Three dead in terrorist attack near Vienna’s main synagogue

Clara Weiss

On Monday at 8 pm local time, just hours before a second lockdown went into effect in Austria amid a catastrophically fast rise in coronavirus cases, a major terrorist attack occurred in the center of Vienna near the capital’s main synagogue. According to the police, six shooters opened fire at six different locations. At least three people were killed. One of them was a suspect who was shot by the police.

15 people were hospitalized, and one died later in the evening. Six of them are still in serious condition. The number of fatalities is expected to rise.

A police officer in position at the scene after gunshots were heard, in Vienna, Monday, Nov. 2, 2020.(Photo/Ronald Zak)

The shooters were armed with automatic rifles. Reports, according to which at least one of the assailants had a belt with explosives, have not been confirmed. As of this writing, at least one of the assailants is still at large, according to the Vienna police.

The Austrian president Sebastian Kurz from the right-wing Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) said Monday evening that it was “definitely a terror attack” which was still “ongoing” and had been “prepared in a very professional manner.” The Austrian government has deployed massive police and special forces to Vienna, and has also mobilized the military.

The attack occurred in an area of the city center which is popular for its many bars and restaurants. The streets were particularly crowded as many tried to enjoy the nice weather on the eve of the lockdown. The attack began with one of the assailants shooting at passersby in the vicinity of the Seitenstettengasse synagogue. Soon thereafter, the shooting spread to least five other locations in the city center. The opera and one theater were evacuated.

The mayor of Vienna said that “people in bars were shot at randomly” and that an anti-Semitic motivation for the terror attack could not be excluded. Eye witnesses and media reports described scenes of chaos and panic across the city center.

According to Oskar Deutsch, the president of the Jewish Community Vienna, the synagogue had just closed at the time of the attack. While it remains unclear whether the synagogue was a target of the attack, all Jewish schools, synagogues, kosher restaurants and supermarkets will be closed on Tuesday.

In a press conference Monday night, the Austrian minister of the interior, Karl Nehammer, called upon people in Vienna to stay at home unless they had to go to work. He indicated that children did not have to go to school on Tuesday but that schools would be open for those who couldn’t stay at home. Nehammer urged residents to stay away from the city center.

The exact motivations for the attack remain unclear.

The attack occurred under conditions of a profound social and economic crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has now entered its second wave in Europe, with case numbers exploding in France, Germany, across Eastern Europe, the UK, as well as Austria. With a population of under 9 million, Austria has been reporting over 4,000 infections every day for the past week, a rate similar to that of the UK and Italy. On Friday, the number of infections reached 5,627. The government has indicated that hospitals won’t be able to cope once daily new cases reach over 6,000.

The government has long opposed a necessary shutdown. Now, much like Germany and France, it has only implemented a partial lockdown. Schools, kindergartens, shops and factories, the main sources of infection, remain open, while cultural institutions and restaurants have to shut down. The economic fallout of the pandemic has been severe. Unemployment has risen by 20 percent compared to last year. In early October, 409,000 people were looking for work—the equivalent of almost 2 percent of the working age population—the highest number since May 1946.

Political tensions are also running high. Over the past years, the Austrian government has stood at the forefront of the shift to the far right of European politics, bearing direct responsibility for the growth of neo-fascist forces. Under Sebastian Kurz, the far right Freedom Party (FPÖ) was integrated into the government and received control over the interior ministry until the government collapsed in 2019.

When the ÖVP entered a coalition with the Greens and Social Democrats, the right-wing policies of the FPÖ-ÖVP government were essentially continued. Much like in neighboring Germany, where the establishment parties deliberately encouraged the rise of the neo-fascist Alternative für Deutschland, while neo-Nazi networks flourish within the state, the Austrian far right has been fostered by the existing parties and the state apparatus. The FPÖ has particularly close ties to the far right Identitarian movement (Identitäre Bewegung). In 2019, it emerged that the neo-Nazi terrorist Brenton Tarrant, who perpetrated the horrific massacre of Christchurch in New Zealand, had donated 1,500 Euros to the Austrian Identitarian movement.

Teachers strike across France against first day of deadly school reopenings

Will Morrow

As schools reopened across France yesterday after the holidays, mass opposition among students and teachers at the Macron administration’s deadly school reopening policy is growing. Assemblies of teachers met at schools yesterday morning and resolved to strike against the lack of safe conditions to prevent the spread of the virus. Images are being widely shared online showing students crammed like sardines into hallways, classes and cafeterias.

The government is reopening schools despite a second wave of the pandemic that its own scientific council has warned will likely be larger than the first, which killed more than 30,000 people in France and 200,000 across Europe. More than 37,000 people have now died from the virus in France, with another 416 deaths reported on Monday.

Students gather outside on the first day of the return to school

Despite the government’s cynical claims that it is determined to protect students’ psychological well-being, the school reopening is driven by entirely different concerns: to ensure that parents can continue to work, and that the corporations can continue to obtain profits throughout the pandemic, regardless of how many lives are lost as a result.

A Twitter account reporting on opposition among teachers to the Macron government reported dozens of local strikes by teachers organised in assemblies at schools across France on Monday morning.

At the Balzac de Mitry-Mory school, 24 teachers organised to strike at 8 a.m. yesterday. At the Romain Rolland school in Clichy-sous-Bois near Paris, another 22 teachers voted to strike. In the Feyder school in Epinay-sur-Seine near Paris, 47 teachers voted by 100 percent to strike at 8 a.m. Classes were held for 60 students out of 1,600 enrolled. At the Berthelot school in Pantin, north of Paris, 28 teachers resolved to strike against the demand that they return to classes “as though nothing was happening.”

At Bachelard school in Chelles, 20 staff lodged their “right to strike” with the direction due to unsafe conditions caused by the pandemic and “non-respect of the health protocol.”

At the Jean Jaurès school in Clichy, teachers walked out, and the administration told families that the school may be forced to close. At Von Donghen school in Lagny, classes were cancelled after teachers threatened to strike. At the Flora Tristan school north of Paris, half of teachers supported a strike at 8:30 a.m. At the Joliot-Curie school in Nanterre, teachers voted 53-3 for a strike at midday. At the Olympe de Gouges school in Noisy-le-Sec, over 30 teachers voted to strike in the morning. At the Eugène Hénaff school in Bagnolet, 18 teachers voted to strike.

At the Alice Guy school in Lyon, the student body reportedly refused to enter classes, and there were reports of further strike action by teachers in Montpellier and Marseille, as well.

Students of the Pantheon university wearing face masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus attend a class in Paris, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

Safety protocols inside schools are essentially non-existent. One teacher writing into Le Monde stated: “I feel humiliated. While in the media there are grandiloquent statements to support our teachers, in reality there is nothing. … The health protocol is the same as before the holidays! The students continue to change between classes, with 30 crammed into a class. We have not received disposable masks since the beginning of the confinement! We have the right to only two masks on Sundays!”

Existing protocols state that social distancing must be respected “to the extent that it is possible.” Given the overcrowding of schools, this simply means they do not apply anywhere. Parents are advised to “take the temperature of their children before they go to school” and to “keep them home” if they have a temperature of over 38 degrees. Since it is well known that many cases are asymptomatic or exhibit symptoms after they have already been contagious, this will do nothing to prevent the spread of the virus in schools.

The protocols state that “social distancing is not required for students in the same group (class or year level) either in closed spaces or the exterior.”

Students aged over six are being made to wear masks, contradicting the government’s earlier lies that young students were neither contagious nor in danger from the virus.

“It will be very difficult for them to stay six hours a day with a mask, while on the street, they don’t have to wear one,” Haydée Leblanc, a primary teacher in Abbeville, told France3. “Then they will spend their time touching the mask! Before, we were told that wearing the mask for young children was counter-productive, because they could actually spread the virus faster with their hands. Apparently the doctrine has changed.” Noting that it was a public relations stunt, she stated, “it’s above all to add something to the health protocol to reassure families.”

The Macron administration is pursuing a policy that it knows will cause thousands of additional cases and deaths. Schools will act as vectors for the transmission of the virus, countless children will become infected, and will infect their family members and friends.

The school reopening takes place as reports by the government’s own scientific advisory bodies make clear that the partial confinement of the population, while keeping non-essential business and schools, will not significantly cut the spread of the virus. The Pasteur Institute estimated that the partial confinement would bring the rate of reproduction of the virus to 0.9, with the “pessimistic scenario” that it would be brought down to only 1.2 by the government’s measures, meaning a continuing exponential spread of the virus.

Inside a school corridor

Children will also fall sick and die. Official claims that youth are not in danger from the virus are lies. French health authorities report that 170 people aged under 19 are currently hospitalised with COVID-19, of which 23 are in urgent reanimation care. The long-term health impacts of the virus on youth are still unknown.

France’s corrupt union bureaucracies are hostile to a struggle against school reopenings. They have been in continuous discussions with the Macron administration on its reopening policy, and have done nothing to mobilize the mass opposition among teachers and students. On October 30, the unions cynically published a notice authorising strike action between November 2 and 7. But its aim was only to provide some means of maintaining control over the growing opposition among teachers.

The growing strike movement among teachers and students must be unified and organized. For that, teachers need their own organizations, rank-and-file school safety committees, independent from the trade unions.

The struggle to close non-essential industries and let workers and youth safely confine at home requires the mobilization of teachers and broader layers of workers in mass strike action. The best allies of teachers and students in France are their counterparts in Germany, Britain, and across Europe and beyond. These forces can fight to prepare and mobilize workers for a European general strike and a struggle for the working class to take state power and impose a scientific policy against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Europe’s COVID-19 pandemic spirals out of control

Alex Lantier

Yesterday, teachers walked out from classes in dozens of schools across France as students returned from holidays to the first classes since President Emmanuel Macron announced a new lockdown. It has not taken long for the political fraud of the lockdowns now being declared by governments across Europe to become apparent to broad layers of youth and working people.

Announcing the lockdown last week, Macron said elementary and middle school students would continue attending school so their parents could continue working. As the health ministry estimated that two-thirds of transmission clusters are at school or work, Macron pledged that reinforced security protocols would limit the spread of the virus. This pledge was worthless. Current security protocols insist that social distancing be implemented only “to the extent that it is possible” and that it is “not required for students in the same class or year level.”

Health care workers transport a COVID-19 patient from an intensive care unit (ICU) at a hospital in Kyjov to hospital in Brno, Czech Republic, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

And so, as a quarter million new cases of COVID-19 are found each day in Europe—with 52,518 in France, 22,253 in Italy, 21,926 in Switzerland, 18,950 in Britain, 18,340 in Spain, 15,578 in Poland, and 13,125 in Germany—teachers and students are still crammed thirty to a classroom in schools.

As students in France join high school students in Greece and in Poland who have launched mass school occupations and protests, youth across Europe face a political struggle. Governments across Europe are acting with contempt for the lives of the population. Even after Macron said that 400,000 Frenchmen could die of COVID-19 if emergency measures were not taken, Paris, London and Berlin all implemented lockdowns which, unlike lockdowns this spring, demand that children and non-essential workers keep going to school and work to be infected.

France’s Scientific Council estimated Friday that such lockdowns cut COVID-19’s reproduction rate (R0) to only between 0.9 and 1.2, meaning the number of daily new cases will only fall very slowly or even keep growing exponentially. “There is great uncertainty on the effectiveness of the new, less stringent measures,” warned Scientific Council member Simon Cauchemez. With France’s ventilator beds already half full with COVID-19 patients, Spain’s a quarter full, and the rest of Europe only a few weeks behind, a breakdown of the health system is looming.

European governments’ pretensions to have handled the pandemic more intelligently than the Trump administration have been exposed as a cynical and deadly fraud. European heads of state did not, perhaps, act with quite the same crass arrogance of America’s billionaire real estate speculator president. They did not refuse to wear masks, compare COVID-19 to the flu, or boast after catching the virus of the exceptional quality of the medical care they received compared to that available to the overwhelming majority of workers in their countries.

Behind the appearance of competence, however, there was lying on a massive scale. Sweden’s “herd immunity” policy—letting the virus rip through the country, hoping the population would eventually become immune—led to a death rate nine times higher than neighboring Finland. Yet this policy was was adopted by all the European governments.

Like officials across Europe, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell denied he was pursuing a herd immunity policy. Yet in a subsequently declassified March 14 email he sent to Finnish officials, Tegnell argued for “keeping schools open to reach herd immunity more quickly.” That is, like the Macron government today, he was advocating keeping schools open so that the virus would spread among teachers, students, and then the broader working population.

While Britain’s chief scientific advisor Sir Patrick Vallance said, “It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it, and it’s also not desirable,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Interior Ministry secretly reported that the unchecked spread of the virus could cost 1 million German lives in 2020. Yet “Mommy Merkel,” as the press markets her to the German people, went before the public and blandly predicted that 70 percent of the German population would become infected.

The crisis of the pandemic cannot be resolved simply by removing Trump, or another individual capitalist politician, from office. The European governments all pursued essentially the same policy as Trump, but paid somewhat more attention to skillful political deceit. And today, around 2,500 people across Europe die of COVID-19 each day—1,000 more than in North America.

What compelled the adoption of lockdowns in Europe was the intervention of the working class. In March, a wave of wildcat strikes demanding a shelter-at-home policy in auto, steel, and engineering plants across Italy, initially the worst-hit country, spread to Spain, France, Britain and beyond. Europe’s capitalist governments, on the other hand, tried to encourage as much complacency as possible, pushing for a premature return to work and to school even before the number of new cases had fallen to zero. The disastrous consequences of this policy are now apparent.

Workers and youth entering into struggle against Europe’s murderous COVID-19 policy should reject with contempt the argument that there is no money for a shelter-at-home policy, the only way to contain the virus and avert a meltdown of the hospital system. The European Union (EU) adopted a €2 trillion bank and corporate bailout scheme, and Britain a £645 billion bank bailout. There is, in fact, plenty of money to spend on ensuring that workers, the self-employed and small business owners can shelter at home, while maintaining their incomes and livelihoods.

The inability of governments in Europe, as in America, to act decisively to stop the pandemic reflects the bankruptcy of capitalism: such action would cut across the material interests of the ruling class. The EU governments, like Trump and the Democrats, intend for these resources to go to bail out the stock portfolios of the billionaires and boost the profits of big businesses, not to save lives.

A slice of these funds were filtered through countless corporate works councils and foundations to union officials and their political allies so they would help implement back-to-work policies. And this fall, as the number of cases surged, public anger mounted, and pressure grew on governments to implement lock-downs, the unions and their allies organized no action. Even yesterday, Spain’s “left populist” Podemos party, in a coalition government with the social democrats, rejected calls from Asturias regional authorities for a shelter-at-home policy.

The way forward for workers and youth against the pandemic is to form their own rank-and-file security committees in workplaces and schools, independent of the union bureaucracies, to monitor health and safety at work and prepare a broader struggle. Fighting a global failure of the capitalist system that threatens a catastrophic loss of life requires the mobilization of the collective industrial and social strength of the working class. The European sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International have advanced the call for a European and international general strike.

To prepare such an action, however, means to take up a political struggle for socialism. Only the impounding of the ill-gotten wealth of the super-rich and the struggle of the working class to take power and organize economic life on the basis of social need, rather than private profit can avert a health catastrophe. In Europe, this means supporting the struggle of the working class to bring down the EU, take state power, and build the United Socialist States of Europe.

Beware of CIA Threats

Ron Ridenour

Chileans and Bolivians are turning the tide away from coup governments imposed on them by right-wing national militarists and the US State Department/CIA.

Within the past week, we have witnessed an overwhelming Chilean victory to rewrite the constitution forced upon them by General Augusto Pinochet, in 1980, and Bolivia’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal confirmation that former President Evo Morales’ political party, Movement for Socialism (MAS), won the election on October 18.

The new Bolivian president, Luis Arce, and vice-president, David Choquehuanca, beat right-winger coup-makers Carlos Mesa (a former president) and Luis Fernando Camacho: 55% to 29% and 14%.
Both houses of parliament will also have a MAS majority.

Meanwhile, just days earlier, seventy-eight percent (78%) of Chileans voting said yes to a new constitution; opposed 22%. While the ayes were expected to win, such huge support was unforeseen.

This shows how much Chileans want a different nation than that forced upon them by the bloody coup d’état, September 11, 1973, which was guided by then Richard Nixon’s hatchet man, Henry Kissinger. They murdered at least three thousand people the first days of the military coup. Thousands more “disappeared” or arrested died in prisons, tortured by the fascist Pinochet government. Over 100,000 people are known to have been arrested for political motivations.

Spanish National Court judge Baltasar Garzón sought to arrest and prosecute Pinochet for crimes against humanity. 

A new constitution will be written by a Constitutional Convention with new representatives elected by the people, on April 11, 2021. A year later, there will be an “exit” ratification plebiscite to repeal the Pinochet constitution.

This popular victory comes on the heels of grassroots protests and resistance movements last year, during what was called the “Chilean Spring.” For months, tens of thousands protested nearly daily. One day there were over one million in the streets. After two months of actions, the government estimated that a fourth of the nation’s nearly 13 million people were protesting hikes in public transportation costs, and, generally, economic inequality and “elitism”.

The government of Sebastián Piñera declared a state of emergency and police killed three dozen protestors, wounded hundreds, and imprisoned 30,000. Piñera was forced by the people to make concessions. He fired several ministers, including the head of military and police, and allowed a referendum to keep or change the Pinochet-created constitution.

Not Forgotten: CIA’s Murder of Allende’s Commander-in-Chief

October 22, 1970, armed thugs working for the CIA intercepted and shot to death Chilean army commander-in-chief, General René Schneider, as he drove to the Ministry of Defense in Santiago, Chile.  “The next day, CIA Director Richard Helms convened his top aides to review the covert coup operations that had led to the attack. “[I]t was agreed that … a maximum effort has been achieved,” and that “the station has done excellent job of guiding Chileans to point today where a military solution is at least an option for them,” stated a SECRET cable of commendation transmitted that day to the CIA station in Chile. “COS [Chief of Station] … and Station [deleted] are commended for accomplishing this under extremely difficult and delicate circumstances.”

The National Security Archive (NSA) reposted declassified documentation about Kissinger and the CIA’s role in the assassination. The intent was to prevent the newly elected socialist Salvador Allende from assuming power. Here are excerpts from the article, “The CIA and Chile: Anatomy of an Assassination,” posted in recognition of the 50^th anniversary of the General’s murder.

“CBS ‘60 Minutes’ segment, ‘Schneider vs. Kissinger,’ drew on the declassified documents to report on a ‘wrongful death’ lawsuit filed in September 2001 by the Schneider family against Henry Kissinger for his role in the assassination. The ’60 Minutes’ broadcast aired on September 9, 2001, and has not been publicly accessible since then. In preparation for the 50^thanniversary of the Schneider assassination, CBS News graciously posted the broadcast as a “60 Minutes Rewind” on October 21, 2020.”

Henry Kissinger was secretly supervising the CIA’s coup operations, and had cajoled President Richard Nixon into letting him prepare for a violent overthrow of the popularly democratically elected Allende.

“In Chile, the assassination of General Schneider remains the historical equivalent of the assassination of John F. Kennedy: a cruel and shocking political crime that shook the nation. In the United States, the murder of Schneider has become one of the most renowned case studies of CIA efforts to ‘neutralize’ a foreign leader who stood in the way of U.S. objectives,” wrote NSA.

The CIA also murdered President Kennedy. 

The CIA’s murderous covert operations to, as CIA officials suggested, “effect the removal of Schneider,” were first revealed in a 1975 Senate report on Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.  At the time, investigators for the special Senate committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church were able to review the Top Secret CIA operational cables and memoranda relating to ‘Operation FUBELT’—the code name for CIA effort.”

General Schneider was targeted for his defense of Chile’s constitutional transfer of power.

As the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, and the highest-ranking military officer in Chile, Schneider’s policy of non-intervention created a major obstacle for CIA efforts to implement President Nixon’s orders to foment a coup that would prevent the recently elected Socialist, Salvador Allende, from being inaugurated.

Brighter Future for Bolivia

Argentina’s President Albert Fernández announced that he would be traveling to Bolivia for the inaugural ceremony. “It will be a dream fulfilled,” he told national media.

Bolivian Senator Andrónico Rodríguez stated that Evo Morales will return to his country from exile in Argentina, on November 9, the day after the inaugural ceremony. That will be one year exactly since he was forced into exile (November 10, 2019) by the military generals and some police.

Judge Jorge Quino, head of Departmental Court of Justice in La Paz, dismissed coup government charges of “terrorism” and “sedition” against Evo Morales. The October 26 decision is expected to be finally approved by the Plurinational Constitutional Court on the day of Arce’s inauguration or the day following.

Bolivia’s President-elect has joined growing calls for the resignation of Organization of American State’s chief Luis Almagro. In an interview with “La Razon”, a Bolivian newspaper, Arce said that Almagro must go for “ethical and moral reasons”, because of the discredited 2019 OAS report that claimed there had been electoral fraud under the last Morales government.

Almagro is known for acting in favor of US interests. Arce said, “We do not agree that an important body be in the hands of people wearing the shirt of a political party or of a political ideology in the region. There should not be interference in the internal affairs of a country. If Almagro did that in Bolivia, imagine, he can do it with any other country, and we cannot allow that.”

President Donald Trump stated that he expected to work with the new government. A State Department spokesperson, Michael Kozak, even stated that the Bolivian election had been “peaceful” “free and just”. US American politicians are infamously known in Latin American (and elsewhere) for speaking with forked tongues.

Researcher-journalist Ramona Wadi, who covers Latin America, cautioned about Bolivia’s perilous future: “The electoral triumph may not spell the end of US intervention in the country. The US is known to have used diverse tactics to instigate violence and unrest in Latin America, biding its time until it strikes again. The military and the police have yet to completely prove their alliance to the new government and against US designs on Bolivia.”

It is imperative that the new government reform the military and police, and find or train leaders who are loyal to their country’s sovereignty and not to the interests of US world domination.

Saving Our Planet Is Our Responsibility

Graham Peebles

Destructive human behavior based on selfishness, greed and ignorance has created the interrelated environmental emergency. A global crisis of unprecedented scale that threatens the survival of over a million plant and animal species, the security of tens of millions of people and the health of the planet.

Unlimited irresponsible consumption of goods, services and animal food produce is the underlying cause; destructive unhealthy behavior encouraged by short-term political and business policies rooted in nationalism and the ideology of competition and greed.

Land sea and air are contaminated everywhere, more or less; the natural climatic rhythms have been radically disrupted, chaos created where order once held sway; the great rain forests of the world are being decimated, trees cut down, land turned over to cattle, or agriculture – principally to grow soya for animal feed – indigenous peoples displaced or killed, cultures shredded, ecosystems shattered, animal habitat destroyed, plant species crushed under the vile weight of corruption and money.

The scale and urgency of the crisis is impossible to overstate; with every new scientific paper that appears the reality becomes more and more overwhelming, the task of salvage more daunting, the need for action more urgent. Most people of course don’t read such texts or notice the rare piece of news coverage that they, or the natural world more broadly receive. And despite being the most pressing issue of this or indeed any other time, within government circles, corporate boardrooms, as well as far too many individual households, the environmental catastrophe remains a marginal matter within the relentless urge for profit, economic growth and personal pleasure; little more than an afterthought within the business plan, a political add-on to appeal to the green contingent or customer base.

In opposition to this crippling complacency there is a growing army of people ringing alarm bells, trying to instill a sense of urgency and wake people up. Loud voices, some well known, like Sir David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and Prince Charles, who has been ‘banging on’ about environmental abuse for thirty years or more, together with movements like Extinction Rebellion and the Schools Strike for Climate, and a raft of environmental campaign groups such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. All work tirelessly to share information about the scale and depth of the crisis and raise awareness.

And awareness is growing, behavior shifting; the details and scope of the emergency may not be known but there is a general awareness (in developed nations at least), however vague and inadequate, that the natural environment is in crisis, particularly among young people, who, in many cases are rightly appalled (and extremely worried) at the level of environmental vandalism perpetrated by previous generations. But the scale of change is nowhere near what is needed and it’s too slow; gradual changes over decades or generations will not cut it, neither will reliance solely on technology.

The response among corporations and governments is consistently inadequate, and the reaction of the mass of people is often indifference and/or a sense of individual inadequacy in the face of such massive issues. Most people live hard insecure lives, are physically tired, emotionally drained and mentally confused, overwhelmed by their own difficulties and trying, for the most part, simply to get by, to feed themselves and their families and find some lightness within what are often heavy days and dreary nights.

If, and it’s a large ominous if, humanity is to reverse the damage, education and widespread environmental/social responsibility are essential.

A global public information campaign is urgently needed. Coordinated by the UN Environment agency utilizing national media outlets and designed in conjunction with environmental groups to raise awareness not just of the scale of the emergency, but to encourage responsible ethical behavior among populations, corporations/businesses and Governments. Environmentally progressive policymaking can no longer be a series of ill conceived halfhearted add-ons within the manifestos of political parties and leaders running for office. Environmental responsibility must be fostered so that it becomes the central consideration in all decision making, for governments, businesses and individuals. It is part of a broader sense of social responsibility, which includes the recognition that we are responsible for one another, and requires the cultivation of a general attitude of positive communal living.

To be responsible is to respond. To respond to the need, whatever that may be, to the challenge or the urgency of the time. The nature and quality of the response is critical, what it is that we respond with. If the response is anchored in selfishness and conditioned by motive, if it is limited by ideology or constrained by considerations of personal gain, financial profit or economic growth for example, then the response, and this is what happens in most cases, will not only be inadequate to the demands of the moment, it will intensify the issue, or crises. Such actions are rooted in the past and cannot, therefore sufficiently meet the crisis; whatever it is, in this case, the environmental crisis, fully, because the crisis is taking place now.

Being responsible also means being “accountable for one’s actions”, which is a quality of living that is lacking in varying degrees, among politicians and corporations – where it is virtually totally absent, as well as large swathes of the world’s population. In place of social/environmental responsibility the dual poisons of complacency and irresponsibility habitually condition action, adding to an overall atmosphere of selfishness and social division. We have come to believe in separation, identifying ourselves with a nation, race or belief system, divided from, superior or inferior to another, ‘the other’, who may not look, pray or think like we do, and therefore cannot be trusted. The ideology of division, based as it is on fear and hate is anathema to responsibility.

If, and there again is that omnipresent if, there is to be an adequate response to the environmental emergency a new atmosphere of collective responsibility needs to be fostered and the nations of the world must unite; this call for united global action is a common-sense statement enunciated and agreed upon many times at various gatherings, but like world peace or equality its little more than a hollow ideal under which the pattern of competitive nationalism drones on, and on and on. International agreements are signed, no doubt in a spirit of optimism, and sincerity, but hypocrisy and duplicity are the worldwide hallmarks of politicians, and commitments are largely ignored, the business of corporate politics continues unhindered and little or nothing changes.

The greatest environmental impact, for good or ill, lies with governments and corporations, but the behavior or individuals is crucial; en-masse it is the neglect, greed and rampant consumerism of the people of the world (primarily the wealthier people of the world) that is the underlying cause of the interconnected environmental crisis. All of us are equally responsible – individuals, businesses and governments – particularly those of us living in the developed nations, and that responsibility demands a change in lifestyle: living simpler lives, consuming less, in many cases, much less, and making decisions based on environmental considerations first.

If we embrace this sense of individual responsibility for the whole, recognizing it to be not just true, but an opportunity to contribute in a positive manner, fully and deeply, then maybe, just maybe, the planet beautiful can be salvaged and with it social harmony and unity be realized.

In Defense of Confucius Institutes

Mel Gurtov

Readers may be surprised to learn that while disputes between the US and China over trade, human rights, and the pandemic are making headlines, educational exchange programs are Washington’s chief target these days.

These programs are easy marks for an administration that wants to demonstrate toughness with Beijing.  It is arousing suspicion about several categories of Chinese visitors—scholars, students, journalists, and scientists among them—on the basis that they might commit espionage, stifle academic freedom, spread propaganda, steal intellectual property, and undermine American values.  Members of Congress and Congressional committees, US intelligence agencies, the State Department, think tanks, journalists, professors on the left and right, and US educational organizations have all weighed in to warn of the dangers of association with individual Chinese and China-financed organizations.

Victims of China Bashing

A focal point of the attacks is Confucius Institutes (CIs), a global network of Chinese-funded offices, mostly based at US universities, that seek to promote Chinese language and cultural learning—or, as some insist, China’s “soft power.”  The institutes’ funding agency is Hanban, the Office of Chinese Language Council under the Chinese education ministry. It provides teachers and textbooks free of charge to university students and K-12 schools, where they are known as Confucius Classrooms.

In the US, there were once more than 100 CIs; now there are fewer than 60, and if Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has his way—he has accused the CIs, without evidence, of seeking to recruit “spies and collaborators,” and in August had them designated as “foreign missions”—there soon will be none. Where once Confucius Institutes were welcomed as part of a thriving US-China people-to-people exchange program, now they are viewed in the context of a bipartisan consensus to treat China as a “strategic competitor.”

Pompeo has been the stalking horse, touring the world with a Cold War message on China that extends well beyond CIs. Working through various US agencies as well as his department, Pompeo seeks to limit visas for Chinese (and other international) students, scholars, even doctors and begin sending home those already here on the basis of “national security.”

Imagine: Last year there were nearly 370,000 of Chinese students in the US.  Those who would normally be eligible for work under the government’s Optional Practical Training program will no longer have that option. Visa requirements are being tightened with the obvious aim of preventing Chinese language teachers, as well as students and visiting scholars, from entering or returning to the US.  A proposed law passed in the Senate would require interrogation of every Chinese in the US to assess whether or not they pose a security risk.  Another bill (S.939), introduced in the Senate by Republican John Kennedy and Democrat Doug Jones, would deny federal funds to universities that fail to meet new ground rules on Confucius Institutes they host, such as that CIs must agree to be governed by both Chinese and US law; that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must approve all CI events and speakers; and that CI teachers cannot teach CCP versions of “Chinese history, culture and current events.”

None of the rules is fact-based, but if they become law, they will be one way to force CIs to close.  There are still other ways, such as preventing CI teachers from obtaining a US visa, and using the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2019 to force universities to choose between continuing to receive defense department money and hosting a CI—a choice with a predictable outcome.

Unwarranted Charges

CIs are closing not because of poor performance or political intrigue but because of political pressure, sometimes from Washington and sometimes from academia. The pressure reflects ideological passion, however, not an investigation of actual circumstances.  In the context of my work I have participated in nearly 100 interviews of CI and university officers and staff, and American teachers in communities with Confucius Classrooms.  No one mentioned Chinese political interference.  Academic freedom was not violated, financial dependence on China was not created, and China was not presented one-sidedly by its teachers.  To the contrary, CIs performed exactly as promised. Besides promoting Chinese language and cultural learning in communities small and large across the country, each CI has taken on some additional or more specialized role, such as partnering with other community organizations on cultural themes, teaching noncredit on-line classes in addition to K-12 classes, or providing study abroad opportunities.  The American interviewees uniformly expressed gratitude for their CI’s contributions to the community’s cultural awareness and students’ international competency.

Virtually all the accusations against CIs are based on isolated Chinese statements extolling China’s soft power, the opaque relationship between Hanban and China’s education ministry, or a rare charge of bias against Taiwan or Tibet.  Behind the charges is the presumption that money and teachers coming from China give the Chinese Communist Party access to young American minds—in short, guilt by association, as in Senator Chuck Grassley’s advice to 74 universities and colleges which at that time (March 2020) were home to CIs, to seek an FBI briefing on “the threats posed by the Chinese Government” generally, and CIs specifically. “Based upon information gathered from unclassified briefings,” said Grassley, “we know that Confucius Institutes are an arm of the Chinese Government . . . The activities of Confucius Institutes are inherently political in nature and intended to influence U.S. policy and public opinion.”

Such warnings not only ignore the benefits of educational exchanges with China.  They also confuse CIs with other Chinese activities that may be nefarious if proven.  FBI and Justice Department officials have testified about threats posed to research labs and universities by researchers with “undisclosed ties to Chinese institutions and conflicted loyalties.” Other US officials are demanding highly detailed reporting from universities about foreign donations, with China especially in mind, in the belief they are sources of political influence. So far, however, the only “threats” concern undisclosed arrangements that some US biomedical professors with National Institutes of Health grants made with Chinese entities.  Several of those professors have been punished. But as the president of MIT has said, the wide net cast by the US government in search of disloyal people has made anyone of Chinese ethnicity “feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge.”

Opportunity Costs

What the administration is doing, in our name, is cutting off our nose to spite our face—denying communities, schools, and laboratories the opportunities for cultural enrichment, people-to-people interaction, and mutual understanding precisely at a moment when these are desperately needed. In past years China was accepted as an economic partner despite its communist system. Now we are back to McCarthyism.  No wonder Beijing accuses the Trump administration of inciting a new Cold War—and is responding with its own exaggeration of the US threat.  It’s a dangerous and unnecessary escalation that will be difficult for a new US leadership to get beyond, assuming it is so inclined.

Strange to have to make an argument about the value of learning a foreign language and knowing more about another country’s culture. Just a few decades ago that debate seemed to end with calls for “internationalizing” curricula in recognition of how our insular educational system was making students uncompetitive in the global marketplace.  Now a huge backward leap is taking place with, of all countries, China.  And it is being accompanied by an equally narrow-minded attempt by Betsy Vos’s education department to limit all foreign students’ time to pursue degrees and work in technical fields not being filled by Americans.

The Chinese educational authorities see the handwriting on the wall and in July reorganized their approach in the US, creating two new organizations to take the place of Hanban and CIs.  But that step will not resolve the political issue: Whether or not a US entity may accept Chinese money for language and cultural learning without coming under official scrutiny.

Cuban Report Says U.S. Blockade Causes Much Grief and Immense Monetary Loss.

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Cuba’s Foreign Ministry every year prepares a report on Cuba’s experience with the U.S. economic blockade of the island, in force since 1962. On October 22 Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez presented this year’s report at a press conference in Havana. The Ministry releases the reports ahead of an annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on a Cuban resolution calling for an end to the blockade. Usually the vote takes place in early November, but because of uncertainties relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, it will take place next in May, 2021.

The Report is supposed to inform the General Assembly delegates and the public as to the nature of the blockade and its impact on Cuba and the Cuban people. The blockade is the principal tool the United States uses to undermine Cuba’s government. A State Department official in the Eisenhower administration, in 1960, expressed counter-revolutionary purpose. In recommending a blockade, Lester D. Mallory sought “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

The 53-page Report, covers U.S. measures taken against Cuba and effects experienced in Cuba and elsewhere during the twelve months between April 2019 and March 2020. It summarizes the U. S. legislation and administrative decrees used to authorize the blockade’s rules and regulations and details U.S. and worldwide opposition to the blockade.

The authors of the Report condemn the blockade as cruel and as illegal under international law. They speak of genocide, Cuban sovereignty endangered, and Cuba’s economic and social development under assault. The entire report is accessible here.

According to the Report, the Treasury Department’s Office for Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) levied penalties against dozens of U.S. and third-country entities. Examples are listed. OFAC derives its authority mainly from the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, which stipulates that third-country companies face penalties on exporting goods to Cuba that contain at least 10% U.S. components. In October, 2019 the U.S. government applied that rule also to goods exported to Cuba by a country that had imported them from another country.

In September, 2019, OFAC sharply limited the dollar amount of remittances Cuban Americans may send to families on the island. On October 23, 2020 – not within the period covered by the Report – the U.S. government ruled that Financiera Cimex SA, Cuba’s sole agency for distributing family remittances to Cubans, was no longer eligible to receive them from the United States. Remittances constitute one of Cuba’s major sources of foreign currency.

The Report devotes much attention to the plethora of fines levied against foreign banks and other financial institutions after they handled transactions involving Cuba and the U.S. dollar. It cites dozens of individual examples. Intimidation is now so widespread as to have persuaded many such institutions to avoid dealing with Cuba altogether.

The document highlights U.S. implementation of Title III of the Helms Burton Law that, beginning in May 2019, has led to law suits against foreign businesses brought before U.S. courts on behalf of former owners of nationalized property in Cuba. They are seeking damages. The resulting anxiety among foreign investors has led to “cancellation of commercial operations, cooperation actions and foreign investment projects.”

Detailing specific examples, the Report condemns U.S. penalties imposed on ships, companies and individuals involved in shipping oil to Cuba. The Report’s authors regard that new phase of the blockade as “a qualitative leap in the intensification and implementation of non-conventional measures in times of peace.”

Additionally, the U.S. government has threatened thousands of Cuban doctors working abroad in various ways. Many of the doctors working abroad generate income for the government. The Report records the prohibition on cruise ships arriving in Cuba.

The fallout is considerable, especially for the healthcare sector. Dozens of U.S. companies, on being asked, refused to sell medical equipment and drugs to Cuban importers. When purchased through a third-country agent, they are more expensive. And supplies and medications manufactured in third countries may not be readily available on account of the aforementioned ten-percent rule.

Cuba’s fight against COVID-19 took one hit when blockade regulations prevented the unloading in Cuba of a Chinese shipment of donated anti-pandemic supplies, and another one when Swiss manufacturers refused to sell ventilators to Cuba. Cuban food imports are expensive in part because of extra expenses involved with the purchase of U.S. food products, allowed through congressional action in 2000. Blockade-related fuel shortages hamper agricultural production by interfering with planting, transportation, and storage.

The blockade has hit education, sports and cultural development in Cuba. Supplies and fuel are frequently in short supply and transportation and travel are often unavailable. Cuba’s manufacturing and service sector lost an estimated $610.2 million, 7.7 % more than during the previous year, according to the Report. Losses incurred in the bio-pharmacological industry exceeded $160.3 million. U. S. restrictions interfere with Cuba’s export of drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tests.

The Report indicates that during the 12-month survey period, Cuba’s tourist industry lost $1.9 billion. Losses stemmed from new U.S. travel restrictions and from prohibitions on tourist services, particularly hotels. OFAC has now prohibited U.S. airlines, or airlines with U.S. connections, from flying into Cuba, except to the Jose Martí Airport in Havana. That action deprived Cuba of an estimated $1.8 billion. OFAC regulations affecting the communications, construction, and transportation sectors made for additional Cuban losses. Cuba’s hobbled foreign trade, both imports and exports, registered losses of $3,013,951,129, of which export losses accounted for $2,475,700,000.

According to this Report, the workings of the U.S. blockade deprived Cuba of $5,570,300,000 between April 2019 and March 2020 – some $1.2 billion more than during the previous year. Among estimates figured into the amount are expenses incurred in buying materials at inflated prices in distant places, losses from foreign sales that never happened, and revenues the crippled tourist industry might have generated. The human cost in lives lost or blunted is not part of the calculation.

Cuba has lost $144.4 billion over the course of almost six decades. Dollar depreciation over the period puts the total up to $1.098 trillion. Why, one asks, does the blockade continue?

The U.S. blockade, with moving, interlocking parts that may be at cross purposes, looks like a machine dangerous to human well-being. It could well have provoked the U.S press and politicians into loud complaints. But near silence has reigned. The absence of real debate signifies overall acceptance of the blockade such that expressions of dissent, even President Obama’s dissent, have gained little support.

Silent acceptance marked other horrors abroad helped along by U.S. agents, especially as they were unfolding, or immediately thereafter. These were killings usually associated with regime change. One recalls Guatemala (1954), Iraq (1963), Brazil (1964) Dominican Republic (1965), particularly Indonesia (1965-1966), Chile (1973), Operation Condor in South America (1975-1976), and Colombia (sporadically from 1964 on).

Anti-Communism became the pretext for these situations in which U.S. emissaries abroad characteristically stopped at nothing. In his recent book The Jakarta Method (Public Affairs Press, 2020), Vincent Bevins connects U.S.-induced atrocities throughout the Global South, anti-Communism, and the installation of neo-liberal governments.

Reasonably enough, public officials do maintain silence when their governments are complicit with crimes like these. The assumption here is that the U.S. anti-Cuban blockade represents one more instance of resort to extremes in the name of anti-Communism, which, once more, is surrounded by silence.

The anti-Cuban blockade is a substitute for military action. U.S. strategists evidently perceived that military intervention or provocation of an internal coup wouldn’t work to ensure counter-revolution in Cuba. They perhaps realized that well-heeled, entrepreneurial Cubans friendly to the United States wouldn’t be there to help out, most of them having departed the island. Elsewhere in the Global South, as reported by Bevins, their kind stayed put and were able to collaborate with U.S. facilitators to instigate violence.

They are still there, in their various countries, as are their neo-liberal regimes. Their staying power validates the U.S. strategic goals pursued in the post- World War II era that were energized by anti-Communism. Perhaps political leaders in Washington associated with both major political parties see continued backing of the Cuban blockade as a way of reassuring their far-flung neoliberal colleagues, and the ones nearby, that their old cause is still intact.

Beheadings in France

Liaquat Ali Khan

History is a merciless teacher.

In October 2020, beheadings in France outraged the people and President Emmanuel Macron, who explained that” Islam in crisis” attacks France’s “core values.” First, a Chechen-born teenager, who entered France as a refugee, beheaded a history teacher sharing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet of Islam with his students. Soon after that, a Tunisia-born tourist “virtually beheaded” a woman and a man inside a church in Nice.

Both perpetrators used sharp blades.

Like all others, Muslims committing murders in any country, including France, must be punished under the territory’s laws where they commit crimes.

For nearly 200 years (1789-1981), the law of capital punishment in France was beheading through a world-famous instrument, called the guillotine. Before the 1789 French revolution of enlightenment, expressed through the slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity, France carried out capital punishment through the torture wheel, tearing up the defendant’s bones and flesh until he or she died.

Amid the enlightenment, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a physician and a member of the Parliament, came hard on the historical execution methods. They are barbaric, he claimed. In 1789, he proposed to humanize capital punishment in harmony with the French revolution’s core values. Incorporating compassion into the killing, France invented the machine and named it the guillotine.

The guillotine was a tall frame equipped with a sharp, angled blade mounted at the top. At the bottom of the frame, a shackle trapped the defendant’s neck and precisely positioned it right below the blade’s edge. When released, the hard and incisive blade fell ferociously on the neck, severing the head from the rest of the body. The machine’s mercy lay in its efficiency as compared to the torture wheel.

In 1793, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were guillotined among thousands of others, upholding the revolutionary principle of equality. For the most part, the guillotine executions were crowd-pleasers. In Paris, women sat by the scaffolds, chatted, waited, and knitted while the heads chopped away from the bodies.

For decades, the guillotine fascinated French intellectuals. Poems, plays, and short stories celebrated the awe and beauty of the machine. Guy Maupassant (1850-1893), an iconic French storyteller, wrote: “March 20th. It is done. He was guillotined this morning. He made a good end, very good. It gave me infinite pleasure. How sweet it is to see a man’s head cut off! The blood spurted out like a wave, like a wave. Oh, if I could, I would have liked to have bathed in it! What intoxicating ecstasy to crouch below it, to receive it in my hair and on my face, and rise up all crimson, all crimson! Ah, if people knew!” Hopefully, Maupassant was writing a satire.

The guillotine turned into a noble French invention. In the revolutionary spirit of fraternity, France exported the guillotine to brotherly and non-brotherly nations, such as Spain, Germany, Sweden, and Italy. In the 20^th century, the Nazis adored the machine, despite reservations about France. Throughout colonization, the French practiced no discrimination in delivering the guillotine to Algeria, Tunisia, and other Middle Eastern colonies.

Fernand Meysonnier (1931-2008), a Frenchman, operated the guillotine in Algeria for fifteen years until Algerian independence in 1962. He was proud of the machine and the justice it furnished to the Algerian legal system. “But of course! Yes, yes. Five, seven liters empties out. It’s not the electric chair, eh jets of blood spray out three meters,” said Meysonnier in an interview with Sarah Richards of Walrus. Unlike Maupassant, Meysonnier believed in the guillotine.

In 1977, Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant, who had lost his leg in a work-related accident in Marseilles, became the guillotine’s last casualty for choking a woman with a scarf around her neck. Neck for neck said some.

In October 1981, the French National Assembly abolished the death penalty; and in 2007, the French constitution was amended to prohibit capital punishment. This constitutional ban abandoned a core enlightenment value exemplified in the mercy machine.

Under French laws, Muslim terrorists beheading the people in France will face no guillotine or capital punishment by any other method, nor can they be deported to a country that enforces the death penalty.

However, it appears that the French police have borrowed the concept of police encounters, prevailing in some countries, under which the police officers shoot and kill a defendant on the spot. Though unlawful, this prompt justice makes it efficient for the system to process terrorists without going through due process and appeals. The Chechen teenager met his end in the police encounter the day he beheaded the history teacher.

Charlie Hebdo Cartoons and Blasphemy Laws in Contemporary Times

Ram Puniyani

The murder of French school teacher Samuel Paty by an 18 year old Muslim boy of Russian origin has opened the Pandora’s Box all over. Few days’ later three people were killed in Nice, in France again. There were protests against France in few Muslim majority countries like Bangladesh and there was boycott of French goods in many of them.

On one side, French President identified with the slain teacher and pledged to fight political Islam, on the other Turkey’ President Erdogan made derogatory comment on French President who withdrew its Ambassador from Turkey. French goods are being boycotted in many countries. At yet another level many a Muslim countries are raising their voice against French President and there are protests in Pakistan, Bangladesh among others.

This all is sequel to the highly condemnable murder of Paty, who in his class was teaching about freedom of expression and was using the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as an example. Just to recall the cases related to murder of cartoonists in Charlie Hebdo (2015) are beginning in the Courts. In this context the cartoons derogatory to Prophet Mohammad were republished by the paper. The cartoons connect terrorism with Islam and the Prophet. This in a way was in the backdrop of 9/11 after which the term ‘Islamic Terrorism’ was coined and popularised by US media. As Charlie Hebdo published those cartoons their office was attacked in which nearly 12 cartoonists were killed. The responsibility of this attack was taken by Al Qaeda. One recalls that Al Qaeda itself was promoted in the beginning in few Madrassas based in Pakistan, where Salafi version of Islam was used to indoctrinate Muslim youth and the syllabus of indoctrination was prepared in Washington. US had pumped 8000 million dollars to indoctrinate the future Al Qaeda Recruits. US also supplied 7000 tons of armaments to this outfit.

During last few decades as the global scene has been dominated by rise of Terrorism particularly in West Asia. It is outcome of the politics to control oil resources in this region. The extremist’s trends within Muslims have seen a new peaking. With this many countries have introduced Blasphemy laws, and some Muslim countries have made blasphemy punishable by death. These include Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.

In our neighbouring Pakistan the death penalty for blasphemy was introduced after Zia regime intensified the Islamisation of Pakistan. At the same time the popular opinion in many of these countries has been shifting to the extremist versions of Islam. We saw as to how in case of Asia Bibi, she was framed for blasphemy and Punjab (Pakistan) Governor Salman Taseer was done to death as he demonstrated his protest against this law by meeting Asia Bibi. The murderer was treated like a hero by large section of Muslims!

The historians of Islam tell us that there was no such law of blasphemy in Islam till two centuries after Prophet Mohammad. It came up during Abbasid rule, in the beginning of 9th Century. It was to strengthen the ruling dynasty’s hold on power. Similarly in comparatively recent times Zia UL Haq, a military ruler also introduced this law to strengthen his own authoritarian rule. The purpose of this was only to legitimize his regime under the garb of an ‘Islamic state’. This was an attempt by the military dictatorship to increase its hold over the society. The concept of apostate (Kafir) runs parallel to it and all non Muslims, and Muslims differing from the ruling sections interpretations are also so labelled and are liable to be killed. In Pakistan the major victims of this law are Muslims like Ahmadiyas and Shiyas. Of course Christians and Hindus are also on the firing line of this concept and the laws of blasphemy.

In one of the engrossing webinars on the topic on 25th October, organized by Muslims For Secular Democracy, Islamic scholar Zeenat Shaukat Ali quoted Koran extensively to say that the holy book does not prescribe violence against those who do not subscribe to the holy book, (To you your religion to me mine). In a refreshing way the webinar’s moderator Javed Anand pointed out, “We are here to condemn in unequivocal terms, no ifs and buts, not only the man responsible for this barbaric act but all those who had any role in the instigation of the crime as also all those who seek to justify it. We are here not just to condemn the slaying of Mr Paty, but also to demand the abolishing of apostasy and banishing of blasphemy anywhere and everywhere across the world”.

This in tune with many interpretation of Islam by the likes of Asghar Ali Engineer; one of the outstanding scholars of Islam who points out that Prophet Mohammad was so spiritual that he would never ask for revenge for insults against his own self. Engineer narrates an incident from Prophets Life. One old woman used to throw garbage on him whenever he was passing that way. One day at that spot, she was not there to throw the garbage. The Prophet straightaway went to see her and inquired about her well being, she felt ashamed of herself and embraced Islam.

There is a need to understand as to why the intolerant tendencies in Islam are more dominating in current times. While history is also replete with Muslim rulers who used these concepts to increase their power, in current times there is an added dimension to the phenomenon. In 1953 Mossadegh regime, an elected regime was overthrown in Iran, as he was out to nationalise the oil companies dominated by US-UK nexus. His regime was overthrown; leading the coming to power of fundamentalist Ayatullah Khoemini in due course. Later with Russian occupation of Afghanistan, America deliberately started promoting the Islamic groups pursuing intolerant versions of Islam. Training of Mujahidin, Taliban, Al Qaeda was part of the same process.

Finally with the continuous intervention of US in West Asia, attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq etc. led to intolerant groups  becoming more dominating leading to acts like the one of murder of Paty. The discussion and debate over rejection of concepts like blasphemy and ‘kill the kafir’, is the need of the hour for a saner World.