

This is de-humanization on a vast scale, and it is made even worse, one has to say, by the suicide bombings that have so disfigured and debased the Palestinian struggle. All liberation movements in history have affirmed that their struggle is about life, not about death. Why should ours be an exception? The sooner we educate our Zionist enemies and show that that our resistance offers co-existence and peace, the less likely will they able to kill us at will, and never refer to us except as terrorists.

I am not saying that Sharon and Netanyahu can be changed. I am saying that there is a Palestinian, yes a Palestinian constituency, as well as an Israeli and American one that needs to be reminded by strategy and tactics that force of arms and tanks and human bombs and bulldozers are not a solution, but only create more delusion and distortion, on both sides. —Copyright Edward W. Said, 2002

Lessons for prosecutors

THE Justice Department last week suffered a pair of well-deserved setbacks when its aggressive legal tactics following the Sept. 11 attacks came up against federal judges.

In New Jersey, Chief Judge John Bissell of the federal district court slapped down the government’s effort to maintain secrecy for its deportation proceedings related to the investigation.

In Norfolk, Va., Judge Robert Doumar ordered that a battlefield detainee named Yaser Esam Hamdi — who was born in Louisiana and is likely an American citizen — must be given access to a lawyer. It should not take federal judges to teach the government such civics lessons. But the government doesn’t seem to be learning from repeated judicial rebuke.

The decision in New Jersey is not the first time the government’s secrecy policy has been held unconstitutional. Since the attacks, the government has detained large numbers of Arabs and Muslims whose deficient immigration status has come to light during the probe.

—The Washington Post

Musharraf’s triple bind

BY ratcheting up its pressure on Pakistan, India has put General Musharraf in a triple bind. He is faced with the problem of dealing with an adversary that is now much stronger militarily and economically than ever before. At the same time, he has to assuage the feelings of a growing number of citizens of his country that the United States is once again prepared to abandon Pakistan. And, finally, he is very mindful of the fact that continuing confrontation with India will exact a very heavy economic toll on his country.

Let me start with the third point briefly but come back to it in greater detail a little later.

The current escalation in Pakistan’s on-going near-war with India has come at a time when the economy had begun to show some signs of recovery. There was a hope that with agreements on debt concluded with most important creditors, with new programmes of development in place financed by concessional flows from a number of official sources, with significant trade concessions provided by the European Union, and with foreign investors beginning to look at Pakistan with some interest, the stage may have been set for the country to improve on its anaemic economic performance of recent years. No matter what happens now — even with a rapid de-escalation of tensions with India — 2002 will be yet another lost year for the Pakistani economy.

A state already operating under severe resource constraints is being compelled to divert more resources into defence. “We are considering recalling 500,000 reserve soldiers and officers to face any situation in the event of war with India,” The Wall Street Journal quoted a Pakistani army spokesman in one of its many stories covering the rapidly deteriorating situation on Pakistan’s border with India.

Such a large recall of reservists will, no doubt, add considerably to the strength of the Pakistan army. It will also cost the country as much as one per cent of the gross domestic product and, perhaps, knock off a quarter percentage point for a few years from its already low rate of economic growth. Can the country countenance such a major redeployment of resources when the economy had reached a turning point? I calculate the “net present value” of the cost of deployment at $10 billion, equivalent to 16 per cent of the current gross domestic product.

It is not surprising that General Pervez Musharraf showed considerable frustration at India’s bellicose stance in a conversation with western newspaper correspondents a few days ago. “On the broader problem of conflict between India and Pakistan, countries born in religious hatred and bloodshed 55 years ago as the sun set on Britain’s subcontinental empire, Musharraf identified the basic problem as India’s unwillingness to accept a growing, stable Pakistan as its neighbour,” wrote Steve Coll, a correspondent with many years of experience of South Asian affairs at The Washington Post.

This then is General Musharraf’s first bind — how to live with a large neighbour that seems still not reconciled to the partition of British India into two independent states more than half a century ago. There is an impression in Pakistan that India seems to act every time Pakistan seems ready to move towards building a robust economy. The response seems almost Pavlovian and goes back to the time of the birth of these two countries. In looking at its relations with India, Pakistan cannot ignore history.

In 1947, India refused to release the accumulated “sterling balances” — Pakistan’s share in the compensation Britain had provided its Indian territory for help in the war against Germany and Japan. Pakistan desperately needed all the foreign exchange it could access to get the new country working. India withheld the amounts that were due to its neighbour on some minor technicality. Its motives were clear: to cripple Pakistan before it got started. Two years later, and with the same objective in sight, India halted all trade with Pakistan when the Pakistani leadership refused to follow its neighbour’s devaluation of the rupee against foreign currencies.

“India will not pay 144 of its rupees for 100 of Pakistan’s,” declared Vallavbhai Patel, the powerful home minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’s first cabinet. That Patel displayed enormous ignorance of economics is not the point. The point is the hostility he harboured towards Pakistan. Patel’s distaste for Pakistan was as deep as that of L. K. Advani, the man who occupies the same position in the cabinet currently headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Advani’s unfortunate comment, made a few days ago, that India is prepared once again to do to Pakistan what it did in 1971 when it helped create Bangladesh reflects an outlook that could not possibly please Pakistan. This was not even a veiled threat. Advani seems to be implying that there were sufficient number of groups in Pakistan that wished to separate from the mother country for India to step in with help as it had done in 1971. A Pakistan broken up into mini-states was something India could achieve, suggested Advani.

And, it appears a military attack on Pakistan is not the only weapon the Indian home minister is prepared to use. Once again, India seems prepared to deploy water as another weapon in its arsenal. It has used water as a threat once before. In 1950, the Indian leadership hinted that it could stop the flow of water in the Indus river system. Several barrages that regulated the flow of water in this system were located in the part of Kashmir that India now occupied. Had India carried out its threat, much of Pakistan, dependent as it was on the water of the Indus system, would have been turned into a desert.

It was this threatened act of aggression against the Pakistani economy that prompted Liaquat Ali Khan to shake his fist at India from the balcony of the Pakistani primer minister’s residence in Karachi, then the capital of the country. This act of symbolic defiance, not couched in the language of diplomacy, was celebrated all across Pakistan. For many years Liaquat Ali Khan’s clenched fist came to represent Pakistan’s resolve not to tolerate constant bullying by India.

But a clenched prime ministerial fist cannot take the country very far. Pakistan had to strengthen its defences by spending more on the military. This began to happen starting with the mid-fifties. It was the eleven-year-long defence alliance with the United States that began in 1954 and ended in 1965 that provided Pakistan the sense of security it needed against a neighbour it was not prepared to trust. The association with Washington started in 1954 when General Ayub Khan, commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, signed the Mutual Defence Agreement with America. It ended in 1965 when war broke out between Pakistan and India over the contested state of Kashmir.

The seventeen-day war in September 1965 was the first time in nearly two decades that Pakistan had attempted to wrest the control of Kashmir by military means. That effort backfired in many different ways. Pakistan could not provoke the Kashmiris to rise against India. (That happened twentyfive years later and without much help from Pakistan.) The Indians were not prepared to confine the military conflict to the state of Kashmir. Instead — and against Pakistan’s expectations — they launched a series of military assaults on various points along their long border. Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, was a particular target.

The war also exposed Pakistan’s extreme vulnerability in the eastern wing, today’s Bangladesh. It vividly demonstrated to the Bengalis that the Pakistan army did not have the wherewithal to defend East Pakistan against any aggression by India. If India chose to walk into East Pakistan, as it did six years later, there was very little to stop it. The 1965 war with India, therefore, laid the ground for Pakistan’s break-up in 1971.

But the most debilitating consequence of the 1965 war was for the Pakistani economy. The Ayubian model of securing foreign help — in his case that meant American help — to protect the country against Indian designs while concentrating a significant proportion of the country’s assets on economic development was now no longer applicable. America withdrew help and China, towards whom Ayub Khan now turned, could not fully compensate Pakistan for what it had received from Washington.

Is history about to repeat itself? Is the on-going near-war with India about to break out into open hostility? How should Pakistan deal with Indian hostility? General Musharraf seemed exasperated when he addressed these questions in his discussion with western journalists. Does India want a strong Pakistan on its northern border? he asked his interviewers and then went on to provide the answer himself. “No sir, that is not what they want,” he told the western reporters on May 25, the day Pakistan tested its medium-range surface-to-surface missile and demonstrated its capability of hitting targets 900 miles deep into the Indian territory.

“They want a subservient Pakistan which remains subservient to them and subcontracts foreign and economic policy to New Delhi. They are arrogant and they want to impose their will on every country in the region. We want to live in peace. But we want to live in peace with our sovereignty guaranteed, with our dignity not compromised.”

No self-respecting Pakistani leader can tolerate Indian hegemony. It was to escape from such a situation that the Muslims of British India had campaigned vigorously for the establishment of a separate homeland for themselves. What was gained in the struggle for independence could not be surrendered on the battlefield. What are, therefore, the options available to Pakistan? For the last 50 years, Pakistan’s military leaders, especially when they were also in charge of the country’s political system, sought some protection under foreign umbrellas. It was in pursuit of such a strategy that Ayub Khan entered into a military alliance with the United States in 1954. A quarter century later, General Ziaul Haq once again developed a close working relationship with America.

The current alliance with Washington is no doubt seen as providing the same opportunity and the same level of comfort. But will this alliance be put under strain once again as happened in 1965 when India and Pakistan went to war and America withdrew its support for Islamabad? This is General Musharraf’s second bind. How to keep America engaged positively while India, for obvious reasons, has become, along with Israel, a passionate adherent of the Bush doctrine on terrorism.

But President George W. Bush seems now to be wavering. His statement while on a visit to Moscow could not have reassured Pakistan. With Russian President Vladimir Putin standing by his side, the American president asked General Musharraf not just to promise action but “show results.” The language used by the American president was very similar to that he directed earlier at Yasser Arafat, the Chairman of the Palestine Authority. Taken together, these two binds that General Musharraf now has to deal with — the continuing Indian hostility and a wavering in the American support — creates the third bind for the Pakistani president, scaring away foreign capital from the country when it most needs it. I will deal with it in this space next week.

Miscellany: ALL OVER THE PLACE

I SPOKE to my younger sister, Kudsia, on the telephone. She lives in England and is married to a wonderful man, a doctor. She had been in hospital with some sort of intestinal blockage and my brother-in-law told me that it had been touch and go.

She had come very close to cashing in her chips. She was a little tearful as we spoke, informing me that she may not be able to visit Pakistan this year because of her frail health. She wanted to know whether Pakistan and India would go to war because the news that they were getting was alarming.

She had troubles enough of her own and I told her that there was a lot of talk about war but did not think that either country would be so foolish as to actually start a war. I didn’t think a little ‘white lie’ would do any harm.

It is a tiresome business to be writing about war and terrorism, week after week. I miss writing about power failures though I must admit that that too had become tiresome subject, so frequent had they become and still are. If anything, they seem to be on the increase and one feels their impact even more than usual because of the heat wave.

I am hoping that there is a football fan in the KESC and we will get to see the World Cup matches without too many interruptions. But one can’t fill an entire column complaining about power failures, particularly since no one appears to take the slightest notice of these complaints.

One could write about the General Elections and in his broadcast to the nation last week, President Musharraf announced the dates. We can now brace ourselves for election-fever. I cannot admit to feeling too excited. From the look of things, we will be back to reshuffling the deck of cards and though there may be new alliances (politics making strange bed-fellows), we are likely to see familiar faces once again on the political stage, mouthing familiar lines and I find this prospect acutely depressing.

This country is crying out for fresh leadership, people with courage of their convictions (and not opportunists) and for young leadership, people who have the energy to turn this country around with new ideas and a new style. I would strongly recommend that there should be an age-limit for the candidates and no one over 50 years old should be allowed to contest the elections. This may seem drastic and arbitrary but our politics need new, not tired blood. These elections must mean something, must be meaningful. I don’t think we need to have elections merely to satisfy the world that we have moved towards democracy. That is a form of tokenism. We need a kind of democracy that reaches out to the people, touches their lives and gives them hope. Pakistan was meant to be a homeland for the many and not a private preserve of the few. And it would seem, the same few.

But no matter how hard one tries to take one’s mind off the gathering gloom of war, one returns to it. The entire international community is cautioning both Pakistan and India not to allow rhetoric to reach such a fever-pitch that it becomes a call to arms. Vajpayee spoke of a “decisive battle.” Was he carried away by emotion or did he, inadvertently, reveal the true nature of the BJP mindset?

India and Pakistan have been uneasy neighbours from the time both countries got their independence, that’s over half a century. A child born on August 14 or 15, 1947 would now be well into his old or middle age. There has never been a let-up in this uneasiness, instead it has flared up, almost at regular intervals, into hostility.

And now both countries are poised, eyeball to eyeball, in full readiness of a war in which there will be only losers. Is there no way to prevent such a madness? There is, and the way is through dialogue. But India refuses to talk to Pakistan. It keeps shifting the goal posts and then, sanctimoniously, says that its patience has run out.

I am reminded of the fable of a wise, old man and a cocky young man who was determined to humiliate the wise, old man. He picked up a bird and clasped in both his hands and asked the old man what he had in his hands. The old man said that he had a bird in his hands. “Is it dead or alive?”

If the old man said that it was alive, he would snap the bird’s head and show that the bird was dead. If he said that it is dead, he would open his hands and the bird would fly away. The wise, old man saw the trap. He simply said: “The bird is in your hands.”

War is in our hands. So too is peace. War seems the easier option, peace requires statesmanship. Any rabble-rouser can whip up a war hysteria but peace requires leadership of the highest calibre and immediately, someone like Nelson Mandela comes to mind. He was imprisoned for 25 years. Who would have blamed him had he come out of prison an embittered man? But he chose the path of reconciliation, for the alternative would have been to plunge his country in a bloody civil war.

Whether he felt any personal hatred for the white man who had snuffed out the bloom of the best years of his life was something that he kept within his heart but knew he had to put the interests of his people ahead of his feelings and he reached out to both his comrades and to his enemies and in the process he dismantled apartheid and turned South Africa into a genuine multi-racial country with equal rights for both blacks and whites.

There is a shining example before us. What we need is an honest broker who can get the two countries talking, not necessarily, to resolve the Kashmir dispute but to defuse the immediate tension so that the threat of war is removed. For once, we should think about the people of both countries, of what war would do to them and for once, the future of the subcontinent should be put ahead of the hate-filled, dangerous present. We are prepared to die for our country. A purer form of love of one’s country is if we are prepared to live for it.

Shapes of terror down the ages

IT is only reasonable to suspect that the ears of the attentive people across the world should by now be choked with the stuff that has been dinned into them about the “Islamic” fundamentalism, fanaticism, fascism, violence, terror and what not.

Let it be stated straightaway that not all of this blistering stuff has been altogether unfounded. Equally, not all of it has been correct and free of dubious motives. There is, no doubt, fanaticism, bigotry and indeed cold-blooded violence in Pakistan are practised and perpetrated in the name of Islam. But make no mistake, religious extremism is not Pakistan’s patented invention, nor Islam’s, nor indeed is it very new. Religious extremism has been integral to the history of human race. At some stage faiths, that demanded total obedience, have tended to become hostage in the hands of professional preachers.

Even in the most revered divine sanctums, one would find streaks of conspiracy and cruelty that in current parlance would be “terror.” Joseph, the Hebrew patriarch, son of Jacob and Rachel, was sold by his own blood-brothers for a pittance into captivity in Egypt.

Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, born a Jew, living in Palestine, dedicated to a mission of preaching and healing, was put to death by crucifixion.

All but the entire family of the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) was martyred in the desert of Kerbala by the Caliphate of the day.

Of the three Semitic religions, Islam is the youngest. As such, the failings of its followers ought to be looked upon with a measure of consideration by the followers and practitioners of the two older Semitic religions — Judaism and Christianity. These two are no strangers to violence and terror. It is regrettable that neither of the two has felt persuaded to behave with the understanding that one would expect from them. But no complaints.

What about religions outside the Semitic trinity? In the Asian context, Hinduism, the religion of the Aryans in South Asia, would perhaps be the most senior. The Aryans descended from Central Asia into the southern subcontinent round 15,000 BC. Hinduism, complete with its rigid caste system, was well in place by about 900 BC.

Buddhism is junior to Hinduism, as Buddha belongs to around 560 BC. It may not be entirely incorrect to suggest that Buddha was born Hindu and felt the need to improve upon his inherited faith.

One of Hinduism’s most sacred books, The Ramayana, tells a long tale of court intrigue, banishment and wars in which human — and, remarkably, superhuman — characters play many and decisive parts. That dates back to 300 BC or thereabout.

The Mahabharat, completed around 400 AD, is all about intrigue, violence and war within the royal family, between (step) brothers. This composition is believed to be the longest epic in the world, with its 10,000 stanzas. It is from these two most sacred books that Hinduism draws its wisdom and inspiration. Both have all manner of violence and war as the central theme.

Terror is certainly not rare in today’s India. The Gujarat carnage is only the recent instance of organized terror perpetrated upon a minority. India’s own human rights monitors have accused state services of involvement — indirect as also direct — in acts of calculated terror. That takes it very close to state terror.

The demolition of the 16th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya is still fresh in memory along with the 2,000 deaths in its wake. Christian churches and seminaries have been targeted after what is often seen to be planned action. In Indian occupied Kashmir 700,000 troops have been in ‘active’ service for well over a decade, having accounted for 70,000 dead. Special laws protect the gun-totting soldiers, not the defenceless citizens.

Sri Lanka has been the theatre of conflict which, in essence, is hardly distinguishable from terrorism. Indeed, it is one of the most organized and powerfully backed drama which is all about terror. Suicide bombers are not unknown to the Sri Lankan chapter of terror.

Acts of terror have become the main concern in the United States, arguably the most powerful as well as the most prosperous society in today’s world. Ipso facto, also the most civilized? The United States has witnessed schoolchildren engaged in some particularly hair-raising acts of terror. Only some weeks ago a similar shoot-out was seen in Germany. In Italy the Mafia is a reality. So is ETA in Spain. Rival Christian militants in Northern Ireland have been active for so many years — and still are.

History of Christianity, around 5-6 centuries older than that of Islam, is full of conflict, a great deal of it is blood-stained. Within Christianity, factions have fought and killed one another of the same faith for at least five hundred years. There is hardly a particle of European soil that is not tainted with innocent blood, shed in the name of the Christian religion by ardent, uncompromising Christians.

Look at Ireland and Spain today. These two are not the poor, uneducated and ‘uncivilized’ countries of the generally despised Third World. They profess Christianity and proclaim adherence to Christian charity, don’t they? Do we not see terror in the most sophisticated form, with all that progress and prosperity and self-righteousness?

The bloodshed that came in the wake of the disintegration of the Yugoslav federal republic is a story of only yesterday. That was terror right in the heart of the civilized Europe. It is no secret that state agencies were deeply involved in the massacres amounting to calculated genocide. Some of the characters in that inhuman drama are belatedly facing trial. Better late than never.

What is the reality on the ground in India, the world’s most populous democracy? Remember it was founded by Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence — Ahimsa? One recalls with profound grief that the Mahatama was assassinated during a prayer meeting by one who could be his family member. The Assassin of Gandhi is today a hero of the ruling party in India. Do you see shades of terror?

Can any serious student of subcontinental affairs overlook the Babri Mosque affair and the 2,000 killed in its wake? The carnage in the western state of Gujarat continues. According to India’s own human rights monitors, nearly 3,000 have been killed, while the police stood by — when it was not actually in the gory business. This is not plain terror. This is state terror.

In Indian occupied Kashmir there are more than 700,000 Indian army troops engaged in full-scale military operations. During the last ten years over 70,000 civilians have been killed. That makes one civilian killed for every ten soldiers on military duty. On top of this, there is so much of noise about ‘infiltration’ from Pakistan. The infiltrators do not operate as an army. If they operate at all, they do in twos, threes and fours.

First, how do they infiltrate when 700,000 trained troops are standing watch? How is it that small groups have kept such a gigantic military presence in retreat? Does this make any sense — military sense or mere common sense? If you ask for evidence of infiltration, none is forthcoming.

This rather longish prelude was required to put in perspective the furore over Muslim fundamentalism, extremism and stretching this tale to pathological extremes of low revengeful rage. Let it be stated once again that this is no attempt to condone, let alone defend, extremism in Muslim societies. The point to stress is that it is not the only aberration of its kind in our times. No imbalance or distortion in a human society is without a cause.

What diabolical injustice has produced Muslim extremism in the Arab world should need no elaboration. Is there any parallel in the history of the human race of what we witness day after day in Palestine? Imagine, ostensibly sensible people all over the civilized world watch all that on their television, without turning a hair.

What does one conclude about modern world’s sensitiveness to the repeated and arrogant violation of the basic human values in the land that is at once the holiest spot on earth for Judaism, Christianity and Islam?

With all this happening all over the world, the noise mostly about Islamic fundamentalism, extremism, indeed, Islamic terror sounds hugely perverse.

How squint-eyed can the world get? And how inert the United Nations?