Indian Home Minister Shinde Confirms BJP and RSS Training Hindu Terrorists

BJP, RSS spreading saffron terrorism: Shinde

Zee news Bureau

Jaipur: Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde on Sunday kicked up a storm by alleging that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) are promoting Hindu terrorism in their training camps. 

“They are talking about infiltration but we have this report that whether it is the BJP or the RSS, their training camps are promoting Hindu terrorism,” Shinde said.

Speaking at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) meeting here, Shinde said, “We are keeping a strict eye on it. The Samjhauta Express blast, Mecca Masjid (blast), Malegaon blast — they are planting bombs and blaming minorities for it. We need to be careful for safety of our country.”

Strongly reacting to Shinde’s statement, BJP said Home Minister’s statement is irresponsible and unfortunate. BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the Home Minister is trying to disrupt the peaceful environment of the country.

Meanwhile, RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav also termed Shinde’s statement as highly irresponsible.

“If a Congress leader had said something like this it wouldn’t had matter that much, but if a Home Minister of the country is saying something like this it is highly irresponsible.”

The RSS leader further questioned government’s motive and said that they first arrested Muslim youths in connection with the particular blasts case, but suddenly in the recent times things have changed and Hindu youths are being wrongly arrested.

“This is all about playing vote-bank politics”, he said.

Advocating Shinde’s views, Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar said that the Home Minister is 100 percent right in what he has said.

Dead Royals Walking–When the Saudi Royal Family Falls Under It’s Own Executioner’s Sword

Brookings’ Bruce Riedel urges intensified US support for Saudi despots

Every now and then, leading mavens of the Foreign Policy Community have an uncharacteristic outburst of candor

Tony Blair meeting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Photograph: Ho/REUTERS

When it comes to the US “foreign policy community”, few if any people are more representative of it than Bruce Riedel. A 30-year CIA officer and adviser to the last four US presidents, he is now a senior fellow at the wing of the Brookings Institution funded by entertainment mogul Haim Saban (whom the New York Times described as “a tireless cheerleader for Israel” and who described himself this way: “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel”). In 2012, Riedel contributed to a book on Iran by Brookings “scholars” which argued that the US could launch a war against Iran by covertly provoking its government into responses that could then falsely be depicted by the US to the world “as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression” – exactly what Brookings’ Ken Pollack proposed be done in 2002 to deceitfully justify the attack on Iraq.According to Brookings, “in January 2009, President Barack Obama asked Riedel to chair a review of American policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, the results of which the president announced in a speech on March 27, 2009.”

When they speak publicly, the mavens of the Foreign Policy Community – whose primary function is to justify US militarism and aggression – typically disguise their real beliefs and objectives with specialized obfuscating jargon. But every now and then, they have an outburst of uncharacteristic candor that clarifies their actual worldview. Such is the case with a remarkably clear memorandum to President Obama that Riedel just authored and Brooking published regarding the extremely close US alliance with the regime in Saudi Arabia.

Riedel begins by noting that “Saudi Arabia is the world’s last absolute monarchy” and “like Louis XIV, King Abdallah has complete authority.” Moreover, “the Saudi royal family has shown no interest in sharing power or in an elected legislature.” The Saudi regime not only imposes total repression on its own people but is also vital, he argues, in maintaining tyranny in multiple neighboring states: “they have helped ensure that revolution has not unseated any Arab monarch” and “the other monarchs of Arabia would inevitably be in jeopardy if revolution comes to Saudi Arabia.” Specifically:

“The Sunni minority in Bahrain could not last without Saudi money and tanks. Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are city-states that would be unable to defend themselves against a Saudi revolutionary regime, despite all their money.”

So given this extreme human suffering and repression imposed by the Saudi monarchy in multiple countries, what should the US – the Leader of the Free World and the self-proclaimed Deliverer of Freedom and Democracy – do? To Riedel, the answer is obvious: work even harder, do even more, to strengthen the Saudi regime as well as the neighboring tyrannies in order to crush the “Arab Awakenings” and ensure that democratic revolution cannot succeed in those nations.

Riedel stridently argues that the US must remain steadfastly opposed to any democratic revolutions in the region. That’s because Saudi Arabia is “America’s oldest ally in the Middle East, a partnership that dates back to 1945.” Thus, “since American interests are so intimately tied to the House of Saud, the US does not have the choice of distancing the United States from it in an effort to get on the right side of history.”

Instead, he insists, while Obama should “encourage” the Saudi King to accelerate the modest reforms he has abstractly embraced, the overarching principle driving US actions should be that “the overthrow of the monarchy would represent a severe setback to America’s position in the region and provide a dramatic strategic windfall for Iran.” And the US should not only prop up the Saudi dictatorship, but also must “be ready to shore up the neighboring kingdoms and sheikhdoms.” As a Bahraini correspondent wrote about this Riedel memo: “Brookings is basically telling Obama to make sure we remain ruled by dictatorial regimes.”

The only thing unclear about Riedel’s memo is why he perceives any urgency to write it. As he notes, US policy long has been and still is exactly what he advocates: to ensure that the people of Saudi Arabia remain tyrannized by this monarchy:

“The critical defender of the regime would be the National Guard. King Abdallah has spent his life building this Praetorian elite force. The United States has trained and equipped it with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of helicopters and armored vehicles.”

Just last week, President Obama emphasized how critical his alliance with the House of Saud is by doing something a US president rarely does: hosting not a fellow head of state but a mere minister (Saudi Minister of Interior, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud) in the Oval Office. Afterward, the White House proclaimed that Obama and the Saudi Prince “affirmed the strong partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia”.

Indeed, the Obama administration has continuously lavished the Saudi Kingdom with a record amount of arms and other weapons, and has done the same for the Bahraini tyranny. He has done all this while maintaining close-as-ever alliances with the Gulf State despots as they crush their own democratic movements.

As always, the rationale for this steadfast US support for Arab tyranny is dubious at best. Riedel notes that “while the United States can live without Saudi oil, China, India, Japan and Europe cannot” – but it’s absurd to think that whoever rules Saudi Arabia would refuse to sell its oil on the world market. Riedel also argues that “the CIA war against al-Qaida is heavily dependent on the Kingdom” – that gets closer to the truth, but it just shows how this endless “war” is the author of most of America’s bad acts in the region, and it’s ironic indeed that the only government with valid links to the 9/11 perpetrators has become the closest US ally in the “war on terror”, while governments with no such links – starting with Iran – have become perpetual US enemies.

Riedel also says that “the Saudis have also been a key player in containing Iran for decades.” But when it comes to repression and tyranny, Iran – as atrocious as its regime is capable of being – is no match for the Saudis. There is zero reason to view Iran as an implacable enemy of the US, and it is certainly no justification for imposing absolute tyranny on millions of people in the Arab world merely because those regimes are similarly hostile to Iran.

But as I emphasized last week, the point here is not to object to US support for the world’s worst dictators; it is, instead, to urge that this reality be acknowledged. Despite this obvious truth – that the US has no objection whatsoever to tyranny but rather loves and supports it when tyrants are faithful to its interests – hordes of foreign policy “experts” shamelessly pretend that the US and its Nato allies are committed to spreading freedom and democracy and fighting despotism in order to justify every new US and Nato intervention.

Just listen to the patently deceitful rhetoric that spews forth from US political leaders and their servants in the Foreign Policy Community when it comes time to rail against anti-US regimes in Libya, Syria and Iran. That the US and its Nato allies – eager benefactors of the world’s worst tyrants – are opposed to those regimes out of concern for democracy and human rights is a pretense, a conceit, so glaring and obvious that it really defies belief that people are willing to advocate it in public with a straight face. Even Riedel notes the real reason for those interventions: the Saudis, he writes, are “pragmatists and have backed revolutions in Libya and Syria that undermine longstanding enemies of the Kingdom, especially Iran.”

The same inane rhetoric is pouring forth in the debate over the Mali intervention. The same countries that are arming the worst human rights abusers on the African continent are simultaneously flattering themselves as crusaders for human rights by bombing Mali. Meanwhile, those who point out that bombing Muslims in yet another country will be used by al-Qaida to strengthen itself further – as the NYT put it: “the backlash might end up being worse than the original threat” – are predictably smeared as Terrorist sympathizers by the self-proclaimed experts of the Foreign Policy Community who exist to justify US and Nato militarism (see here and here as examples).

It’s the same warped, flagrantly propagandistic debate that has been taking place over and over for decades. It’s how the Saudi-loving George Bush and Tony Blair were able to tell their citizens that their former ally, Saddam Hussein, had to be attacked and removed from power in part because of how tyrannical he was (citing past human rights abuses that took place when he was supported by the US and Nato allies). And it’s how those who pointed out all of the contradictions and hypocrisies in these pro-freedom claims were systematically smeared as being pro-Saddam.

Critically, this propaganda about the commitment to human rights and democracy of the US and its Nato allies is aimed at, and only works on, the domestic populations of those countries. People in the region where these pro-tyranny policies are imposed by Nato members are fully aware of this reality, as public opinion polls unambiguously prove. But when there exists a massive apparatus of self-proclaimed experts calling itself the Foreign Policy Community that exists to propagate these myths, and a US media that similarly views the world through the prism of the US government, it is easy to see why these myths, despite how patently absurd they are, work so effectively. The fact that one can have a memo like Riedel’s so clearly explaining US policy to support the worst tyrannies that serve its interests, sitting right next to endless US pro-war rhetoric about the urgency of fighting for freedom and democracy, is an outstanding testament to that myth-making.

Obama’s Middle East: the politics of hopelessness

Patrick O. Strickland

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RAMALLAH: Many critics of President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy seemed to preserve a degree of hope, especially during the run up to the 2012 president elections, in spite of numerous letdowns. During his second term, it was oft repeated, Obama will be free of the constraints that accompany worrying about reelection, and he will be able to inject into US foreign policy a stout dose of justice.

Obama’s cautious posturing towards the Arab Spring and failure to press for any meaningful justice for Palestinians were both repeatedly forgiven by analysts, pundits, and polemicists who naively believed that the only thing standing between fixing America’s image in the Middle East was the threat of a Mitt Romney election and a throng of Republicans in Congress.

The president’s record suggests otherwise, however. As the leader of a two-party government dominated by corporate influence, foreign lobbies, interest groups, and still committed to hegemonic aspirations, Obama neither desires nor is capable of redressing legitimate grievances in the Middle East. His own record, spotted with dubious diplomacy and a highly questionable claim to human rights, allots us a preview of what to expect of American involvement in the Middle East during his second term.

Egypt, Bahrain, and other troublesome American real estate

Only after the ouster of Egypt’s former tyrant Hosni Mubarak was imminent did the Obama administration grant the January 25 revolution its blessings. As the administration belatedly declared that Mubarak ought to step down and clear the path for democracy, the regime continued its vicious crackdown on protesters, employing American arms in a fruitless attempt to asphyxiate the revolution.

Since the moment the morally tenuous endorsement was proclaimed, the United States has been several steps behind every development throughout the course of the revolution, the period of military rule, and the present epoch of Muslim Brotherhood patronage.

While the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), essentially the same faces and framework of the former Mubarak regime, brutally smashed demonstrations in now-famous Tahrir Square, security forces clouded Egyptian streets with the fog of tear gas, the canisters of which were abhorrently labeled with an American-made stamp.

Once the SCAF finally did step aside for democratic elections, for which a proper incubation period of preparation and campaigning had not been adequately conducted, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, one of the only permitted to organize under three decades of Mubarak tyranny, captured the presidency.

A shrewd and calculative strategist, the newly-crowned President Mohammad Morsi waited for the right moment to effectively assume the dimensions of Mubarak’s former power. After satisfying the US by successfully brokering a ceasefire between the Hamas-led militants of the Gaza Strip and Israel, Morsi wasted no time in issuing a presidential decree that essentially abolished the newly-acquired trappings of Egyptian democracy.

Much like his predecessor, Morsi sacrificed his prior commitment to pursuing justice for the Palestinians in order to consolidate his throne in Cairo, and he did so with full American support, punctuated solely by sparse and unconvincing proclamations of disappointment and concern.

In Bahrain, where a similar uprising was raging on at roughly the same time, American officials couldn’t even be moved to express verbal support for democracy. In March 2011, as former Defense Minister Robert Gates arrived on a visit to the cringing little island’s royal family, tens of thousands of protesters were being stomped into submission by Saudi-assisted and American-armed security forces.

The roughly 70 percent Shia majority is regarded by the minority ruling sect as a fifth column for Iran, and thus, in the US government’s eyes, has no right to demand legitimate representation in a government not doomed to toil under the sectarian-centric concerns of a autocratic monarchy.

Authentic Bahraini self-determination, the sculptors of US foreign policy decided, does not mesh with imperial designs for the region, especially not on an island that serves as the parking lot of the US Navy’s 5^th Fleet and is cursed to be situated immediately between the increasingly-bellicose theocracy in Iran and the generous oil fields of the Saudi Arabian police state, the most despotic and important American ally in the Gulf.

In Syria, where the most horrifying show of bloodshed presses on, Washington and Moscow have played a crude game of geopolitical posturing. As the balancing act goes on, Russia hoping to preserve its client and the US seeking to destabilize the balance of power against Iranian influence, over 60,000 Syrians died since the civil war broke out, according to a recent UN report. Other reports have alleged that certain factions of the anti-Assad resistance have received American arms, while others have been placed on the official terrorist list.

As changes continue in the region, the Obama administration and its Democratic Party backers have sought to seize the opportunity to ensure American hegemony in the region in a manner that effectively functions as a present-day Sykes-Picot Agreement, redrawing the borders of influence and installing new client regimes and preserving existing ones elsewhere.

Israel-Palestine

As the latest Israeli military offensive against the already besieged Gaza Strip got under way in November, and while what must have seemed to Gazans an endless onslaught of death fell from above, President Obama ironically declared that no nation, least of which Israel, should be expected to tolerate rockets hitting the residential areas of its territory. The president firmly reiterated that Israel reserved the unconditional right to “self-defense,” which he ostensibly viewed the latest war on Gaza.

But the offensive was by no means necessary from a security perspective. The assassination of Hamas military chief Ahmad Ja’abari, which broke an informal ceasefire and began the latest war, was a carefully planned attempt to spark another round of fighting that would secure Israeli hegemony and win back the sympathy of an increasingly pro-Palestinian international community.

That the offensive was unnecessary from a security perspective became even clearer when Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peace activist and negotiator for the 2011 release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, revealed that Ja’abari had just hours before received paperwork for a final truce agreement with Israel, including a detailed strategy to maintain a lasting ceasefire.

Until Ja’abari’s assassination, no Israeli civilians had been killed by rocket attacks in 2012. According to thePalestinian Center for Human Rights, during the eight days that followed, around 160 Palestinians were killed, 102 of which were civilians, by far reaching Israeli airstrikes across the 136-square-kilometer coastal enclave. Five Israelis died, including three civilians, as a result of rockets launched from Gaza.

Less than a month after the tenuous ceasefire was reached, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority sought a peaceful and diplomatic path by seeking the approval of the United Nations General Assembly for a resolution recognizing an independent, sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, encompassing all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and including East Jerusalem as its capital.

The overwhelming majority of the world supported Palestine, though the United States, Israel, and a handful of their allies opposed it. After this astounding display of hypocrisy, it quickly became impossible for the Obama administration to declare its commitment to a two-state solution: Israel immediately announced a plan to settle the E1 area of the West Bank, dividing the West Bank into two separate slithers of land and enclosing a circle around occupied East Jerusalem with Jewish settlements.

A few half-throated groans alighted from Washington, but Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, unfazed as usual by hollow American objections, promised to move forward with plans to settle the E1 and elsewhere in the West Bank. By not acting, it became perfectly clear that the two-decade peace process, always under American auspices, has been little more than a smokescreen for Israel’s project to colonize the embattled remains of Palestine one plot of land at a time.

Now many Palestinians are abandoning the call for territorial liberation and turning their struggle towards equal national and political rights in a single secular and democratic entity. Will the Obama administration still be able to tout its Israeli ally as “the Middle East’s only democracy” as more and more of the world comes to understand it as an apartheid state governed by laws that historically echo America’s own Jim Crow era?

Obama’s New Year: Hopeless after all

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama introduced in America a new “politics of hope.” After eight difficult years of toiling under the patronage of George W Bush and his neoconservative outfit, Americans sought to repair America’s badly damaged international image. The president initially ran on a platform of withdrawing from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, closing the morally shameful Guantanamo Bay, and, as he proclaimed in a 2009 Cairo Address, building a new relationship “based on mutual interest and respect; one based on the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition.”

Yet, as Obama enters his second presidential term, little has changed. Although the Iraq disaster was finally put to an end, life in Post-occupation Iraq is still marred by sectarian violence, economic disaster, and political disunity. It’s impossible for the Middle East to view America as an improved entity as that hangover persists, and it doesn’t help that the Obama administration has continued to employ torture, fill Guantanamo with detainees, execute a drone program that costs hundreds of civilian lives, and has hitherto been on the wrong side of every uprising in the Middle East since the awesome string of revolutions first erupted in Tunisia in December 2010. Once again standing in the way of Palestinian self-determination only makes matters worse.

Those who still believe that President Obama is capable of saving America from its spiraling moral decline would be well advised to examine his record. For the Middle East, far from being a period of reversing imperial injustice, all the evidence suggests that the president’s second term will shape up to be another epoch of hopelessness.

BN

Turkish-Bulgarian Politician Survives On-Air Assassination Attempt By Fellow Turk

Man sticks gun in the face of Bulgarian politician during televised speech

Ahmed Dogan, 58, who leads the country’s ethnic Turkish party, escaped unharmed after Oktai Enimehmedov, 25, a fellow ethnic Turk, rushed him with a gun in front of an audience of 3,000.

BY VICTORIA CAVALIERE / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

BTV HANDOUT VIA EPA

A image grab from a broadcast by Bulgarian television shows a man pointing a gun at party leader Ahmet Dogan (left) of the ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedom party during a party conference in Sofia, Bulgaria on Saturday. Dogan escaped from the encounter unharmed after security intervened.

 
A top Bulgarian politician had a brush with death on Saturday after a gunman pointed a pistol at his head as he delivered a televised speech. 

Ahmed Dogan escaped unscathed after falling to the ground as security tackled the gunman in front of stunned meeting hall of 3,000 people in the capital, Sofia. No shots were fired, but the Sofia Globe reports that sources say the gun might have jammed.

“Ahmed Dogan is in good health. Everything is under control,” Ceyhan Ibryamov, a member of Dogan’s political party, said after the incident.

Dogan has led Bulgaria’s ethnic Turkish party for 25 years. He was in the middle of a speech to party members when a man in a black coat rushed the stage, holding a gun at arm’s length pointed directly in the face of the 58-year-old politician. Delegates and security jumped on the man, and television footage shows them beating, kicking and punching him.

Police arrested 25-year-old Oktai Enimehmedov, a Bulgarian man and ethnic Turk from the Black Sea town of Burgas. Enimehmedov was also carrying two knives, officials said.

It was unclear how he got past security and into the meeting hall. His motive was not known.

Bulgarian officials say Enimehmedov has a criminal record for drug possession, robberies and hooliganism.

Saturday’s incident was the most serious attack on a  politician in post-communist Bulgaria since ex-prime Minister Andrei Lukanov was shot dead near his home in 1996.