Author Archives: Editors

Pak school attack; Brief thought by Nasik Elahi

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Pakistan has undergone a 9/11 moment. The unprecedented scale of the attack on school children and teachers by Taliban elements has shocked the nation and its political and defense establishment to form a united front. It is too early to tell what concrete results may emerge but the beginning is at least promising. Imran khan has called off his long boycott and national disobedience against the present government to face the crisis in the part of the country run by his political party which was the focus of the terrorist outrage.

Pakistan is a country of pent up rage and needs. Imran khan has given voice to grievances of the common folk but his tactics of boycotts, vilification of government and judicial figures do not create a model of good governance. The democratic process in Pakistan is shaped by vested dynastic interests, crony capitalism, religion and an elitist mindset that sets up privilege as a right for the haves.

Clearly there is a pressing need to make the process more inclusive. Demanding the forced resignation of a prime minister through the sheer will of a determined personality does not foster national reforms. The movement becomes yet another manifestation of personality driven agendas that have a lock on the existing political system.

The true drive for reform needs to focus on making institutions of government more open and accountable. The direct political interference into the routines of government has to cease. The bureaucrats and agency heads should function as professionals openly accountable for their performance to the public rather than the political paymasters. People recognize but putting programs into shape is going to be a torturous process.

For the immediate future the country is in a reactive mode. The national revulsion demands revenge. The government has lifted the EU inspired moratorium on executions and has started to hang people on a regular basis. The reactions by the militants are sure to be even more violent. The government has to be judicious in its use of force and corner the militants through an organized campaign of interdiction. At this point it remains a wish as a befitting memorial in memory of the innocent victims of a heinous act.

Porn in the Middle East-Elephant in the Room; By William Smith

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There was a time when finding pornography in the Arab world meant going to a shady side-street VHS tape vendor, casting a furtive glance over one’s shoulder, and casually enquiring as to whether there were any “cultural” films on sale. 

But while people may publically express their aversion and opposition to Internet pornography, their private viewing habits suggest something quite different. Put simply, porn is BIG in the Arab world. According toGoogle AdWords, the 22 Arab states account for over 10% of the world’s searches for “sex”; A total of 55.4 million unique monthly Google “sex” searchers in the 22 (ignoring a further 24 million searches for “sex” transliterated into Arabic) that matches both the United States and India, two countries often cited as world leaders in porn consumption.

What is even more striking is that, when these numbers are adjusted to reflect people’s ready access to the Internet (which ranges from 85% of the population in the UAE to just 1.4% in Somalia) Arab Google searches for “sex” outweigh those from almost anywhere else worldwide. As per AdWords, for every 100 Arab Internet users, an average of 52 searches are made each month, compared to 21 in the United States, 36 in India, 45 in France and 47 in Pakistan.

It also seems to be the case that viewing porn in the region is not simply big in absolute terms, but also relatively to all other things people search. Data obtained from the Internet analytics company Alexa shows that adult-themed sites account for seven of the 100 most visited websites in the US, a figure that is trumped by at least six Arab states – Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. Meanwhile, Google Trends, which shows how many searches for a particular keyword are made relative to all searches on Google, suggests that people in the region are more likely to search for “sex” than almost anywhere else in the world, with the exception of the Indian Sub-Continent.

http://raseef22.com/News-Detail/186/news

Posted By F. Sheikh

 

 

Slavery & Capitalism; Sven Beckert

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Worth reading article on how slavery was the backbone of Capitalism in USA. Slavery was as common in Northeast as in Mississippi delta. Some excerpts from article; 

“If capitalism, as many believe, is about wage labor, markets, contracts, and the rule of law, and, most important, if it is based on the idea that markets naturally tend toward maximizing human freedom, then how do we understand slavery’s role within it? No other national story raises that question with quite the same urgency as the history of the United States: The quintessential capitalist society of our time, it also looks back on long complicity with slavery. But the topic goes well beyond one nation. The relationship of slavery and capitalism is, in fact, one of the keys to understanding the origins of the modern world.”

“In these accounts, slavery was just as present in the counting houses of Lower Manhattan, the spinning mills of New England, and the workshops of budding manufacturers in the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as on the plantations in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The slave economy of the Southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire economy, not just shaping but dominating it.”

 

For the first half of the 19th century, slavery was at the core of the American economy. The South was an economically dynamic part of the nation (for its white citizens); its products not only established the United States’ position in the global economy but also created markets for agricultural and industrial goods grown and manufactured in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. More than half of the nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by slaves. In an important book, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2013), Johnson observes that steam engines were more prevalent on the Mississippi River than in the New England countryside, a telling detail that testifies to the modernity of slavery. Johnson sees slavery not just as an integral part of American capitalism, but as its very essence. To slavery, a correspondent from Savannah noted in the publication Southern Cultivator, “does this country largely—very largely—owe its greatness in commerce, manufactures, and its general prosperity.”

Much of the recent work confirms that 1868 observation, taking us outside the major slaveholding areas themselves and insisting on the national importance of slavery, all the way up to its abolition in 1865. In these accounts, slavery was just as present in the counting houses of Lower Manhattan, the spinning mills of New England, and the workshops of budding manufacturers in the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as on the plantations in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The slave economy of the Southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire economy, not just shaping but dominating it.

Merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere, like the Browns in cotton and the Taylors in sugar, organized the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities, accumulating vast riches in the process. Sometimes the connections to slavery were indirect, but not always: By the 1840s, James Brown was sitting in his counting house in Lower Manhattan hiring overseers for the slave plantations that his defaulting creditors had left to him. Since planters needed ever more funds to invest in land and labor, they drew on global capital markets; without access to the resources of New York and London, the expansion of slave agriculture in the American South would have been all but impossible. For full article click link below.

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/150787/

Posted by F. Sheikh

The Line Between Man And God: Atif Mian

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There is a line separating man from God that should never be crossed. For when it is, hell breaks loose. We witnessed hell today in Pakistan. One hundred and thirty two children slaughtered in a barbaric attack on a school.

This time the line was crossed by Taliban – a serial offender. They gloatingly accepted full responsibility, adding that the children were murdered in response to Pakistan army’s offensive against them. One might question such logic. After all there are rules, even in war. Rules set by the very religion the Taliban profess to follow. Civilians are off-limits. The children for sure.

But such logic matters not. For when you have crossed the line, you are no longer subject to constraints put on men. You are “god” now – judge, jury and the executioner – all rolled into one. The Taliban want to impose “shariah”. We can never know what that means, except to know that it means whatever the Taliban want it to mean. Murdering children could be kosher, if “the god” Taliban so decides. We better submit, or our head could be next.

There is a word in the western world for crossing the line between man and God. It is called Fascism, and the line-crossers are known as Fascists. But we in Pakistan know them through more honorific titles such as Maulana, Allamaand Mashaikh – or even Generals and Prime Ministers.

Yes, make no mistake. The Taliban are not the first to cross the line between man and God. In fact, they are really one of the last to join this habitual pastime of Pakistani elite.

The line was first breached by Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1974 who, flanked by every political party and religious scholar, set out to determine who was a true Muslim and who wasn’t. General Zia took this initiative to the next level by inventing his own “divine laws” that prescribed precise penalties for a wide range of “blasphemous” acts.

The following generation of leaders, both within the army and beyond, became even bolder. Why not just decentralize the whole business of trespassing on God’s territory, they thought. Thus you no longer had to head the parliament, or be a General to decide “god’s will”. Anyone with the right length of beard could do it. The subtleties of law and due process were no longer a hindrance.

A local cleric would declare some poor Christians “blasphemous”, and they could be lynched, burnt alive, or their entire community set on fire. The cleric and his mob would never face justice. And if the “accused” Christian somehow managed to save her life, she would surely be picked up by police and banished behind bars for years to come.

Before the Taliban butchered our children in Peshawar, there was a Talibanesque mob in Gujranwala that went to punish the “heretic” Ahmadis. They locked up women, and children as young as 8 months old, inside a room before setting it on fire. The whole episode was video-taped with exuberant men chanting religious slogans. The government looked the other way because the “god” was on their side.

This begs the question. Why blame the Taliban alone when so many in Pakistan are quick to impose divine punishment upon others? But let us not try to answer this question any more.

It is not easy to bury one’s own children. Not so many. And not so regularly. We must put an end to this. We must do the unthinkable. We must redraw the line between man and God in Pakistan, and promise never to breach it again.

This means getting rid of all discriminatory laws in Pakistan. All laws where the state interferes in matters of faith. It means getting rid of all blasphemy laws. The question is not whether Aasia Bibi committed blasphemy or not. The question is why should there be such a question in the first place.

We must respect the line between man and God. Let us all admit that there is no god, except God. May our children rest in peace.

http://scholar.princeton.edu/atif/blog/line-between-man-and-god/