The fallout from 9/11
September 11, 2006
The following appeared on Rediff.com, but with a subtle change: they edited out a sentence.
I wrote:
“Al-Qaeda appears to be more and more a figment of some fevered State Department staffer’s brain, because it is not a small group of extremists, but practically the entire Ummah, the Mohammedan community, that is up against America.”
They took out the last phrase, which makes that a dangling sentence that does not make sense. It now reads:
“Al-Qaeda appears to be more and more a figment of some fevered State Department staffer’s brain, because it is not a small group of extremists.”
This is intriguing, as my statement was reasonably factual. Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that the Mohammedan-on-the-street anywhere is rather unhappy with the US.
Here’s the entire article:
In Memoriam: Raja Rao
September 9, 2006
Raja Rao, who passed away in July, was almost certainly the greatest English-language writer of Indian origin in the last fifty years. He had lived to the ripe old age of 98, and I had been fortunate enough to speak with him by phone a few times.
Raja Rao said he was pleased to speak to someone from Trivandrum, for he had lived there briefly and written ‘The Cat and Shakespeare’ there; but his asthma had gotten the better of him and had forced him to retreat to Austin. HIs guru’s ashram was nearby, so he had tried to return but had been foiled by his health.
KPS Gill on the soft State of India
September 6, 2006
Mr. KPS Gill is one of the most thoughtful and articulate officers (he is retired now) in the Indian police. I have been very impressed by his forcefulness, directness and candor, not to mention his tremendous track record in ridding Punjab of the separatist/terrorist threat.
I think it is no coincidence that subsequently Gill was hounded and humiliated with a sexual harassment case. It is routine in India for those who are patriotic or nationalistic to be destroyed through the ancient technique of tejovadham, the murder of their reputation and self-image through innuendo and rumor. For an example, refer to what happened to Acharya Jayendra Saraswati, the Sankaracharya of Kanchi.
The anniversary of 9/11
September 6, 2006
It is a little sad that the US has comprehensively and thoroughly dissipated all the goodwill towards the country in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. And exactly what has the Bush administration achieved since then in the much-hyped war on terror?
- Osama bin Laden is still at large
- The price of oil has shot through the roof, which means Saudi Arabia has mountains of cash to fund terrorism
- The threat of Mohammedan terrorism has reached alarming levels all over the world
- The American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have bogged down seriously
- Israel has had its image of invincibility dented
- Iran, flush from its success in supporting Hizbollah, is thumbing its nose at the US
- America’s image has taken a beating all over the world
- The Pakistanis are in the thick of every terrorism operation in the world, and yet George Bush will only give the ISI a slap on the wrist
The only thing that is a concrete achievement is the removal of Saddam Hussein, which isn’t that big a deal, really.
The latest on the California textbook controversy
September 6, 2006
The HAF lawsuit has produced an interesting result: one that allows all sites to claim victory on points. I suspect that is what the court was in fact trying to do: leave everybody with something that they could highlight to their supporters.
Having said this, the core issue, that of the impact of deliberate anti-Hindu propaganda, on sensitive Hindu children in the US, remains up in the air. The same textbooks that have the distortions in them will continue to be used by the school districts for the foreseeable future, although the court has rapped the CBE’s knuckles for poor procedure. And the court has dismissed the locus standi of the usual suspect rabble-rousers in this instance. Thus, as I said elsewhere, a half-victory.
What is entertaining in context is the fact that almost simultaneously, Chinese textbooks have dropped almost all references to the great Mao Tse-Tung. This, I suspect, is giving the leading lights of the Left in India sleepless nights, as their Great Leader is being declared as a god with clay feet by his own countrymen. What of the CPI-M which famously declared that Chairman Mao is “our Chairman”? The delicious irony is that the only places where Marxism still exists are:
- Cuba (with the imminent demise of Fidel Castro this will change)
- West Bengal
- Kerala
- Nepal
- The Maoist corridor from Nepal to Andhra Pradesh
- The BBC, and India’s ELM
That’s it!
Venezuela is not Marxist per se, merely anti-American and nationalist. And even though Marxism has become an expression of Chinese imperialism, and the rotting corpse of Mao is a ghoulish stop on trips to Beijing, China itself is declaring that it has outgrown the idiocies of this murderous ideology.
Marxism is now strictly for the consumption of others whom China hopes to dominate in its goal of world conquest, and this is where the “useful idiots” continue to be China’s storm-troopers.
“Do as we preach, not as we do” — says China now. In this, they have finally become the equal of the Americans, who have long been the champions of moralizing: they want all of us to listen to their rhetoric of free trade and so forth, but the moment we do free trade, they don’t like it because it gives them no advantage. Quite hypocritical, indeed.
Underground processes, Hostile academics
By Ari Saja
