Sujata Mody questions Western notions of Feminism

Sujata Mody. <sujatamody063@gmail.com>	11:56 AM (7 hours ago)
to the-moderates

I was in Berlin in the mid 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall, and was struck by the hundred of women from eastern Europe who were engaged in sex trade. Trafficking was the key word in women's groups. Eastern Europeans were confused, wanted freedom, but the lack of security was demeaning and frightening to them. 

 I also witnessed the arrogance of western feminism over their Eastern European counterparts, but the streets had huge posters and advertisements using women's bodies. 

Today's piece in the Guardian about the horrid Playboy business magnate tells a lot about the achievements of western feminism. The way in which western feminism has allowed women's bodies to be commoditised and refused to challenge colonisation, capitalism and consumerism is an enormous failure. We in the former colonised and developing world have deepened our understanding of feminism. The western feminists got the condom and birth control pill, and the prosperity through white imperialism, but did they get liberation? Why is there so much inequality in ownership of wealth and does individualization of  freedoms alone mean women are better off. 

Feminism needs to be a much deeper exercise, it really must deal with the liberation and equality of all women, not some Indra Nooyi, while the others must look at them in wonderment. These are just some thoughts that come to my mind... Can we call someone who sells Pepsi and Coco Cola a feminist, someone who is instrumental in usurping water resources for private profit?

 If I am wrong, I would think my entire life and work is wasted, as I spent with penniless, propertyless and powerless women, understanding and trying to make a difference.

I am asking western feminists who did not rage against war in Afghanistan, accepting government propaganda that  war was required to destroy the Taliban had pushed women into the middle ages. It was such hogwash. They supported the worst regime - Saudi Arabia, while they without much noise recently destroyed Libya and Syria and would have done the same for Iran if they could. 

We in India have an onerous task of dealing with the huge irrational baggage of Hinduism, along with prevailing hinduised  sematic religions. There is no space for feminism, no rationality, no truth... While triple talaq did make a dent into the regressive Islam, are we working to build greater gender equality within the communities and groups that follow Islam?  

The small spaces of freedom and privilege do exist for  women all over the world and in all religions. However,  what is the route for the larger groupings to be less free? What do we in the Moderates think?? 

Taking Educational Institutions Backwards - By Sandeep Pandey - Mainstream Weekly

http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article7499.html

Mainstream Weekly

Home > 2017 > Taking Educational Institutions Backwards

Mainstream, VOL LV No 41 New Delhi September 30, 2017

 

Taking Educational Institutions Backwards

Friday 29 September 2017, 

By Sandeep Pandey

On September 11, 1893 Swami Vivekananda delivered his famous speech in the Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago. The Bharatiya Janata Party Government decided to celebrate the event and Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the youth of the country. Incidentally, he shares his first name with Vivekananda’s original name, Narendra Nath Datta.

Vivekananda has inspired the youth of this country for long. His preachings are thought- provoking. For example, he says, ‘As certain religions of the world say that a man who does not believe in a Personal God outside of himself is an atheist, so the Vedanta says, a man who does not believe in himself is an atheist. Not believing in the glory of our own soul is what Vedanta calls atheism.’ At another place he pleads with his audience, ‘If you are not a prophet, there never has been anything true of God... Everyone of us will have to become a prophet.’

However, when this occasion was celebrated on September 11, 2017 on university campuses, students were asked to memorise the speech of Swami Vivekananda delivered in 1893 and regurgitate it. When students did not even bother to learn it by rote, they were allowed to read it from paper. Such is the sorry state of affairs of our academic institutions. If the Swami were alive today he would have cringed in despair.

He wanted everybody to have complete faith in themselves and feel like a sovereign but our higher educational institutions do not want our students to develop independent thinking. Had the students been asked to give their comments on Vivekananda’s speech they would have had to exercise their brain. But it is amazing that university-level students are just being asked to memorise and reproduce a speech! The entire idea of putting a curb on students’ thinking is contradictory to Vivekananda’s idea of empowerment. How can the students have belief in themselves if they are merely activating not the analytical power of the brain but only its photographic ability? Quite clearly the autho-rities want to produce followers and not leaders.

That Vivekananda is not taken seriously by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling dispensation in India, is also clear from his statement in the same speech, ‘We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth.’ However, in the context of the current migration of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, the Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, says they are illegal immigrants and not refugees who have not followed the procedure to apply for asylum, but it is not clear whether the Government of India would welcome them even if they were to seek entry through the proper channel. They obviously don’t have Viveka-nanda’s large heart. Narendra Modi chose not to raise the issue of persecution of Rohingya Muslims during a meeting with its famous leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in his recent maiden visit to Myanmar. That demonstrates India’s overall insensitivity towards the Rohingyas.

Vivekanand also said in Chicago, ‘Sectaria-nism, bigotry, and its horrible descendent, fanaticism, have long possessed the beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilisation and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.’ However sectarianism, bigotry, fanaticism and violence have increased with the BJP’s ascent to power. Some Sangh Parivarloyalists can argue that this is in response to the rise of similar tendencies in Islam globally. The moot question is: could there have been a different response rooted in Vivekananda’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideologies to it?

It is also worrisome that senior functionaries of the BJP governments are indulging in negating scientific and rational thinking. The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, while speaking at the convocation of the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Lucknow on September 16, claimed that China was researching how Hindu God Ganesh’s head slain by his father Lord Shiva was replaced with an elephant’s head and exhorted the Indian doctors to delve into the treasure of our scriptures. He also beseeched the faculty and students to find the herb which brought back Laxman to life. According to him, Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was inspired by the Mahabharata to work on missiles. Yogi Adityanath holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.

The State Minister for Human Resources Development at the Centre, Satya Pal Singh, claimed in a programme of the All India Council for Technical Education on September 20 in Delhi that Shivakar Babuji Talpade in India invented the air plane eight years before the Wright brothers. According to him, plants in Ravana’s kingdom were not required to be watered as they contained a mythical elixir, Chandramani. He wants engineering students to learn about the Hindu deity, Vishwakarma, puranas and mythology. Singh holds a Master’s degree in Chemistry and is a former Indian Police Service officer.

By not letting analytical thinking develop in students the RSS is ensuring that there will be no one to ask the Yogi when he makes the suggestion to doctors to research how an elephant’s head replaced the beheaded Lord Ganesh and that if indeed doctors were successful in doing this surgery, whose brain would the resultant creature possess—human’s or elephant’s? Or they don’t want any student to ask Satya Pal Singh that if India possessed the know-how of making planes, why is it not investing in rediscovering that knowledge rather than buying Rafale jets from France?

Noted social activist and Magsaysay awardee Dr Sandeep Pandey is the Vice-President of the Socialist Party (India). He was elected to this post at the founding conference of the party at Hyderabad on May 28-29, 2011.

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Westerners: Guilty of Reading the News

Westerners: Guilty of Reading the News

Wazeer e Kharija Khuwaja Asif ne Americans ko Khari khari suna dein

America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars -By Philip Giraldi - www.unz.com

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/americas-jews-are-driving-americas-wars/

The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection

America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars

Shouldn't they recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East?

PHILIP GIRALDI • SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

 • 1,600 WORDS • 1,046 COMMENTS • REPLY

UPDATE: On the morning of September 21st Phil Giraldi was fired over the phone by The American Conservative, where he had been a regular contributor for fourteen years. He was told that “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” was unacceptable. The TAC management and board appear to have forgotten that the magazine was launched with an article by founder Pat Buchanan entitled “Whose War?” which largely made the same claims that Giraldi made about the Jewish push for another war, in that case with Iraq. Buchanan was vilified and denounced as an anti-Semite by many of the same people who are now similarly attacking Giraldi.

I spoke recently at a conference on America’s war party where afterwards an elderly gentleman came up to me and asked, “Why doesn’t anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference and we all know it’s American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn’t we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?”

It was a question combined with a comment that I have heard many times before and my answer is always the same: any organization that aspires to be heard on foreign policy knows that to touch the live wire of Israel and American Jews guarantees a quick trip to obscurity. Jewish groups and deep pocket individual donors not only control the politicians, they own and run the media and entertainment industries, meaning that no one will hear about or from the offending party ever again. They are particularly sensitive on the issue of so-called “dual loyalty,” particularly as the expression itself is a bit of a sham since it is pretty clear that some of them only have real loyalty to Israel.

Most recently, some pundits, including myself, have been warning of an impending war with Iran. To be sure, the urging to strike Iran comes from many quarters, to include generals in the Administration who always think first in terms of settling problems through force, from a Saudi government obsessed with fear over Iranian hegemony, and, of course, from Israel itself. But what makes the war engine run is provided by American Jews who have taken upon themselves the onerous task of starting a war with a country that does not conceivably threaten the United States. They have been very successful at faking the Iranian threat, so much so that nearly all Republican and most Democratic congressmen as well as much of the media seem to be convinced that Iran needs to be dealt with firmly, most definitely by using the U.S. military, and the sooner the better.

And while they are doing it, the issue that nearly all the Iran haters are Jewish has somehow fallen out of sight, as if it does not matter. But it should matter. A recent article in the New Yorker on stopping the impending war with Iran strangely suggests that the current generation “Iran hawks” might be a force of moderation regarding policy options given the lessons learned from Iraq. The article cites as hardliners on Iran David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Bret Stephens.

Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative has a good review of the New Yorker piece entitled “Yes, Iran Hawks Want Conflict with Iran,” which identifies the four above cited hawks by name before describing them as “…a Who’s Who of consistently lousy foreign policy thinking. If they have been right about any major foreign policy issue in the last twenty years, it would be news to the entire world. Every single one of them hates the nuclear deal with Iran with a passion, and they have argued in favor of military action against Iran at one point or another. There is zero evidence that any of them would oppose attacking Iran.”

And I would add a few more names, Mark Dubowitz, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine; Elliot Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations; Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute; Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; and Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka and David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute. And you can also throw into the hopper entire organizations like The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Hudson Institute. And yep, they’re all Jewish, plus most of them would self-describe as neo-conservatives. And I might add that only one of the named individuals has ever served in any branch of the American military – David Wurmser was once in the Navy reserve. These individuals largely constitute a cabal of sanctimonious chairborne warriors who prefer to do the heavy thinking while they let others do the fighting and dying.

So it is safe to say that much of the agitation to do something about Iran comes from Israel and from American Jews. Indeed, I would opine that most of the fury from Congress re Iran comes from the same source, with AIPAC showering our Solons on the Potomac with “fact sheets” explaining how Iran is worthy of annihilation because it has pledged to “destroy Israel,” which is both a lie and an impossibility as Tehran does not have the resources to carry out such a task. The AIPAC lies are then picked up and replayed by an obliging media, where nearly every “expert” who speaks about the Middle East on television and radio or who is interviewed for newspaper stories is Jewish.

One might also add that neocons as a group were founded by Jews and are largely Jewish, hence their universal attachment to the state of Israel. They first rose into prominence when they obtained a number of national security positions during the Reagan Administration and their ascendancy was completed when they staffed senior positions in the Pentagon and White House under George W. Bush. Recall for a moment Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. Yes, all Jewish and all conduits for the false information that led to a war that has spread and effectively destroyed much of the Middle East. Except for Israel, of course. Philip Zelikow, also Jewish, in a moment of candor, admitted that the Iraq War, in his opinion, was fought for Israel.

Add to the folly a Jewish U.S. Ambassador to Israel who identifies with the most right-wing Israeli settler elements, a White House appointed chief negotiator who is Jewish and a Jewish son-in-law who is also involved in formulating Middle East policy. Is anyone providing an alternative viewpoint to eternal and uncritical support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his kleptocratic regime of racist thugs? I think not.

There are a couple of simple fixes for the dominant involvement of American Jews in foreign policy issues where they have a personal interest due to their ethnicity or family ties. First of all, don’t put them into national security positions involving the Middle East, where they will potentially be conflicted. Let them worry instead about North Korea, which does not have a Jewish minority and which was not involved in the holocaust. This type of solution was, in fact, somewhat of a policy regarding the U.S. Ambassador position in Israel. No Jew was appointed to avoid any conflict of interest prior to 1995, an understanding that was violated by Bill Clinton (wouldn’t you know it!) who named Martin Indyk to the post. Indyk was not even an American citizen at the time and had to be naturalized quickly prior to being approved by congress.

Those American Jews who are strongly attached to Israel and somehow find themselves in senior policy making positions involving the Middle East and who actually possess any integrity on the issue should recuse themselves, just as any judge would do if he were presiding over a case in which he had a personal interest. Any American should be free to exercise first amendment rights to debate possible options regarding policy, up to and including embracing positions that damage the United States and benefit a foreign nation. But if he or she is in a position to actually create those policies, he or she should butt out and leave the policy generation to those who have no personal baggage.

For those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity, the media should be required to label them at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up, e.g. Bill Kristol is “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel.” That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as “ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril.”

As none of the above is likely to happen, the only alternative is for American citizens who are tired of having their country’s national security interests hijacked by a group that is in thrall to a foreign government to become more assertive about what is happening. Shine a little light into the darkness and recognize who is being diddled and by whom. Call it like it is. And if someone’s feelings are hurt, too bad. We don’t need a war with Iran because Israel wants one and some rich and powerful American Jews are happy to deliver. Seriously, we don’t need it.

--

1046 Comments to "America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars"

Commenters to Ignore...to FollowEndorsed Only

1. Priss Factor says:

   September 19, 2017 at 4:14 am GMT

   • Replies: @יְהוֹחָנָן, @Viktor Pilarski, @No More Neos, @REALITY CHECK

   REPLYAGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER THIS THREAD HIDE THREAD 
2. wayfarer says:

   September 19, 2017 at 4:15 am GMT

   “Why the Media Loves Antifa!”

   REPLYAGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER 
3. wayfarer says:

   September 19, 2017 at 4:27 am GMT

   “Trump’s Jews and Generals!”

   • Replies: @Advisor519, @dav, @Aren Haich, @olde reb

   REPLYAGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER THIS THREAD HIDE THREAD 
4. chris says:

   September 19, 2017 at 4:41 am GMT

   Wow, Phil, you hit another one right out of the ball park!

   • Agree: Cloak And Dagger

   • Replies: @Anonymous, @Wally, @Moi, @SMK

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5. Anonymous says: • Disclaimer

   September 19, 2017 at 4:44 am GMT

   Trump will exterminate the Iranians.

   • Replies: @anonymous, @Santoculto, @attilathehen, @anon

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6. Monty Ahwazi says:

   September 19, 2017 at 5:42 am GMT

   Well said Mr Giraldi! Unfortunately the Jewish Mafia in this country won’t allow truth to be said and will do anything to keep us in the dark!

   • Replies: @olde reb, @olde reb

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7. Bubba says:

   September 19, 2017 at 5:54 am GMT • 100 Words

   Amen brother! And I would like to throw some gasoline on your Neocon fire. President Trump has never worked with military generals before and he is extremely naive to their absolute Machiavellian manipulation of him. Most generals today are expert political backstabbers who advanced during the tragic Neocon and PC era of the past 30 years. Who can forget the disgusting General Casey when he said, “And what happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” The generals that Trump hired for his administration are now running circles around him, particularly McMaster. They want war to keep the Neocons happy and that is what this crop of generals has been trained to do.

   • Replies: @Lagertha, @jerrymac200

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8. Thomm says:

   September 19, 2017 at 6:21 am GMT

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