Day: February 2, 2024

 

“It amazes me that honest news reporting appears increasingly rare on our British TV screens. Nowadays, the overtly theatrical device of employing a young, black interviewer as the obvious voice of objectivity when questioning Azerbaijani motives has become a ridiculous norm. However, the carefully scripted and overtly biased questions quickly reveal political manipulation behind the scenes for those with ears to hear. As such, my general reaction to these extraordinary presidential elections is directly opposed to that of the mainstream British media,” says David Parry in his comment to Azernews.

Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark have found out that drastic climate change can change the seascape in the Arctic, leading to the emergence of many new islands around Greenland, Azernews reports, citing the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).

NPR News: 02-02-2024 12PM EST

There is an old story of a young man who came to an expert and who enquired from him, “How long does it take to reach enlightenment?” The expert replied that it may take ten years and the young man said, “So long!” The expert then said, “No, in your case it may take twenty years.” And then the young man started to blurt again about the time, but the expert said again. “For you it may take actually twenty-five years.” The young man then asked, “Why do you keep adding more years?” The expert then said to him, “Let us see. I think in your case, it may take thirty years!” This story was narrated in Readers Digest by Phillip Kapleau, in 1983.

A goal may be achievable in ten years, but one may want to achieve it in ten days, which denotes that you want to move fast, ignoring the old saying: “The more hurry the less speed.” It is not good to delay either, but to hurry is worse. All works get completed in due course. The activities of Ethiopia’s administration and more particularly Abiy Ahmed, the Prime Minister, appear to have been done in great haste without thought to the consequences to the extent that Ethiopia, which remained to be a respected member of the African continent appears to be its laughing stock today. He was awarded even a Nobel Peace Prize but only started wars within his country and then jumped off to Somalia, a country that has a long violent history with Ethiopia, which he should not have done. Accessibility to a sea would have been achieved through an integrated regional economic platform. He only delayed the formation of that regional platform further. It cannot be achieved through force as the Prime Minister said in front of his appointed parliamentarians in 2023, who have no independent thinking processes.

The Ethiopian administration is now involved in multilayered crises involving domestic, regional and international dimensions. There are deadly wars in the Amhara State and Oromia. The Tigray war is not extinguished yet and there is the Benishangul war as well. The Afar State and the Somali State are also at each other’s throats all within Ethiopia. But worse, the Prime Minister without proper thinking jumped into Somalia and got involved in Somalia’s internal affairs, an issue well known to the world and where the international community has been working to patch the seemingly illusive differences among the Somali politicians, an event which involves both regional and international dimensions. No one in the world wants to break the international rules. What if Somalia signed agreements or MoUs with the Somali State in Ethiopia, which were not acceptable to Ethiopia. He would have been hollering across the halls of the globe!

But worse for Ethiopia is the poverty and the droughts and the famines in the country. There are reports indicating that over thirty million Ethiopians have no food security, yet he was being awarded a FAO prize. Something must be wrong somewhere! In the Tigray region hundreds of thousands are dying of hunger and instead of working for these poor Ethiopians, the Prime Minister is busy causing international issues and causing killings and more disasters in the Amhara and Oromia States of his country. It is perhaps time the Prime Minister stepped down. He cannot handle the job, which needs a calmer person to take over.

Working in haste and embarking on many different agendas at the same time appears to be a sign of irresponsibility or a sign of crass impatience. Ethiopia today appears to be a polarized society when it used to be an organized country with an agenda and a direction. It did not move in all directions all the time causing headaches not only for its population but also for others such the Horn of Africa region. This is affecting not only the country’s stability but also its economy and, indeed, this is affecting the region. The region today seems to be more divided as is Ethiopia and instead of coming together and helping each other, the countries of the region seem to be wary of each other. Relations are strained and the possibility of war between the two largest states, Somalia and Ethiopia, cannot be ignored. This also gives space to the terror groups that operate in the region. It is perhaps time the Prime Minister of Ethiopia stood back from the brink he is standing on. He could fall into a deep abyss!

Ethiopia with all its internal problems did not need to embark on fingering others. Perhaps the interference in Somalia’s affairs was intended to divert the attention of Ethiopians from the multiple conflicts within the country and create a foreign enemy. It did not work and would not work. Ethiopians know that it is a landlocked country, and they should have good relations with the littoral states of the region including Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia and even further south, Kenya or further north, Sudan. It cannot, however, interfere in the internal affairs of any of these countries. It is not in its interest. It is not the only landlocked country, and an economy does not depend on an owned access to a sea. Many countries such as Uganda or Switzerland do not have access to a sea but they still thrive, because they maintain good relations with others and enjoy a balanced and steady foreign policy.

The Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiye needs to pull back from his current moves. He knows they are not successful and would only lead to more chaos in his country and in the neighboring countries. The region was healing. His peace agreement with Eritrea in 2018 was a good sign, but since then he has launched wars in Tigray (2020), Amhara (2021), Afar/Somali States (2021), the Benishangul-Gumuz (2021), the Oromia Conflict (never settled but was triggered again in 2022). The interference in Somalia’s internal affairs (start of 2024) seems to have crowned his mischievous internal and external policies. 

The region need not crack its fault lines further. It already suffers from climatic and natural calamities. Adding human chaos to the mix would not be good. The region needs to address the actual needs of the population and not the needs of ambitious politicians making history for themselves, for good or bad. It actually needs to watch for the perils that accompany haste in the decision-making processes of the region.

General elections are expected to be held in India between April and May 2024 to elect 543 members of the Lok Sabha. Will this year’s elections deliver a change for better?

The 2019 elections have transformed India from what was a de-facto apartheid democracy into a kind of de-jure apartheid democracy. But they also marked a shift toward authoritarianism in which opposition voices are muffled. Most media moguls in today’s India are businessmen supporting the BJP who have become promoters of Modi’s authoritarian regime, crony capitalism, and Hindutvadi agenda. Consequently, if the government is not happy with some of the journalists, they ask the businessmen to remove those journalists unless they ‘fall in line’. (1)

Even serious matters of anti-Muslim and anti-Christian prejudice and persecution by the government and its Hindu vigilantes are, therefore, either ignored or under reported. In this environment of mass frenzy, hatred, and prejudice, no one dares to speak out against the excesses of the Modi government, as if such populist programs, which are dehumanizing to religious minorities are part of a national agenda to make India great again. Many of the political opponents of Modi have been coopted to join his party to be politically relevant in this toxic environment. The critics say that Modi has been transformed into an ‘overbearing, cult-like’ personality who is above the law. 

Today, India lacks the civil society to challenge such serious aberrations of a government that is making all its neighbors nervous and worried about the ripple effects. Many liberal and secular academics and news reporters face threat to their lives for just airing their views that India is heading in wrong direction under Modi and the BJP. 

Many experts who had earlier celebrated the multiculturalism of Indian existence and the capacious nature of the Indian constitution are now seriously concerned about the waning of those values under Modi. Consider, for instance, the remarks of Professor Amartya Sen on the health of Indian democracy in an interview with the New Yorker in 2019. He said that “The big thing that we know from John Stuart Mill is that democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes. And that is massively true now. People are afraid now. I have never seen this before.” (2)

India has been depicted as a country of ‘particular concern’ because of her horrible records on human rights of hundreds of millions of her own citizens that are religiously different. (3) These accusations have become louder and more transparent these days since BJP’s coming to power, not only at the local level but also at the national level. 

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The Ram Mandir, an unfinished Hindu temple, was consecrated on January 22, 2024, on a contested holy site with an eye to the 2024 elections. The site once housed the 16th century Babri Mosque in India’s northern city of Ayodhya. That mosque, a monument of faith for Indian Muslims, was razed by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992. 

On 14 January 1992, less than a year before the mosque was destroyed, Modi had pledged not to return to Ayodhya until a temple dedicated to Lord Ram was completed. He was part of the ‘yatra’ for the integration of Kashmir with  India, which was accomplished under his watch in 2019 when Article 370 was abrogated. On that day, he raised cries of ‘Jai Shri Ram’, and participated in the worship of Hindu deity Ram, who was then housed in a makeshift tent. 

Nearly three decades later, Modi oversaw the groundbreaking of the temple, likening it to “the day India gained independence.”

For Narendra Modi, the construction of the Ram Temple represents more than just the honoring of a decades-long Hindu nationalist pledge. It also cements his legacy as one of the country’s most consequential leaders—in particular, one who is helping to transform India from a secular democracy into an avowedly Hindu nation.

“His entire career has been based on Ayodhya because he realized early on that the only way to become a favorite of the masses is to endear them through the Ram Temple movement,” journalist Rana Ayyub says. “This is the ultimate movement of Modi as a Hindu nationalist leader, and this is the ultimate moment of creating the Indian Muslim as a second-class citizen.” (4)

Critics of Modi accuse him of weaponizing religion for political gains.

The temple consecration followed a number of other major political moves implemented by Modi in his efforts to advance his government’s Hindu nationalist or Hindutvadi agenda. As already hinted above, this included the passage of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 (a law extending Indian citizenship to religious minorities from neighboring countries that excludes Muslims, undermining India’s constitutionally mandated secularism) and the repeal of the special autonomous status of India-administered Kashmir, the country’s sole Muslim-majority state. “What unites these three things is that they work against Indian Muslims and Muslims more broadly,” says Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, “and, by extension, strengthen the status and interests of Indian Hindus.” (5)

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of “The Demolition and the Verdict,” a book about the 1992 Babri Mosque demolition, said Modi’s decision to preside over January 22 festivities was a sign of Hindu hegemony in India. 

Surely, neither the demolition of the historic mosques like the Babri Masjid nor the consecration of Hindu temples like the Ram Mandir will be the last of its kind in what many observers see a blatant attempt by the Modi government to push a pro-Hindu agenda and  cement Hindu hegemony or supremacy over India. 

Predictably, on January 31, 2024, a court in Varanasi, which is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency in northern Uttar Pradesh state, said Hindus can offer prayers in the Gyanvapi Masjid, a 17th century mosque in Varanasi.

Many Hindus believe that Modi is going to deliver them the mythical Ram Rajya. On the other hand, India’s hundreds of millions of religious and ethnic minorities see the transformation of their country quite differently. They believe that they are living under a highly oppressive, apartheid system, which is characterized by an authoritarian political culture that allows India to be dominated politically, socially and economically by her Hindu majority while the religious and ethnic minorities are treated as unequal in a stratified system. 

As India goes to the poll, an important question for her voters is: can anything good come out of the belly of a hideous, apartheid system that is built upon hatred and intolerance and a highly flawed judicial system that is biased against its minorities, and shields the bigwigs and Hindu extremists, and is abused by the ruling party to act as its rubber-stamp to materialize its highly divisive agenda? 

In the international front, the Government of India aspires to be a veto wielding power within the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Such an aspiration is seen as preposterous and would continue to be rejected by the UN member states unless human rights are ensured for all its citizens, irrespective of ethnicity, caste, and creed. This is a serious matter that concerns everyone, and not just the 1.4 billion Indians. The latter need to take a hard look and ponder on the vital question: can our world afford to have another apartheid state, albeit the most populous country in our time, where hundreds of millions of religious and ethnic minorities feel insecure and unwanted? Can the world support a partner whose judiciary is pressured by the executive in unconstitutional ways?

If the people of India are serious to amend the way India is perceived by the rest of the world, they must reverse the current developments inside their country through ballots. For surely, the rest of the world is gravely concerned about the direction that India is heading. They see the ruling BJP, under the leadership of Modi, flirting with Hindutva, which is considered by many experts as nothing but the Hindu version of fascism. If such perceptions are true, then we have not seen the worst yet. After all, European fascism has been destructive and murderous, let alone being genocidal. No thinking man can afford to see a resurrection of fascism that denies the rights of “others”. A failed ideology cannot be thought to be a savior for any people, and surely not for a billion plus impoverished people who deserve much better. The embrace of such a poisonous ideology as a national redeemer, some 75 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is simply inexcusable and unacceptable. 

I pray and hope that Indians make the right choices when they cast their votes.

Notes:

1.  Press freedom in India has declined under the Modi government: NPR
2.  Amartya Sen’s Hopes and Fears for Indian Democracy | The New Yorker
3.  India – United States Department of State: 2021 Report on International Religious Freedom: India. June 2, 2022; India – United States Department of State: 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom: India. May 15, 2023.
4.  Why Modi’s Temple of Ram in Ayodhya, India Is Controversial | TIME
5. Ibid

President Biden’s pick of John Podesta to replace John Kerry as his top climate envoy is revealing on several fronts. All three Catholics worship at the altar of climate control more than they do the altar of the Magisterium, or the teaching body of the Catholic Church. In the case of Podesta, not only is his fidelity misplaced, he has actively sought to subvert the Catholic Church.

To be specific, we learned in 2016 that Wikileaks documents from 2012 showed how Podesta created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a bogus lay Catholic entity. He did so with the express purpose of mobilizing Catholics to challenge the Catholic hierarchy, forcing changes that advance the left-wing agenda.

Catholics in Alliance was funded by George Soros. We fought this shell group from the get-go, exposing them as a fraud. When Wikileaks documents confirmed our allegations, Podesta claimed he could not be anti-Catholic because he is a Catholic.

Here is what I said on October 17, 2016, in reply. “Bigotry is determined by what is said and done and does not turn on biographical data. For example, putting a swastika on a synagogue is no less anti-Semitic if done by a Jew. Similarly, making anti-Catholic statements, or engaging in anti-Catholic conduct, is no less anti-Catholic if done by a Catholic.”

If a non-Catholic president chose Podesta for a senior post in his administration, we would brand it as anti-Catholic. When a president who identifies as a Catholic does it, it is aiding and abetting sabotage within the Catholic Church.

Podesta is not only duplicitous about his Catholic status, he is just as duplicitous about his commitment to the environment. 

Last November, Podesta went with John Kerry, the climate chief at the time, to the U.N.’s COP28 summit. They had a good time hammering fossil fuels. More important, they got there by taking a private jet. Sen. Joni Ernst took note. “Once again, the Biden administration exposes the hypocrisy of their own radical green fantasy.”

Podesta loves jetting around in private planes. In fact, he averages 11,000 miles per year in private jet travel. He also owns nine luxury cars. In other words, his lifestyle is responsible for emitting so many pollutants into the air that he has to be in the top 1 percent of the nation’s polluters. And when he gets to his destination, he bashes polluters.

John Podesta is a quintessential phony. That is why he was chosen to be the Climate Czar by our “devout Catholic” president. The Czar of Duplicity is a perfect fit.

Contact White House Secretary: Karine.Jean-Pierre@who.eop.gov

By Jon Miltimore

In February 2022, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he was invoking the 1988 Emergencies Act, a new Rubicon in Canadian history. 

The action marked the first time federal emergency powers had been activated in Canada since the “October Crisis of 1970,” when Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, invoked the War Measures Act of 1914, a move he initiated after a high-ranking Canadian official was kidnapped (and later killed) by political terrorists.

The target of the younger Trudeau’s wrath was not political terrorists, however, but truck drivers protesting the government’s vaccine mandates and broader COVID-19 restrictions.

“We cannot and will not allow illegal and dangerous activities to continue,” Trudeau said of the group of truckers, who became known as “the Freedom Convoy.” 

It turns out, however, that it was not truckers who were behaving illegally. It was Trudeau.

On Tuesday, a Canadian court rebuked the prime minister for invoking emergency powers in response to the protests, ruling that the action “was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.”

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which, in 2022, filed suit against the federal government, applauded the court’s decision, saying emergency powers are “dangerous to democracy” and “should be used sparingly and carefully.”

The CCLA is right about the dangers emergency powers pose. And because Canadian officials say they will appeal the court’s ruling, it’s well worth examining just how egregious and reckless Trudeau’s use of emergency powers was. 

Traditionally, in Canada, emergency powers were reserved for things such as war, insurrection, or invasion. And though the Emergencies Act broadened the language of Canada’s emergency powers statute to include things such as “public welfare emergencies,” those powers had never been activated until 2022.  

Trudeau’s actions were a radical departure from the norms and philosophy of classical liberalism. 

The constitutions of the United States and Canada, the United Nations, and thinkers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela all recognize the fundamental right of peaceful protest. 

By invoking these sweeping emergency powers to crack down on a civil protest, Trudeau was behaving more like the head of a state such as Iran, North Korea, or China than a liberal, constitutional democracy. (Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us, considering that Trudeau has in the past expressed envy over the unfettered power of dictators.) 

Hundreds of charges were issued, and many were arrested after exercising their right to protest. 

Yet it’s important to understand that Trudeau’s persecution did not end with the truckers. His crackdown extended to those supporting them financially. 

To cite one high-profile example, the Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo, which was collecting donations for protesters, was ordered to stop receiving donations.

It refused.

The following day, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the government would now have the power to freeze bank accounts without a court order. The action, which caused momentary chaos in Canada’s banking system, was a form of economic warfare and a gross violation of free speech.

“There is no principled basis for cutting off the ability of citizens to support other citizens in a campaign of civil disobedience,” George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley wrote.

Despite his authoritarian attempts to steamroll political opponents, Trudeau, in what might have been the best gaslight of 2023, later argued he actually never made anyone get vaccinated. He was merely giving people the proper “incentives.”

It’s hard to imagine a more shameless claim. And Trudeau’s effort to “incentivize” behavior, and crush dissenters in his path, is a reminder of just how important the separation of powers is to freedom. 

The idea stretches back to the Enlightenment-era French philosopher Montesquieu, who wrote in The Spirit of Laws that “power should be a check to power.” This simple idea of separating power and using separate branches of government to keep one another in check underpins both the American and Canadian constitutions, as well as many others.

The Canadian court has, thankfully, finally put Trudeau in check. 

But his tyrannical actions show that checks and balances are designed not only to protect the people from the Caligulas, Lenins, and Pol Pots of the world but also from what C.S. Lewis called the worst of all tyrants, the busybody who would exercise power over his subjects “for the good of its victims.”

• About the author: Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at FEE
• Source: This article was published by FEE and originally appeared in The Washington Examiner.

In yet another instance of piracy attempts on a fishing vessel, Indian Navy stepped in to foil the attempts on an Iranian flagged Fishing Vessel (FV) Omaril along East coast of Somalia. INS Sharda deployed in the region was diverted to intercept the boat