Editor: As Editor of the monthI have received many submissions to the Thinkers’ Forum regarding the Kashmir issue, mostly from the Pakistani point of view. They all blame India for not initiating a self determination referendum and they all claim sympathy with Kashmiri Muslims and they all claim the west of the world is ignorant about the issue or is partisan towards India because the world dislikes Muslims. The article below that I have chosen to publish is no different.

I actually believe that by the formula that Junagadh went to India (Muslim ruler but Hindu Majority population) that Kashmir (Hindu ruler, Muslim majority population) should have gone to Pakistan.

But what all those commentaries conveniently fail to mention is that, like all thorny international issue, there are ALWAYS two sides to the issue. First of all the Maharaja did sign a legal document of accession to India. Why this writer calls it bogus is not clear to me. He may have signed in a panic but it is because he hesitated for a few days.

Secondly, if these writers read the actual UN resolution 47 (see link below), it clearly mentions “Secondly, the Resolution recommended a three-step process for the resolution of the dispute. In the first step, Pakistan was asked to withdraw all its nationals that entered Kashmir for the sake of fighting.” Pakistan never took that first step and of course India has conveniently used that as an excuse not to have a referendum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_47

Thirdly, what these writers fail to note is that all was relatively quiet and peaceful in Kashmir until Pakistan escalated the issue by sending in their fighters into Kashmir and create an unstable situation which again India conveniently used to take very aggressive measures because there was complete loss of law and order.

I am not assigning any party to be absolutely right or wrong; I just wish people looked at the issue from both angles. Pakistan would be in a much better moral ground if it had removed the fighters as per Resolution 47 and then if India never had a referendum. And an even better moral case if it didn’t send its operatives to cause unrest in Kashmir.

Shoeb Amin

Here’s the sample article.

Global Media and Kashmir Dispute 

Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai 

May 28, 2021 

I am gratified by this opportunity to explore media influence in the United States on foreign and national security policy regarding Muslim nations and peoples in general and Kashmir in particular. Let me begin by summarizing the case of media detractors, which should tell us whether or not, it is too facile and undiscriminating. 

Doubtless the media is instrumental in foreign policy because public opinion is ordinarily decisive on government decisions, whether in South Asia, Vietnam, the Middle East, Europe or elsewhere. It is charged by many thoughtful critics that the media is biased against Muslims, and that Bosnia was the rare exception that proves the rule. Samuel Huntingdon’s thesis in his “Clash of Civilizations” which pits Islam against the West, is said to be revealed truth to the American media. 

What I submit is that media portraits generally reflect a blending of the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States coupled with domestic voting constituencies, which are more Judaeo-Christian than Muslim. Let’s examine South Asia in last three decades, with a focus on Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. Pakistan and Afghanistan were treated kindly during the approximately 10 years needed to evict the Soviet Union after their December 1979 invasion of the latter. The fragmented Mujahidin were celebrated as freedom fighters opposing Communist secularism and Soviet tyranny. They even received stinger weapons from the Central Intelligence Agency, and irregularities in the distribution of financial and military aid were overlooked. Pakistan was acclaimed for hosting millions of Afghan refugees despite the dislocations on the Pakistan economy and resentment by some indigenous Pakistanis around Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and beyond. Indeed, the media and the American government closed their eyes to Pakistan’s nuclear capability in order to evade the strictures of the Pressler Amendment. 

Now let’s take the case of Kashmir, which is more complex. At the time that the resistance hardened and swelled in 1989, the media in the United States, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and others showed signs of sympathy, but India was never castigated except by human rights organizations in the context of assailing countless other countries.  

The proposition that the United States tilted towards India because of its successful propaganda campaign maligning the Kashmiri resistance as largely so-called ‘Afghan Arab terrorists’ and ‘fanatics’ seems unconvincing. President George H. W. Bush, President Clinton, President George W. Bush, President Obama, President Trump and now President Biden administration always favored India over Pakistan or the people of Kashmir. They made no protests at the United Nations Security Council over India’s violations of its plebiscite resolutions and recently over abrogation of the Article 370, 35A and enactment of Domicile Law that changes the demography of Kashmir. That is tantamount to acquiescence in India’s illegal claim of sovereignty over Kashmir. They all gave India a veto over any third party intervention knowing it would be employed to the disadvantage of Pakistan and Kashmiris. They made no attempt at building moral suasion against India’s human rights crimes and brutalities as was done against South Africa’s apartheid, Yugoslavia’s ethnic cleansing, and Indonesia’s maltreatment of East Timorese.   

A pro-India tilt is largely caused by India’s multi million annual lobbying campaign with Congress and the Executive Branch coupled with a soaring number of politically organized Indian-Americans in the media, IT and other industries who command handsome salaries and make generous campaign contributions through political action committees. Election of Kamala Harris as Vice President of the United States, whose mother was from India, testifies to the growing influence of Indian American community. The Indian Caucus in Congress dwarfs a tiny Pakistan counterpart. And the domestic voting clout of Kashmiris and Pakistanis combined is no match to their Indian-American rivals. 

It might be argued, however, that South Asian experts and national security wizards have identified Kashmir as the most dangerous place on the planet because it could trigger nuclear exchanges between India and Pakistan. The conspicuous fact is, nevertheless, that President Clinton was the one who was reciting the most dangerous place mantra for years, but did nothing as the President to demonstrate he seriously believed what he was saying. No special envoy on Kashmir or push on Secretary-General of the United Nations to do the same. Not a syllable of criticism of India for its negotiating intransigence. In other words, the United States all along, including Biden Administration treats Kashmir with complacency, although its statements ring with urgency.  Why the discrepancy? 

The point of these observations is to demonstrate that the United States prevailing tilt toward India represents not a brake from the past but a continuity. The reasons for the pro-India sentiments are manifold. A hefty percentage of Americans equate India with Mahatma Gandhi, especially after watching movies that treat him as a virtual deity of peace and non-violence. The economic attractiveness of India as a trade and investment partner played a very important role in its image. Finally, India has maneuvered skillfully to keep its Kashmir atrocities off the likes of CNN and BBC and the front pages of newspapers by the exclusion of foreign journalists or permitting them only carefully scripted and chaperoned visits. No pictures means little international outrage and calls to action.  

I have identified what seems to explain India’s positive image in the United States. I will now turn to what I think explains a less positive or negative image of the Kashmir resistance and Pakistan, which is blurry in the eyes of most non-experts in the field. And they dominate image making. 

After partition on August 15, 1947 when Kashmir became internationalized, the conflict was virtually uniformly treated as a dispute between India and Pakistan, not about Kashmiris and their right to self-determination.  

When India raced to the United Nations Security Council in 1948 over Kashmir, Pakistan answered by itself. It did not insist that even a single Kashmiri be heard during endless argument and debate despite the fact that their political and human rights were at stake, not those of either Pakistan or India. Kashmiris later were not represented at Tashkent, Simla, or Lahore.  Even today, no one persuades India and Pakistan to change track-two  into multi-track diplomacy, with the inclusion of the Kashmiri representative..  

Let me finally address Kashmir directly. Why has its self-determination claim been received with less media and foreign policy sympathy in the United States than Kosovo, Montenegro, East Timor or Southern Sudan?   

The answers do not lend themselves to Euclidean exactitudes, but seem reasonably clear. Most Americans know nothing of Kashmir or its history. They do not understand its international law right to self-determination. They do not know of the Hindu Maharaja’s bogus and invalid instrument of accession to India. Kashmir does not feature internationally renowned political figures like the two Nobel Prize winners in East Timor, Carlos Belos and Jose Ramon-Horta or  personality like Nelson Mandela.

In conclusion, I do believe that Kashmir cause is hurt by ignorance and misinformation. National security interests and domestic political influences are the overwhelming determinants of how any nation or cause is perceived by the United States. Exemplary is Joseph Stalin, who was portrayed as a kind uncle during World War II when fighting with the United States, but then was rapidly transformed into a villain or demon with the onset of the Cold War.  

Let us not gripe about the unfairness of the world, which is as otiose as shouting at the weather. Let us continue to improve our organizing and communications strengths so that our domestic influence in the Unites States and elsewhere will accordingly climb. 

Dr. is the Secretary General of Washington-based World Kashmir Awareness Forum. He can be reached at: 1-202-607-6435    or   gnfai2003@yahoo.com 

The Bioscience Resource Project, Ithaca, NY

A rare recent ray of light from Science magazine, from Sheila Jasanoff and others:

“The pandemic has seen much hand-wringing about Americans’ unwillingness to “accept science” and follow public health directives…….It is tempting to treat matters of health, safety, and environmental policy as if they are primarily about facts, because this transforms intractable social disputes into seemingly answerable technical questions. But such moves are inimical to democracy. When the key issue is who decides, acting as if disagreements are mainly about evidence is bad politics and bad social science. It turns expertise into an object of distrust and exacerbates American culture’s tendency to alienate people from the perceived elitism of science (2). This creates fertile ground for alternative facts and conspiracy theories that reframe problems and relocate the focus of blame.

Science advice thus occupies a precarious position on the boundary between asserting facts and making policy. It faces the structural problem of being authoritative without becoming authoritarian. It divides power between scientists, who are mainly accountable to their peers, and authorized political representatives, who are accountable to the citizens they serve. This allocation of authority is fundamentally political, even constitutional. We should not be surprised if expert advisers find their claims being questioned, given their consequential role in contemporary governance.”

Worth reading in full and digesting at length IMO. Its at:

Science2021

Jonathan

Jonathan Latham, PhD
Executive Director

The Bioscience Resource Project, 

Ithaca, NY 14850 USA

Websites:

www.independentsciencenews.org
www.poisonpapers.org

www.bioscienceresource.org

Notice: Please forgive any delays and slow news. I am writing a book about genetics and genetic determinism.

It is provisionally titled: The Myth of The Master Molecule: DNA and the Social Order

The contention of the book is that the key organising principle of Western thought is the seemingly innocuous and seemingly simple idea that our personal qualities are biologically inherited. That is, our character derives from our ancestors rather than being an always-adapting product of our own experiences, decisions, and education. The book makes the case, first, that genetic determinism is a scientific fallacy. Organisms are self-organised systems and therefore are not genetically determined. Second, the explanation for the myth, which predates Mesopotamian cities of 6,000 years ago, is its utility. Genetic determinism rationalises political systems based on genetic privilege. The result of the emergence of genetic determinism was the dismantling of ancient cultures based on inclusiveness and egalitarianiism and their transformation into rigid structures of authoritarian domination based on separation and division: into families, classes, races, nations, sexes (i.e. patriarchy), and species. The final proposition of the book is that propagating the myth was the chief aim of Zoroastrianism and the subsequent Abrahamic religions. Since the 1850s, this role has been appropriated by science. By recognizing how the founding myth of Western civilization is being re-told in the language of science we can start to dismantle and replace it with a more humane and scientific understanding of the world.

Jonathan Latham, PhD
Executive Director

The Bioscience Resource Project, 

Ithaca, NY 14850 USA

Websites:

www.independentsciencenews.org
www.poisonpapers.org

www.bioscienceresource.org

Tel: 1-607-319-0279

Skype: jonathanlatham2

Twitter and Facebook: @Biosrp 

Please sign on to our mailing list: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/subscribe/ 

 Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

We, the People, the Humanity and Our Entangled Future in Global COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic surge has depleted our inner thoughts, souls and outlook for change and adaptability to the making of the future. At the outset, political leaders appear to be leading the movement for human survival, often abridged by medical scientists and experts in determining which vaccinations – be it European, Russian, Chinese or American should be used to treat people of ethnic, social, moral and intellectual and political diversities. Do they pretend that vaccines or the pandemic knows nationalities or political ideologies separating the human intellect? Ostensibly, human faculties of thinking and choices are being used for divisions and political indoctrinations not for specialized human unity to cope with the emerging crises of COVID-pandemic and its aftermath impacting the masses across the world.

We must be looking for truth to necessitate rethinking in our minds and souls for change and universal sense of humanity as being One and unshakeable by geography, politics and ethnicity and sentiments of political nationalities and persecution. We can do it, we are One People and One Humanity impacted by unknown motives of the few lacking knowledge and wisdom to unite mankind in situations of crises often engineered by ignorance missing divine knowledge of truth and human origin.  We cannot be divided into segments of geography and history as numbers. We the People, We the Humanity are connected to all other things within the God-given Universe to serve the mankind. This gives soundness and power to reason and forbidden truth in the current global affairs.