Eran Yashiv Wikipedia entry, April 2048. Israel is a religious Jewish republic with a secular minority on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Its regime is currently theocratic and authoritarian. Israel’s history as a state is relatively brief (100 years), though it is part of the long history of the Jewish people. Its official language… Read More Israel’s Future: A Jewish Theocracy That Resembles Iran
The moment the middle class feels it has no access to a public good, it does everything it can to devalue it. The systematic destruction of Delhi University is a case study in elite secession Mukul Kesavan The death of Delhi University has gone unremarked. It isn’t formally dead; it still educates tens of thousands… Read More In memoriam
A sudden wave of protest meetings held in Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar and Meerut by leaders of the dominant, landed community has forced the BJP to address their question and try to gloss over the divisions in its electoral caste rainbow by ramping up the Hindutva card and sentiments of nationalism. Omar Rashid With just a week… Read More Rajput Anger in Western UP Puts BJP in Firefighting Mode Days Before Polling
Gideon Levy Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi was killed April 1 in a strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Two weeks later, Israel is anxiously bracing for what’s next. Judging by the U.S. warning, the Iranian attack is already making its way here, and it could even arrive in the hours between the writing of… Read More If Iran Attacks Israel, the Blame Lies on Israel’s Irresponsible Decision-makers / Two Assassinations, Same Problem
NB: This essay was published in Outlook magazine on April 11. DS Waiting Are we in a post-ideological age? No, we are submerged in it. The term ‘post-truth’ is merely an example of the impact of ideology on our speech habits. What does it mean? We can approach the meaning of the term ideology by… Read More The Crisis of Ideology
The U.S. government’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s annihilation of Gaza – torrents of heavy weaponry, diplomatic and political cover, and vast majorities in Congress swearing fealty to Netanyahu’s extremist regime – is usually attributed to AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the powerful domestic pro-Israeli government lobby, organized in every Congressional District, with its abundant… Read More Ralph Nader: The Mutually Reinforcing US and Israeli Empires
More concerning is the university and police’s promptness to align with ABVP’s ideology, disregarding their obligation to operate within the framework of the Constitution of India. Instead of penalising those who commit violence, they punish the victims of violence… The list of such institutions is long where the administration has acted like the authorities of… Read More Pondicherry Violence Sparks Question: Why Can’t India Interpret Hindu Gods?
Rohini Hensman Introduction Myth and reality are intertwined in accounts of how Buddhism was brought to Sri Lanka. According to the Mahavamsa, a 6th century CE epic, the Buddha himself visited Lanka on three occasions, but this myth has effectively been demolished by scholars[1]. There is more evidence for the story that in the third century BCE, when Ashoka ruled… Read More Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism & Women In Sri Lanka
Bharat Bhushan Even as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) talks up its promise of “Viksit Bharat” (Developed India), it increasingly looks like a party of turncoats. The BJP has tended to drop 20 to 30 per cent of sitting legislators in every election to counter anti-incumbency. But why is it filling these vacancies with defectors from the… Read More The BJP and political turncoats
ARZU GEYBULLAYEVA ( Globalvoices.org ) – Turkey’s local elections which took place on March 31, will go down in history as one of its most surprising. Turkey’s demoralized opposition, namely the [secular] Republican People’s Party (CHP), dominated in what many pundits described as the ruling [center-right] Justice and Development Party’s worst defeat of its 22-year existence. For the first time since 1977, the CHP took… Read More Secular Opposition Crushes Islamist AKP in Turkey’s Local Elections
After the truth-shower 