In a recent analysis on the website Africa Metro, Philip Rivers and Kent Underwood pointed out that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is determined to wage jihad against India, China and Rome. [1] It is time the international community realises that the establishment of Islamic State has been the most significant development in international jihadism since...
The terms of Resolution 2254 mostly confirm those of the Geneva Communique, which was adopted three years ago. The two greatest military powers in the world agree that the Syrian Arab Republic should be maintained, while the imperialists - with France in the front line – pursue their dream of changing the Syrian regime by force. But the world has changed ove...
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s apparently impromptu visit to Lahore on Christmas day is readily explained by the need to contain the Taliban and ensure regional stability and connectivity in the ‘Heart of Asia’ after the US-led International Security Assistance Force withdraws next year. The visit follows growing realization in capitals across the region tha...
“Iraq is breaking up before our eyes and it would appear that the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion.” – Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to John Kerry in Paris, 26 June 2014
“The goal is to proclaim a ‘Kurdistan’ straddling the border between Iraq and Syria, and then expel the Syrian populations who live there, foll...
Donald Trump, judging by polls as of December 21, 2015, is the most likely candidate to be the next president of the US. Trump is popular not so much for his stance on issues as for the fact that he is not another Washington politician, and he is respected for not backing down and apologizing when he makes strong statements for which he is criticized. What p...
Heavy darkness befalls the North; the sun rarely emerges from between the clouds. This year, Russia has noticeably less street illumination, and the spirits are anything but festive. Only the whiteness of the snow and Christmas trees break the gloom and remind us of the forthcoming low point of the cosmic wheel, Yuletide, when days starts to wax and nights t...
Imagine if a sixth class world history textbook in America was using the following images to illustrate its lessons on the history of various world religions:
For the lesson on Christianity, we find a photo of a woman being burned as a witch.
For the lesson on Islam, there is a photo of a woman being stoned to death by a mob.
And just for the lesson...
But for the sake of some little mouthful of meat, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy - Seneca
The greatest moral challenge faced at Christmas being a religion-based festival is to make it slaughter free. Violence towards innocent animals on a mass scale is not an ethically...
The modern banking system evolved from private lending in Europe during medieval times and gradually took over the role of creating money in the economic system. The modern banking system creates money; it doesn’t lend saving deposits to borrowers as commonly perceived. The banking system creates new deposits, which is money, from thin air with new loans (cl...
Modern civilisation is entering an interesting and critical phase. It is only a matter of time before the nakedness of the order is exposed just as in the tale wherein a little boy exposed a deluded emperor roaming naked in the street. The little boy could expose the emperor because he saw things as they were without superimposed fear or self-doubt born...
Last month, on 6th Nov, Pakistan quietly amended the service rule for appointment of persons to the post of sanitary workers/sweepers. Under the previous rule, only non-Muslims of minority communities could be appointed to these positions at the bottom of the social and administrative ladder.
The D.O. letter to all administrative secretaries from the govern...
ISIS’ ideological source code can be found among America’s allies in Riyadh. A recent confab of so-called “Syrian rebels” took place recently in Saudi Arabia. Those attending included a collection of dysfunctional expatriate “opposition” leaders as well as commanders from various militant groups operating in Syria including Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam –...
What Makes Recep Run? The Making of a Modern Pasha: Erdoğan began his ascent to power as a social reformer in opposition to the power elite; he was a rabble-rouser for popular Islam and social welfare. Once he takes political power he enriches his family and the business elite and purges adversaries and rivals. With political power and economic connections, ...
The media coverage of the terrorist atrocities of Friday November 13 in Paris would seem to promote an almost mythical image of the Islamic State (ISIS). What humanity needs, however, is to demystify ISIS as a criminal organization. And that need is particularly important in my community – the Muslim community.
The vast majority of Muslims almost certainly ...
Kerala’s political affairs for the last two decades are controversies, mysteries and scams. This is an unending and enduring phenomenon of the political contours of ‘God’s Own Country’. The tent managers of Kerala Political Circus effectively shift the attention of the masses (voters) from vital issues of the state. That political front becomes victorious wh...
When Qatar received its independence from Britain in 1971, its population was a meagre 100,000. Fifty years or so later, its population has ballooned to nearly 2.2 million, but only 275,000 are actual Qataris. The rest are not migrants, they are not going to be integrated in the population as fully fledged citizens, they are simply hired expats on contracts,...
Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi’s attempt to portray a court summons in a case of dubious takeover of the properties of a public limited company has failed the first test of sycophancy. The cloying media acolytes and intellectuals who spared no effort to promote the Amethi MP as legitimate future ruler of India and attacked Pr...
In recent weeks, one nation after another is falling over themselves, literally, to join the turkey shoot known, erroneously, as the war in Syria, ostensibly against the Islamic State or Daesh. The most wanted but most feared question is where will this war frenzy lead, and how can it be stopped short of dragging the entire planet into a world war of destruc...
Paris and London are multiplying their categorical declarations against Daesh, its programme of ethnic cleansing and its terrorist attacks. And yet they are preparing in secret for the ethnic cleansing of Northern Syria with a view to creating a pseudo-Kurdistan, and the re-localisation of Daesh to Al-Anbar in order to create a “Sunnistan” there. Thierry Mey...
While the events in Syria, Iraq and Turkey related to the combatants of the local Kurdish armed opposition (Peshmerga) fighting ISIL [also known as ISIS] and other terrorist organisations in the region develop at a swift pace, the question has been raised yet again about the right of the Kurdish people to self-determination (the total population of the Kurds...
In the 1950s, India, a gold guzzler had banned import of gold. In sharp contrast, the bullion markets in Hong Kong and Macau were free of government controls, incentivising the Chinese syndicates to smuggle gold into India where the price of the yellow metal was the highest in Asia. Normally, gold entered India hidden in boats and the bulkheads of ships and ...
Questions to ask President Obama the next time (also the last time) you’re invited to one of his press conferences:
Which is most important to you – destroying ISIS, overthrowing Syrian president Assad, or scoring points against Russia? Do you think that if you pointed out to the American people that Assad has done much more to aid and rescue Christians in ...
There is a marked difference between what was happening in Syria before the Russian campaign against terrorist organizations started and what is happening today. If terrorist organizations, such as ISIL, are today on the run, that is primarily due to Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of what had otherwise literally become the ‘stranglehold’ of ISIL and other C...
The main reason behind the disaster borne out of the unpredicted outburst of floods in Chennai was the humiliation of ‘mother earth’ by the regimes of the Metro City and Fort St. George for last three decades. This is not a topic confined to the Tamil Nadu state alone, but the warning of the times, the writing on the wall for the entire country, and specific...
In response to the provocations of the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, according to whom accusations should not be made lightly, the Russian government organised a Press conference by their assistant Minister for Defence. He presented proof that we have been publishing in our columns for more than a year – that Turkey, as a state, is responsible for...
Close on the heels of the November 13 terrorist attack, Paris has become the battleground for the fight between the developed and developing world over climate justice. A new legally binding protocol is likely to replace the Kyoto Protocol by 2020. As the battle lines are already drawn between the two warring camps, four issues have become contentious, namel...
If the world is to limit global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, a level that scientists say is a red line, the following are the numbers global leaders have to grapple with between now and December 11. Can they? The world has used up two-thirds of its carbon space for a 2-degrees-Celsius temperature rise,...
The US-coalition provocations against the Syrian-Russian counter terrorism success have been successful in the high innocent body count category, but have put nothing but torpedoes into its own sinking international credibility. We had expected to see terrorist attacks on the soft targets to be mixed in with military strikes as cover. Israel invaded Damascus...
Turkey made a bad mistake when it shot down the Russian aircraft which had strayed into its airspace for 17 seconds. The operation, conceived to teach Russia not to interfere with the Third Syrian War – designed to create a colonial state in Northern Syria to which the Turkish Kurds would be transferred – had the opposite effect. Moscow has reinforced its an...
Three important events influenced the course of the Syrian war in the course of last month: the Metrojet flight 9268 crash in Sinai October 31, the Paris attacks on Friday November 13 and the downing of a Sukhoi 24 on November 24, 2015.
The Metrojet crash was not deemed an act of terror to start with. First accounts concentrated on the poor state of the cha...
The downing of a Russian Su-24 warplane that ostensibly made a 17-second incursion over Turkish air space on November 24 is a watershed in Syria’s prolonged civil war. The episode differs qualitatively from the ISIS strike on a Russian Metrojet over the Sinai (October 31), and is a calculated move against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most powerful ally...