Never Again? Lets Not Kid Ourselves!

When I studied in the USA, I was constantly told that "never again" was the moral to live by. Holocaust studies, memorials, monuments, documentaries, novels, memoirs dominated and still dominate the Western marketplace and psyche. In that process what is lost is the genocide determinedly practised over 60 years by survivors of the Holocaust.

Like children of abusers and alcoholics, the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust have grown to refine and put into practice the very atrocities they suffered from and apparently fought against. And they have had their cheerleaders and enablers to continue their abuse, as is borne out by the most recent massacre in Gaza.

For the past week, I have been sickened by the hypocrisy and hubris displayed by Western politicians and press over the massacre in Gaza. Again and again, we are told that Hamas is to blame. That they "started" it by lobbing rockets at Israeli towns - which just for the record have killed all of FOURTEEN Israelis in the past SEVEN years. Compare that to Israel's record of killing over 5000 Palestinian civilians in the same period.

The same press and politicians care not to talk of overt acts of war practised by Israel in breach of all international law including:

1. Blockade of sea/land/air in Gaza
2. Collective punishment by denying basic amenities to civilian population whose only crime is to vote against Western wishes, and for the party that provides them the basic modicum of education, health-care, social services.
3. Assassination and kidnapping of elected leaders of government, which would be considered acts of war against any "sovereign" state.
4. Killing of civilians during the same acts of war.
5. Illegal incarceration of thousands of Palestinians with no trial or reason.

And that is not even going back to the simplest point: that Israel has behaved as a racist, imperialist power since its inception. And it flouts all international law with full support of its Western cheerleaders and paymasters who consider the Palestinians simply as Israel's unter-menschen, to be incarcerated, humiliated and killed with impunity. But since words no longer suffice, the picture below speaks loud and clear:



So yes, indeed, Hamas is to blame. As is Fatah. And the PFLP. And every Palestinian who dares to protest the genocide they are being subjected to, and thus challenges the logic of the superior race in the Holy Land!

Never again? Yeah sure, but not when its practised by the worthy heirs of the Nazis!

Hubris, Ignorance or Just Plain Don't Care?

I have been a news addict since I was a child.

My father's job required him to monitor all media very closely, so we all grew up with obscene amounts of newspapers, reports, clippings, and then finally television news around us. Dinner conversations in my parents house often feel like policy debates - and there have been instances when a dinner debate has formed the nucleus of the country's major policy document.

A not so pleasant aspect of this news addiction is of course the constant awareness of bias and ignorance regarding India (and a lot of other countries) in "western" press. Some how media based in USA, UK and Europe has greater credibility, partly due to history and partly due to the economic, military and political clout of these countries. It also helps that the same countries come up with increasingly unbelievable rankings and reports on "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press."

Just think back to the WMDs in Iraq hysteria before that nation was attacked and you get the picture. Think back to the self-censorship of the western press regarding Iraqi and Afghan casualties. Or just think back to the level of attention paid to Mumbai simply because some of the victims were Western.

Yet its not just the "big" stories that get reported with glaring errors and free editorialising. The western media spends a lot of time and energy embedding value judgements into what appear to be "news stories." The result - and perhaps the motivation - is to subtly perpetuate a narrative, a stereotype, an idea that is more pleasing and acceptable to western powers, press and bulk of the readers/viewers. And in doing so, they choose to jettison the most basic qualities of reporting and the simplest of journalistic standards!

This morning brought home that realisation rather starkly. In the Times was a story about film-makers attempting to cash in on the Mumbai attacks and the public revulsion that such actions have unleashed. So far so good.

Except the story had serious factual bloopers: Filmmaker Ram Gopal Verma did tour the Taj, but not with his actor son, but rather with the now thankfully resigned Maharashtra CM Vilasrao Deshmukh's son.

And we won't even go into the overly generalised, condescending bit of editorialising that declares: "There are, however, indications that Indian audiences who are more used to lavish musicals will watch films that examine terrorism from fresh perspectives." Really? Like we did back in 1996? Or should we go further back to Roja and Bombay?

As the cherry on top, the story also cites unnamed critics who say: "Indian cinema has a history of films that address current affairs but most dealing with terrorism have used real-life events as springboards for crudely nationalistic action movies, critics say."

Ahem: I guess the critics missed films like the Mani Rathnam trilogy? Or Gulzar's Maachis? Or Mission Kashmir, which not only linked terrorism in Kashmir to bin Laden well before 9/11, but included the acclaimed novelist Vikram Chandra as one of its scriptwriters? We won't even go into the range of politically complex, ideologically sophisticated and well researched films, including Sarfarosh, 16 December: All Forces Alert, Fiza, Fanaa, Rang de Basanti that have taken on terrorism in the past decade.

Sure the western press trots out the handful of Indian writers/novelists on its op-ed pages to provide the illusion of objectivity. But beyond all that, a little painful truth I learned as a child remains: the western press will print what it likes about India, especially if it feeds their own illusions about the country. Anything actually based in facts is a little too politically, ideologically, possibly even morally, inconvenient!

Fanatics Abound All Around!

When Salman Rushdie was knighted earlier in the year, I wrote a piece praising his work. I got a lot of hate mail for that: mostly from self-professed Islamists who threatened violence from behind walls of anonymity provided by the internet.

I have been writing about Mumbai now and again there is a spate of hate mail filling my inbox - this time from self-professed Hindu nationalists who threaten violence from the same walls of internet anonymity.

So once again - and this time for the "Hindu" nutjobs: I didn't back down on Rushdie and I won't back down now. Save yourselves the time you spend writing stupid threats and actually go do some reading and thinking about India, its history and its politics.

Meanwhile, one point to note: fanatics are not only to be found on all ends of the spectrum, but they also show the same lack of imagination when it comes to the depth of their arguments, and the rather banal ideas of violence they threaten. Good to know that there is a meeting point for fanatics of all ilk somewhere even though its marked by an acute absence of intelligence and imagination.