The Insane Neocon Masterplan - Pitting Hindu India against Islam

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The Insane Zionist Masterplan - Pitting Hindu India against Islam

Don't make the mistake of assuming that because India is not in the Middle East that it's not an integral part of the Zionist master plan.

This opinion piece by Maryum Saifee published in the Columbia Spectator Online is crucial reading for anyone who wants to understand the latest horrific developments involving Pakistan and India and to figure out who is behind them.

Last Monday, a number of organizations convened a panel at Columbia University law school to celebrate emerging relations between India and Israel. As a person of Indian origin with a Middle East regional focus at SIPA, I was particularly intrigued by the subject matter of the talk and wanted to learn more about this budding relationship.

After attending the talk, I realized that much of the content was not academic in nature and was politicized to the point of propaganda.

The panelists included members of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the former Indian ambassador to Israel, and the United Nations Development Programme. By the end of the talk, I found the panelists to collectively reflect a very biased and unrepresentative point of view that is not shared by the majority of moderate-minded Indians and Israelis.

The AJC, one of the lead organizers, recently endorsed an article by Indiana University professor Alvin Rosenfeld conflating Jewish criticism of the Israeli state policies with anti-Semitism. The AJC's decree has sought to silence a constructive debate on Israeli state and foreign policies by labeling any dissent as falling inside the category of anti-Semitic hate speech.

Although the panelists harked back to long-time relations between India and Israel and glorified India as one of the only nations with no traces of "anti-Semitism," the two nations only established normalized diplomatic relations in 1992, coinciding with the rise of a Hindu nationalist-led Indian government. The talk offered little convincing substance that the two countries shared much in common aside from rising Hindu nationalist and intolerant AJC-style fundamentalisms.

The theme reiterated throughout the talk was that both India and Israel are democracies under attack by a Muslim fundamentalist threat-both internal and external. This rhetoric of fighting a common war on terror against an Islamic enemy serves to fuel a rising Islamophobia that has become mainstreamed in Israeli, Indian, and even American discourse. We can see manifestations of these policies in Israel to justify the occupation of the Palestinian territories, in India to create a motive for the state-sponsored pogrom against Gujarati Muslims in 2002, and in the United States with Guantanamo Bay and a wide array of civil-liberties infringements against Muslims/ Muslim-Americans.

Rather ironically, the panelists invoked the rhetoric of both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to illustrate Indian and Israeli commitments to nonviolence and plurality. Nehru never supported the creation of a nation-state based on religio-political nationalism and I am confident that if Gandhi were alive, he would not have endorsed the Israeli occupation and apartheid wall as part of his definition of ahimsa (nonviolence).

The panelists described both Indian and Israeli principles guiding state policies by referring to Nehru's famous words that "the only alternative to coexistence is codestruction." While this is predominantly true in the case of India (with the exception of episodic outbreaks of politicized Hindu-Muslim violence, India's one billion plus do live in harmony), I do not believe this analogy extends to the state of Israel, as both Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter have analogized Israeli treatment of Palestinians to that of the South African apartheid system.

Another disappointing aspect of the talk was the perpetuation of the model-minority myth to describe Indian-Americans and Jewish-Americans. The AJC representative talked about the commonalities between both groups as being peoples tied by cultural ethics-such as hard work, family ties, and an emphasis on education. She identified cultural reasons as lending to the success of these two groups. As an Indian-American, I know that one of the main reasons I and my compatriots were able to succeed in this country had less to do with inherent cultural superiority, and more to do with immigration policies of the late 1960s.

During my parents' generation, the United States had an aggressive policy of recruiting skilled professionals (engineers and doctors) to come to the United States in response to a labor shortage. Most sociologists and historians who study the period would agree that the success of Indian-Americans in the United States context has to do with filtered immigration policies rather than cultural/racial superiority.

Aside from the racially charged content and questionable historical accuracy of the talk, I was most surprised by the fact that the Earth Institute, which generally sponsors events and conferences of high academic caliber, was included as one of the co-sponsors for an event promoting right-wing fundamentalists on both sides of the Indian and Israeli spectrums.

When I made an inquiry to professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, he stated that the talk was never approved by the Earth Institute and that an individual must have used the logo without the permission of Earth Institute's senior management. While Sachs is making a concerted effort to find out exactly what went wrong, it seems clear to me that at least one individual within the Earth Institute must have been aware the event took place as an announcement was circulated to the Earth Institute list on Friday, Feb. 9.

Whatever the case may be as to how and why the Earth Institute was involved in the talk, I was relieved to hear from Sachs that the Earth Institute had no intention of sponsoring such a talk. I was particularly concerned that the Earth Institute's sponsorship of such an event would not only lend credibility to such propaganda, but also tarnish the Earth Institute's reputation for rigorous academic standards.

The talk ended in a rather tasteless display of solidarity with participants indulging in spicy Kosher Vegetarian Indian cuisine. I left the talk depressed, but not discouraged. Despite the offensive nature of the content, the event has opened the door to what will hopefully be a more constructive debate on campus that will critique this one-sided Hindu nationalist/ right-wing AJC-style narrative of Indian-Israeli relations predicated on a common Muslim enemy.

To further understand the insane zionist masterplan, that involves pitting the Hindu world against Islam, I urge readers to review the maps in Redrawing Borders (to get at the oil) and israeli pipedreams.

2007-02-19 23:09. qrswave's blog