Archives: Articles

By Floyd Rudmin

The crisis in Ukraine is serious. At some point soon, reality needs to become the priority. No more name-calling. No more blaming. If there are any adults in the room, they need to stand up. The crisis in Ukraine is going critical, and that is a fact.

The first fact. The Ukraine has 15 nuclear reactors loaded with a 1000 tons or more of radioactive fuels. The largest nuclear reactor in Europe is on the Dneiper River, a little north of Crimea. Plus, there are the 4 Chernobyl reactors, still leaking radiation, still needing constant attention. A rational world cannot tolerate chaos, or a collapsed economy, or a civil war, or any kind of war, in a region with nuclear reactors. If the power grid fails, if workers are unable or unwilling to show up for their shifts, if there is an act of sabotage, an act of war, if something happens to a nuclear reactor, then the Ukraine, Europe, Russia, and the rest of the world will receive heavy doses of radioactive fallout. There is now no government in Ukraine with the resources to manage a nuclear catastrophe.

The second fact. The ability to start a war has now been distributed across hundreds of relatively low-ranked individuals, on both sides. NATO nations, including Canada, have moved military aircraft to front-line states and have begun armed missions along the Russian border. Russia has been matching these with deployments of interceptors and missile batteries along its borders and in Byelorussia. Accusations of border violations are already appearing. New NATO warships have entered the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. The Ukraine and Russia have both moved military units to their border. Thus, there are now hundreds of armed and ready military personnel on both sides, any one of whom, for any reason, can cross a border, can shoot a missile, can start a war. In the Ukraine, large numbers of anti-Russia militia are eager to provoke Russia to invade Ukraine, and equal numbers of anti-Kiev militia are also eager to provoke Russia to invade Ukraine. War now waits on hair-triggers, hundreds of them. If an incident turns into a war, it would quickly turn into a missile war, and maybe into a global nuclear war.

In 2014, on the one century anniversary of World War I, European nations are again mobilizing for war. As in 1914, so in 2014, war is not for repelling an attack, but for loyalty to an alliance, even when some members of the alliance are belligerent. The 1914 war was supposed to be over by Christmas, but went on and on and on for years, killing 9 million people. The 2014 war, if its starts in earnest, will be over in one week, maybe less, and could kill a 100 million people depending on how many nuclear reactors break open and how many nuclear missiles are launched. The 1914 war was called “the war to end all wars”. The 2014 war will be that.

We need proposals that have some prospect of resolving the Ukraine Crisis. Here is my list:

1) Settle the Crimean secession. War is on the ready as long as NATO says the Crimean secession was an act of Russian aggression, and Russia says that it was an act of democratic self-determination. All sides, including the acting government in Kiev, should agree to a second referendum run by the electoral commissions of several small, non-aligned nations, for example, Switzerland, Ireland, and Costa Rica. If the referendum votes majority for secession, then the Ukraine, US, EU, and UN accept that act of democratic self-determination. If the referendum votes majority against secession, then Crimea reverts to its former status as an autonomous region of Ukraine, and Russia gets perpetual lease of its naval base modeled on the US lease of Guantanamo. All sides should accept a throw of the dice of democracy to decide the fate of Crimea.

2) Deploy non-aligned peace keeping troops. The acting government in Kiev is illegitimate in the eyes of many Ukrainians because it came to power by unconstitutional means and includes right-wing neo-fascists who have publicly voiced violence against Russian-speaking Ukrainians. The methods of Maidan Square are now being copied in eastern cities. The acting government in Kiev has mobilized neo-nazi militia into national guard units, and has started conscripting western Ukrainians to join attacks on eastern Ukrainians. Demonstrators are being denounced and targeted as “terrorists”. Both sides are accusing the other of having foreign advisors and support. Neo-nazis from across Europe are reportedly coming to Ukraine to join in the mayhem. If this continues and escalates, then civil war is unavoidable. There is need for international, non-aligned military forces in eastern Ukraine and in Kiev, so that Ukrainian military units need not attack Ukrainian cities, so that citizens can feel secure, and so that militia can be disarmed. I suggest that Brazilian and Argentinian army units, wearing blue UN helmets, would be good. They are non-aligned nations far from the conflict, and the football reputations of those two nations might make their soldiers welcomed and accepted by Ukrainians. The costs of UN peace keeping troops would be paid by the US, EU, and Russia, in equal parts. Though expensive, it would be much cheaper than war.

3) Form an interim government of national unity. It may take months to organize national elections, perhaps delayed until a new national constitution can be written and approved. In the meantime, if the nation of Ukraine is to survive as one nation, then there is need for immediate representation and power in the government for all regions of the Ukraine. This could perhaps be achieved by empowering a “Council of Cities” comprised of representatives appointed by the elected mayors of the capitol cities of each of Ukraine’s 24 “oblasts” (provinces). Such a nationally representative council could be empowered as a “senate” in Kiev, or could be the pool from which ministers and deputy ministers of the government must be drawn. Without urgent action to include all of Ukraine in national decisions, especially military and economic decisions, then Ukraine might shatter and be unlikely to ever again exist as a coherent nation.

4) Grant immediate economic aid, without conditions. The Ukraine’s economy was poor and is now collapsing. The EU, US, and Russia, in equal parts, should implement an economic aid package to get the Ukraine through the next few months, until a legitimate government can be elected and accepted by all regions of Ukraine. The EU, US, and Russia should give preferential status to Ukrainian exports. The EU, US, and Russia should accept Ukrainian refugees, in approximately equal numbers, as long as ethnic attacks, anti-Semitism, and militia wars force Ukrainians to flee their home communities. Although such actions may seem expensive, they are far less expensive than war, especially war that risks nuclear reactor meltdowns and risks nuclear missile launches.

5) Investigate all oligarchs for financial crimes. The motivation for many of the original Maidan Square protesters was to rid Ukraine of corrupt government run by oligarchs, for oligarchs. The 2012 Transparency International Corruption Index ranked Ukraine as 144 out of 176 nations, tied with Syria and the Central African Republic. European and US financial crime units and tax authorities should investigate all Ukrainian oligarchs. All of them. Pro-European oligarchs, pro-Russian oligarchs, and ordinary gangster oligarchs. The acting government of Ukraine is again in the hand of oligarchs. For example, Igor Kolomoysky was given Dnepropetrovsk to govern, and Sergey Taruta was given Donetsk to govern. Both are billionaires. Even Arseniy Yatsenyuk, acting leader of Ukraine, has explained that he himself had €47,000 ($65,000) of bank interest income. Presuming a high return of 3% interest, then he has around €16 million ($23 million) in bank deposits. That is not counting real estate or other investments. How did a civil servant in a poor nation acquire that kind of wealth? Someone should inquire. All financial crimes, by any of the oligarchs, no matter what their positions of power or where they have stashed their cash, should be prosecuted. Stolen money and unpaid taxes should be recouped to Ukraine’s national budget.

6) Investigate the Maidan Square snipers. The foreign minister of Estonia, Urmas Piet, after his trip to Kiev, reported to EU Foreign Policy Chief, Catherine Ashton, that “all the evidence shows, that people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people on the streets, that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides.” Ashton replied that this should be investigated, and Piet explained that the new government refuses to investigate this because it was members of the governing coalition who hired the snipers. To date, the EU has not investigated the snipers that caused the fall of a constitutional government, caused the rise of neo-fascists to positions of power, and caused the start of a civil war, maybe regional war, maybe global nuclear war. It is not a minor matter. If the NATO nations and their media truly believe that a government that shoots demonstrators is illegitimate, then the present government in Kiev is illegitimate if it came to power by shooting demonstrators. The Maidan murders are acts of political terrorism, and should be referred to the criminal court at The Hague, with support from national police forces to the degree possible.

7) Audit the $5 billion spent by the US in Ukraine. Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, has gone on record saying that the US has invested $5 billion in NGO activities in Ukraine. That does look like covert operations to destabilize Ukraine and impose a new government, especially considering that the Ukraine was destabilized by demonstrations organized by NGOs and considering that it was the same Victoria Nuland who selected the new leadership in Ukraine. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) should do a public auditing of that money, reporting which NGOs got which amounts of money, under what authorization, disbursed by whom. Misappropriations and unlawful disbursements should result in criminal prosecutions.

The pieces of the Ukraine crisis all come from the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union 25 years ago: a) oligarchs controlling and corrupting the government, b) regions that are predominantly Russian-speaking, c) neo-fascists with a hatred of Russians and other minorities, and d) NATO nations investing in chances to imperil Russia. It will be difficult for Ukraine, EU, and Russia to escape horrific outcomes unless concerted actions are taken to change the course of events. People need to press their governments to start acting for the well-being of the region’s societies, and stop acting out historical bad habits and loyalty to alliances.

Floyd Rudmin is Professor of Social & Community Psychology University of Tromsø, Norway

06 May, 2014
Countercurrents.org

By Habib Siddiqui

There is little doubt that BJP leaders’ xenophobic speeches have catalysed targeted pogrom in Assam. Justice demands that they be held accountable for their criminal role, writes Dr Habib Siddiqui from Pennsylvania

DOES Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader, have a hand in the latest killing of Bengali-speaking Muslims in western Assam’s Baska and Kokrajhar districts since Thursday evening of May 1? Union minister Kapil Sibal believes so, and so does Assam Youth Congress president Piyush Hazarika.

Addressing media, the law minister said the BJP leaders were fanning violence in Assam using morphed pictures as part of its ‘communal propaganda’ on social media. Targeting the Gujarat chief minister, the Congress leader said, ‘Modi is a model of dividing India. This is the policy of the BJP since 1984 of dividing India. The Rath Yatra, Babri Masjid demolition and all this has been a part of the communal strategy of the BJP.’

Raha MLA Hazarika said, ‘On April 1, immediately after Narendra Modi’s rally in Biswanath Chariali, a local BJP leader, Bhavdev Goswami, told a TV channel that the BJP had the support of the NDFB [National Democratic Front of Bodoland] rebels. At Sri Rampur on the Assam-West Bengal border, Modi said he would drive out all Bangladeshis after May 16.’ [The relevance of May 16 is that the BJP expects to win the marathon election held now, which ends on May 12, whose results will be declared on May 16, 2014.]

It is worth noting here that the NDFB is an armed separatist outfit which seeks to obtain a sovereign Bodoland for the Bodo people in Assam, India. It is designated as a terrorist organisation by the government of India.

According to the Assam police, the NDFB’s Sangbijit group is behind the killings in the massacre of Muslims since May 1, though the group has denied its role in a press statement.

The published reports from Assam show that on April 1, Bhavdev Goswami claimed in front of a television camera that he along with some other party workers had a meeting with members of two NDFB factions — Sangbijit and Ranjan Daimary — at Bhalukpung and they had pledged support to the BJP for the Lok Sabha polls. The BJP candidate from Tezpur constituency, RP Sarma, also reportedly told the TV channel that he was aware of the meeting. The BJP’s Sonitpur West district president Ritubaran Sarma later denied that any such meeting took place.

‘When Rahul Gandhi had a rally at Biswanath Chariali on March 27, the NDFB had declared a bandh. What more evidence do you need that the BJP is hand in glove with terror groups? Modi wants to repeat in Assam what he did in Gujarat in 2002,’ Hazarika said.

Meanwhile, the Assam minister of state for border areas development, Siddique Ahmed, has claimed that extremist elements in Bodoland People’s Front, an alliance partner of Tarun Gogoi-led state government, are involved in the recent violence in Bodoland Autonomous Territorial Districts. The BPF is also in power in the BTAD. Congress leader Abdul Khaleque has sought BPF leader Pramila Rani’s arrest for her ‘incendiary’ comment on April 30 that Muslim migrants did not vote for her party candidate from Kokrajhar seat Chandan Brahma. Chandan Brahma is currently transport minister in the Gogoi cabinet.

he All Assam Minority Students’ Union Abdur Rahim said the BTC administration had planned the mayhem after the votes were cast.

An umbrella group of 21 non-Bodo organisations has also attributed the violence to BPF legislator Pramila Rani Brahma’s view on April 30.

Opposition parties have also sought immediate resignation of chief minister Gogoi, who is also in charge of the home ministry. Badruddin Ajmal, president of Assam’s largest opposition party All India United Democratic Front, has demanded the imposition of the president’s rule in the state.

Muslims are a major constituent of this group that fielded Naba Kumar alias Hira Sarania, a former United Liberation Front of Asom rebel, as an independent candidate in Kokrajhar. Non-Bodos including other tribes have never won this seat despite constituting two-thirds of the population. ‘BPF chief Hagrama Mohilary is responsible for instigating his cadres to attack non-Bodo villagers, particularly Muslims, because his party has realised it could lose the Kokrajhar seat,’ Sarania said.

According to government officials, hundreds of Muslims and other minority groups have fled their villages to safer locations fearing a rerun of the 2012 communal clashes that took the lives of 108 people. According to India Today, indefinite curfew has been clamped in Baska and Kokrajhar districts. The union home ministry has sent 10 companies of central paramilitary forces to Kokrajhar and Baksa.

As I have noted elsewhere in a 2012 article, at the heart of Assam’s troubles is a debate over the ‘infiltration’ by outsiders, which has led to ethnic tension between the state’s so-called indigenous population and Bengali-speaking people who have settled there for generations. Overlooked in this debate is the fact that all these territories were once part of British India with people — both Assamese and Bengali — living on either side of today’s border that separates Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan/East Bengal) from the state of Assam in India.

The Assamese were mostly illiterate people and so many Indians (mostly from the province of Bengal) were brought in to work as engineers, doctors, administrators, clerks, railway workers and other government related jobs. Many of the Bengali-speaking famers were also brought in to boost rice production in the area, especially around the ‘chars’ (river islands). Having lived there for generations, these so-called migrants are as Indian (in today’s parlance) as the ethnic Assamese or the tribal people are in the state.

Forgotten also in this charged-up xenophobia is the mere fact that Muslim inhabitation in Assam can historically be put at least in the early 13th century. The descendants of those early Muslims continue to live in Assam, and are mixed with other Muslims whose ancestors had moved to the territory ever since.

Unfortunately, the ensuing change in demography, rivalry for land, dwindling natural resources and livelihood, and intensified competition for political power between the ruling party and the separatists has added a deadly force to the issue of who has a right to Assam. It is all about xenophobia. Successive governments have used Assamese/Bengali Muslims as little more than a vote bank without recognising their due rights.

The latest massacre in the tea-growing Assam state comes towards the end of a marathon election in which the Hindu fascists of the BJP have been able to stoke ethnic and religious hatred. The sad fact in today’s India is: xenophobia and bigotry sells, especially if it is against the minority Muslims. Modi and Swamy’s recent visits of the troubled northeast — a copycat of (now dead) Ariel Sharon’s visit of the holy Muslim precincts of Jerusalem just before the Israeli election — where they sold the poisonous pills of communalism and intolerance provided the necessary backdrop to bring the worst amongst the Bodo people. They became the BJP’s willing executioners.

As we have seen before, in this latest pogrom, too, entire Muslim villages have been burnt down while the police and army came too late to stop the massacre of Muslims. Like chief minister Modi of Gujarat a dozen years ago, Assamese chief minister Gogoi cannot evade his culpability for the massacre of Muslims — both then in 2012 and now in 2014.

Assamese Muslims now live in fear. The Reuters reported that Anwar Islam, a Muslim who had come to buy food in Barama, a town about 30 kilometres from the villages in the Baksa district where the violence erupted on Thursday and Friday, was heard saying, ‘We are scared to live in our village, unless security is provided by the government.’ He said men armed with rifles had come to his village, Masalpur, on bicycles and had then fired indiscriminately and set huts on fire.

As I write this article on Sunday, 32 people have died, all Muslims, as a result of the latest pogrom in the BATD of the state of Assam. The district administration in the adjoining Dhubri district has opened up two relief camps. The death toll is expected to go up with many reported missing.

Targeted massacre of minorities has no place in our time, especially in a state that touts itself as a model of democracy and secularism. Such crimes only strengthen the dark forces on all sides, and often have ramifications that go beyond the sources of the trouble. The Indian government owes it to its people to rein upon such evil fascist forces that have managed to thrive unscathed, often fattened by the local government that is supposed to protect the victims.

The Indian Election commission should also look into the matter of hate speech delivered by chauvinist politicians whether such speeches had violated rules during the election time.

There is little doubt that BJP leaders’ xenophobic speeches have catalysed targeted pogrom in Assam. Justice demands that they be held accountable for their criminal role. Otherwise, all those bloated claims about Indian secularism are mere hogwash and nothing else.

Dr Habib Siddiqui is a peace and rights activist.

5 May 2014

http://newagebd.net/

By Akbar E. Torbat

Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani (formerly Fereidon Sorkhei) “does not have any political or social base of his own at home.” That was a statement by Ahmad Pournejati , a reformist and a former member of the Iranian parliament. [1] According to Pornejati, Rouhani did not comply with the demands of his reformists’ allies who made the ground for him to become president. Losing reformists’ supports, Rouhani now depends on the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Western Powers for support. Rohani’s political-base is strong in London and in Washington. This can be understood from the support he is getting from the Western media and lobby organizations.

Rouhani’s secret dealing with the US to settle Iran’s nuclear dispute has raised a lot of criticisms in the Iranian political circles, including the Iranian parliament. Because Rouhani does not have people’s support, he is seen as a West’s stooge who tries to abandon Iran’s nuclear program. His dealing has to do more with getting support from the West to preserve the clerical rule in Iran than to defend Iran’s nuclear rights in the dispute.

Rouhani pretends his secret nuke deal was not Iran’s outright yield but instead was surrendering of the Big Six powers to Iran. [2] When some academics criticized his secret deal, he called them uneducated, while he has given himself a doctorate title since he served in the Iranian Parliament more than three decades ago. A British university (Glasgow Caledonian) tried to legitimize his “doctorate” title by publishing a one-page summary of a paper supposedly written by Hassan Fereidon dated July 1998. But that turned out to be an embarrassment to the university and Rouhani himself as the main idea and expressions in the summery were from a book titled Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence written by an Islamic Scholar Mohammad Hashim Kamali, which had been originally published in 1989. [3] Despite all that, President Barack Obama praised Rouhani and his election in a television message he sent on March 20, 2014, for the occasion of Iranian New Year day Norooz. He said “Last year, you—the Iranian people—made your voice heard when you elected Dr. Hassan Rouhani as your new president. During his campaign, he pledged to strengthen Iran’s economy, improve the lives of the Iranian people and engage constructively with the international community—and he was elected with your strong support”. [4] It was a surprise that a country founded on the basis of separation of religion and state to view the clerical oligarchy in Tehran as the rightful government of Iran.

Rouhani came to office by the motto of “prudence and hope”. However, his promise of transparency became secrecy, his promise of political participation for all turned out to be purging his critics from the government institutions, his promise of freedom of the press turned out to be shutting down critical newspapers and giving warning notices to others. [5] Being afraid of worker revolt against the regime, he did not approve a permit for a march on the May 1 st Labor Day celebration requested by the state labor organization “Khaneh Kargar”.

Despite his promises, Rouhani has made no progress on promoting and protecting freedom of speech. In late March, it was announced that some prisoners had been pardoned or their sentences were reduced by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but it was not indicated whether any political prisoners were among them. The number of political prisoners in Iran is quite large. According to Ahmed Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran, there are currently about 900 political prisoners in Iran. Imprisoning political dissidents and executions have continued under Rouhani’s watchful eyes. In fact, Mohammad-Javad Larijani, whose one of his brothers is heading the judiciary and another one is heading the parliament, has loudly said the world should stop complaining about Iran’s executions and instead “be grateful for this great service to humanity”. [6] Rouhani’s justice minister, Mustafa pour-Mohammadi, has blood on his hands for executing thousands of Iranian political prisoners in 1988. [7] As a matter of formality, both the US and EU officials have publicly criticized Iran’s human rights records, but at the same time they have restarted their commercial business with Iran in exchange for Iran dismantling its nuclear program.

Rouhani has filled his cabinet with very wealthy ministers. According to Elias Naderan, a member of Iran’s parliament, several ministers in Rouhani’s cabinet have about 800 to 1000 billion tomans ($265 to $330 million dollar) wealth. [8] While most Iranians are suffering from poverty, Rouhani’s wife gave a lavish party on April 19 in previous Shah’s Sadabad Palace, which raised strong criticisms in the Iranian media. [9] In February, Rouhani spent pennies of the approximately $ 4 billion returned to Iran (a part of the $100 billion Iran’s assets frozen by the West) to give food baskets to the poor hoping to build a political base among them. However, his action backfired as it was demeaning to the poor who were treated like beggars. The poor had to wait hours outside in frigid weather to get to front of the long line, at which time some found they were not qualified to get the foods. Two persons died in the stamped in the crowded lines while waiting to get the foods. Ultimately, Rouhani had to apologize on state television for the problems the food distribution had caused.

Rouhani urged the Iranian people in late April not to apply for monthly $15 cash subsidies. Contrary to his expectation, 73 million or 95% of the 77-million Iran’s population registered to receive the subsidy, which amounts to about $1,140 million per month. [10] In this year budget, he has increased the funding for clerical institutions while cutting the funds for essential subsidies. Under the clerical regime, the Iranian workers have become more and more impoverished while the clerics, their relatives and cronies have amassed enormous wealth.

Instead of speaking about what he has done to solve the country’s problems, Rouhani frequently criticizes his predecessor, former President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad gained people’s support for his promise to bring Iran out of the hands of the oil mafia led by cleric tycoon Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his sons. Rouhani has done just the opposite. His oil minister, Bijan Namdar Zangeneh, has been involved in a major oil corruption case. Zangeneh served as the oil minister in Mohammad Khatami’s cabinet (1997-2005). In 2001, Zangeneh signed the shameful Crescent oil contract through a middleman involving Rafsanjani family. Crescent Petroleum is a privately owned oil and gas company headquartered in the United Arab Emirates. Under the 25-year contract, the National Iranian Oil Company obligated Iran to sell oil to Crescent at a bargain price of $18 to $40 as compared to the current price of over $100 per barrel. [11] In 2006, Iran unilaterally canceled the Crescent contract. The case is now in the International Hague Arbitration Tribunal for corruption charges.

In the meantime, Rouhani wants to bring back the international oil companies and give them lucrative contracts. In late January 2014, he led a delegation that included Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif and Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Rouhani presented an outline of the new “Iran Petroleum Contract” to replace the former “buy-back” contract format in order to attract investment from the oil companies. To encourage the oil companies’ investments, he has proposed long-term contracts and faster production rate to the companies. While this is good for the oil companies, it is not good for Iran because it deplete Iran’s oilfield and will flood the market leading to lower oil prices. At Davos, Rouhani attended a meeting with oil companies’ executives including Christophe de Margerie, the Chief Executive Officer of the French oil company Total SA. De Margerie in an interview said, the oil contracts will be “more sexy than before”. [12]

Rouhani’s political base will be further tested as he has begun to implement the next phase of neoliberal reforms prescribed by the International Monetary Fund. While the Iranian economy is already in recession, It remains to be seen how the Iranians, 95% of whom have registered to get a monthly subsidy check, will react to Rouhani’s economic austerity program.

Akbar E. Torbat (atorbat@calstatela.edu) teaches economics at California State University, Los Angeles.

03 May, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Countercurrents

Stephen Hawking has warned against the use of drones in warfare, with the world caught in “an IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investment and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation”.

The physicist considered one of the greatest minds in today’s world said:

“Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets; the UN and Human Rights Watch have advocated a treaty banning such weapons. In the medium term, as emphasised by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age, AI may transform our economy to bring both great wealth and great dislocation.”

He says that humanity should learn how to avoid the risks that artificial intelligence (AI) poses to mankind.

In an op-ed in the Independent (UK), Hawking describes a situation in the not-too-distant future where the intelligence of machines could outpace humans.

Stephen Hawking is the director of research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge and a 2012 Fundamental Physics Prize laureate for his work on quantum gravity.

The pioneering physicist has said the creation of general artificial intelligence systems may be the “greatest event in human history” – but, then again, it could also destroy us.

The physicist said IBM’s Jeopardy! -busting Watson machine, Google Now, Siri, self-driving cars, and Microsoft’s Cortana will all “pale against what the coming decades will bring.”

We are, in Hawking’s words, caught in “an IT arms race fueled by unprecedented investment and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation.”

These investments, whether made by huge companies such as Google or startups like Vicarious, have the potential to revolutionize our society.

But Hawking worries that though “success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. … it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.”

So inevitable is the rise of a general artificial intelligence system that Hawking cautioned that governments and companies are not doing nearly enough to prepare for its arrival.

“If a superior alien civilization sent us a message saying, ‘We’ll arrive in a few decades’, would we just reply, ‘OK, call us when you get here – we’ll leave the lights on’? Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI,” Hawking wrote.

The only way to stave off a societal meltdown when AI arrives is to devote serious research at places such as Cambridge ‘s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future Life Institute, he said.

03 May, 2014
Countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are the highest in 3 million years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere averaged more than 400 parts per million throughout April, the first time the planet’s monthly average has surpassed that threshold.

The data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California , San Diego , shows how world leaders are failing to rein in greenhouse gases that climate scientists say are warming the planet.

“We’re running out of time, but not solutions,” Ed Chen, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an e-mail. “The next big step is to limit, for the first time, carbon pollution being spewed by our power plants.”

The average value for April was measured at 401.33 ppm at the Mauna Loa monitoring station in Hawaii , according to an announcement on Twitter disclosing the finding by the institution’s Keeling Curve program. It was named for the scientist who began the measurements in 1958 and shows that temperatures are rising more quickly.

The finding adds to concerns that a buildup of carbon dioxide is damaging the atmosphere, making storms more intense, melting glaciers and putting at risk the future of seaside cities such as Miami .

The level of CO2 broke 400, as a daily average, for the first time last May. Less than a year later, the average for a month has exceeded a threshold not seen in the measured record dating back 3 million years.

Concentrations of CO2 are rising at about 2 to 3 ppm a year. The United Nations has said that in order to maximize our chances of limiting the global temperature rise since 1750 to the internationally agreed-upon target of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the concentration of all greenhouse gases should peak at no higher than 450 ppm this century.

That includes methane and nitrous oxide, gases not included in the Scripps measurement.

The atmospheric concentration of all greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxide, was equivalent to a CO2 level of 430 ppm in 2011, according to the UN intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The annual average concentration of CO2 that year was about 391 ppm, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Association.

03 May, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Mike Head

In what can only be described as a massacre, 38 anti-government activists were killed Friday after fascist-led forces set fire to Odessa’s Trade Unions House, which had been sheltering opponents of the US- and European-backed regime in Ukraine.

According to eye-witnesses, those who jumped from the burning building and survived were surrounded and beaten by thugs from the neo-Nazi Right Sector. Video footage shows bloodied and wounded survivors being attacked.

The atrocity underscores both the brutal character of the right-wing government installed in Kiev by the Western powers and the encouragement by the US and its allies of a bloody crackdown by the regime to suppress popular opposition, centered in the mainly Russian-speaking south and east of Ukraine.

As the Odessa outrage occurred, US President Barack Obama, at a joint White House press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, explicitly endorsed the military offensive being carried out by the unelected Kiev government against protesters occupying official buildings in eastern Ukraine.

Despite Western media attempts to cover up what happened in Odessa—with multiple reports stating that “the exact sequence of events is still unclear”—there is no doubt that the killings in the southern port city were instigated by thugs wearing the insignia of the Right Sector, which holds positions in the Kiev regime, along with the like-minded Svoboda party.

The Trade Unions House was set on fire by pro-Kiev elements after they surrounded and set fire to a tent camp of anti-government activists that had stood for several weeks in front of the building on Odessa’s Kulikovo Field Square. The building itself was torched after some of the anti-government protesters barricaded themselves inside it.

As the building was engulfed in flames, photos posted on Twitter showed people hanging out of windows and sitting on windowsills of several floors, possibly preparing to jump. Other images showed pro-regime elements celebrating the inferno. Some jeered on Twitter that “Colorado beetles are being roasted up in Odessa,” using a derogatory term for pro-Russian activists wearing St. George’s ribbons.

Thirty of the victims were found on the floors of the building, having apparently suffocated from smoke inhalation. Eight more died after jumping out of windows to escape the blaze, according to local police. Ukraine authorities said a total of 43 people died in Odessa Friday and 174 others sustained injuries, with 25 still in a critical condition.

The violence started as around 1,500 supporters of the Kiev authorities, who recently arrived in the city, gathered at Sobornaya Square in central Odessa. Armed with chains and bats and carrying shields, they marched through the city, chanting “Glory to Ukraine,” “Death to enemies” and “Knife the Moskals [derogatory for Russians].”

Odessa has been among the southeast Ukrainian cities swept by protests since the February coup. At the end of March, thousands rallied in the city, challenging the legitimacy of the coup-imposed government and demanding an autonomy referendum.

The Odessa massacre is the largest death toll so far since the Ukrainian regime, at the urging of the Obama administration, renewed its full-scale military assault on anti-government protests and occupations.

Earlier Friday, interim Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov said many separatists had been killed in a government offensive in Slavyansk. Kiev officials said troops overran rebel checkpoints surrounding the city of 130,000 people in an operation launched before dawn, adding that the city was now “tightly encircled.”

Despite the use of helicopter gunships, the assault stalled, however, because of local resistance. By early afternoon, the Ukrainian troops were halted in the villages of Bylbasovka and Andreyevka, where residents flocked to their lines to argue with them and urge them not to fight.

In Andreyevka, about 200 people formed a human chain to stop armoured personnel carriers and trucks. In Bylbasovka, residents chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” In the nearby town of Kramatorsk, people blocked roads with trolley cars and buses in an attempt to prevent the army from entering.

At his press conference with Merkel, Obama seized on reports that two Ukrainian helicopters had been struck by ground fire. He cited unconfirmed allegations by the Ukrainian intelligence agency SBU that one was hit by a heat-seeking missile as proof that Russian forces were involved. By the evening, however, even the New York Times admitted that no evidence had been produced of heat-seeking missiles.

Along with Obama’s incendiary claim, his backing for Kiev’s military onslaught points to a drive by the US and its European partners to create civil war conditions and goad Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration into intervening, in order to provide the pretext for crippling economic sanctions and a NATO confrontation with Russia.

Washington pushed for the renewed offensive just days after the Kiev regime appeared to back away from an all-out military assault, saying it was “helpless” to stop the occupations of buildings, which have spread to at least 17 cities and towns.

Putin sought to forestall the US-led push by signing a so-called peace agreement with the US, the European Union and Ukraine two weeks ago, which provided for ending the building occupations and halting plans for a military crackdown. This pact has been swept aside by Kiev and its backers. Putin’s spokesman yesterday said the “punitive operation” mounted by Ukraine had destroyed the agreement.

Russia called another emergency UN Security Council meeting Friday to denounce Ukraine’s actions. Moscow’s ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, warned of “catastrophic consequences” if the military operation continued, only to be denounced by his US counterpart, Samantha Power, who called the attack “proportionate and reasonable.”

Power, who made a name for herself by championing US military interventions in Libya and elsewhere in the name of “human rights” and the “protection of civilians,” declared that Russia’s concern about escalating instability was “cynical and disingenuous.” In keeping with US government propaganda since the beginning of the crisis, she baldly asserted that Russia was the cause of the instability.

It was Washington and its allies, particularly the German government that orchestrated the ultra-nationalist February putsch in Kiev and then exploited the reaction of Moscow, and Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population, to accuse Russia of threatening Ukraine.

Having poured some $5 billion into the country to install the Kiev regime via violent paramilitary operations, it is now accusing Russia, without producing any serious evidence, of doing the very same thing.

Ukraine’s initial military assault last month began after CIA Director James Brennan surreptitiously visited Kiev. A second push followed a visit by US Vice President Joseph Biden.

There is evidence of ongoing US involvement. The Russian Foreign Ministry said English-speaking foreigners had been seen among the Ukrainian forces mounting the assault on Slavyansk on Friday, echoing its previous charges that Greystone, a US military contractor, is working alongside the Ukrainian military.

In part, the US operation seems directed at preventing an autonomy referendum planned by anti-Kiev opponents on May 11. In addition, a Ukrainian presidential election, scheduled for May 25, is seen by the Western powers as a means of lending legitimacy to the coup government in Kiev. The most widely-promoted presidential candidate, billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko, advocates NATO membership for Ukraine and the subordination of the country to the dictates of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

But with the Kiev regime failing to suppress the opposition, Washington appears intent on provoking a confrontation and then accusing Russia of preventing the presidential poll from proceeding. Meanwhile, on the pretext of training exercises, US troops are being deployed in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as Poland, bringing NATO forces right up to Russia’s borders.

03 May, 2014
WSWS.org

 

By Gaither Stewart

Rome: On the heels of the disasters left behind by the USA-led wars in the small countries of Iraq, Libya and Syria, among others, the reasons for America’s blatant and barely disguised aggression against Ukraine might seem at first puzzling. If America’s armed forces and its proxies left such socio-economic messes in such smaller and weaker countries, why the sudden all-out attack on Ukraine that translates into an attack on the powerful nuclear power Russia? If US forces could not defeat the Shia in Iraq, nor suppress the tribal society in Libya, nor break the Assad government in Syria, how could Washington’s power-mad neocons even dream of planting missile bases in Ukraine and of subduing an unbeatable Russia as both Napoleon and Hitler experienced?

It is difficult to distinguish Ukraine from Russia. Ukraine is as much Russia as Texas is the USA. Russian-Ukrainians in the traditional Russian city of Kiev, today claimed by bands of Fascists and neo-Nazis of the so-called Right Sector and the Svoboda political party, write daily in pure Russian on their Facebook pages of their disgust with the whole artificially mounted process. Though the majority in Kiev are Ukrainians, or Little Russians, Ukraine is still Russia. The attempt to separate them is pure folly.

The awkward and mad US attempt to simply skip over Ukraine, as if it didn’t count, is the acme of hubris, just as would a Russian-backed Mexican attempt to occupy Texas and California.

However, there is a secondary aspect of the US-NATO-EU aggression against Ukraine: the enduring American fear of the endemic germ-disease of Socialism/Communism in Russia that is very much alive today, and spreading in Russia and East Europe. The independent Socialist magazine, Monthly Review, recently quoted the Secretary of the Russian Communist, Gennady Zygunov, at the 14th plenum of the Party Central Committee on the 95th anniversary of the Russian Revolution that today’s Russian CP, together with the other main Socialist Party, regularly poll about 40% of the vote which some observers claim would be more than 50% if elections were a little more transparent.

The American fear of Russia is an old story. In November, 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia based on the slogan of “peace, bread and land.” Within five weeks, France, Britain and the USA decided to intervene against the antiwar Russian Bolsheviks, claiming it was necessary to keep Russia in the war against Germany.

Today we know that was not the real reason. The real reason was to stamp out the spreading contagion of Socialism. The Allied intervention nearly a century ago marked the real beginning of the Cold War against Russia. Today’s US/NATO/EU support for neo-Nazis and Fascists in Ukraine against Russia is the continuation of that same anti-Socialist crusade.

As Phil Braithwaite underlines in his book To Begin at the Beginning, the same “Allied intervention was responsible for Bolshevik terror (against real internal threats)—which was then used as the basic public pretext for continued intervention after November 1918.”

The English scholar, Braithwaite goes on the say that “the motivation and character of Allied intervention in Russia between 1917 and 1920 … were primarily ideological.”
“The purpose of the Allied intervention,” Churchill stated, “was to strangle the baby in its crib.” And thus, ultimately, one may safely add, the intervention was a primary cause of WWII. This same Allied anti-Socialist crusade motivated the non-intervention in Spain on the side of the Republic, the sell-out to Hitler in Munich and the subsequent policy of appeasement of the Nazi regime in the hope the Wehrmacht of the Third Reich would succeed in smashing Socialist Russia where the Allied intervention failed. Consequently, even the post-WWII arms race has its origins in the hostility to Socialism and the Soviet Union

The Russian has often been labeled the most religious person in Europe. One can argue that though Russian Communism was executed by Lenin or Stalin, they did not invent it. The Russian form of Socialism/Communism is closely linked to the Russian’s sense of Communitarianism. In ancient times, “the Russian village community, called in Russian the mir, was based on neighbourhood and property, with however the warmth and the patriarchal character of life.” (G.P. Fedotov in The Russian Religious Mind.) Even the word mir has messianic connotations inherent in Socialism; mir means also world and peace.

Moreover, according to Russian historiography, ancient Russian peoples and kingdoms sought to avoid wars and bloodshed. Only extreme historical and geographical circumstances have precipitated Russia into war, for example its drive for a maritime exit from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

Here is the issue today: Russia has not sought conflict in Ukraine. During Russia’s period of weakness after the disintegration of the former USSR, it had to accept US/NATO encroachments and military a/o missile bases in neighbouring nations like Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland and even in former Soviet republics like the Baltic States and Georgia. Russia even bore up under US-sponsored interference in Chechnya in the Caucasus.

However, today, an again strong Russia, pushed to the limit by American hubris, has said a loud No! to aggression against Ukraine, Russia’s spiritual Slavic brother. A powerful No! to the US strategy of placing missile sites in territory considered the cradle, the very soul of Russia. It has said No! to this new “Allied” intervention. Loud and clear. This intervention, as was the Napoleonic invasion, as was the Allied intervention in 1917, as was the Hitlerite invasion in WWII, is an attack on Holy Russia. Those previous interventions have much in common: they all ended in disastrous failures.

No one should be deceived by a puppet Fascist-Nazi regime in Kiev, one of Russia’s holy cities. People of Kiev are not deceived. People of the West Ukraine with its history of collaboration with Hitler’s legions invading Holy Russia in WWII are not deceived. Russia will never be content with re-claiming what is “hers”, the south-eastern, pro-Russian provinces of Ukraine. Russia will eventually re-absorb what is as much a part of Russia as is Texas of the USA. Without Russia, Ukraine is hardly a nation that could not even organize properly world soccer championship games. As a people they are called in those parts “Little Russians”. A people-nation which cannot exist economically independent from Russia. Today, Ukraine’s puppet leaders are begging Europe and the USA to pay its debts to Russia for its indispensable gas supplies, while they pathetically decide to cut off water supplies to the Crimea already re-annexed to Russia. And dare to send troops eastwards toward Eastern cities whose Russian ethnic majorities have revolted against the US supported Fascist regime in their holy Kiev, many of which troops anyway defect to the Russian side.

The aspect of Russia’s historical preference for peace (which is not as esoteric a discourse as it might seem to more hardened readers) as compared to America’s marked preference for war reflect the extreme difference between two types of society. (As according to Emil Cioran, the difference between the very basic moral values of the two cultures: one for peace, the other for war.)

I don’t believe that Putin’s long silences are signs of a tolerance born from weakness —neither his own nor of the people he leads. Washington should be extremely careful not to overstep here the limits as it does regularly. As Cioran writes in Histoire et Utopie, “Ambition is a drug which makes of the addicted a madman in power.”

Gaither Stewart is a veteran journalist, his dispatches on politics, literature, and culture.

02 May, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Alex Lantier

NATO officials escalated their military build-up against Russia yesterday, as the pro-Western puppet regime in Kiev reinstated conscription in order to boost its crackdown on spreading pro-Russian protests in eastern Ukraine.

The news came as the position of the far-right regime in Kiev weakened, with more cities and government buildings in east Ukraine held by protesters and militias opposed to it. Protesters stormed the prosecutor’s office, disarming police, in the city of Donetsk, one of many cities in the region, including Luhansk, Slavyansk, and Kramatorsk, now outside of Kiev’s control.

A statement issued by the Kiev regime’s acting president Oleksandr Turchynov confirmed that the aim of the conscription order, for all able-bodied males between 18 and 25, was to boost the crackdown in predominately Russian-speaking areas. The order was issued “given the deteriorating situation in the east and the south [and] the rising force of armed pro-Russian units and the taking of public administration buildings,” the statement declared. It added that the protests “threaten the territorial integrity” of Ukraine.

Turchynov’s justification for the conscription order is a political fraud. His regime, the product of a Western-backed putsch, does not stand for Ukraine’s independence or its territorial integrity. The regime has launched crackdowns planned in discussions with top US officials such as CIA Director John Brennan and Vice President Joe Biden, who visited Kiev as successive waves of repression began.

The contempt of the Kiev regime and its imperialist backers for the Ukrainian population was further underscored by their agreement to a $17 billion bailout package dictated by the International Monetary Fund. It is conditioned on unpopular fuel price increases and mass layoffs in the public sector that have already provoked protests in several cities.

Turchynov has admitted that his regime’s security forces are “helpless” to stop the spread of pro-Russian seizures of cities and government buildings across east Ukraine. Some army and police units have refused orders to shoot protesters. The Kiev regime has turned to setting up private militias led by business oligarchs or fascist paramilitaries from the Right Sector to attack the protesters.

This crackdown has placed the world on the verge of war. Moscow has stated that it will use “all means” to protect ethnic Russians from Ukrainian forces, should the Kiev regime’s crackdown escalate into a large-scale massacre of the population of east Ukraine. In a phone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that all Ukrainian troops be withdrawn from eastern Ukraine.

The conscription order is a desperate attempt to bolster the tottering Kiev regime amid deepening political crisis and rising popular opposition. If obeyed in parts of the country still under Kiev’s control, it would provide back-up to the fascist forces spearheading the repression of the protests.

It would also place an army of over a million men, supported and equipped by NATO, directly on Russia’s southwestern border. In this, the Kiev regime is doing the bidding of its Western imperialist masters, who are recklessly denouncing Russia and mounting a military build-up across Eastern Europe laying the basis for a major war with Russia.

Yesterday, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow branded Russia an enemy. “Clearly the Russians have declared NATO as an adversary, so we have to begin to view Russia no longer as a partner, but as more of an adversary than a partner,” he said.

Vershbow said NATO could repudiate its 1997 pledge not to station nuclear weapons or large numbers of troops in Eastern Europe. Given Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and the east Ukraine protests, he said, “we would be within our rights” to scrap the deal and permanently station “significant” numbers of troops in Eastern Europe.

The Western powers are seizing upon the Ukraine crisis to try to carry out a major restructuring of European and world politics. Like the September 11, 2001 attacks, which US imperialism exploited to launch a series of unpopular Middle East wars, the Ukraine crisis is to provide the Western imperialist powers with a justification for a massive military escalation and the preparation of large-scale wars.

Such topics will doubtless be at the heart of discussions today between US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is visiting Washington, DC.

Claims that NATO’s reckless escalation is simply a response to Russian military aggression are lies. Protests in eastern Ukraine—previously the power base of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed by the February putsch—are not the product of Russian aggression, but of broad opposition to the oligarchs and fascists who lead the Kiev regime. They are a consequence of the reckless decision of the NATO powers, led by Washington and Berlin, to back the putsch and then stoke tensions with Moscow.

Since the Kiev putsch, Washington and its NATO allies have stationed fighter jets and ground forces in Poland, the Baltic States, and Romania. They have also stepped up naval deployments to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, while hypocritically denouncing Russia for stationing troops along its western border with Ukraine.

Vershbow said that NATO will deploy more forces, to be able to intervene rapidly in the Baltic states. “We want to be sure that we can come to the aid of these countries if there were any, even indirect, threat very quickly before any facts on the ground can be established,” he said.

Such a deployment would be wildly provocative. Were NATO forces to be stationed in the northernmost Baltic country, Estonia, they would be less than 100 miles from Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg.

NATO officials also announced yesterday that they were examining ways to grant NATO membership status to the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, in the southern Caucasus.

Such a move also directly raises the risk of war between Russia and NATO. Russia and Georgia fought a brief war in 2008, after Georgia attacked Russian peacekeepers stationed in ethnic minority regions of Georgia along its border with Russia. Had Georgia been a NATO member state at the time, the other NATO powers could have invoked the Clause 5 mutual self-defense guarantee between NATO member states to justify intervening in the war on Georgia’s side.

NATO Special Representative for the Caucasus James Appathurai pledged that the organization would ignore Russian objections to Georgian membership in NATO.

“What Russia says or does will not influence our decision,” he said. “We will judge Georgia on Georgia’s merits and regardless of what’s happening elsewhere and regardless of comments from the Kremlin or elsewhere … We are now looking, of course, at next steps, at bringing Georgia even closer to NATO and to meeting its goals.”

02 May, 2014

WSWS.org

 

 

By Anuradha Sharma And Vishal Arora

BANGKOK — To many Americans, Buddhism is about attaining enlightenment, maybe even nirvana, through such peaceful methods as meditation and yoga.

But in some parts of Asia, a more assertive, strident and militant Buddhism is emerging. In three countries where Buddhism is the majority faith, a form of religious nationalism has taken hold:
* In Sri Lanka, where about 70 percent of the population is Theravada Buddhist, a group of monks formed the Bodu Bala Sena or the Buddhist Power Force in 2012 to “protect” the country’s Buddhist culture. The force, nicknamed BBS, carried out at least 241 attacks against Muslims and 61 attacks against Christians in 2013, according to the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress.

* In Myanmar, at least 300 Rohingya Muslims, whose ancestors were migrants from Bangladesh, have been killed and up to 300,000 displaced, according to Genocide Watch. Ashin Wirathu, a monk who describes himself as the Burmese “bin Laden,” is encouraging the violence by viewing the Rohingya presence as a Muslim “invasion.”

* And in Buddhist-majority Thailand, at least 5,000 people have died in Muslim-Buddhist violence in the country’s South. The country’s Knowing Buddha Foundation is not a violent group, but it advocates for a blashemy law to punish anyone who offends the faith. It wants Buddhism declared the state religion and portrays popular culture as a threat to believers.

Though fundamentalism is a term that has thus far been used mostly in relation to Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, some are beginning to use it to describe Buddhists as well.

Maung Zarni, an exiled Burmese who has written extensively on the ongoing violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, argues that there is no room for fundamentalism in Buddhism.

“No Buddhist can be nationalistic,” said Zarni, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. “There is no country for Buddhists. I mean, no such thing as ‘me,’ ‘my’ community, ‘my’ country, ‘my’ race or even ‘my’ faith.”

He views the demand for an anti-blasphemy law in Thailand also as a distortion of Buddhism, which doesn’t allow any “organization that polices or regulates the faithful’s behavior or inner thoughts.”

But Acharawadee Wongsakon, the Buddhist teacher who founded the Knowing Buddha Foundation, insists Buddhism needs legal protections and society must follow certain prescribed do’s and don’ts.

She and others see the new movements as providing “true knowledge on Buddhism.”

Thailand’s conflict between Muslim insurgents and local Buddhists, which reignited along the Malaysian border in 2004, is part of a long-standing feud pitting Buddhist monks and Muslim insurgents.

“For sure, Thailand has its own brand of ‘Buddhist’ racism towards non-Buddhists,” said Zarni. “But, I am not sure the Thai society will go the way of those two genocidal Theravada Buddhist societies (Sri Lanka and Myanmar) — where racism of genocidal nature has enveloped the mainstream ‘Buddhist’ society.”

Buddhist monk Phramaha Boonchuay Doojai, a senior lecturer at Chiang Mai Buddhist College in Thailand, said there are reasons why Theravada Buddhists see Islam as a threat. Among them, he cited the destruction of Nalanda University in India by Turkic military general Bakhtiyar Khilji in the early 13th century and attacks on Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, around the seventh century and more recently by the Taliban in 2001.

“Thousands of monks were burned alive and thousands beheaded as Khilji tried his best to uproot Buddhism,” he said.

Zarni agrees there are links “among what I really call anti-Dharma ‘Buddhist’ networks” in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, which are “toxic, cancerous and deeply harmful to all humans anywhere.”

Wirathu was recently labeled on the cover of Time magazine as “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” The Myanmar government banned the edition. But Wirathu was quoted telling a reporter, “I am proud to be called a radical Buddhist.”

YS/MG END ANURADHA-ARORA

2 May 2014

Religion News Service

By BBC
A Dutch Catholic priest was shot dead in the Syrian city of Homs earlier this month, but who was he, and what was he doing there? Bethlehem-based writer Daniel Silas Adamson pays tribute to a Jesuit who practised yoga, ran a farm and welcomed people of all faiths on mountain hikes.

No-one who knew Frans van der Lugt, the Dutch Jesuit priest murdered in Syria, was surprised by his refusal to leave the besieged city of Homs. He had spent almost 50 years in Syria and had been in Homs since the siege began more than two years ago.

The last European left inside the Old City, he was sought out by journalists and became a spokesman for the trapped and starving civilian population. “I have learned about the generosity of the Syrian people,” he told a reporter earlier this year. “If these people are suffering now I want to be in solidarity with them. As I was with these people in their good times, I am with them in their pain.”

A few years ago, I met Frans at the residence in Homs where, on 7 April, he was taken into the garden by a masked gunman and shot in the head. We were introduced by Paolo dall Oglio, an Italian priest who also spent his life in Syria and has not been seen or heard of since he was kidnapped by Islamist rebels in Raqqa in July 2013.

In many ways the two men were similar. Both were Jesuits. Both spoke fluent Arabic and considered Syria home. Both had been shaped by the ideals of internationalism and social justice that influenced the Catholic Church in the 1960s. In Syria, far from the rigid hierarchies of the Vatican, Frans and Paolo each found the freedom to pursue an unorthodox vision of what it meant to be a Catholic priest.

But they responded in radically different ways to the challenge of serving a dwindling Christian community in a predominantly Muslim country.
Paolo built on the bedrock of Syrian Christianity – desert monasticism. In the 1980s he found a ruined Byzantine monastery in the mountains some 80km (50 miles) north of Damascus and slowly restored it to life. Deir Mar Musa, as the monastery was called in Arabic, had been founded before Islam and only abandoned in the mid-19th Century.

For Paolo, it was witness to centuries of coexistence between Christians and Muslims and was, for that reason, an ideal place from which to promote friendship across lines of religious difference. He received thousands of Muslim guests at Deir Mar Musa, always making clear that they were welcome to eat, to sleep, and to pray at the monastery. Often he would show them the frescoes in the church, pointing out the 12th Century painting of Abraham (for Muslims, the Prophet Ibrahim) that covered the west wall.

“I believe in traditions, and the oriental tradition is rich and full of value,” Paolo told me as we drove from Deir Mar Musa to meet Frans in Homs. “Fourteen centuries of common life between Christians and Muslims is not something to be cast aside lightly.”
In the early 1990s, while Paolo was rebuilding his monastery in the desert, Frans was given a few acres of flat agricultural land about 15km south-west of Homs. He called it al-Ard – the earth – and he used it to create a spiritual centre that had no precedent in Syria.

“It’s simple, like the earth,” Frans said. “That’s all.”

The dirt track that led from the main road to al-Ard ran between olive groves and vineyards. Frans didn’t use weed-killers or pesticides and there were wild flowers everywhere. In the centre of the land was a vegetable garden where perhaps a dozen people, many of them children or teenagers with disabilities, were weeding and watering the red earth.

Each morning Frans made a circuit of the nearby villages in his old VW van, collecting these young people from their families and bringing them to the farm. In a culture where people with disabilities are often hidden away in shame, Frans was creating a space where they could work together as part of “a community that values everybody”.
Some of these people needed patient, full-time support. Others, with less severe disabilities or mental health problems, were employed in the vineyards that made al-Ard economically sustainable.

The work was shared by the volunteers who lived on the farm and by those – of all faiths – who visited for spiritual retreats led by Frans.

Sceptical about initiatives that emphasised theological common ground, Frans rarely mentioned the Abrahamic roots shared by Syria’s Christians and Muslims. If anything, he looked beyond monotheism entirely. He was a serious student of Zen Buddhism and sat in silent meditation every morning. He also taught meditation and yoga in a quiet, light-filled space, neither church nor mosque, that he built at the heart of al-Ard. “For me,” he said, “it is important to start from the human meeting. Not to start with religion.”

The hike in the Jebal Ansariya mountains
That lack of dogmatism may have been one of the things that drew young people to Frans. In 1980 he began walking through the Jebal Ansariya, the mountains that rise from Syria’s Mediterranean coast, with students from his parish. Almost 30 years later, already in his 70s, Frans was still leading an annual eight-day hike across the country, followed by as many as 200 or 300 young Syrians – Christian and Muslim, Druze and Alawite. Though he was reluctant to ascribe any particular purpose to the walks, Frans acknowledged that they had become something special.

“The hike brings people together. They share the common experience of fatigue, of sleeping and eating together, and this builds a link between people. After the hike it is not important that you are Christian or Muslim, it is important that you are present.”

Working on the land, sitting in silence, walking across the countryside. For Frans, these basic human experiences were the most reliable way to create “a kind of unity, a human complicity, a human comprehension”. In the search for what he called “the common place of being” he had come to distrust the certainties that often accompany religious identity. Unless he was leading a service, Frans wore no outward signs of the priesthood to which he belonged and there was nothing at Al Ard that marked it out as a Christian space.

As he drove me back to Homs, Frans said: “You know, I don’t really like religions. I believe in the spiritual experience that is the source, the initial inspiration of faith. Religions are always losing that inspiration, that direct experience; then they are not in the true way. I mean, they are in the hypocrisy of speaking for the spirit with which they have lost touch.”
Frans, though, stayed true to his life’s work. Through the appalling siege of Homs, his devotion to the Syrian people never faltered. To the end he spoke not of Christians or Muslims but of fellow human beings struggling to survive.

“There is nothing more painful than watching mothers searching for food for their children in the streets,” he said in a video clip released in February. “We love life, we want to live. And we do not want to sink in a sea of pain and suffering.”

 

26 April 2014
www.bbc.com