Middle East Monitor: Recent weeks rank among the most turbulent in the West Bank, with massive protests taking place in different parts of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. From tension in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah that led to a bloody escalation last May, to the weekly protests being held since June in the… Read More Why is Popular Resistance in the Occupied West Bank Increasing?
The Afghan fiasco pales compared to the multi-dimensional tragedy created by the Iraq invasion and occupation. The scorecard: Hundreds of thousands dead, wounded, orphaned The fostering of sectarian blood-letting that institutionalizes the country’s political fragmentation. The massive destruction of economic infrastructure. The welding of ties between Shi’te majority governments in Iraq with Iran’s clerical regime… Read More Michael Brenner: Lowering the Throne of America’s Delusion
Shockingly, some campaigns are being led by people who are camouflaging their murderous rhetoric by wearing the saffron robes of Hindu renunciants. Last month, the theme of many speeches at a religious conclave in Haridwar was the need to ‘finish off’ Muslims. It would be easy to ignore this as the ranting of fringe Hindutva… Read More Manoj Joshi: India will come apart if secular contract is torn / Harish Khare: The Real Import of Satya Pal Malik's Warning About Narendra Modi
No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak: Pastor Neimoller at his last sermon, Germany, 1937 The counter revolution …tried many forms and devices, but soon learned that it could come to power only with the help of the state machine and never against it… the Kapp… Read More Bharat Bhushan – Incitement to violence: When will Supreme Court take note?
In my first class on an archaeology course at Lund University in Sweden, I stood out more than usual. It was not just that it was full of blond and blue-eyed students, more than in any other class I had ever attended – it was that archaeology is not a field that many migrants study.… Read More Sada Mire: Africa’s heritage is humanity’s – and it’s been overlooked for too long
I said at the beginning of my first talk that this is not a critical age. It is an age of partisanship and not of detachment, an age in which it is especially difficult to see literary merit in a book with whose conclusions you disagree. Politics – politics in the most general sense –… Read More George Orwell: Literature and Totalitarianism (1941)
Ram, the crown prince of Ayodhya, was born in Chaitra, the first month in the lunar Hindu new year. Ever since, chaiti songs have Ram’s name woven into them. His mother’s lament still resounds all over the Indo-Gangetic plains in popular chaitis: “Kin more Awadh ujaari ho, bilkhain Kaushalya/ Ram bina mori sooni Ayodhya, /… Read More Mrinal Pande: A land where no one speaks truth to power
Five former chiefs of the armed forces and a number of other prominent citizens including bureaucrats have written a letter to President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the recent incidents of hate speeches and urged them to take appropriate measures. In a letter, the group of over 100 people also referred to the communal comments made at… Read More Citizens, armed forces veterans write to President, PM Modi on hate speech / Aditi Mittal: Deafening silence in a year of hate speech
The modern world has been animated by two important impulses. The first is a drive to a mastery over nature, where we can remake and engineer the natural world, this planet and even our bodies, to serve human desire and imagination. Nature, in this view, is not a binding constraint but an obstacle to be… Read More P. B. Mehta: Can 2022 be a year of cooperation?
After the truth-shower 