FOX ‘Straight News’ Show Promotes Abolishing CDC

POSTED BY BRIAN -4PC ON JANUARY 03, 2022 · FLAG

Fox’s Special Report roundtable got a right-wing threefer Wednesday when they promoted demolishing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, attacked pandemic safety measures and used it all to smear President Joe Biden.

The pretext was the CDC’s decision to cut quarantine time for the coronavirus from 10 to five days. Not one of the panelists has any apparent credentials in public health or medicine.

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen got the politicization going.

THIESSEN: [H]onestly, we would have been better off in this if the CDC didn't exist. It's been a disaster from the beginning. Just this week they revised downward the prevalence of the Omicron variant from 73.2 percent, which they reported great confidence last week, to they said, no, it actually was 22.5. That's not a minor revision. That's a 50.7 percentage points. How do you get that badly wrong?

And they did this now on the isolation? They also came up with the six feet distance rule out of whole cloth. There was no science behind it. That's what shut down all these schools. So, the CDC were wrong on masking, they screwed up the testing at the beginning of the pandemic, they wouldn't let private labs do testing. The CDC is an absolute disaster. I don't understand how people can trust our public health officials anymore.

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane helped validate the messaging:

LANE: [P]eople will tolerate a lot of things from government in a situation like this. But the one thing they won't tolerate is mixed messages and confusion. And, unfortunately, I think that's kind of what's been coming out of the authorities all over the country now.

Anchor Bret Baier prodded for more, this time asking his unqualified panel to play education/child psychology experts. He said to right-winger Mollie Hemingway, “It’s hard to imagine virtual learning coming back across the country, Mollie, after what we saw for 18 months and the detriment that a lot of people say it did to kids.”

Sure enough, Hemingway played her part.

HEMINGWAY: It is scandalous that it's even being proposed. There was never good scientific reason for locking children away from school and in-person learning. It really is true now that we know that it is not something that is good for children, that it has a scientific basis.

I was so struck by how Anthony Fauci talked today in terms of the costs and benefits associated with different policies. Cost benefit analysis is what all of our public health officials and the people who listen to them should have been thinking about during this entire pandemic, and it's something that you don't really hear them talk about at all. When you look at schools, the cost to our children of banning children from schools have been way too high. It has been so bad for the mental health of these children. It has been so bad for the educational development of these children. That you have union officials and other bureaucrats talking about doing it again is scandalous.

Thiessen also played child development expert.

THIESSEN: Germany just reported that in 15 months not one single healthy child has died of COVID in Germany. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, was asked what the number was here in the United States. She said we don't know. The U.S. government doesn't know whether any healthy children have died of COVID. Well, Germany, not one. There is no excuse for closing schools. There is no excuse for the damage that we are doing to these children that they'll never, especially poorer minority kids, that they'll never recover from.

Nobody mentioned that Germany has strict public safety measures against COVID.

Schools are closing in the U.S. because COVID cases are at an all-time high. It’s too bad these fake experts won’t use their platform to urge people to mask up, get vaccinated and stop the spread. Instead, they’re using it to stop the public safety measures we have.

Hawaii upholds order requiring Navy to drain fuel tanks at center of water crisis
By Audrey McAvoy, The Associated Press
Jan 3, 2022

The Defense Department Inspector General is undertaking a sweeping investigation of the Navy and DoD's management of the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Hawaii. The World War II-era facility has 20 steel-lined underground storage tanks encased in concrete. (Navy)

HONOLULU — Hawaii’s Department of Health on Monday upheld the governor’s order requiring the Navy to drain massive World War II-era fuel tanks after oil leaking from the aging facility contaminated Pearl Harbor’s tap water.

Marian Tsuji, the department’s deputy director, on Monday said she agreed with the conclusions of an official appointed by the department to review the facts of the case. She said she would adopt the official’s proposed findings as final, though would fix a typographical error.

The Navy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Tsuji’s decision. Hawaii law allows parties to appeal such decisions in the court system.

RELATED

Top DoD official visits Hawaii base amid contaminated water crisis

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks visited the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility Dec. 14, speaking with military families and facility workers about the water issue.
By Rachel Nostrant

The department’s hearings officer for the case, Deputy Attorney General David Day, concluded the tanks were a “ticking time bomb” that threaten the water supply on the state’s populous island.

He said they posed “an imminent threat to human health and safety or the environment” and agreed with the governor’s order to defuel the tanks.

The Navy objected to Day’s findings last week, saying he used an “overbroad” interpretation of the Department of Health’s emergency authority to regulate underground fuel storage tanks. The Navy argued the tanks didn’t currently pose an “imminent” threat to human health and the environment.

Stop Normalizing Islamophobia

Hateful attacks on Ilhan Omar and other Muslims should be forcefully condemned, regardless of partisanship.

January 3, 2022 

by Other Words 


By Farrah Hassen

In her latest act of demonizing Muslims, Rep. Lauren Boebert recently insinuated at multiple events that Rep. Ilhan Omar could have been a suicide bomber because of her Islamic faith.

This might be business as usual for the Colorado Republican. But for Muslim Americans like myself, it’s another painful reminder of prevailing hatred in the country we call home.

In the past, Boebert has made other pointedly hateful anti-Muslim comments. She once called Omar the “Jihad Squad member from Minnesota” during a speech on the House floor, as well as an “honorary member of Hamas” on other occasions.

Boebert offered a non-apology apology on Twitter for her latest vitriol, but she refused to apologize directly to Omar.

More disturbingly yet unsurprisingly, Republican leaders have remained silent and refused to rebuke Boebert’s dangerous and bigoted rhetoric. Although House Democratic leaders have condemned Boebert’s latest comments, it remains to be seen whether they’ll issue a formal resolution or penalty regarding her statements.

Meanwhile, Omar has reported hundreds of death threats.

This episode isn’t just about an unhinged Congresswoman stoking the extreme fringe of the Republican base. The real issue is the ongoing normalization of Islamophobia in America, which has soared to frightening new heights since 9/11.

Islamophobia contains religious and racial components and generally refers to fear, prejudice, or hatred of Muslims, or those perceived to be Muslim. Islamic traditions, culture, and religion come to be viewed as threats to Western values, which often leads to hostility, intolerance, and discriminatory practices.

These views have become commonplace in our culture. Politicians and pundits routinely make false claims that Muslim Americans seek to replace the Constitution with “Sharia law.” Even more pervasively, Hollywood and the mainstream media endlessly portray Muslims as inherently violent or oppressed.

After 9/11, Muslims became the main target of U.S. government policies that resulted in racial profiling and FBI surveillance of mosques across America. And from 2000 to 2009, hate crimes against American Muslims spiked by over 500 percent, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute. People of Arab and South Asian descent who “looked” Muslim were also attacked.

Since 9/11, the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims have had their religion conflated with the reprehensible terrorist acts of a few individuals. The Trump administration further exacerbated anti-Muslim sentiment through its policies, including the “Muslim ban,” which barred citizens of seven predominately Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S.

Twenty years after 9/11, a September 2021 report by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute surveyed Muslim Americans and found that 76 percent had experienced Islamophobia recently. Close to a quarter of respondents identified “discrimination/racism/prejudice,” followed by “ignorance/misconceptions of Islam,” as the top issues facing Muslim Americans.

These survey results only confirm why Boebert’s Islamophobic remarks against Omar must be forcefully condemned, regardless of partisanship. Leaving this behavior unchecked would send a message that hatred against Muslims is totally acceptable.

Even worse, it may inspire more acts of anti-Muslim hatred on top of the over 500 incidents documented in the U.S. so far this year.

Regardless of whether it occurs in the halls of Congress or in our communities, Islamophobia must end because, just like other forms of hate, it has no place in a free and just society.

The Muslim American perspective is rarely sought out in public debates over matters of our own discrimination. In that context, Rep. Omar’s response provides a much-needed voice: “I know that when we proudly stand up for our values — when we celebrate the diversity of this country, and the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, others stand with us.”

—

This post was previously published on otherwords.org and under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative 3.0 License.

India’s income inequality fell post 2020 lockdown as rich got poorer, US economic study shows

Non-peer-reviewed paper by US-based non-profit NBER says pandemic brought decline in inequality in two senses, the second being consumption inequality also fell marginally.

NIKHIL RAMPAL
4 January, 2022 

File photo | A view of the Outer Ring Road as shot with a drone camera during coronavirus lockdown in Bengaluru | PTI

New Delhi: Millions of Indians were pushed into poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the period post the initial strict lockdown also saw a decline in income inequality in the country, a working paper published last month has said.

The paper, titled ‘Inequality in India declined during Covid’, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a US-based non-profit that focuses on conducting and disseminating research on economics, said the pandemic in India was associated with a decline in inequality in two senses. The first was that Indians from higher income groups had larger relative reductions in income than the poor, and the second was that consumption inequality also declined, albeit only marginally so.

The non-peer reviewed study was led by three scholars — Arpit Gupta from the Stern School of Business, University of New York, and Anup Malani and Bartosz Woda from the University of Chicago Law School.

The researchers’ main source of data was the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS),

Opinion

World has moved on from US, EU’s drug monopoly. India and China are changing IP regulations

Even without an IP waiver from the WTO, China and India are leading the challenge to the West’s vaccine monopoly.

HANNAH SWORN
3 January, 2022 

Vials of Zydus Cadila's Covid-19 vaccine ZyCoV-D | Photo: zyduscadila.com

Twenty years after the HIV/AIDS crisis, the world faces a new pandemic but a familiar problem. Technology needed to produce life-saving drugs remains fiercely guarded by the Western pharmaceutical companies who develop it. But there are signs that their tight grip may be loosening.

In the mid-1990s, a course of anti-retroviral drugs (ARTs) was priced at US$10,000. This was an impossible sum in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 90 per cent of new HIV infections in 1995 were recorded. But governments of developing countries were blocked from supplying their HIV-affected citizens with affordable, generic alternatives by strict global intellectual property (IP) regulations.

Patents: power and regulations

In the negotiation of IP regulations, the world’s most powerful states use their economic clout to establish rules that disproportionately benefit them. Introduced at the behest of the United States and European Union, stringent IP standards protect high-value patented drugs developed by Western pharmaceutical companies.

Eventually recognising that HIV/AIDS could destabilise entire regions of the globe, the US and EU backed the 2001 World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha Declaration. This allowed governments to overrule IP regulations in the interest of public health. Facing competition from generic versions, the price of patented ARTs dropped to US$700 a year.

But after Doha, Western governments reverted to their old ways. Unable to work through the WTO, these powers shifted to threats of sanctions and narrower trade agreements to extinguish the IP flexibilities provided by the declaration.

In 2021, most IP related to COVID-19 vaccines is owned by pharmaceutical giants based in the US and EU who have reaped tens of billions of dollars in sales. Struggling to access immunisations, just under four per cent of people in low-income countries are fully vaccinated.

This contrasts with the much higher 69 percent vaccination rate in high-income nations, an inequality that is prolonging the pandemic with new strains of the virus. Once again, developing countries are beseeching the WTO to waive IP protections. But the review process has been hamstrung for more than a year.

Also read: Govt panel recommends emergency use nod for Covovax, Corbevax

Big pharma vs generic drug makers

Drafted in 2015, the then Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was a 12-member mega-regional free-trade agreement that would have required many less-developed signatories to increase IP protections — including for pharmaceuticals — beyond what was already mandated by the WTO.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was another controversial and ambitious US-driven arrangement that would have allowed countries to seize in-transit shipments of generic drugs suspected of IP infringements.

The rules embodied in these agreements once again bestowed advantages on Western pharmaceutical companies, while generic drug manufacturers based in countries like India, Brazil and Thailand were restricted in what they could produce.

Fearing the loss of precious access to the US and EU’s enormous markets, developing countries were prepared to capitulate to these IP regulations, all the while arguing that open access to knowledge was necessary for education, public health and economic development in their countries.

But since the 1990s, a tiger has joined the table. China has now overtaken both the US and the EU in GDP (PPP), positioning it to influence global IP regulations. While China has been reluctant to directly challenge the economic system that enabled its rise, it has endorsed flexible IP regulations advocated by the developing countries who are its most important economic partners.

Also read: Govt panel recommends EUA for COVID-19 vaccines Covovax, Corbevax and anti-Covid pill molnupiravir

Rival camps in global IP

Trends in recent trade agreements suggest that the US-EU regulatory hegemony may not be as robust as was presumed. Beijing has placed ASEAN at the centre of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a mega-regional trade agreement rivalling the TPP that does not include the US and EU.

The agreement, which will enter into force in a few weeks on 1 January 2022, has emerged with flexible, development-friendly IP provisions that contrast starkly with the TPP. When in 2017, Donald Trump withdrew the US from the TPP, RCEP became the world’s biggest free-trade agreement. Left to pick up the pieces, the remaining TPP members unveiled the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) a year later.

The CPTPP eliminated all but one of the original IP chapters — including those related to pharmaceuticals — while leaving the rest of the agreement intact. Suddenly, the global landscape of IP regulation appeared very different.

Thailand has now expressed interest in joining the CPTPP, citing a reduced threat to access to medicines, and China formally filed a bid to join in September 2021. If the CPTPP advances in its current form, global IP regulations will be even further cemented away from the US and EU’s preferences, giving generics manufacturers greater scope to produce affordable medicines.

Also read: SII gets DCGI nod to manufacture drug substance, test it for developing jab against Omicron

Asia steps up its pharmaceutical game

Even without an IP waiver from the WTO, vaccine competition is heating up as Asia’s pharmaceutical companies leverage high demand and an injection of funds into R&D to put alternative immunisations on the market. With the second and third highest number of COVID-19 vaccine developers in the world, China and India are leading the challenge to the West’s vaccine monopoly.

While Chinese vaccines suffer bad publicity from questionable efficacy rates, generics giant India has seen Baharat Biotech’s Covaxin recently obtain WHO emergency approval and has another immunisation hot on its tail from Zydus Cadila.

South Korea and Japan are investing billions of dollars in local vaccine development, with multiple candidates in clinical trials in both countries. Another high-profile generics manufacturer, Thailand, has two promising vaccines in the pipeline — one mRNA and another protein-based — as well as two nasal sprays beginning human trials.

Asia’s home-grown vaccines could drive down prices globally by increasing supply. They could also produce valuable spillover effects for the development of other innovative drugs, rendering Asian firms more competitive against their Western counterparts in the long run.

A fractured Western IP camp

The West’s IP dominance has not only been weakened by the changing balance of power, but also from within. The US and EU’s powerful partnership came under strain as the latter found it increasingly difficult to achieve agreement between the European Commission and European Parliament on IP issues.

In 2012, the European Parliament rejected ACTA, sealing its political death. Even the US’ special partner, the United Kingdom, has begun negotiations to join the CPTPP, further indicating the pact’s viability with countries that have traditionally been firmly in the US and EU’s IP camp.

But the trajectory of IP regulations is far from settled. Property protections are key for encouraging innovation, especially given the high R&D costs for pharmaceuticals. As countries develop and produce more innovations, they are likely to demand higher IP standards.

China is shifting from a dependence on trade in goods toward high-technology sectors that benefit from more stringent IP regulations. If history repeats itself, developing countries may once again find themselves at the mercy of these great power interests.

Hannah Elyse Sworn is a Senior Analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

This article was previously published by the RSIS and first published by 360info™ under Creative Commons. It has been reproduced here with permission.

Emma Watson shares message in solidarity with the Palestinian movement

IMAGES STAFF
DESK REPORT

The British actor's message has received worldwide

attention, with Pro-Palestinian supporters on

social media lauding the move.

Photo: AP

British actor Emma Watson recently took to social media to share a message in support of the Palestinian movement, leaving many Pro-Palestinian netizens both surprised and elated at the move.

The 31-year-old — who rose to fame for her portrayal of Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies — reposted a post originally shared by the Bad Activist Collective on Instagram on January 2.

The post includes a picture showing Pro-Palestinian supporters with the quote "solidarity is a verb". The post's caption included a poem by British-Australian scholar Sara Ahmed about what solidarity truly entails.

Watson's move has received worldwide attention. Pro-Palestinian supporters on social media have hailed her support for the cause.

Watson was already in the public eye because of her appearance in the Harry Potter reunion special broadcast on January 1. Netizens have lauded how she chose to post the message while she and the reunion were trending on social media, capitalising on the opportunity to make her post "more visible and impactful".

However, the actor has also been on the receiving end of criticism. Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan strongly criticised her post, calling Watson an "antisemite".

A long-held argument of the anti-Palestinian movement is that calling for a free Palestine is akin to anti-Semitism. Model Bella Hadid was on the receiving end of a lot of backlash and claims of anti-Semitism after she was vocal about her support for the Palestinian cause. Actor and activist Mark Ruffalo withdrew his support for Palestine and apologised after criticism.

Harry Potter actor Watson is a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador and has been since July 2014. She is known for her campaigning efforts in promoting gender equality, campaigns such as the HeforShe solidarity movement.

Israel's UN envoy lashes out after Emma Watson expresses support for Palestinians

Gilad Erdan and former ambassador Danny Danon face online backlash after criticising Harry Potter star who expressed solidarity with Palestinians

Emma Watson at a premiere in NY in 2019 for her movie Little Women (AFP)

By MEE staff
Published date: 3 January 2022 

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations lashed out at actress Emma Watson on Monday after the Harry Potter star shared a picture on Instagram in solidarity with Palestinia

In the post, Watson shared a picture from a pro-Palestinian rally with the phrase, "Solidarity is a verb". In the caption, Watson included a quote from British-Australian activist Sara Ahmed, who said: "Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future.

"Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground."

Gilad Erdan, Israel's ambassador to the UN, took to Twitter to criticise the actress' remarks, writing: "Fiction may work in Harry Potter but it does not work in reality."

"If it did, the magic used in the wizarding world could eliminate the evils of Hamas (which oppresses women and seeks the annihilation of Israel) and the PA (which supports terror). I would be in favor of that!" he added.

His comments came shortly after Danny Danon, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, also lashed out at Watson.

"10 points from Gryffindor for being an antisemite," Danon tweeted

Social media users slammed both Erdan and Danon over their comments, with many claiming they "diminished attention to real cases of anti-semitism."

Leah Greenberg, the co-executive director of Indivisible Project, a nonprofit founded in 2016 in response to the election of Donald Trump as president, said Danon's remarks were "a perfect demonstration of the utterly cynical and bad-faith weaponization of antisemitism to shut down basic expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people.

"Former Israeli ambassador to the UN calls Emma Watson an ‘antisemite’ for expressing solidarity with the Palestinians. Beyond parody," tweeted broadcaster Mehdi Hasan.

Meanwhile, Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd, who played a crucial role in raising international awareness about the forced evictions of Palestinians in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, responded with, "Cry louder it's making me laugh."

Watson's Instagram post currently has over 600,000 likes and over 47,000 comments. The picture was originally posted in May by the Bad Activism Collective after Israel's latest offensive on the Gaza Strip resulted in the deaths of more than 250 Palestinians.

LETTER FROM INDIA
Stalled but not overturned

Jawed Naqvi

Published January 4, 2022

The writer is Dawn correspondent in Delhi.

A NEW YEAR’S ritual of decluttering mail threw up some old dispatches from New Delhi to Dawn. A November 2004 piece points to the growing distance between relative agreeableness and reason — and the bilious ditch we find ourselves in today. The dispatch spoke of then prime minister Manmohan Singh’s upcoming visit to Jammu and Kashmir. A troop reduction was ordered in the militarily fraught area. Predictably, the move was slammed by the Hindu right, a common feature of domestic compulsions.

The step to improve relations with Pakistan was seen by the international press as a facet of Singh’s sagacity. In today’s India, such an act would face hateful slander. In its essence, pervasive right-wing hate isn’t new. If anything, it is in keeping with its growing worship of Gandhi’s murderers. Among reasons cited for the assassination, was Gandhi’s proposed visit to Pakistan with a message of Hindu-Muslim harmony.

Hindutva fears harmony. Period. It thrives on parochial strife. The communally hateful speeches made in Haridwar recently were not original in this respect, nor did they mark a major shift in communal bias in recent Indian history. A new element is that the government has become more openly engaged in encouraging communal hatred to spread unhindered. The singer Rasoolan Bai was driven from her home in Ahmedabad following anti-Muslim violence in the 1960s. The bias in Gujarat has a history. It is equally true that Atal Bihari Vajpayee tendered an embarrassed apology to the global community as prime minister when Graham Stein and his sons were burnt alive by a Hindutva mob. Contriteness eludes Hindutva’s current crop of leaders.

Read: Where the linear progression of Hindutva will take India

If Indian democracy is yet to be rescued there’s a recent example to emulate. The peaceful farmers movement has shown the way, not for the first time. It was the farmers who formed the bulwark of the JP movement against Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. Sadly, the RSS wormed its way to become a key part of the movement. The plot showed up in the subsequent early collapse of the opposition government that succeeded Mrs. Gandhi. The recent farmers movement on the other hand not only ensured victory for its economic causes, its social impact helped the coming together of Hindu and Muslim farmers in western Uttar Pradesh to the chagrin of Hindutva.

Hindutva fears harmony. Period. It thrives on parochial strife.

It goes to Singh’s credit that he studiously avoided the temptations of political hamming in his two-term tenure. He didn’t sit on a swing to the sway of folk music, for example, with visiting leaders. Nor did he show up uninvited at a party across the border. The protocol ensured there was no emotional backlash when things went wrong. Life with neighbours, more so with difficult neighbours, as he had seen from close quarters, was not black and white. He stayed his course for mutually handy peace with Pakistan. When he went into a civil nuclear deal with the US, he dexterously left largely unruffled the fragile trust with Beijing.

Singh didn’t blink even when the Mumbai horror came visiting four years down the road from the Kashmir bonhomie. He overrode calls from his own party men for military action against Pakistan. The foreign minister of Pakistan was visiting New Delhi when the terror attack happened. The Zardari government was in denial about the Pakistani identity of the lone attacker captured alive. Pakistani journalists stepped in to correct the narrative by identifying the family of the gunman. Dawn led the team, which may not be unrelated to other reasons that upright journalism is facing the heat from the Pakistani establishment today.

Stern words to the neighbour and a change in the home portfolio saw Singh cruising back to a second innings within seven months of the dastardly carnage. He annoyed his right-wing opponents further when he followed his instincts with a controversial post-Mumbai nightmare peace bid with Pakistan in Sharm el Sheikh. His overall trajectory showed that Singh was only building on his predecessor’s steps to keep Pakistan crucially engaged in peace talks.

Moreover, Singh was not going to repeat the mistakes of the Vajpayee administration, which mobilised the army for what was projected to be a ‘decisive war’ with Pakistan following the December 2001 attack on parliament. Mercifully, the war never came although some 1,800 Indian soldiers were killed in accidents with mines and fuses. As the author of the letter to president Clinton, which the US made public, Vajpayee claimed the nuclear tests he ordered in 1998 had China in the cross hairs. In other words, peace with Pakistan was a way for his strategists to avert the nightmare of two simultaneously hostile borders should relations with Beijing sour.

I cross-checked the facts of Singh’s Kashmir visit with The Guardian’s narrative of the event. It spoke of “guerrillas” launching an attack on an Indian army camp ahead of the troop reduction. This was baffling. Only those who didn’t want Indian troops to be reduced in the militarily saturated region would do something so damning. The same question arose with the subsequent terror attack in Pulwama. Did the perpetrators not know that they were shoring up Prime Minister Modi’s sagging election campaign?

Another telling story that surfaced in the old emails was about the Agra summit of July 2001. The summit was a disappointment for Gen Musharraf and Vajpayee. But the failure was handled with grace. “The caravan of peace has stalled, ladies and gentlemen of the press. It has not overturned.” Foreign minister Jaswant Singh’s words helped Vajpayee ride out the ensuing tensions and go to the 2003 Saarc summit in Islamabad. “Jang mein qatl sipahi hongey, surkh ru zilley ilahi hongey.” (In a war, soldiers will needlessly die/ So their majesties can hold their heads high!) Jaswant Singh grimly heard the couplet recited at his packed news conference following the parliament attack outrage. The lines from the mailbox are just as relevant today.

The writer is Dawn correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 4th, 2022

'Despicable and totally unacceptable': Pakistan slams fake online auction of Muslim women in India

Naveed Siddiqui

Published January 4, 2022 -

Screengrab of the Bulli Bai platform. — Photo via The Wire/Twitter


Pakistan strongly condemned on Tuesday the displaying of Muslim women's photographs for fake online auction on a website in India, terming it "despicable and totally unacceptable", and urged the international community to play its parts in stopping the "rising xenophobia and Islamophobia" in the neighbouring country.

Photographs of more than 100 prominent Muslim women, including journalists, activists, film stars and artists, were displayed last weekend without their permission on a website named Bulli Bai — a derogatory slang for Indian Muslims — for sale through fake auction.

The website was hosted on GitHub, a San Francisco-based coding platform, and taken down within 24 hours. The Indian police have arrested a man who was allegedly behind the fake auction.

Though there was no real sale involved, the Muslim women listed on the website said the auction was intended to humiliate them, many of whom have been vocal about rising Hindu nationalism in India and some of the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Foreign Office in Islamabad denounced the act in a statement issued on Tuesday, saying that "Pakistan strongly condemns the despicable and totally unacceptable harassment and insult of Muslim women on the internet and purpose-built online application in India."

"In a completely obnoxious and repugnant act, aimed at humiliating, harassing and insulting Muslim women, their doctored images have been placed on the internet application with outrageous captions for 'auction'," the statement said, adding that "hate-mongering followers of such applications attacked the dignity of nearly 100 influential Muslim women by 'bidding' on them with deeply offensive remarks."

The FO said this was the "newest low in the violent streak of hate attacks against minorities in India whereby cyberspace — with purpose-built online platform(s) and social media — has been used yet again, to demean and harass women, particularly Muslim women, [so as] to create a feeling of fear and shame amongst the Muslim community".

"These horrifying occurrences have left Muslim women traumatised and in deep fear," it added.

Read: 'Sulli Deals' — How photos of Muslim women were misused on a GitHub app

The FO further stated that under the "Hindutva-inspired BJP-RSS combine dispensation" in New Delhi, space for minorities, particularly Muslims, continued to shrink in India.

"It is reprehensible that no action has been taken against the perpetrators of [a] similar abhorrent act six months ago," wherein the photographs of dozens of influential Muslim women were put up on a social media platform, the FO said.

It was referring to Sulli Deals, another app on GitHub on which photos of hundreds of Muslim women were uploaded on July 4 for fake auction.

"Deafening silence of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) leadership and absence of discernible action against ‘Hindutva’ proponents openly calling for genocide of Muslims should send alarm bells across the international community about the gross and systematic human rights violations of minorities, particularly Muslims, in India," the FO said.

It added that Pakistan was reiterating its calls on the international community, particularly the UN and relevant international human rights and humanitarian organisatins, to fulfill their responsibilities to "stop the rising xenophobia, Islamophobia and violent attacks against minorities in India and ensure their safety, security and well-being".

America’s trajectory

Owen Bennett-Jones

Published January 4, 2022 

DAWN.COM

The writer is author of The Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in Pakistan.

THE ushering in of the new year is a time not only for resolutions but also, in the case of journalists, for predictions. So here is a forecast of what’s going to happen in the United States, not only in 2022 but looking as far ahead as early 2025.

This scenario begins with the 2022 mid-terms in which the Republicans will take back control of Congress. The recent Republican victory in the race for governor of Virginia show that the visibly aging Joe Biden has next to no prospect of bucking the well-established trend that the mid-terms go against the White House.

Once in control of Congress, the Republicans will inevitably resort to their hyper-partisan tactics, further frustrating any proposal, initiative or policy with Biden’s name on it and setting the scene for a rancorous presidential election campaign in 2024. Whether Biden has the energy to run for a second time is not yet clear. But we do know that Trump has a total grip on the Republican Party and although he has not declared his intention to run, he will do so and the Republicans will make him their candidate.

Making a prediction about the result of that election is inevitably speculative but past results give an indication of what might happen. In the popular vote in 2016, Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes — only securing the presidency because of the electoral college system whereby states — in most cases on a ‘winner takes all’ basis — send delegates to Washington to vote for the new president. In 2020, Trump lost to Biden by 7m votes. Trump is such a divisive figure there is little prospect of him breaking out from his loyal support base. In other words, there is every chance that when it comes to the popular vote in 2024 he will lose again — and possibly by a very significant margin.

Very many people in America — Democrats and Republicans — are armed.

When he lost to Biden, Trump tried to overturn the result. We all heard the phone calls to, for example, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump repeatedly demanded that the results be manipulated in his favour. These efforts failed only because state-level officials who control US elections — such as Raffensperger — refused to be bullied. That is unlikely to happen again in 2024. Many of those who resisted Trump last time round have come under severe pressure. Raffensperger, for example, has received a series of death threats describing how he and his family will die. Similar threats have been made to election officials all over the country. Police — for reasons that are unclear — have failed to investigate, never mind prosecute, the so-called patriots making the threats.

As a result, many of the officials who held the line in 2020 have withdrawn from public life are being replaced by Trump ultra-loyalists who have swallowed their leader’s evidence-free claims that the 2020 election was rigged. Raffensperger has in fact refused to resign but, as a result, faces a challenge for his secretary of state slot (which comes up for election in 2022) from a Republican Congressman Jody Hice who is leaving his seat in Congress in an attempt to take over from Raffensperger. That Hice would relinquish his Congressional seat to be Georgia’s secretary of state is a mark of just how far Trump loyalists are going to get themselves into key positions in the electoral system. Some Republican states are also reforming their procedures to empower potentially partisan official oversight boards.

These new ideological state-level officials can be expected to refuse to validate Democrat wins in 2024. This in turn opens up the likelihood that Republican-held state assemb­lies will refuse to send duly elec­ted pro-Democ­rat delegates to the electoral col­­­lege to form­ally choose the president. Re­­m­ember, it was at the Cong­res­sio­nal meeting to validate those delegates’ votes on Jan 6, 2021, that Trump tried to have a mob occupy the building to prevent that validation from taking place.

So, what happens if the election result isn’t respected? The endless manufactured grievances churned out by Fox News and the other right-wing US channels have given the Republicans the false impression that they are angrier than anyone else. But if the popular vote of the US electorate is overturned, then the Democrats and their supporters may well be even angrier. And needless to say, very many people in the United States — Democrats as well as Republicans — are armed.

So here is my prediction. In late 2024 or early 2025, there will be armed civil conflict in the US between the supporters of Trump on the one side and supporters of democracy on the other. And for once Pakistanis will be able to look at the US and shake their heads about a failed state.

Published in Dawn, January 4th, 2022

PAKISTAN

Age of politics

Arifa Noor

Published January 4, 2022 

The writer is a journalist.


AGE has never been too far from political discussions. Take the case of the US where the youthful Barack Obama was replaced by a 70-year-old Donald Trump who then stepped aside for an even older Joe Biden. Their respective ages were more than just numbers. If Obama’s youth was seen as a symbol of hope, his successors’ ages could be seen as reflecting the crises of American politics and the two main political parties.

In Pakistan, we seem to have a mix of the old and the young. Imran Khan, at 69, along with Nawaz Sharif (72) and Asif Ali Zardari (66) are seen as part of the same generation. However, of the three only the latter two are seen as experienced politicians, having been through the turmoil of the 1990s. And their children and heirs, Maryam Nawaz (48) and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari (33) are not just seen as the future but also as young leaders who can afford to wait till they come to power.

Imran Khan, on the other hand, is not young but is (or should one say ‘was’) viewed as the leader of the youth. Whether he can hold on to this image after this term remains to be seen.

But considerable attention is paid to Maryam Nawaz and BBZ and their political futures. Here, it is rather interesting how it is said repeatedly that they have the luxury of time on their side. For example, it used to be said that PPP may have ceded space in Punjab but BBZ could afford to wait to regain this space, as he was so young. Similarly, in between all the analyses about who will lead the PML-N, many are of the view that Maryam may have to wait for her turn because once again she is rather young and cannot become prime minister right away. Even Shehbaz Sharif hinted at this in an interview some time ago.

In Pakistan, we seem to have a mix of the old and the young.

Are Maryam and BBZ really so young? Or does it only seem so because of the presence of Khan, AAZ and Sharif? And one just needs to catch the footage of any meeting of the PDM to realise that our political landscape is mostly dominated by ageing men.

This was not always so. While Maryam and BBZ are seen as inexperienced, their parents came into the limelight and power when they were rather young. Benazir Bhutto was a mere two years older than her son is at present when she took oath as the first prime minister of Pakistan in 1988. And Nawaz Sharif, who replaced her two years later, was 41 years old then.

Before these two catapulted to the political mainstage, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was also around 45 when he took over as prime minister of Pakistan, while Mohammad Khan Junejo, who seemed to be an old soul, was just 56 when he took oath. To offer another example, Altaf Hussain was 35 in 1988 when MQM made its mark in the 1988 national elections.

Read: Karachi's political fortresses

Over the years, it seems, as we begin to be seen as a country with a young population, that those leading us have grown older and older.

This isn’t just limited to Pakistan. When Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan’s prime minister, her counterpart in India, Rajiv Gandhi, who took oath in 1984 at 40 years, was just as young and glamorous. At present, the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, is at 64, just a wee younger than our three politicians. And the Congress is headed by 75-year-old Sonia Gandhi whose son at 51 is still seen as ‘young’. Bangladesh and its two begums present a similar ageing problem.

Is this all a coincidence or does it reveal something about our politics?

To some extent, in Pakistan, at least, the 1970s and the 1990s could be explained by the socioeconomic changes brought in during the Ayub era because of land reforms and industrialisation, followed by the first election on universal franchise. The combination of factors ushered in an age of populism symbolised by the PPP and Bhutto. The old guard was replaced by a young party and its young leadership, including Bhutto. His premature death led to his young daughter coming to the fore. And her nemesis, Nawaz Sharif, established himself in Zia’s Punjab, during the period the military regime was trying to groom an anti-PPP political class as Punjab too was changing rapidly, thanks partly to remittances from abroad.

Since then, a relatively continuous process has perhaps allowed the same set of (ageing) politicians to dominate the landscape. Although by the noughties, Imran Khan emerged as an option and was able to attract the growing number of young voters, or would-be voters, as he had stepped foot into politics in the 1990s, his age didn’t match his inexperience.

And this continuation, which has also led to the cultivation of the political dynasties, has seen the emergence of BBZ and Maryam Nawaz. They are young but their political image, which they lay claim to, is not what Benazir and Nawaz Sharif symbolised in the 1990s. This is not to say they cannot symbolise hope — they could. But it is a hope which harks back to the past — their speeches reveal this, which speak of the populism of Bhutto or the achievements of Nawaz Sharif. And the debate about Imran Khan’s performance refers again and again to his and his team’s lack of experience. Maryam Nawaz and BBZ, to some extent, are about continuation and not change.

But all this leads to a number of questions about the youth and their political choices. Will Khan continue to be seen as their leader or will it be someone else? And if it’s the latter, who will it be? Will it be new young leaders brought forward by movements such as PTM? Or will Maryam Nawaz and BBZ evolve into young leaders who signify a new age as their parents once did? But in order to do that, they will first need to be seen as old enough to be in charge. If the Gandhi dynasty in India is any indication, there may still be some time before that happens.

Published in Dawn, January 4th, 2022