Category Archives: International Affairs

“New Caliphate” Nonsense

By Ziryab | Published: August 26, 2010

This is cross-post by M.J Akbar

New Delhi, India – “Muslims want to revive the Caliphate,” I hear pundits say. The idea is just preposterous. The Caliphate is a pre-nation state concept, relevant only to the Age of Empire. The Caliphate was defeated by the British in 1918. It was buried by the Turks in 1924.

Upon first glance, it seems the Caliphate had a fabulous run from 632 to 1918. However, look again: Only for a very short while during these 1300 years was there a single Caliph to which all Muslim political formations gave allegiance. Usually, there were multiple Muslim communities. The Ummayads in Spain never recognized the Abbasids in Baghdad; and the Mughals in India certainly did not pay obeisance to the Sublime Porte of their Turkish kinsmen in Istanbul. Then Mustafa Kemal Ghazi packed off the last Ottoman Caliph with 2000 pounds and a one-way ticket to Europe. He sealed the institution that had long outlived its utility.

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Also posted in Islamism | 2 Comments

Goodbye Pakistan?

By Guest | Published: August 17, 2010

This is a cross-post by Terry Glavin

The Sound of Pennies Dropping:

1. Pakistan’s main spy agency says homegrown Islamist militants have overtaken the Indian army as the greatest threat to national security, a finding with potential ramifications for relations between the two rival South Asian nations and for the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. A recent internal assessment of security by the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s powerful military spy agency, determined that for the first time in 63 years, it expects a majority of threats to come from Islamist militants, according to a senior ISI officer.

2. Much now depends on the ability of the government and its foreign allies to bring relief to flood victims. Tens of thousands of Pakistani troops and virtually the army’s entire helicopter fleet are now involved in the effort. But its resources are way overstretched, and for months to come the army is unlikely to be in a position to even hold the areas along the Afghan border that it has recently won back from the militants, let alone initiate any new campaigns against the Taliban. That means the war in Afghanistan is about to become even more bloody.

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Also posted in Islamism | 1 Comment

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is digging mass graves for American soldiers in preparation for a war over its nuclear programme, according to a former senior commander.

By Ziryab | Published: August 15, 2010

This is a cross-post by Richard Spencer.


The scene in the south of Iran where hundreds of mass graves have been dug

General Hossein Moghadam, the Guard’s former deputy chief, was speaking after film footage showed strings of freshly dug graves in the south of the country.

They were close to the site of war graves for the dead of the long war between Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which devastated the region in the 1980s.

“The mass graves that used to be for burying Saddam’s soldiers have now been prepared again for US soldiers, and this is the reason for digging this big number of graves,” Gen Moghadam told the Associated Press, which obtained the footage.

The warning is unlikely to be more than symbolic. No-one expects a land invasion, should the White House authorise a strike on nuclear facilities, while Iran has so far suggested counter-action is most likely to be aimed at American allies in the Gulf and Western bases there.

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Also posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Pakistan leads the War on WikiLeaks

By Effendi | Published: July 27, 2010

The Pakistan government has gone into damage control mode after the evidence of the ISI’s involvement in Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan was exposed and confirmed on WikiLeaks. The Pakistan ambassador to USA, Husain Haqqani has penned an article in the WSJ, to undermine the veracity of the reports.

Ambassador Husain Haqqani and the ear of US envoy Richard Holbrooke

The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not even remotely reflect the current realities on the ground. For example, a retired Pakistani general is named as the master planner of the Afghan Taliban’s strategy. But this is a man who hasn’t held any position within Pakistani intelligence or the military for more than 20 years. For its part, Pakistan’s current leadership will not be distracted by something like these leaks. We have paid an unprecedented price in blood and treasure over the last two years. We will not succumb to the terrorists.

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Also posted in Afghan war | 15 Comments

Is Gaza Starving?

By Effendi | Published: June 13, 2010

The UNDP has published its yearly Human Development Report (HDR) and the results are surprising to say the least. It will put paid to a few received notions held dearly by the moralists of the Left, the Islamists of the religious right and pretty much everything else in between. I say that with irony at full blast and very little confidence, of course.

According to the report, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which comprises the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are classified in this broad-based UN Index as having “Medium Human Development”. It places its position at 110 of 182 countries, putting the Palestinian Territories in neither the top nor bottom groups.

And most surprising of all, the country’s HDR index places it ahead of the muslim-majority countries Egypt (123), Indonesia (111), Pakistan (141) and Bangladesh (146).

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Also posted in Moral relativism | 12 Comments

The Taliban and its Pakistan puppet masters

By Faisal | Published: June 13, 2010

The Times has published an article on a new study published by the LSE which uncovers support by the Pakistani government and by Pakistan’s intelligence servcice, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), for the Taliban. The ISI in particular is said to be represented on the Taliban’s war council, the Quetta shura. And up to seven of the 15-man shura are believed to be ISI agents!

There is no doubt that the British left, Islamists and the hinterland of “muslim middle England” will ignore the ramifications of this report and blithely continue doing what they do reflexively: Indulge in the usual toxic cocktail of ‘whataboutery’ and blaming the USA, the “neocons”, Nick Cohen and of course, the Jews Israel.

Pakistani support for the Taliban is prolonging a conflict that has cost the West billions of dollars and hundreds of lives. Last week 32 Nato soldiers were killed.

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Also posted in Islamism | 3 Comments

Turkish Deceit

By Faisal | Published: June 6, 2010

Last week, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu gave the USA a stern lecture on its role in the Flotilla incident, and revelled in his own “with us or without us” moment:

“Psychologically, this attack is like 9/11 for Turkey. We expect full solidarity with us. It should not seem like a choice between Turkey and Israel. It should be a choice between right and wrong, between legal and illegal.”

That’s an impressive job of grandstanding by Davutoglu, but let’s not forget that in the “choice between right and wrong” and in the not so distant past, Turkey had few scruples when it leveraged its alliance with the US and Israeli security organisations to help them to track down and imprison the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan.

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Also posted in Israel/Palestine | 12 Comments

meanwhile, in israel…

By bananabrain | Published: June 4, 2010

with the flotilla imbroglio (or fiasco, if you prefer) in full swing, yours truly has just arrived back from the zionist entity, where numerous representatives of clan bananabrain continue to live as normal a life as one might expect in what hussein shobokshi of asharq al-awsat describes as “a state established on a lie based on a myth” – and he was chosen as one of the “global leaders for tomorrow” by the world economic forum in 1995, so 15 years later he must be therefore a global leader and not at all the sort of bloke to make wild accusations about a massacre of 60 people (oh, hang on, what am i saying?). i’ll write separately about the flotilla stuff when i have a moment, but i thought it might be interesting to put up a few insights that i think you’ll find interesting, based as they are on a visit on a ground and interacting with normal, sensible [well, members of my family at any rate], well-educated israelis as well as a range of other social observations.

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Also posted in Civil Rights, Democracy, Freedom of Religion, Israel/Palestine, Jewish Extremism, Politics | 13 Comments

religious idiots round up: vengeful volcanoes

By bananabrain | Published: May 12, 2010

of course, nobody should be surprised that when a natural disaster occurs, the usual suspects jump on the bandwagon to explain why it proves their wacky theologies and that G!D Is Having a good old Smite at people of whom they disapprove or, alternatively, that it’s all part of the dastardly plans of the illuminati or reptilian space overlords.

a reptilian overlord yesterday

anyway, we’ve had boobquake, gayquake and immorality-inspired flooding so, predictably, our new icelandic friend eyjafjallajökull has been pressed into surface for this purpose, proving variously that:

1. we should never have turned on that large hadron collider

2. iceland is being too tolerant of neo-paganism and europe of gay rights

3. G!D Disapproves of “obamacare”

4. people are having a go at the pope

5. aliens (or satan) are doing space paintings with ufos

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Also posted in Anti Muslim bigotry, Antisemitism, Blogosphere, Environmental, Esoterica, Farce, Israel/Palestine, Media, Misc, Obscurantism | Leave a comment

Bangladesh’s Quest for Justice

By Guest | Published: April 1, 2010

This is a cross-post of an article by Salil Tripathi for the Caravan Magazine of India. It is long (7000 words) but it is balanced, moving and well worth reading.

****

A QUARTER CENTURY AGO I met a man who calmly told me how he had organised the massacre of a family. He wasn’t confessing out of a sense of remorse; he was bragging about it, grinning as he spoke to me.

I was a young reporter on assignment in Dhaka, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with Bangladesh, which had emerged as an independent nation after a bloody war of liberation 15 years earlier, in 1971. The man I was interviewing lived in a well-appointed home. Soldiers protected his house, checking the bags and identification of all visitors. A week earlier he had been a presidential candidate, losing by a huge margin.

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Also posted in History | 1 Comment

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