Saudi Arabia on UN Commission Protecting Women — Now That’s a Cruel Joke: New Age Islam's Selection, 26 April 2017
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
26 April 2017
• Saudi Arabia on UN Commission Protecting Women — Now That’s a Cruel Joke
By Bobby Ghosh
• The Unholy Saudi-Israel Nexus
By Minhaz Merchant
• Manifesto for a Liberal Hindu – It’s Time for Secular Hindus to Say: Garv Se Kaho Hum Liberal Hain
By Sagarika Ghose
• Hasina's Flirtation A Cause For Alarm
By Shantanu Mukharji
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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Saudi Arabia on UN Commission Protecting Women — Now That’s a Cruel Joke
By Bobby Ghosh
Apr 25, 2017
Of all the outlandish conspiracy theories favoured by the American lunatic fringe — aliens are being held captive in Roswell, the moon landing was staged, Elvis is alive… ad infinitum — the one that always makes me laugh out loud is the belief that the United Nations is a shadowy world government, plotting to take over the White House and US Congress, and stamp out the freedoms held most precious by said fringe, such as the right to bear assault weapons, and to deny women control of their own bodies. This notion is especially hilarious if you’ve had any direct contact with the UN, and have witnessed the sheer incompetence that attends so many of its well-intentioned missions. Never mind plotting to take over the White House, the UN wouldn’t be able to take over my New Delhi apartment, unless I was incapacitated by a giggling fit from watching its bumbling bureaucrats make the attempt.
In recent years, this most multi of multilateral organisations, which is meant to render succour to the world’s miserable has also been delivering relief of the comic kind. Remember the 2003 rib-tickler, when Libya (yes, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya) was elected to the chair of the UN Human Rights Commission? Or the 2012 chuckle-fest, when the UN’s World Tourism Organization endorsed Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe as a “leader for tourism”?
Last week, the UN’s absurdist sense of humour yielded yet more global guffaws with the announcement that the new countries elected to its Commission on the Status of Women would include — cue the trumpet fanfare — Saudi Arabia.
Thank you for indulging my sarcastic streak. Room for one more? Here’s Hillel Neuer, head of the monitoring group UN Watch: “Electing Saudi Arabia to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief.” He pointed out that the government in Riyadh requires every Saudi woman to “have a male guardian who makes all critical decisions on her behalf, controlling a woman’s life from her birth until death.” For good measure, he added, “Saudi Arabia also bans women from driving cars.”
Okay, enough sarcasm for now. It’s easy for the world to giggle at this, or at least those of us living in countries where the law (and in many cases, society) recognises women as equal to men. But putting Saudi Arabia on a women’s commission will have unfunny consequences.
First, it will diminish the already slim chances that Saudi women will get equal rights anytime soon. If you think membership of the commission will subtly pressure, or even shame, Riyadh into doing right by half its population, think again. Brutal, undemocratic regimes do not respond to moral suasion, much less shaming. Gaddafi, you’ll remember, did little to improve his human-rights record after 2003.
Second, it will send a terrible message to the world, and a reassuring one to regimes that repress women, and to organisations that persecute them. Saudi Arabia may be the monarch of misogynist nations, but there are many others that will feel their policies now have some kind of sanction from the UN. Chauvinistic religious and political groups everywhere will take this as an endorsement of their retrograde worldview.
Third, it will undermine the work of the commission itself. Even if the other members are able to shun, silence, or otherwise render ineffective the Saudi representative, their collective decisions will lack credibility. Who, after all, would take seriously the judgement of a jury if one of its members openly identified with the accused?
Finally, it will hurt the UN itself, by strengthening the argument of those who believe the organisation is highly compromised, has lost touch with reality, and needs to have its wings (and budget) cut. This is especially true in the US. It’s not just loony conspiracy-theorists who regard the UN with suspicion: A broad swath of the Republican Party feels the same way. That is, of course, the party that now controls both the White House and Congress. The president himself has made his own views perfectly clear, declaring the UN as “just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.” The international opprobrium that has met Saudi Arabia’s election to the commission will only harden that view.
This is an especially bad time for the UN to draw attention to one of its follies, since the Trump administration is already looking to cut back US support — financial and non-financial. The US gives $3 billion a year, which covers 22% of the organisation’s costs, and more crucially, pays for 29% of the cost of the Blue Helmets’ peacekeeping operations.
Source: hindustantimes.com/columns/saudi-arabia-on-un-commission-protecting-women-now-that-s-a-cruel-joke/story-AHlZC2cr6Z5620o9ZEHYBJ.html
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The Unholy Saudi-Israel Nexus
By Minhaz Merchant
26 Apr 2017
It is the best kept secret in West Asia. The two most important partners of the United States in that region, Saudi Arabia and Israel, are covert allies. Officially, they despise each other. They don’t have diplomatic relations.
Israeli citizens are banned from entering Saudi Arabia. But scratch beneath the surface and a different picture emerges. The two countries have long arrived at a modus vivendi. Contacts between Saudi and Israeli officials are increasingly common.
Saudi Arabia was an early backer of the Islamic State (ISIS) before the jihadists turned on the Saudi royals. Israel, so ruthless against Hezbollah (one of the Shia militias fighting ISIS in Syria), has been notably quiescent about the Islamic State. There were virtually no direct clashes between the strong Israeli army or air force and ISIS even as the jihadists rampaged across Syria and Iraq in 2014-16. ISIS too has been careful not to attack Israel or Israeli citizens.
Washington pumps US$4 billion in aid every year to Israel, a country with a population of 8 million (around the same as Chennai). That works out to $500 per Israeli, the highest per capita aid the US gives to any country. If, for example, every Indian received $500 in US aid, Washington’s annual aid bill to India would amount to $640 billion — nearly 25 per cent of India’s GDP.
Saudi Arabia gets US aid too but is rich enough to look after itself. The Saudis, however, as its ill-fated two-year invasion of Yemen has proved, are not very good fighters. They rely on US military protection and mercenaries drawn from other Arab countries. Riyadh has hired Raheel Sharif, Pakistan’s former army chief, to lead a 39-country coalition to fight the Houthi-Shia rebels in Yemen. The Saudis and Israelis have meanwhile stuck to an unwritten arrangement not to step on each other’s toes even if it means giving the jihadists of ISIS free rein.
Washington backs this self-serving arrangement. It cares more about maintaining its geopolitical monopoly over West Asia, with the Saudis and Israelis acting as its two sentries across the region. The reason, of course, is a common enemy: Iran. It is the dominant Shia power. Once ISIS is driven out of Syria and Iraq, Iran’s influence will grow. Iraq too is Shia-majority. Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite, a Shia-affiliated sect.
Sunni Saudi Arabia regards an Iran-Iraq-Syria axis with great anxiety. Russia’s backing of the Shia triumvirate has further unnerved Riyadh. The US, since the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, has backed the Sunni Arabs barring a brief flirtation with the Shah of Iran, who was Washington’s puppet. After he was deposed in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini, the enraged US manufactured in 1980 an eight-year war between its (then) other puppet Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Khomeini’s Iran. (Saddam turned rogue for the US only in 1990 when he invaded Kuwait, another US protectorate.)
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes his historic visit to Israel in July, he will bear all these facts in mind. Like the Americans, he has balanced India’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Israel while keeping the country’s historical ties with Shia Iran on an even keel. Saudi Arabia has suffered the most (along with Russia) from the oil price crash from $125 per barrel three years ago to $55 today. It has been forced to impose municipal taxes for the first time. Unemployment has risen. Budgets are being cut. The Yemen war is sucking cash. Meanwhile, its mortal enemy Iran is enjoying renewed backing from Russia. Its Shia militias are taking active part in the fight against ISIS despite American misgivings.
The biggest losers in this ruthless chess game being played out in the Middle East are the Palestinians. Their independent state is now a distant dream. The Saudis and its Arab allies have mothballed the problem. Israel couldn’t be happier. When its right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosts PM Modi, Palestine will be off the table. Terrorism from ISIS and the lethal Taliban resurgence in Af-Pak will dominate talks. Israel is now one of India’s key weapons suppliers. And as Netanyahu will doubtless remind Modi, it is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East.
Minhaz Merchant is author of ‘The New Clash of Civilizations: How The Contest Between America, China, India and Islam Will Shape Our Century’.
Source: dnaindia.com/analysis/column-the-unholy-saudi-israel-nexus-2416157
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Manifesto for a Liberal Hindu – It’s Time for Secular Hindus to Say: Garv Se Kaho Hum Liberal Hain
By Sagarika Ghose
April 26, 2017
Dear liberal Hindus,
You’re out there. Even though your voices are muted. You know that today you’re being outrageously misrepresented. The strident voices who claim to speak for you, the war-like fundamentalists who have captured the “Hindu” space and call for a holy war against other religions, are not voices you identify with. Your faith is subliminal, ever-present but hardly domineering. You’ve sung Qawaalis, Bhajans and Christmas carols, enjoyed your Kababs without guilt. You’ve never been ruled by a religious police or been asked to prove your Hinduness through political loyalty.
But suddenly you’re being ironed into a vegetarian, Muslim-hating, puritanical uniformity. You’re being asked to hate when your religion teaches love. You’re being asked not to question when your traditions are full of Vaad, Vivaad, Samvaad. You’re being asked to be perpetually angry when your gods have always been playful and genial. Krishna, Ganapati, Saraswati – were they full of hatred and rage? The mark of a true Hindu, as the Mahatma, is above all a generosity towards others.
Liberal Hindus, yours has always been a merry, amiable religion, entwined with family folklore, each god almost a family member whose story often mirrored an identifiable human drama. Yes, caste and superstition created terrible injustice. But from within the ranks of Hinduism itself rose the great social reformers who challenged these evils: Phule and Rammohan Roy, Vivekananda and Tagore.
Your faith is about a culture-soaked joie de vivre, of sindoor, jasmine and marigolds: What a feast for the senses and a balm for the soul! So when did this joyful aesthetic religion turn into a force that rages about insults, sedition, blasphemy, re-conversion, love jihad and bloodshed in the name of the cow? When did it become a doctrine that inspires fear and a quaking acceptance of mob rule? When did a fountain of spirituality become a fountain of unending FIRs?
Liberal Hindus, you don’t recognise this new angry, religion. Why should you? You’re the legatees of Kabir and Mira, of Krishna Chaitanya and Ramakrishna and you know Hinduism has always stood for an open embrace of diversity and pluralism. Those who killed Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri or Pehlu Khan in Alwar, those attacking lovers, movie directors, meat-eaters, artists or writers or rationalists, can those attackers really represent a religion which places individual freedom at the very centre of spirituality? No, liberal Hindus, you’re repelled by those who kill in your name. You’re appalled at what the world will think of Hinduism if the Gau warriors are its only face.
Hinduism is a belief in an individual pursuit of Moksha: The seeker meditates alone and finds his own way. Why did Hinduism never need to proselytise? Because every path to god was seen as valid, Hinduism respects all. As Ramakrishna Paramahamsa said: Jato math tato path (There are as many paths as there are opinions).
A true Hindu thus has no reason to be fearful or to be threatened. Because you can even be an atheist and still be a Hindu. The Upanishads do not speak of god. At the Kumbh Mela there are no priests to mediate between the individual and his relationship with sun and river. No wonder Hinduism didn’t seek to capture political power. There was no reason to wield the sword for a religion that was simply unconquerable precisely because it was so undefined and varied. Who would a Hindu take up the sword for? For the shaivite? For the Vaishnavite? For the Tantric? Whoever ruled on earth, whether British or Mughal, Hinduism has always been indestructible. It has survived and always will. It has never felt threatened because its domain is within.
But today the advocates of Hindutva are seeking political power and destroying precisely that quality of inwardness that makes Hinduism so enduring. The Christian world struggled for centuries to separate church from state. The Islamic world has been beleaguered by theocrats who used religion for legitimacy. Now modern Hindutva vaadis want India to repeat the same tragedies that befell Christian and Muslim societies who have had to wage bloody battles to separate political chieftains from holy men. Paradoxically, by politicising Hinduism, zealots are taking away its unique power.
Why has Hinduism thrived and survived for so many centuries in spite of the fact that it only rarely enjoyed political patronage? Precisely because of its plurality, the fact that it has never had a single established church, no single set of beliefs, no one spiritual authority. Hinduism has never needed state power.
Liberal Hindus, it’s time to reclaim your religion. It’s time to create a Manifesto of the Liberal Hindu and live by it. Assert that the Hindu inheritance is far greater than the building of a Ram Mandir at a particular spot. In Hinduism after all god resides in puja rooms in almost every Hindu home.
The attempt to create a homogeneous religious loyalty to only one set of deities, the insistence on a single form of worship, a single set of dietary preferences, a single racial type, a single language, a single temple is a repudiation of the faith of your ancestors who lived in ease with dizzying diversities. Liberal Hindus, it’s time for you to show there’s more to Hinduism than lynchings and police complaints and abusive language on social media. Haven’t generations of Hindus heard the muezzin’s call without feeling remotely threatened? Step up and assert that you are members of a religion that the whole world, from scholars to hippies to the Beatles once fell in love with, and that you do not approve of it being now ruined by petty politics. Liberal Hindus, your time is now.
DISCLAIMER: Views expressed above are the author's own.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/bloody-mary/manifesto-for-a-liberal-hindu-its-time-for-secular-hindus-to-say-garv-se-kaho-hum-liberal-hain/
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Hasina's Flirtation A Cause For Alarm
By Shantanu Mukharji
April 26, 2017
Bangladesh watchers were euphoric after the much hyped and publicised India visit (April 7-10) of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina raising perhaps misplaced hopes that she would strengthen her secular credentials upon return.
Intriguingly, however, the secular forces in Bangladesh have been deeply disappointed by Hasina’s recent statements which could be seen as warming up to the Islamic hardliners, clearly departing from her secular stance.
The issue emanated from the statue of a Greek goddess, Themis (Greek goddess of justice) installed inside the Supreme Court at Dhaka becoming an eyesore to Islamic hardliners who went on a campaign demanding removal of the idol as it wore a saree which was considered opposed to the tenets of Islam.
The vitriolic campaign was spearheaded by none other than Hefazat-eIslam, an extreme Islamic hard-line outfit which has registered a robust growth contributing to reinforcement of fundamentalism in Bangladesh.
Reverting to Hasina’s body language, it is more than an extraordinary coincidence that these gestures became apparent within only 48 hours of her return from India, especially when progressives in Bangladesh had earlier felt that apart from inking numerous bilateral treaties, the Indian polity must have subtly put across to her to be more firm in dealing with Islamic extremists constantly perpetrating excesses on minorities, foreigners and liberals.
On April 11, while addressing Supreme Court judges in Dhaka, Hasina said, “I don’t like it myself it being called a Greek statue and how did a Greek statue reach here?”
This statement has shocked many. Secular and forward thinking lobbies in Bangladesh are crestfallen by Hasina’s tenor.
They apprehend that emboldened by her “pro-Islamic” rhetoric, anti liberation forces may start demanding removal of statues and memorials erected in memory of the 1971 liberation war.
Prominent crusader of secularism in Bangladesh, Shahriar Kabir has already criticised Hasina for what he described as her U-turn. Elaborating on the development, litterateur Taslima Nasreen has questioned the hardliners saying that it’s Greece and only Greece which has given civilisation and the statue is a symbol of Greek culture.
She has said that any move to remove the statue would be a clearly regressive step. Hasina did not stop here.
On a different occasion but in the same vein, she stated that her government would soon start recognising degrees obtained from hard-line Madrasas thus paving the way for millions of religious scholars to qualify for jobs in public and private sectors.
If implemented (and it looks very likely) in the not so distant future, Bangladesh may have theocratic elements embedded in all walks of life.
And precisely because of this, seculars appear alarmed and apprehend that Hasina is trying to reach out to hardliners - to befriend them to be on her right side as the dates of the next general elections draw close.
Even if we assume such gestures are for electoral reasons, Hasina should keep an exit route open. The radicals wouldn’t let her escape without fulfilling her promises.
The Jamat-e-Islami is banned but its cadres are around following the party ideology in letter and spirit. Jamat and Hefazat-eIslam may have different names but they remain steadfastly united in pursuit of their goal to make Bangladesh an Islamic state.
Politically and diplomatically therefore, Hasina should be astute enough to wean one away from the other lest her own political existence is imperilled.
Hasina will play with fire if she continues to come closer to Hefazat-e-Islam. The group has shown a tremendous rise within only seven years. Its cadres have increased manifold. Its agenda is loud and clear.
It wants enactment of blasphemy laws including banning of Ahmediyas as an Islamic sect.
Its 13-point charter still holds good and it had already demonstrated its scheme of things in 2013 through a long march exposing its strength and drawing more popular support. One should not forget that such outfits are linked to terror.
Bangladesh is already under the ISIS scanner and witnessed a series of terror attacks full of fury and devastation.
Many youth stand radicalised and we don’t know how many are fighting with the ISIS rank and file.
After the collapse of ISIS, the cadres will be back in Bangladesh adding muscle to the ultras. The most dreaded home grown terror outfit, JMB took off with cadres who had participated in the Taliban-led war in Afghanistan.
That’s a lesson to be borne in mind . Those at the helm in Dhaka must exercise extreme discretion and keep bodies like Hefazat-e-Islam at a distance so that her party does not collaborate with it.
This is vital in the interest of peace and stability in the region.
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Shantanu Mukharji is a retired IPS officer and a security analyst. He is also a senior fellow of the India Police Foundation. The views expressed are personal.
Source: http://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/hasina-s-f-lirtation-a-cause-for-alarm-1493154422.html
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