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the paradox of india’s claim to be the leader of the global south......
The Indian reaction to the massive eruption of violence between Hamas and Israel on Saturday belies ground realities and ignores the geopolitical environment in that region and globally in which this cataclysmic event merits careful appraisal. It will prove to be unsustainable and can damage the country’s interests and standing globally.
10 Problems With India’s Stance on Gaza
No 1: Indian policy has blatantly tilted toward Israel. What has been a matter of speculation assumed habitation and a name when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tweet on Saturday underscored India’s “solidarity” with Israel.
The resonant expression signifies a historic departure from India’s consistent stance on the Palestine issue, which followed, quintessentially, the footfalls of Mahatma Gandhiji who had the prescience and vision to oppose the creation of Israel on Palestinian homelands in the cruel manner in which the Western powers imposed that geopolitical construct on West Asia.
What prompted this radical shift remains unclear.
No. 2: Delhi had the benefit of a “preview” of what is to follow in Gaza in the coming weeks or months. Prime Minister Benjamin proclaimed that the “enemy will pay an unprecedented price” and promised that Israel would “return fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known.” He declared war on Gaza.
Netanyahu’s capacity for mindless violence is legion. Yet, Delhi rushed in to react at an emotional, subjective level.
No. 3: The possibility of a ground offensive and even occupation of Gaza is real. Simply put, India’s patented mantra that “this is not an era of wars” obliges it to mark distance from Netanyahu. But instead, it risks taking a virtual partisan position in the carnage that is to follow — politically, morally, diplomatically.
At such a crucial juncture, at the very least, the government being a “Vishwa Guru” who tirelessly propagates the notion of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakaam (The World is One Family), gets exposed, warts and all. India’s role should be of a unifier rather than divider.
No. 4: India’s reaction is clearly at odds with the sentiments of the Global South. Empathy with victims of violence is one thing, but political support for the collective West (which is what this entails, in reality, in the prevailing climate in world politics) is another thing.
Two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Modi’s India sky-high as a stellar example of a civilisation state role model in a multipolar world in a landmark speech addressing an elite audience, distinguishing it from the predatory neo-colonial Western powers, India negated his thesis.
There is no question that the Indian stance exposes the paradox of its self-appointed claim to be the leader of the Global South. When the crunch time came, Indian elites showed their true colours.
No. 5: Israel’s reaction, now under way, is expected to be massive, unremitting and ruthless. An Israeli occupation of Gaza is a high probability, howsoever foolish that might eventually turn out to be. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s chilling words vowing to “change the reality in Gaza” will mean that increasingly, it will become difficult for the countries of the region and the Global South — and even the “friends of Israel” in the U.S. and Europe — to remain passive.
India has dug itself a foxhole from where it will be difficult to come out with anything but a battered reputation and credibility.
No. 6: Troubling questions arise in regard of India’s credentials to be a U.N. Security Council permanent member. Whose interests, after all, does India represent other than its self-interests? This becomes a daunting question for which there are no easy answers. Succinctly put, the fruits of decades of hard work by successive Indian leaderships and diplomats are being squandered away.
No. 7: All wars come to an end through negotiations. But this war will be a long and wide-ranging one. The wily politician in Netanyahu, who is under immense pressure domestically, facing personal legal charges and holding on to power with the help of ultra-nationalist and right-wing partners, will seize the opportunity to salvage his reputation as Israel’s great protector and rally the political and security establishment in his country, which is deeply divided, and shall be in no hurry to sit at the negotiating table with Hamas.
On the other hand, the U.S. intention will be to claw its way up the greasy pole of West Asian politics after the Iran-Saudi rapprochement. In a major display of force, a vast armada of warships and planes is slouching toward East Mediterranean. How this force projection will pan out remains to be seen.
The temptation will be there to reimpose U.S. hegemony in West Asia and to project U.S. President Joe Biden as a decisive leader at a time when, on the one hand, his re-election bid in the 2024 election is wide open and, on the other hand, the spectre of a humiliating defeat in Ukraine haunts his presidency.
The political interests of Biden and Netanyahu are coalescing and the stench of Israel’s war may engulf other countries in the region as time passes. The Indian leadership will be hard-pressed to demonstrate its friendship and bonhomie with Netanyahu in an apocalyptic scenario.
No. 8: The Modi government might as well say goodbye to the grand idea of building an Indo-Arab economic corridor to Europe in a foreseeable future. That means, Haifa Port, which was acquired by the Adani Group in a “strategic purchase” at a reported cost of $1.13 billion with Netanyahu’s blessing, will be underperforming. Smart economic diplomacy entailed fostering Arab-Israeli amity.
No. 9: The Indian government has blithely ignored that Israel is a state sponsoring terrorism. Optics matter in politics and international affairs, and at a time when India’s own credentials are under Western scrutiny, it is doubly important that it is careful in its words and behaviour. There is an old saying, “Show me your friends and I will show you your future!” If the intention is to fly on the wings of the Israeli lobby in North America — or to catch Biden’s eye — it smacks of naïveté, to say the least.
No. 10: Finally, India should know that in the final analysis, sins are forgotten and forgiven when a political movement with violence in its toolbox commands the overwhelming support of the masses. Indeed, that is how it should be. By that yardstick, Hamas passed the litmus test decades ago, much before the BJP formed a government in 2014.
Hamas today is the unquestioned leader of Palestinian aspirations, towering head and shoulders above peer groups and is a mainstream interlocutor for the regional powers. It even has a representative office in Moscow. Clearly, the Indian reaction, which tends to view the current development as a “stand alone” event of terrorism, is anachronistic.
An enduring Palestinian settlement will have to be inclusive and will include Hamas after the audacity of hope it has displayed. The BJP leadership should educate its provincial leaders with tunnel vision on international affairs that Islamism is not to be equated with terrorism in the global commons, especially the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood to which Hamas belongs.
M.K. Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat. He was India’s ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey. Views are personal.
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/10/10-problems-with-indias-stance-on-gaza/
- By Gus Leonisky at 11 Oct 2023 - 7:06pm
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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one shot two kills....
By Dave DeCamp
Lawmakers in the US and Israel have called for the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza in response to the Hamas attack on southern Israel that has killed at least 1,000 Israelis. So far, Israeli retaliation has killed 900 Palestinians, a number that’s growing amid Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
Revital “Tally” Gotliv, a member of Israel’s Knesset and the Likud party, called for Israel to use its nuclear weapons, which Israel has never formally acknowledged exist.
“Jericho Missile! Jericho Missile! Strategic alert. Before considering the introduction of forces. Doomsday weapon! This is my opinion. May God preserve all our strength,” Gotliv wrote on X on Monday.
In another post, she urged for Israel to use “Doomsday weapons” and “everything in its arsenal.” The following day, she continued to call for a massive strike on Gaza, which is home to over two million people, about half of whom are children.
“Only an explosion that shakes the Middle East will restore this country’s dignity, strength and security!” she wrote. “It’s time to kiss doomsday. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza. … without mercy! without mercy!”
Over in the US, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) also called for mass slaughter in Gaza.
CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Rubio: “Is there a way for Israel to destroy Hamas without causing massive casualties against the innocent people of Gaza? There are more than two million people in the Gaza Strip and roughly a million of them are children.”
Rubio replied: “Yeah, I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to co-exist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages. I mean, these are people, as you’ve been reporting and others have seen, that deliberately targeted teenage girls, women, children, the elderly … just horrifying things, and I don’t think we know the full extent of it yet. I mean, there’s more to come in the days and weeks ahead. You can’t exist. They have to be eradicated.”
In an apparent reference to civilian casualties, Rubio continued, “And you pointed out the difficult challenge. This is going to be incredibly painful. This is going to be incredibly difficult. And it’s going to be horrifying, the price to pay. But even more horrifying is allowing a group like this to continue to be a viable group operating from a space that they control. I wish, you know, in an ideal world, people will tell you that there is, but I just don’t — I don’t see any other option. It’s a terrible option, but it remains the only option.”
Source: Antiwar
https://www.activistpost.com/2023/10/us-israeli-lawmakers-call-for-genocide-of-palestinians-in-gaza.html
SEE ALSO:
My preparations for this weekend’s False Flag Weekly News, with its tongue-in-cheek lead story suggesting that Wednesday’s emergency alert’s hidden message was “killer tranny Sarah Ashton-Cirillo is on the loose,” were shockingly interrupted by the Gaza concentration camp breakout. Suddenly, the emergency alert was real—and being sounded all over Israel.
As usual, Western morons blamed the victims. In a lame attempt at sick humor, American National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson condemned the attacks as “unprovoked.”
Apparently it isn’t a provocation to slaughter Palestinians, virtually all unarmed and posing no threat, many of them women and children, by the hundreds. In many cases, children are killed for sport by Israeli snipers who brag about it on social media and are never punished.
The Israeli government supports this sport shooting of children. Netanyahu-allied minister Ayelet Shaked memorably has called for Israel not only to exterminate all Palestinian children, whom she termed “little snakes,” but also to kill the mothers who give birth to them. IDF soldiers agree, and vaunt their agreement by proudly wearing “one shot two kills” T-shirts.
https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/gazans-break-out-of-worlds-biggest-concentration-camp/
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bombing Damascus?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfx2O4v2IY
Israeli Jets Enter Syria; Airports Bombed In Damascus & Aleppo Cities Amid Israel-Hamas War | WatchIs Israel searching ways to start WW3? UNDER ORDER FROM THE CIA AND THE PENTAGON?
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why would modi cuddle Israel?
New Delhi said on Wednesday that it was “deeply shocked” by the decision of a Qatari court to sentence eight Indian nationals to death. The men were arrested in August last year on charges of spying on a submarine program on behalf of Israel, Mint reported.
Following the verdict, the Indian Foreign Ministry said it would raise the issue with the authorities in Qatar.
“We are deeply shocked by the verdict of death penalty and are awaiting the detailed judgment. We are in touch with the family members and the legal team, and we are exploring all legal options,” the ministry stated. It added that the Indian government attaches “high importance” to the case and would “continue to extend all consular and legal assistance.”
The eight Indian nationals, all of whom are former navy personnel, were detained in Doha by the State Security Bureau, Qatar’s intelligence service. They worked for a private firm, Al Dahra Global Technologies and Consultancy Services, which provided services to the Qatari armed forces and security agencies. The company’s chief executive was also reportedly arrested last year but was later released on bail.
The list of detainees includes the managing director of Al Dahra, identified as Purnendu Tiwari, who is a retired commander of the Indian Navy, according to Indian media. The others have been identified as Navtej Singh Gill, Saurabh Vasisht, Sanjeev Gupta, Birendra Kumar Verma, Sugunakar Pakala, Amit Nagpal, and Ragesh.
https://www.theinteldrop.org/2023/10/26/new-delhi-deeply-shocked-after-qatar-sentences-eight-indians-to-death/
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IF spying on a submarine program on behalf of Israel IS TRUE THEN ONE CAN UNDERSTAND WHY MODI'S CONNECTION WITH ISRAEL (SEE AT TOP)....
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walking a tightrope....
BY Ullekh N.P.A Saudi Arabian prince recently asked the people of Gaza to follow in the footsteps of Gandhi and his tactics of civil disobedience and non-cooperation to win freedom from Israeli occupation, rather than resort to military means. Whether or not Gandhi’s methods are viable in the ongoing humanitarian crisis in that region at present, many of us know that the iconic Indian leader and apostle of peace was interested in what was happening in Palestine in his lifetime.
He was opposed to the British policy of “settling” Jews in Palestine against the wishes of those who had lived there. Gandhi wrote back then, “The German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history (but) my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me … Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.”
He wrote those sentences in the late 1930s, shortly after Hitler launched his anti-Jew pogroms. For decades, Free India stood by the Palestinians and upheld Gandhi’s views, even after it officially entered into ties with Israel in the early 1990s. Unofficial ties were much older.
Interestingly, notwithstanding Gandhi’s views against a national home for the Jews in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, the founder and the first prime minister of Israel, had in his post-retirement study a portrait of the Mahatma, who did not live long enough to witness the formation of Israel. He was assassinated three months prior – in January 1948.
READ MORE: https://www.rt.com/india/585959-india-mahatma-gandhi-position/
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trading on terror.....
By Ullekh N.P.
in New Delhi
Special to Consortium News
Did Hamas raise funds on Israel’s stock exchange by shorting ahead of the Oct. 7 attack? The report by U.S. law professors Robert Jackson Jr and Joshua Mitts that analyzed Israeli stock sales doesn’t say so. The 66-page study merely said that the “short-selling of Israeli securities on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) increased dramatically” ahead of Oct. 7.
However, a large section of the Indian media had no doubts whatsoever about the perpetrators. A video on the Times of India website blamed Hamas for shorting and striking gold. News anchor Ketki Angre ran a video under the headline “Hamas possibly profited from Israeli stock market bets prior to October terror attacks”. The opening text accompanying Angre’s video says:
“According to a report by prominent US researchers, individuals linked to Hamas may have gained substantial financial benefits from the terrorist attacks on October 7.”
But a full reading of the report, titled “Trading on Terror?” confirms that the authors have not pointed fingers directly at Hamas. It just says this:
“While many investigating how the Hamas attack was financed have focused on cryptocurrency, to our knowledge little attention has been given to trading in securities markets in advance of Oct. 7 — an important omission given the relative sizes of the cryptocurrency and securities markets.”
The report adds: “Taken together, our evidence is consistent with informed traders anticipating and profiting from the Hamas attack.”
The study by these American professors found that for Leumi, Israel’s largest bank, 4.43 million shares sold short over the period September 14 to October 5 yielded profits of 3.2 billion shekels (U.S.$859 million).
Interestingly, shortly after the news broke on Dec. 4-5, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange said the “Trading on Terror?” report was inaccurate and its publication irresponsible.
Media Reflects Positions of Government
Not long after the Times of India aired its biased report, NDTV, the Indian media organization in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s friend and billionaire businessman Gautam Adani owns a majority stake, sprang into action stating that the “study claims Hamas made millions by short selling ahead of Oct 7 attack”. Mint newspaper also ran a header along those lines:
“Hamas likely profited from Israel stock markets over short selling ahead of October terror attacks: US-based study”.
Contrast it with the Western mainstream media, which, despite its inherent pro-Israel bias, stuck to the report’s actual finding.
“Traders earned millions anticipating Oct. 7 Hamas attack, study says”, The Washington Post headline stated, without blaming Hamas directly. The Wall Street Journal headline read: Short-Selling in Israeli Stocks Jumped Before Hamas Attacks, Paper Finds. Here’s how a headline by CBS News read: “Study: Someone bet against the Israeli stock market in the days before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.”
So, who hedged their bets and profited? It could have been anyone in the know, the report says. The U.S. intelligence community had repeatedly warned the Biden administration about Hamas preparing to launch a rocket attack against Israel.
An Egyptian official was quoted in the media as saying that Cairo had warned Israel about an impending major strike against them. Tel Aviv, which is under fire for the massive failure of its famed intelligence apparatus, however, denied it had received any such heads-up.
Even if you are to call out Indian mainstream journalism for sloppy homework, such reporting is proof of insensitivity towards the Palestinian side of the story.
In a country where the majority of the political bureaus of mainstream news outlets are taught to be servile to the government in power to protect the business interests of their owners – and from raids from federal agencies – the media’s position against Palestine reflects the mindset of those in power.
As early as July 2014, within months of Modi coming to power as prime minister for the first time, the then external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj had stalled a discussion on the Israel-Palestine row in the upper House of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) stating that “no discourteous reference should be made to a friendly nation.”
An Indian Tightrope
Years later, on Dec. 27, 2023, Rajya Sabha, a member Saket Gokhale, took to X to protest the Modi government’s refusal to answer questions on Israel from even lawmakers in India. The government recanted the same 2014 logic while disallowing questions by Members of Parliament that the government of the day is meant to answer and place before the House.
He asked how many Israeli nationals were currently resident in India on long-term visas? How many criminal cases and types of offenses had been registered against Israeli nationals by police and agencies across India, year-wise, between Jan. 2015 till date?
He also asked how many Israeli nationals had been deported or ordered to leave India for overstaying their visas, year-wise between Jan. 2015 till date?
The explanation given for disallowing Gokhale’s questions by the Modi government was it “refers discourteously to a friendly country.”
True, the Indian government is walking the tightrope on the Israel-Palestine issue. After all, it doesn’t want to displease the Arab world which, put together, is the highest source of remittances to India by its diaspora.
At the same time, New Delhi wants to keep close ties with Israel, with which it normalized relations in the early 1990s, because of growing military ties. India had allegedly bought the Pegasus software from Israel to spy on dissenters, journalists, and even Opposition ministers, a charge denied by the Modi government.
New York-based South African journalist Azad Essa – whose 2022 book Hostile Homelands focuses on the two countries’ growing military-industrial relationship from the 1990s and the ideological link between Zionism and Hindutva – recently spoke about Israel’s export of military hardware marketed as “battlefield-tested technology” to India.
Meanwhile, numerous reports have surfaced even in the Western media that Hindu nationalists – those who follow the political ideology of Hindutva as separate from Hinduism as a religion, much like the difference between Zionism and Judaism – are a major source of fake news peddling and the creation of hate-spewing videos targeted at Palestinians.
This comes at a time when a population of 2.3 million Palestinians is being subject to genocide by a settler-colonial-occupier state.
Hindutva Propaganda and Zionism
The death toll in Gaza from Israeli attacks since Oct. 7, in gross violation of international laws, has crossed 21,000, approximately half of whom are children and women, and many tens of thousands have been injured. Almost the entire population has been displaced from their homes, and half of the city has been wiped out including infrastructure like hospitals, schools and universities.
The pro-Israel affinity of propagandists who align with the majoritarian Hindutva political forces in India is rooted in Islamophobia. Muslims account for less than 15 percent of India’s population, while Hindus make up close to 80 percent.
The politics of polarization by Hindutva forces have won rich dividends at the hustings, pulling in the votes of Hindus who are otherwise divided along caste lines.
The projection of Muslims as the age-old enemy is at the core of Modi’s political propaganda. Various government reports have suggested that the majority of Muslims live miserable lives and are disadvantaged financially and politically.
Yet they are routinely demonized by the dominant political party in the country to pull in votes from across the Hindu spectrum.
As a result, the Hindu-first agenda and intolerance of opposing views, including those in Parliament, are corroding democracy in the country.
The effects of toxic majoritarianism are felt across society, especially in the media, even as the government mixes politics with religion. The media fails to rise to the occasion to call out the government for its excesses, including the rampant use of religious symbols at government events though India is a secular nation.
On the other hand, the media offers wide coverage of Hindu religious functions that Modi attends.
Modi was one of the first among world leaders to express support for Israel on Oct. 7. He said on X:
“Deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour.”
That set the agenda for a large section of mainstream media which, like American social-media platforms, continue to downplay Palestinian suffering. As with right-wing Hindutva trolls, the trauma of the Gazans has been a moment of joy and exhilaration amidst soaring Islamophobic rants across Indian society.
It is ironic that the founders of India’s Hindutva movement had glorified and deified Hitler, and lapped up Nazism as a model for building a Hindu Rashtra (nation) in India.
The truth about the Indian news ecosystem, which now comprises American social-media platforms and a mainstream media that chases social media to keep pace, is as tragic as it is farcical. In the face of authoritarian tendencies, legacy media has lost its sting to challenge the Islamophobia of the ruling party.
Ullekh N.P. is a writer, journalist, and political commentator based in New Delhi. He is the executive editor of the newsweekly Open and author of three nonfiction books: War Room: The People, Tactics and Technology Behind Narendra Modi’s 2014 Win; The Untold Vajpayee: Politician and Paradox; and Kannur: Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics. His forthcoming book on Cuba, part travelogue and part political commentary, is due for release in mid-2024.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/01/02/indias-affinity-for-israel/
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