Today's Stories

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

Weekend Edition
December 5 / 7, 2008

Cusp of the Inferno

Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

By RANJIT HOSKOTE

Mumbai.

While the flames around the seafront Taj Mahal Hotel’s Italianate dome have died down, and crews of cleaners have washed away the blood on the concourse of the Victoria Terminus train station, the stutter of Kalashnikovs has been replaced by the chatter of strategy analysts. Every surveillance camera grab and every shred of paper left behind by the terrorists who shattered the peace of our city last week is being scanned closely for clues.

The theories that many commentators have expounded, to account for last week’s terrorist attack on Mumbai, are as flat and two-dimensional as the television screen on which these have been expressed. The 26-29 November attack, in which nearly 200 people were massacred and more than 400 were injured, has already pressed pause on the fragile peace process initiated between India and Pakistan. In Mumbai, an unprecedented if informal alliance of intelligence agencies from India, the USA, the UK and Israel has been convened to sift through the evidence, which points to the involvement of highly motivated terror agencies in Pakistan. Some commentators in the western hemisphere, dusting off the faded picture-books of colonial ethnography, have described the attack as yet another episode in the supposedly centuries-old strife between Hindus and Muslims, each side depicted as volatile, animated by murder-lust and the memory of clan feuds. Others, with a somewhat better claim to reason, explain the attack as an outcome of the simmering antagonism that has held India and Pakistan apart for the last 61 years. And yet others see the attack, in generic terms, as the latest outrage perpetrated by the forces of global jihad.

In actuality, the terrorist attack against Mumbai must be seen as a four-dimensional game. It was staged at the intersection among four distinct yet interrelated scenarios of cultural politics in South Asia. The first and best known of these scenarios is that of global jihad: its ability to gauge and channel the anger and resentment of Muslims across the planet against a ‘West’ that is seen to incarnate neo-colonial oppression, and also, specifically, the appeal it holds out to young Muslims who have experienced inequity and injustice in South Asia. But we must also consider, as a second vital scenario, the startling rise of Hindu religious extremism within India during the last two decades: in these years, Hindu majoritarian elements with strongly fascist leanings have repeatedly challenged the rule of law and the inclusive, multi-religious and multi-ethnic charter of the Indian Republic. They have consistently assaulted the Muslim and Christian minorities, as well as liberal Hindus, using provocations that range from mob censorship and rioting to pogroms and full-blown ethnic cleansing.

A third scenario is that produced by the deep-seated antagonism that Islamic extremists in Pakistan – like their Hindu majoritarian rivals in India – feel towards the Indian Republic’s charter of ecumenical acceptance. To these radicals, multi-religious India’s continued existence is a challenge to Pakistan’s claim to be the natural and only homeland for South Asian Muslims. And fourthly, we must acquaint ourselves with the visceral rage that retrograde tendencies, both of the Hindu nativist and the Islamic militant variety, feel against Mumbai’s cosmopolitan and internationalist ethos, with its blend of Indian, Asian and Western perspectives and populations. It is true that Mumbai offers terrorists numerous targets of a military nature: among them, a nuclear reactor, a naval dockyard, an air force base, a cantonment, two railway hubs, and two airports. But more than any of these, it is Mumbai’s richly hybrid, receptive, inventive and unabashedly transnational culture that has made this metropolis a natural target for fanatics committed to various brands of spurious purity, over the last two decades.

Last week’s attack is the eighth terrorist strike that Mumbai has suffered since 1993. With each attack, the sight-lens of the terrorist is amplified to include more of the panorama that gives Mumbai its unique identity: the city’s massive, multi-route railway system, which services several million commuters daily; its grand hotels, each embodying a dialogue among cultures; its vibrant centers of enterprise in finance, banking and industry; and above all, its open-armed approach to the religious imagination, which welcomes the Hassidic Jew and the Sufi, the Jesuit and the Buddhist, the Brahmin and the atheist with equal enthusiasm. The killings at the Chabad-Lubovitch Centre in South Mumbai, during last week’s attack, were especially despicable: Jews have lived in peace in India, as a community integral to Indian society, for 2500 years. Only twice in these 2500 years have they suffered attack: once, in the early 16th century in Kerala, at the hands of Portuguese settlers; and last week, at the hands of jihadists.

* * *

Mumbai, December 1992-January 1993: I remember riding up and down the north-south needle of the metropolis on trains that were nearly empty. On one side were bare roads and a silent sea, on the other side were blazing shanties and timber warehouses, inhabited or owned by Muslims who had been attacked and driven from their homes by goon squads affiliated to the Hindu majoritarian formation. The violence continued for weeks, watched by politicians who seemed to have turned to stone. By the time it abated, not only Muslims but also migrant workers from the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and the southern states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, had been forced to flee. Torn hand-me-down suitcases, a parrot abandoned in flight and squawking in his cage, charred birth certificates – these relics remained to tell of slaughter and exodus. And the lists of the dying and the dead in the city’s hospitals.

A decade later, the violence was re-enacted in Gujarat, this time perfected to the pitch of organisational exactitude and supported by the Hindu-majoritarian government of the state: Muslims were murdered and raped, their homes and shrines destroyed, the very proof of their existence covered over with asphalt. The survivors were herded into refugee camps, where they remain today, without amenities or even the right to vote, which has been snatched from them on Kafkaesque bureaucratic grounds. “You can’t vote here because you are not registered in this district; you can only vote from the districts where you lived earlier,” says the helpful officer. “But of course you can’t return there, can you, because the majoritarians don’t want you back.”

From these experiences, a new and angry young Indian Muslim was born: one who could not understand why the country of his birth had allowed such grievous injustice to be visited upon his people. And whether, after all, the Ummah was not a better alternative: the global ecumene of Muslims, cutting across national and racial identities. This sense of a natural alliance with Muslims suffering injustice and oppression elsewhere has driven some young Indian Muslims into the arms of India-hating Islamic extremists in Pakistan: extremists who have created para-states for themselves, in defiance of Pakistan’s fragile democratic government. These para-states, as we know, are built and managed by an alliance of actors ranging from fire-breathing Wahhabi preachers and Pakhtoon clan leaders to handlers and operatives from the ISI, Inter-Services Intelligence. The syndrome of hatred for India, that citadel of Jahiliyya or paganism, is cultivated in training camps situated in the grey zones of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. That India is now closely allied with the USA and its geopolitical interests only convinces the trainee terrorist that India must be destroyed.

And this Muslim is not the white-robed, long-bearded, Koran-reading madrassa student who is usually identified as the bearer of jihad; I have met many madrassa students in Mumbai, and they are training to be good Muslims and good Indian citizens. Like the great majority of Indian Muslims, most madrassa students are committed to peace and harmony against all the odds stacked against them. No, the kind of young man I have sketched here is more likely to have a master’s degree in engineering or management, be versatile in the use of media technology, at home in English, fully conversant with international politics, and able to ally himself with Pakistani, Afghan, Sudanese, Somali, Bangladeshi and Arab militants. Indeed, this is the face of global jihad in South Asia.

Global jihad is a modernist interpretation of the teachings of Islam, which many traditional Muslim teachers would denounce as a distortion. In the doctrines of Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Maududi, men who were enraged by Western colonialism but influenced by the strategies of Bolshevism and Fascism, many young Muslims now seem to find an answer to their perplexities. Here is a path through the anxieties of the contemporary world. It renders life simple and clear; so what if its austere singularity calls for the destruction of diversity? It fills the individual with a sense of messianic purpose; so what if it involves the death of innocent people, offerings at the altar of apocalyptic necessity? It inspires the individual with the hope of glory in the afterlife; so what if it costs him his life in the here and now? The tragedy of all such millenarian beliefs is that they beget a cycle of violence that takes the world, not to Paradise, but to Inferno.

Ranjit Hoskote is a cultural theorist, poet and curator based in Mumbai. He can be contacted at ranjit.hoskote@gmail.com.

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