Gaza… surviving inside the tiny box

Post Information
Print & pdf

The Hippasus Blog

gaza-strip-map.jpgThe Gaza Strip  sits inside a tiny box some 25 miles long and, for the most part, less than five miles wide. At its widest it is well under eight miles wide.

It is bounded to the west by the Mediterranean’s most miserable beaches. To the south-west is a seven-mile border with Egypt’s Sinai desert. To the east and north it is bounded by barbed wire, concrete, corrugated iron and a 32-mile long border with Israel.

Inside this box live more than 1.4 million people, probably the sixth most densely populated area in the world. Certainly it is the most densely populated area to be surrounded on three sides by barbed wire. Most are descended from refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Almost half the population is 14 or under.

Getting in and out of Gaza is entirely governed by the whims of those who live on the other side of the barbed wire.

This is how it has been for most of the time since 1967 - more than 40 years.

Read more



Comments

Forever Mumbai

Post Information
Print & pdf

On both sides of the border there are men who think that a solitary major crisis, a single lucky break of violence will be sufficient to usurp all the hopes, all the dreams of the subcontinent’s citizenry of ever coming together as one people, even if divided by borders.

By Anwaar Hussain

indopak.jpgLet us state the obvious from the start without mincing any words. The tragic death of hundreds of innocent human beings in the Mumbai massacre is barbaric, ghastly and far beyond any possible forgiveness. This crime of heinous proportions defies religion as equally as it does one’s sense and sensibility. It was a ghoulish act conducted by some human lowlifes with scant regard for the gift of life.

The aftermath of the savagery is proving to be equally riotous for the people of South Asia. There are groups on both sides of the border whose leaders, foaming at their mouths, are crying havoc to let slip the dogs of war. The crimson haze kicked up by the macabre event continues to swirl, so do the tempers boiling red hot as they already are.

The failure of India and Pakistan to prevent Mumbai like events, or failing which to contain their fallout, cannot be ascribed to the foot soldiers alone. Perhaps the biggest single contributor to such calamities has been the persistent crisis of leadership in both countries.

Let us see how.

Read more



Comments

Benazir the Matchless

Post Information
Print & pdf

TS Note: On this day, in 2007, the most momentous political assassination of our time claimed the life of Benazir Bhutto and plunged a nation into mourning. The article below was written in the aftermath of that ominous event. Here it is once again on her first death anniversary.

Whoever killed her, snuffed out the last major representative of liberal/moderate voices in Pakistan

By Anwaar Hussain

benz-3.jpgI met Benazir. I spoke to her.

Some twenty years back, she became the first woman elected to head a Muslim state and was feted as a sensational feminist symbol of modernity. She was only 35. People magazine included her among its Fifty Most Beautiful People. Common Pakistanis started dreaming the dream of free people. She was the central figure in those dreams. She was their symbol.

In early 1989, the newly elected Prime Minister embarked upon a goodwill visit to all military cantonments. A spectacular air show was arranged for her on one of the Air Force bases. The airplanes involved were the American supplied state of the art F-16 aircraft. I was in one of those planes.

When the show was over she asked to meet the pilots. She was brought over to the Air Defense Alert hut where she shared a cup of tea with us all. Being a young woman, she appeared to be visibly impressed by our air dance. Unbeknown to her of course, and to many amongst us too, it was decided before hand that the meager flying allowance that we pilots were getting would be tactfully brought to her attention. Needless to say, young Anwaar, the scribe, was made the scapegoat.

Read more



Comments

Why Israel Isn’t Angry

Post Information
Print & pdf

Outrage over India’s handling of the Nariman House siege has given way to a colder calculation.

By Kevin Peraino

india_israel_flag.jpgThe smoke has finally cleared after last week’s botched hostage rescue at the Nariman House Jewish center in Mumbai, but in some Israeli security circles, the sniping has started anew. Defense Minister Ehud Barak complained last week that India’s commandos hadn’t performed up to Israeli standards. Other Israeli counterterror experts griped that the operation had taken far too long to unfold. “They should have come from many angles-through windows, through walls,” says Lior Lotan, an Israeli security consultant who once commanded the military’s hostage-negotiation squad. “I didn’t see any deception, any diversion, any surprise element at all.” Israeli paramedics reported that some of the hostages appeared to have been killed accidentally by their would-be rescuers; their stories were splashed across the front page of the local newspaper in Jerusalem.

Read more



Comments

Sons and Heirs

Post Information
Print & pdf

The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and Its Fortune by Steve Coll  

By Robert Vitalis*

bin_laden.jpgSteve Coll’s book tells two stories: a big one about how the bin Laden family cashed in on the oil bonanza in Saudi Arabia, and a smaller one about Osama’s role in the family business before he turned to holy warfare. Although well written, lucid and packed with useful detail, The Bin Ladens doesn’t establish much of a connection between the family firm in Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden’s jihad in Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan and America, except that oil wealth funded both. The bin Laden group isn’t among the world’s largest engineering businesses, although readers might finish this book believing that it is: Coll calls it Saudi Arabia’s Halliburton, even though the latter is an oil services firm, not a construction company. He is at his best excavating details from the mountain of documents generated by various bin Laden brothers in the lawsuits and divorce settlements that have followed on several decades of deals gone sour.

Read more



Comments

Mumbai: Institutional Paranoia and Obama’s Foreign Policy

Post Information
Print & pdf

By Cernig Friday

29mumbai_600a.JPGThere are a lot of conflicting reports coming out of the Indian subcontinent right now, and no-one seems to have told their right hand what their left hand is doing. For instance, The UK’s Telegraph reports Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, saying that two British citizens were among the terrorists who first attacked Mumbai two days ago and who are still being winkled out of their positions by Indian special forces- while elsewhere the Mumbai Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor is being quoted as saying “We have found nothing to indicate they were British.”

That confusion extends to speculation about who is to blame, although India seems to be prematurely certain. Pranab Mukherjee, India’s Foreign Minister, has said: “Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved.” India is stopping and searching Pakistan-flagged merchant vessels, yet the best indications are that the terrorists came ashore from Indian fishing vessels. Rather than admit it might have an indigenous terrorism problem, which would open an unhappy can of worms about tensions between militant Muslim extremists and equally militant Hindu supremacists, the Indian government is stretching as hard as it can to implicate Pakistan. Their working theory is that these Indian boats were hijacked off Pakistani shores - yet they’ve no evidence for that at all.

Read more



Comments

The blood of innocents

Post Information
Print & pdf

By Irfan Husain

islamic-women.jpgAISHA Ibrahim Duhulow was 13 years old when she was buried up to her neck in the Somali port city of Kismayu on Oct 27 and stoned to death by 50 men belonging to the Islamic group Al Shahab.

A truckload of stones was brought to the field where this murder took place. When a few members of the thousand-strong spectators tried to save the girl, Al Shahab gunmen opened fire, accidentally shooting a little boy.

It did not take long to kill Aisha. She had been accused of fornication, although according to her bereft father, she had gone to complain of being raped by three men. Her rapists remain at large, and there has been no attempt to apprehend them.

Read more



Comments

A Letter to America

Post Information
Print & pdf

By Anwaar Hussain

risun3.jpgDear Americans,

With your election of Barack Hussein Obama, you have almost realized the dream of Martin Luther King. Now truly you have a chance to rise up as a nation and live out the proper meaning of the creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Now you have an opportunity to ensure that ‘on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners indeed are able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood’. Now is the time to make certain that your great country does really get ‘transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice’. Now is that moment in time to become color blind forever to the skin tones of not just your countrymen but of all the citizens of our planet. Do that and you have arrived.

But before you can join Barack Obama’s sweet lilting voice in singing, Free at last! Free at last!, Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!, you have one last ritual to perform. And that is the killing of the demons of your recent past lest they come back to haunt you yet again. Unless you perform that sacred rite too, this transformation stands incomplete.

Read more



Comments

Remembrance day salutes man’s ancient instincts

Post Information
Print & pdf

By James Delingpole

flo.jpgEvery man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, and I’m sorry to repeat such a hoary cliché, but the reason it’s so hoary is it’s true. There’s barely a chap I know who doesn’t wonder how he’d fare if forced to undergo the ultimate male test - combat. And the ones who claim not to wonder such things I find frankly a bit weird. Are they not in denial of almost everything it means to be a man?

A boy’s childhood is - even now, in an era when we’re supposed to have evolved from all that militaristic nonsense - a preparation for war. Some of it’s plain obvious, like the way boys love to fight one another with sticks, and shoot each other from behind corners going ‘peeeooing peeeooing’ (or, better still, ‘trrrrrrrrrrrrr’ if they can roll their ‘rs’ and do machine guns) with their pointed fingers.

Read more



Comments

Americans Murdering Their Judges, and the US Crisis of Judicial Corruption

Post Information
Print & pdf

By Dr Leslie Sachs

prison-bars-image.gifIn the headlines are the appalling news stories of Americans carrying out murderous attacks on judges and their families. In a matter of days, one judge was shot and killed in his own courtroom, while another judge had family members brutally murdered in their home.

These news stories are, however, related to another news story, which is the most taboo subject of the American media - the expanding crisis of corruption among American judges and lawyers. At question is whether the deepening despair of Americans about their own legal system, is fueling some of these violent attacks on judges.

Much is written now about how America’s economy is resembling that of a banana republic, given how America is sunk in preposterous debt, and how the US dollar currency is sinking toward a possible collapse in the near future.

But there is another way that America is also like a banana republic, in that its legal system - contrary to its Hollywood image - has become a sinkwell of secret proceedings, the jailing of the innocent, and political misconduct; and how it is sullied with documented corruption, fake trials and court fraud.

Read more



Comments



Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


US loses its status as economic world power
DAVOS, Switzerland, 2008
.: ARTICLE BLOCKED :.
ON MARCH 2008
Who links to my website?