Dr. Nasik Ekahi is in Pakistan on an assignment for the last six weeks. He will deliver the next lecture and discuss the current situation in Pakistan.
Sunday, January 25th, 2015 at 3:00 PM
Location
Dr. Shoeb Amin’s office
48 New Main Street
Haverstraw NY 10927
Roger Cohen wrote a column in NYT” A Time For Traitors” suggesting that Israel needs a Traitor to break the impasse on Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A comment below by a reader of NYT is the best analysis I have read on the conflict. It is worth reading.( F. Sheikh)
“Let’s just say the obvious: The two-state outcome is dead. It is D-E-A-D. There is no Israeli government, left, right, or center, that has ever been willing to accept full Palestinian sovereignty (with the full meaning of the word) west of the Jordan River. And there is no nation on earth, Palestinians included, who will accept less freedoms for itself than that taken for granted by the rest of humanity.
The Swiss cheese-like geography of Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, as well as the inhumane nature of Israel’s control over Palestinian lives (let alone the Orwellian language used to justify the subjugation and murder of Palestinians) is all the evidence one needs that there is no “solution” that involves two independent states.
The only “divorce” that is real here is the divorce from reality that proponents of the two-state outcome live by. The truth is that when the “security” of a state is threatened by non-Jewish babies, that speaks volumes about the rotten nature of that state. The only thing one needs to remember about Israel is this: Equal rights for all is a threat to Israel. Let me type that again: Equal rights for all is a threat to Israel. Only once this fact sinks in will you realize the idea of an imposed Jewish State of Israel was *never* sustainable in the long run. In the history of the world, equal rights for all always triumphs, and triumph here it will despite a forceful decades-long Israeli PR campaign to avoid it.”
Few weeks ago Tunisia’s secular party, Nidaa Tounes, defeated Islamist Party, Ennahda , in Parliamentary elections. Few days ago secular candidate won Presidential elction. The power has been peacefully transferred from the Islamist party to secular party. The solution to deal with islamist parties ,who want to bring Sharia Laws ,is to defeat them in the polls and not shut them out of the process by force. Following is editorial from NYT. ( F. Sheikh)
With the election of its first freely chosen president, Tunisia has taken another important step on its post-Arab Spring transition toward democracy. Although the country faces many difficult challenges, it remains a symbol of hope and sanity in a region consumed by chaos and dominated by authoritarian governments.
The winner, Beji Caid Essebsi, is an 88-year-old former government official and leader of the secular, anti-Islamist party Nidaa Tounes. Mr. Essebsi received 55.68 percent of the vote, while Moncef Marzouki, the interim president, received 44.32 percent.
Mr. Essebsi served as interior minister under Tunisia’s repressive first president, Habib Bourguiba, and as speaker of Parliament under Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted in the 2011 Arab Spring revolution. During the campaign, he promoted himself as an establishment figure whose experience could help ensure Tunisia’s security. Mr. Marzouki, a former human rights advocate, embodied the ideals and fervor of the revolution.
After the results were announced on Monday, Mr. Marzouki conceded defeat, and Mr. Essebsi made a speech in which he thanked his rival and promised to “work together without excluding anyone.” Mr. Essebsi also praised the people who took part and died in the 2011 revolution. The importance of such gestures cannot be underestimated; in many countries, stolen ballots, bitterly contested outcomes and hostility toward political adversaries are all too common.
American officials and experts who know Mr. Essebsi expect him to be an inclusive leader who will work to advance liberal goals like women’s rights and education.
While he will have to satisfy his secular, Western-oriented supporters, one of Mr. Essebsi’s biggest challenges will be cooperating with Ennahda, the country’s Islamist party, which has worked hard to prove that Islam and democracy can coexist.
Shared by Syed Naqvi.
(Bloomberg View) — The world seems full of crises and
disasters: from political stasis and racial standoffs in Europe and the U.S., to the classic conflicts of capitalism in “emerging” economies (inequality, weakening states, authoritarianism), to tribal conflicts and sectarian uprisings in the Middle East and Africa. But the small coffins of Peshawar’s students are the heaviest burden on our conscience.
The murder of children crushes our soul. It destroys the already frail hope, without which life becomes unbearable, that there is justice in our world. Adults commit unspeakable atrocities against each other in the name of religion, race, nation and profit. But none of our many competing gods has yet explained why the innocent young should suffer for the sins of adults.
The killing of 132 children in Peshawar violates the shared assumptions that have regulated the conduct of humanity for millennia. Some unshakeable tenets, which the fiercest partisans on the left and the right both cherished, have been trampled into the earth. It is why our grief is not assuaged by the ritual condemnation of international statesmen and editorialists, the cool analysis of terrorism experts, or the retaliatory measures of politicians and generals.
Nor is it alleviated by jeremiads against allegedly anti- modern Islam, or the unique depravity of the Pakistani Taliban.
The group’s apparent enemy, Pakistan’s security establishment, has itself created and sponsored some of the most vicious militant organizations in South Asia. Demagogues in Sri Lanka and India demonstrate that civilian rule is no insurance against extremism. The massacre of children has occurred in the same fortnight that a former vice-president of the world’s biggest democracy claimed that he would authorize torture again if need be.
We cannot precisely diagnose a crisis that seems so all- encompassing — the life-denying nihilism that hangs over the world like smog. It does hint at insidious decay in the very institutions and processes — families, education, media and inherited patterns of culture — through which basic values such as individual self-restraint are transmitted.
This is true not only of brutalized contestants in an endless war. There seems to be a pervasive uncertainty in even the world’s relatively peaceful zones about what one generation should pass on to the next, or how it should define the duties and responsibilities of being human.
Formal education, reduced to vocational training by anxious parents and teachers, no longer effectively insulates against the mental confusion and hideously distorted urge for transcendence that makes a corporate executive in Bangalore turn into a fervent tweeter on behalf of Islamic State. Many of the young today are nurtured by and mature intellectually in new communities of meaning on the Internet, where everything seems permitted. In the resulting moral vacuum, deracinated and estranged young men succumb to a grandiose will to power, and an infatuation with charismatic figures and utopian movements.
Something more than just economic and political distress must explain the worldwide proliferation of men who espouse spine-chilling convictions and fantasies of mass murder. We cannot afford to renounce the possibility of achieving a more democratic, free and just society through political change. Yet we can no longer believe that the enabling conditions of nihilistic violence or the apocalyptic mind-set can be removed by reform or modification of public policy alone, let alone by military retaliation.
The blood of innocent children rouses us to drastic action.
But it is not cowardly to acknowledge problems to which there are no stock sociopolitical remedies, and to grasp the unprecedented nature of the threats in our time to human life, freedom and dignity. Certainly, however deep our revulsion to atrocities perpetrated by all sides — sectarian or secular, governments or terrorists — it won’t help to blame religion for a phenomenon that is so clearly rooted in a catastrophic loss of the religious sense.
To contact the author on this story:
Pankaj Mishra at pmishra24@bloomberg.net To contact the editor on this story:
Nisid Hajari at nhajari@bloomberg.net