So the buck stops at Islam? BY ARJIMAND HUSSAIN TALIB - greaterkashmir.com

http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2011/Dec/11/so-the-buck-stops-at-islam--3.asp

So the buck stops at Islam?

That is what the Vatican, Occupy Movement and others seem to say

DATELINE SRINAGAR

BY ARJIMAND HUSSAIN TALIB

Capitalism is in deep crisis today, far graver than what the mainstream media makes us to understand. The ongoing debt crises in the US and Europe have proved a lot of books and theories on economics worth trash.

A lot will be rewritten in the days to come.

The Occupy Wall Street movement makes us to appreciate the situation even further. Its followers – who claim to be world’s 90 per cent – are saying a categorical “no” to the credit card culture and consumerist growth philosophy. They also want more and better jobs, redistribution of wealth, reform of the credit and interest-based banking system. A lot of Occupy voices are angry about financial markets, saying “only insiders, brokers and its rich players get rich from there.”

America and Europe’s sovereign debt crises and the messages that came out from the European summit at Brussels on Friday have some chilling messages.

Use of beautiful and dignified jargon even in a difficult situation like this is a peculiar characteristic of the European cultures. But, let us admit, at the core of all, three learnings are unmistakable: living beyond one’s means has been a great folly. Excessive and imprudent credit over a long period and speculation has been even worse. And the worst? Interest-based loans, with no legitimate means to repay and a flawed approach to growth.
Guardian’s well-known columnist Timothy Garton Ash summed up the summit like this: There are still huge uncertainties on this continental journey into the unknown!

Tim also quoted a friend describing Euro zone’s agreement on a fiscal union: with the euro area's arteries clogged and its heart on the brink of failure, the European Central Bank (ECB) has said it is not qualified to perform bypass surgery, while the member states have pledged to go on a starvation diet. 

But isn’t all this somewhat similar to what the Quran actually says?

For centuries, Islam’s idea of finance hasn’t received due attention in the mainstream. It is not that Islamic finance was less convincing; the point is that the capitalist financial system was never in a pathetically grave situation as it is today. The world today is desperately looking for alternatives.

As this crisis lingered on, Vatican’s newspaper Osservatore Romano shocked many around the world when in 2009 it wrote that banks “should look at the rules of Islamic finance to restore confidence amongst their clients at a time of global economic crisis.” The ethical principles on which Islamic finance is based may bring banks closer to their clients and to the true spirit which should mark every financial service, the Osservatore Romano said.

A large number of people have misgivings about the practicality of Islam’s financial system. 

Even Muslims and Muslim countries themselves haven’t embraced this idea fully.

With its assets of nearly $1 trillion globally, Islamic finance remains tiny compared to conventional finance with its tens of trillions of dollars. The market in Islamic bonds, or sukuk, is believed to total about $50 billion, roughly one per cent of global bond issuance.

But things are changing. London and France have already opened legal doors for Islamic banking. More than 20 banks in Britain now offer Islamic finance products and there are five fully Islamic banks in the country. There are some 55 professional institutions offering education in Islamic finance in Britain today.

Deutsche Bank, a global giant, recently estimated that Islamic finance would almost double to $1.8 trillion in assets by 2016, as companies seek alternative financing methods.

A Reuter’s special report on Islamic finance in November said some big western banks, facing tough conditions in the funding markets, are also turning to sukuk. HSBC issued a $500 million sukuk in May and Goldman Sachs announced a $2 billion sukuk programme in October.

Further, Senegal is expected to hold investor meetings soon to issue its first sovereign sukuk, while Nigeria said in June that it planned to issue a debut sovereign sukuk next year.

But there are challenges too. It will take a long time and effort to integrate Islamic financial principles, and make them work, with the deeply entrenched and complex conventional system.

Today a large number of world’s people are convinced that capitalism has failed to deliver. They are looking for alternatives. It will take extraordinary efforts to make people know how Islam’s philosophy of finance is universal and intrinsically just.
 
The columnist is presently an advisor international development, and based overseas

India, an Evolving Idea By Manu Joseph - The New York Times

TIMES LITERARY CARNIVAL - AT MEHBOOB STUDIO, BANDRA WEST, MUMBAI

Manu Joseph in his following Letter from India published by The New York Times, missed a very important discussion point on 'Idea of India' during the panel debate. Why the idea of India should be discussed at all. It shows the insecurity and lack of confidence by the intellectuals that they have to discuss the subject, as if they are discussing the changing weather.Dasgupta, a Bongo, had to bring in Bengal to claim that though everybody is under the impression that the phrase was coined by Sunil Khilnani who wrote a volumunous book with the title: Idea of India, the word was used originally by Bengal's tallest philosopher and scholar, Rabindranath Tagore. It was left to a Bandra-based interlocutor from the audience to correct him, that originally it was Lord Macaulay who used the term 'Idea of India' that he proceeded to formulate and impose on the colony-- with quite an great amount of success by Colonial standards. Some would say, that it is the Macaulay's doing that India is lost and that it is still debating what is the Idea of India.The debate cannot be completed in a sense, as India is still a truncated state and by excluding its extended boundaries and people that are Indians by origin, an imposed idea of India to conform to some transient authority, formal or intellectual or ideological cannot be given the stamp of finality.

Manu Joseph further left out the account of a very heated debate between Dasgupta and MJ Akbar on the subject of Pakistan and Muslims. Swapan Dasgupta, always carrying the communal baggage on his shoulder, did not miss the chance to needle MJ Akbar on Jinnah and Pakistan. Akbar gave a very detailed account of how Muslim politics had developed in the subcontinent and how the Indian Muslims have been reduced to a 'Minority'. In strict terms of the word, they were always a minority, even when they ruled the entire subcontinent; just like the Brahmin minority that is now ruling. It is the loss of empowerment that has now projected Indian Muslims as a minority. And that can change. A more authentic and durable idea of India will have to wait till then.
 
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>

---
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/world/asia/08iht-letter08.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

.

Letter from India

India, an Evolving Idea

By MANU JOSEPH

Published: December 7, 2011

MUMBAI — When people in Delhi stand holding their drinks and talk, it would appear that they have solutions to all of India’s problems, and sometimes the problems of the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan as well. And when people in Mumbai stand holding their drinks, an old complaint in Delhi goes, their banter is frivolous, politically naïve and unfit to be published in the editorial pages of any newspaper.

So it was not surprising that a public debate in Mumbai on the grave subject “The Idea of India” would feature speakers from elsewhere, including Delhi, of course. And that such a debate would have the quality of a rare spectacle in Mumbai, as if it were a road accident. Nearly 500 people turned out Sunday for the event, part of The Times of India’s inaugural “Literary Carnival.”

On stage were M.J. Akbar and Swapan Dasgupta, two leading journalists; Jerry Rao, an entrepreneur and popular commentator; and Patrick French, the British historian, biographer of V.S. Naipaul and author of “India: A Portrait.”

In no time, the panelists were defending the fact that they were discussing “The Idea of India” in an alleged foreign language, English. Mr. French tried not to smile.

“Does it create a divide?” Mr. Rao asked about the fact that public discourse in India is largely conducted in English. “If I include a Wodehousian joke in my writing, am I alienated” from Indian realities? “No,” he said, because Indians are accustomed to English as the dominant medium of explanation.

“India is ruled in English,” Mr. Akbar said, “but we laugh and cry in Hindi, Tamil and other languages.” That is why, he said, while the English-language news media constitute the national mainstream, the country does not have a single television soap opera in English, 
“because the mother-in-law does not speak in English.”

“But we do speak English better than the English,” Mr. Akbar later said, pointing to Mr. French, who looked amused and achieved an ambiguous smile.

Mr. Dasgupta, the moderator, asked if the idea of India was defined by people in Delhi. It is the sort of question that always warms the hearts of Indians who are not from North India, especially people in Mumbai and South Indians like Mr. Rao, who said, “‘Delhi’ is an adjective used to mean India from the point of view of North India.”
South Indians have been historically saddled with what North Indians think are matters of national importance. As Mr. Rao noted, people in the South are far less obsessed with Pakistan, Kashmir or India’s role in Afghanistan. But then there are also benefits in being far from Delhi. As Mr. French said, South Indians “have been able to get on with their lives. They are not caught up in North Indian politics.”

A complex Indian emotion that surfaced in the debate is fear of the foreigner, which sometimes masquerades as righteous rage against the white man, his swagger and his corporations. That fear has been manipulated at various points in India’s history by politicians, businessmen, nationalists afflicted by a sense of inferiority and socialist eggheads, who together ensured that India would open its economy to the world very late in its life and continue to impede further reforms.

It is a complex fear, because the average Indian is not sure whether he is afraid anymore, even though a certain type of politician and intellectual tells him he should be. The fear is topical, as the Indian government’s move to allow in foreign retailers has created such a political storm that the decision has been put on hold. The anti-corruption champion Anna Hazare, who is among those ancient ideologues of whom India has so many thanks to medical advancements, has even invoked the ghost of the East India Company, which colonized India once upon a time.

None of the speakers had any doubt that the arrival of foreign retail chains would benefit Indians through competition and job creation, and that the fear of foreign corporations was a comically anachronistic sentiment. Mr. French said, with a straight face, referring to the Tata Group, “I come from a country where the largest industrial employer is an Indian company.”

It appears that the foreigner Indians are least worried about now is the Pakistani. And it was somehow inevitable that the speakers would explain The Idea of India through The Idea of Pakistan.
Always the opportunistic reporter, Mr. Akbar found a way to connect the topic of debate with the day’s top story — the death of the Hindi film star Dev Anand, who had migrated from Pakistan to India in the early 1940s.

“He took the decision of choosing the idea of India over the emerging idea of Pakistan,” Mr. Akbar said.

At the time of Mr. Anand’s arrival, the idea of India was that it would be a secular state, at least in theory, and the idea of Pakistan was that it would have an Islamic identity. Both these ideas were forced on the people of the two nations by the men who created them.

In the world and time that Mr. Anand left, both nations have survived because, Mr. Akbar said, “The idea of India is stronger than the Indian, and the idea of Pakistan is weaker than the Pakistani.”

When the discussion came to an end, neither the speakers nor the audience claimed to understand exactly what the idea of India is. But everybody agreed that, whatever it is, it is a good idea.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “Serious Men.”

http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/2/20111207201112070219058622420d0a5/The-ones-that-got-away.html

The ones that got away

No one was punished for the riots in Mumbai that followed Babri Masjid's demolition, 19 years ago. We look at three cases

 

 

Jyoti Punwani

Posted On Wednesday, December 07, 2011 at 02:18:29 AM

No one was punished for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The men behind it adorn Parliament and are treated as elder statesmen. No one was punished for the riots in Mumbai that followed the demolition. Those indicted for it have risen in life. The findings of a sitting High Court judge, the Justice B N Srikrishna Commission of Inquiry, have been overturned by policemen. A few victims and lawyers continue to try to get the guilty punished. A petition to implement the Srikrishna Commission Report, filed in 1998, soon after the report was tabled and rejected by the then Shiv Sena-BJP government, is still being heard in the Supreme Court. The last hearing was in 2008. The few measures taken to punish the guilty of 1992-93 were due to the Supreme Court and a pro-active Chief Justice A S Anand. In 2000, the newly-elected Congress-NCP government set up a Special Task Force (STF) on the instructions of the Supreme Court, to look into all offences mentioned in the report. The STF filed criminal cases against a large number of policemen and alleged rioters, going far beyond the recommendations of the Srikrishna Commission. Not one resulted in conviction – the STF filed cases with no evidence to back them – and put up half-hearted prosecutions in court. In 2007, harsh sentences were handed down to the accused in the March 12, 1993 bomb blasts cases. Angry Muslims pointed out that no one had been punished for the riots that were the cause of the blasts. The Congress-NCP government then set up two Special Magistrates' Courts to try riot cases. These were wound up in six months, after hearing 83 cases and handing down convictions in six. The convicted included Sena leader Madhukar Sarpotdar. A look at three landmark cases. Suleman Usman Bakery and R D Tyagi: The big fish got away In 2001, former Police Commissioner R D Tyagi and 17 other policemen were charged by the STF under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code (murder), for the raid against Suleman Usman Bakery that left eight innocents dead, after then Chief Justice of India A S Anand specifically asked what action had been taken against Tyagi. The case generated huge excitement; the legendary P R Vakil was appointed the government's special public prosecutor. The then home minister Chhagan Bhujbal didn't want Tyagi's anticipatory bail application opposed. However, public pressure forced Bhujbal to change these instructions. Vakil's powerful arguments convinced Justice S S Parkar that a prima facie case of murder had been made out, and anticipatory bail was rejected. However, the former CP checked into hospital the moment he knew he was to be arrested, checking out only when he finally got bail, granted only because it had already been granted to his co-accused. None of the murder accused spent a moment in custody; nor did they have to face trial. Tyagi and nine co-accused policemen were discharged in 2003 by Sessions Court Judge P V Bavkar, who said Tyagi had simply done his duty by ordering the raid; he was not responsible for the killing that took place inside the bakery and adjoining madarsa. Only the eight policemen who actually fired during the raid were ordered to face trial. The STF didn't inform special public prosecutor P R Vakil about the discharge application; its routine PP contested the discharge plea. The government didn't appeal against the discharge. Maulana Noor ul Huda, who had been injured during the raid, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the discharge this year. The trial of the eight policemen who were not discharged has yet to begin; the incident is now 19 years old. The Hari Masjid firing Nikhil Kapse – Charmed life Police firing at Wadala's Hari Masjid left six persons dead, four of them inside the masjid. Amnesty International and the Srikrishna Commission held PSI Nikhil Kapse responsible for unjustified firing, inhuman conduct and fabricating records. But the STF exonerated him without even speaking to those who had been injured. In December 2008, the Bombay High Court, approached by Farooq Mapkar (one of the injured), ordered a reluctant CBI to take over the investigation, saying the case "affects the very soul of India". The CBI filed a case of murder against Kapse in February 2009, but never arrested him. By then, Kapse had been promoted to Inspector. The State government rushed to the Supreme Court to save Kapse; but the Court refused to interfere, and gave the CBI six months to finish investigations. Last week, the CBI filed a report in court; a year after its deadline had lapsed, asking that the case be closed due to lack of evidence. Though it spoke to those who had deposed before the Commission, the CBI refused to believe them, because they had been accused by Kapse of rioting. Justice Srikrishna found this accusation "wholly unbelievable"; so did the Sessions Court which acquitted them in 2006. The CBI found two "neutral" witnesses, but chose to believe only one of them, who contradicted the victims' version. The testimony of the second, which went against Kapse, was ignored. The CBI also claimed it could not access crucial documents of the concerned police station – documents that had been produced before the Srikrishna Commission. If the court accepts the CBI plea, Mapkar plans to appeal – another long and lonely fight ahead. The Sarpotdar case Convicted but free Former Sena MLA and MP Madhukar Sarpotdar was the only high-profile Sena leader to be convicted for the 1992-93 riots, 15 years after the offence. The case under Section 153 A of the Indian Penal Code (promoting communal enmity), that had been lingering in various courts since 1993, concerned a Shiv Sena procession in December 1992 led by Sarpotdar, during which inflammatory placards were displayed and provocative slogans and speeches made. Special Sessions Court Magistrate R C Bapat Sarkar found enough evidence in the documents produced by the Prosecution to conclude that Sarpotdar, Ashok Shinde and Jaywant Parab had in fact made speeches "aimed at kindling the Hindu populace into an aggressive stance", and sentenced them to a year's imprisonment and a fine of Rs 5,000. The three were released on bail immediately, and filed an appeal against their conviction. The Congress-NCP government announced it would appeal for a harsher sentence and appoint a special public prosecutor. Neither promise was kept. The appeal against the conviction has since passed through three courts with no hearing ever taking place. Sarpotdar passed away 18 months after his conviction.

Islamists Electoral Rise Due to Failed Secularism: Pankaj Mishra - BLOOMBERG | BUSINESSWEEK

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-01/islamists-electoral-rise-due-to-failed-secularism-pankaj-mishra.html

Bloomberg

Islamists Electoral Rise Due to Failed Secularism: Pankaj Mishra

December 01, 2011, 11:10 PM EST

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By Pankaj Mishra


Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- My last column, on the strangely renewable appeal of political Islam, provoked some strong reactions from both extremes of the ideological spectrum.

Some correspondents urged me to reconsider -- even embrace -- Islam as the most superior way of life, one that holds answers to all problems of individual and collective existence. Others accused me of endorsing the ideology of Islamism that legitimizes such inhumane punishments as cutting off limbs and stoning women to death.

Admittedly, much intellectual confusion -- and mischief -- is caused by an elastic concept like Islamism, which can be stretched to accommodate the mass-murderer Ayman Al-Zawahiri as well as the Tunisian leader and modernist thinker Rashid Ghannouchi. As it turns out, fast-moving events in the Arab world illustrate what I was trying to say better than any intellectual abstraction.

Since I wrote, voters in Morocco have given the moderately Islamist Justice and Development Party more than one-quarter of the parliamentary seats for which elections were held, making it the largest bloc. Egyptians, turning out in large numbers to exercise their long-denied franchise, also seem likely to empower Islamist parties. Libyans as well.

Visionary Individuals

This is the most extraordinary political phenomenon yet in the new century. My interest in it derives from a belief that every new generation of men and women possesses the power to open up fresh possibilities of political thinking and action -- what Hannah Arendt often called “natality.” As Arendt saw it, this ever-renewed promise of politics was best realized by visionary individuals and groups -- such as America’s Founding Fathers or India’s Mahatma Gandhi -- who can creatively interpret the particular historical situations they are thrown into.

Nearly a century ago, Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk seemed to be that far-reaching individual in the Muslim world, hectically making over his country in the image of the West. His attempts at large-scale secularization -- which essentially created a small, authoritarian elite -- were imitated by many Muslim leaders. It is safe to say now that this political and cultural experiment failed, that some selective borrowing from Western modernity could not relegate Islam to the private sphere.

Even before the Arab Spring, many Muslim countries had made new ideological and political beginnings with leaders from non- secular and non-elite backgrounds. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, Abdurrahman Wahid, the leader of one of the world’s biggest Islamic organizations, indispensably helped his country’s transition from a dictatorship to representative government.

In the same decade and a half, Turkey also witnessed the political empowering of many of its previously underrepresented people through the work of the Islamists in the Justice and Development Party.

Still, the fact that Arab countries such as Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia that have had ostensibly secular regimes now seem to offer a new base for “Islamism” will no doubt set alarm bells ringing in the West.

At least some of this fear and bewilderment is due to old, persisting misperceptions -- and a bit of narcissism. The suave, English-speaking Cairo residents who fronted the Egyptian revolution to Western television viewers may have made it seem like their own handiwork, with a little help from Facebook and Twitter. But they were never representative of the Egyptian population or the religiously conservative working classes that really tipped the balance against Hosni Mubarak.

Laptop Warriors

Furthermore, the ideological oppositions that arouse many laptop warriors in the West -- liberal democracy versus Islamism, secularism versus theocracy -- bleach out the mundane but more significant social and economic factors behind the Arab Spring: For instance, the fact that welfare-statism in Tunisia followed by a globalized and apparently successful economy produced a latent middle class whose high expectations, fueled by the entertainment media, turned out to be impossible to fulfill.

A socioeconomic analysis would reveal how a mass of aspirers first came to be denied the highest fruits of capitalist modernity, and were then pressed down to the ranks of permanent losers. A historical account of secular Arab despotisms would also show why and how they destroyed the semblance of civil society previously maintained by clergy and other Islam-minded social and political organizations.

It may be comforting for some Westerners to think of middle-class Tunisians and Moroccans holding -- like their counterparts in Greece, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. -- study sessions on Galbraith, Keynes and Marx in tented “People’s Universities.” But it seems more natural that Arabs should turn to belief systems and political organizations still standing in the ruins of the ancien regimes, whose promise of social justice has become more attractive than ever.

These may seem menacingly “Islamist” in Western eyes. But it is more useful to think of present and future election results in Muslim countries as expressing a strong desire for accountable governments that guarantee civil rights and a degree of egalitarianism. That such desires are outlined by an old ideal held by a moral community of believers should not be so surprising.

Even in Iran, which has suffered greatly from hard-line Islamists, reform movements uphold Islamic principles. Following the efforts of the country’s former president Mohammad Khatami, the Green Movement has struggled to attain liberal freedoms within an overall Islamic polity. While thwarted by a brutal and increasingly reckless regime in Tehran, this endeavor will now be undertaken in Arab countries, where devout Muslims deftly using a vocabulary of social and political rights are all set to assume state power.
Potential Tyrannies

It is possible, of course, that their experiment of reconciling Islamic principles with modern statecraft and globalized economies will fail. It may even result in religious tyrannies and the exodus of secular and liberal elites.

As Ebrahim Yazdi, one of the leaders of Iran’s Green Movement, put it in an open letter to Ghannouchi last week, there is reason to be “seriously concerned about the long range outcome.” He continued: “Our people, Muslims of every nation, struggle for the restoration of their basic rights, liberty, and sovereignty. But we do not have sufficient experience with democracy … We fight and overthrow dictators, but not dictatorship itself.”

Yazdi prescribed some ways of avoiding “the mistakes we have made in Iran, or those of our brothers in Algeria and elsewhere.” These included a “recognition and celebration of the diversity of human society and pluralism” and the spirit of tolerance and compromise.

These are admirable ideals. We will see whether and how the new Islam-minded rulers of the Arab world will enshrine them in legal and political institutions -- as opposed to declaring that the Shariah law contains all that you need.

It is not even clear whether they realize that, as Yazdi puts it, “elections are valued instruments, but are not by themselves democracy.” In any case, unlike with Ataturk long ago, this time the whole world is watching to see whether the promise of political natality in the Muslim world can be realized.
 
(Pankaj Mishra, the author of “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond,” is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)


--Editors: Tobin Harshaw, Stacey Shick.
Click on “Send Comment” in sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.
To contact the writer of this article: Pankaj Mishra in London at pmashobra@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net.
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Line Grows Long for Free Meals at U.S. Schools - By Sam Dillon - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/education/surge-in-free-school-lunches-reflects-economic-crisis.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2&pagewanted=all

Line Grows Long for Free Meals at U.S. Schools

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

More than 100 students eat a free dinner daily after classes at Ingels Elementary School in Kansas City, Mo. The Hickman Mills C-1 district feared students would otherwise go to bed hungry.

By SAM DILLON

Published: November 29, 2011

Millions of American schoolchildren are receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their families for the decades-old safety-net program.

Multimedia

Graphic

Rates of Increase in Subsidized Lunches

The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.

The Agriculture Department has not yet released data for September and October.

“These are very large increases and a direct reflection of the hardships American families are facing,” said Benjamin Senauer, a University of Minnesota economist who studies the meals program, adding that the surge had happened so quickly “that people like myself who do research are struggling to keep up with it.”

In Sylva, N.C., layoffs at lumber and paper mills have driven hundreds of new students into the free lunch program. In Las Vegas, where the collapse of the construction industry has caused hardship, 15,000 additional students joined the subsidized lunch program this fall. In Rochester, unemployed engineers and technicians have signed up their children after the downsizing of Kodak and other companies forced them from their jobs. Many of these formerly middle-income parents have pleaded with school officials to keep their enrollment a secret.

Students in families with incomes up to 130 percent of the poverty level — or $29,055 for a family of four — are eligible for free school meals. Children in a four-member household with income up to $41,348 qualify for a subsidized lunch priced at 40 cents.

Among the first to call attention to the increases were Department of Education officials who use subsidized lunch rates as a poverty indicator in federal testing. This month, in releasing results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they noted that the proportion of the nation’s fourth graders enrolled in the lunch program had climbed to 52 percent from 49 percent in 2009, crossing a symbolic watershed.

In the Rockdale County Schools in Conyers, Ga., east of Atlanta, the percentage of students receiving subsidized lunches increased to 63 percent this year from 46 percent in 2006.

“We’re seeing people who were never eligible before, never had a need,” said Peggy Lawrence, director of school nutrition.

One of those is Sheila Dawson, a Wal-Mart saleswoman whose husband lost his job as the manager of a Waffle House last year, reducing their income by $45,000. “We’re doing whatever we can to save money,” said Ms. Dawson, who has a 15-year-old daughter. 

“We buy clothes at the thrift store, we see fewer movies and this year my daughter qualifies for reduced-price lunch.”

She added, “I feel like: ‘Hey, we were paying taxes all these years. This is what they were for.’ ”

Although the troubled economy is the main factor in the increases, experts said, some growth at the margins has resulted from a new way of qualifying students for the subsidized meals, known as direct certification. In 2004, Congress required the nation’s 17,000 school districts to match student enrollment lists against records of local food-stamp agencies, directly enrolling those who receive food stamps for the meals program. The number of districts doing so has been rising — as have the number of school-age children in families eligible for food stamps, to 14 million in 2010-11 from 12 million in 2009-10.

“The concern of those of us involved in the direct certification effort is how to help all these districts deal with the exploding caseload of kids eligible for the meals,” said Kevin Conway, a project director at Mathematica Policy Research, a co-author of an October report to Congress on direct certification.

Congress passed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 to support commodity prices after World War II by reducing farm surpluses while providing food to schoolchildren. By 1970, the program was providing 22 million lunches on an average day, about a fifth of them subsidized. Since then, the subsidized portion has grown while paid lunches have declined, but not since 1972 have so many additional children become eligible for free lunches as in fiscal year 2010, 1.3 million. Today it is a $10.8 billion program providing 32 million lunches, 21 million of which are free or at reduced price.

All 50 states have shown increases, according to Agriculture Department data. In Florida, which has 2.6 million public school students, an additional 265,000 students have become eligible for subsidies since 2007, with increases in virtually every district.

“Growth has been across the board,” said Mark Eggers, the Florida Department of Education official who oversees the lunch program.
In Tennessee, the number of students receiving subsidized meals has grown 37 percent since 2007.

“When a factory closes, our school districts see a big increase,” said Sarah White, the state director of school nutrition.

In Las Vegas, with 13.6 percent unemployment, the enrollment of thousands of new students in the subsidized lunch program forced the Clark County district to add an extra shift at the football field-size central kitchen, said Virginia Beck, an assistant director at the school food service.

In Roseville, Minn., an inner-ring St. Paul suburb, the proportion of subsidized lunch students rose to 44 percent this fall from 29 percent in 2006-7, according to Dr. Senauer, the economist. “There’s a lot of hurt in the suburbs,” he said. “It’s the new face of poverty.”

In New York, the Gates Chili school district west of Rochester has lost 700 students since 2007-8, as many families have fled the area after mass layoffs. But over those same four years, the subsidized lunch program has added 125 mouths, many of them belonging to the children of Kodak and Xerox managers and technicians who once assumed they had a lifetime job, said Debbi Beauvais, district supervisor of the meals program.

“Parents signing up children say, ‘I never thought a program like this would apply to me and my kids,’ ” Ms. Beauvais said.

Many large urban school districts have for years been dominated by students poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. In Dallas, Newark and Chicago, for instance, about 85 percent of students are eligible, and most schools also offer free breakfasts. Now, some places have added free supper programs, fearing that needy students otherwise will go to bed hungry.

One is the Hickman Mills C-1 district in a threadbare Kansas City, Mo., neighborhood where a Home Depot, a shopping mall and a string of grocery stores have closed.

Ten years ago, 48 percent of its students qualified for subsidized lunches. By 2007, that proportion had increased to 73 percent, said Leah Schmidt, the district’s nutrition director. Last year, when it hit 80 percent, the district started feeding 700 students a third meal, paid for by the state, each afternoon when classes end.

“This is the neediest period I’ve seen in my 20-year career,” Ms. Schmidt said.

Robbie Brown and Kimberley McGee contributed reporting.

Zionist Front Page Magazine article - The Dangers of Democracy By Bruce Thortnton

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Comments posted by GM on Front Page article: Dangers of believing in democracy -

Just as Muslim political parties, now ascendent in many Arab countries, have manifestly tried to compromise and come to terms with other liberal and secular co-citizens, it is now time that Liberals and secular citizens too, start cooperating and accommodating majority views that give more emphasis to Islamic percepts even in  daily life, without any necessary political compulsions. In wider Muslim world, there is an overwhelming perception, that it is the Jewish/Zionist elements that have convinced themselves, that countering Islam and Muslim political revival is the only existentialist recourse to the survival of western and Zionist world view. In fact, history is rampant as to how clash of civilizations too end up with new permutations and combinations, without necessarily settling the differences through wars and propaganda.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/30/the-dangers-of-believing-in-democracy%E2%80%99s-magical-powers/

The Dangers of Democracy

Posted by Bruce Thornton Bio ↓ on Nov 30th, 2011 

The parliamentary elections that have begun in Egypt will impress only the most starry-eyed of democracy champions. These are the people who, like Senator Joe Lieberman​, think that the “Arab Spring” is all about people “demanding lives of democracy, dignity, economic opportunity, and involvement in the modern world.” What we’ve seen so far instead is the growing success of Islamist parties demanding a greater role for Islam and shari’a law in running their countries. Our failure of imagination that has reduced events in the Middle East to our own historical paradigms and ideals continues to compromise our foreign policy in that region, and endanger our national interests.

For example, since we prize freedom, human rights, separation of church and state, and tolerance for a variety of ways for individuals to pursue happiness, we think everybody else values or defines those ideas the same way we do. But what we call freedom, many Muslims see as a soul-destroying license and destructive self-indulgence. As the Ayatollah Khomeini​ preached in 1979, such Western-style freedom is a “freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way to the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom.” Decades earlier, Muslim Brothers​ founder Sayyid Qutb​, along with Khomeini the most critical influence on neo-jihadism, likewise had scorned Western “individual freedom, devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives.” Similarly, al Qaeda theorist Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, “The freedom we want is not the freedom to use women as commodities . . . it is not the freedom of AIDS and an industry of obscenities and homosexual marriage.” For the faithful, true freedom is the freedom to live as an observant Muslim in harmony with Allah’s precepts, something far different from what we in the West mean by political freedom. So too with our ideal of human rights, which in Islamic terms means the right to be a faithful Muslim without any interference. That’s why Article 24 of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam reads, “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a.”

This failure to imagine the world-view of those unlike us is worsened by our failure to understand that “democracy” is more than just the mechanics of voting. As G.K. Chesterton said, “We shall have real Democracy, when . . . the ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, but what he is going to vote about.” The evidence of elections in the Middle East so far––in Algeria, Gaza, Lebanon, and Tunisia, which have all seen Islamist parties triumph––suggests that most ordinary Muslims want democracy not to institutionalize Western goods and ideals such as personal freedom, individual rights, or tolerance for minorities, but to integrate more thoroughly Islam and shari’a into government. In Egypt this is the explicit program of the organization poised for success in the democratic elections, the Muslim Brothers. Their 2007 draft platform proclaimed that “Islam is the official state religion” and “the Islamic shari’a is the main source for legislation.” 

Nor are these demands for more religion in government coming just from a well-organized, unified minority. In a Pew poll from 2010, 85% of Egyptians said Islam’s influence on politics is positive, 95% said that it is good that Islam plays a large role in politics, 59% identified with Islamic fundamentalists, 54% favored gender segregation in the workplace, 82% favored stoning adulterers, 77% favored whippings and cutting off the hands of thieves and robbers, and 84% favored death for those leaving Islam.

Nor will we see in Egypt the sort of religious tolerance sanctioned by the Western separation of church and state. So far this year, 80 Christian Copts have been murdered, some by soldiers, and their churches attacked and destroyed. The intolerance that breeds such violence finds its sanction in traditional Islam, at least according to Sheik Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Cairo’s prestigious Al Azhar University. Gomaa calls Christians “infidels” and quotes the Koran’s injunction to “Fight … the People of the Book [Jews and Christians] until they pay the Jizya [tribute] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” This faith-sanctioned intolerance explains why only 48% of Egyptians look favorably on Christians, despite the presence of 8 million Christian Copts, and a scant 2% look favorably on Jews. It is hard to see how a liberal democracy as we understand it can flourish in such an environment of intolerance.
Given these faith-based attitudes, if a majority of Egyptians democratically vote for policies that will incorporate the prescriptions from shari’a into government policies and laws, the result will not be anything close to what we mean when we extol democracy and human rights.

Even more important than our simplistic view of democracy, and our blindness to the incompatibility of democratic principles with Islam, is our failure to acknowledge how much more significant religion is for Muslim identity than it is for ours: “In most Islamic countries,” historian Bernard Lewis​ writes, “religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian . . . in no Christian country at the present time can religious leaders count on the degree of belief and participation that remains normal in Muslim lands . . . Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority that is still normal and accepted in most Muslim countries.” A Pew poll from this year confirms the truth of this observation in Egypt, where 46% of Egyptians identified themselves as Muslims first, while only 31% identified themselves as Egyptians first.

Despite all this evidence for the powerful role of religion in Muslim identity, we continue to understand the Muslim Middle East and jihadism in terms of our own categories and ideals. Thus we have tried to explain Middle Eastern political and social dysfunctions of the last 80 years in terms of nationalism, fascism, communism, economic failure, and now the illiberal dictators whose overthrow will presumably usher in a springtime of liberal democracy and political freedom that will eliminate the conditions creating jihadist terror. But all these Western-imported ideologies and explanations do not find traction with most Muslims, who see their problems as resulting from a crisis in Islam that has allowed peoples who once trembled at Allah’s armies to dominate the world. As Lewis points out, since Islam’s retreat in the 17^th century in the face of European penetration of Muslim lands, “the most characteristic, significant, and original political and intellectual responses to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels.” This observation was confirmed recently by the Muslim Brothers Supreme Guide Muhammad al-Badi’: “The Muslim nation has the means [to bring about] improvement and change . . . It knows the way, the methods, and the road signs, and it has a practical role model in Allah’s Messenger, [the Prophet Muhammad​] . . . who clarified how to implement the values of the [Koran] and the Sunna at every time and in every place.” Al-Badi’ further explains that this “change” will be brought about not by democracy, but by jihad: all Muslim regimes “crucially need to understand that the improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.” Democratic elections thus are a means to an end, not the end itself. As Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan puts it, “Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.”

Starting with Iran, for over 30 years we have misunderstood the Middle East because we have refused to acknowledge the role of Islam as the central dynamic of most Muslim hearts and minds. Now we are indulging the magical powers attributed to “democracy” and “freedom” to continue avoiding that truth. As a result, we have colluded in the overthrow of rulers like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak​, who at least served our interests, in favor of Islamist groups explicitly hostile to them, as we may soon find out when democratically elected, illiberal Islamic regimes increasingly pursue policies that threaten our security and interests.