SACW - Jan 9, 2011 | Pakistan: Fight Religious Right Now / India: Animation Film on Binayak Sen case / Wounded Kashmir / UN Must'nt Legalise Blasphemy

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire -  Dispatch No. 2692 - January 9, 2011
From: sacw.net

[1]  Pakistan: Time to Take on the Fundos After Salman Taseer's assassination
     (i) In the wake of Taseer's murder, moderate Pakistanis must speak out (Ahmed Rashid)
     (ii) This is Jinnah’s Pakistan (Ayesha Siddiqa)
     (iii) Peace Mumbai condemn's Taseer’s killing
     (iv)  Blasphemy is not a protector of religious freedom, as the UN maintains, but its mortal enemy (Nick Cohen)
[2]  Time to confront RSS man on his terrorist links (Editorial, Mail Today)
[3]  India: Why Is Dr. Binayak Sen Being Jailed? - An Animation Film on the Binayak Sen Case produced by Balaji Narasimhan
[4]  India / Kashmir: Wounds of war (Nirupama Subramanian)
[5]  Philippines : Catholics Risk Excommunication Over Reproductive Rights (Kara Santos)
[6]  Europe and North America:
   (i) The Fading Dream of Europe (Orhan Pamuk)
  (ii) 'Le Batman Francais' finds a formidable foe in right-wing America (John Lichfield)
[7] Upcoming Events:   Beyond The Ayodhya Judgment - Historians workshop (New Delhi, 10 January 2011)

---------

[1]  Pakistan: More reactions to Salman Taseer's assassination

(i) The Guardian, 8 January 2011

IN THE WAKE OF TASEER'S MURDER, MODERATE PAKISTANIS MUST SPEAK OUT

We have to stand up against the fanatics determined to destroy our democratic nation

by Ahmed Rashid in Lahore

Salmaan Taseer's murder is likely to have wider and more cataclysmic consequences than even the murder of his renowned leader, Benazir Bhutto, three years ago. Everyone mourned Bhutto – even her political enemies – because she was a woman, illustrious and a possible solution to what were, even then, seen as Pakistan's insurmountable problems.

Taseer's death has unleashed the mad dogs of hell, inspiring the minority of fanatics to go to any lengths to destroy the democratic, secular and moderate Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

We Pakistanis are at the edge of a precipice and as a consequence the stability of the entire region is at risk.

The all-powerful army refuses to issue a single comment of support for the government or Taseer's family; the Pakistan People's Party government is paralysed and making concession after concession to the extremists and the political opposition; civil society has largely gone into hiding and anyone connected with defining Islamic principles (lawyers, judges, scholars, mullahs) refuses to stand up and be counted.

The state of the nation is such that not a single registered mullah in the city of Lahore with its 13 million people was willing to read Taseer's funeral prayers, because they were too scared to do so.

Five hundred lawyers have signed up to defend Taseer's killer Mumtaz Qadri, but Taseer's wife cannot find a single criminal lawyer to prosecute him. It is hard to see which judge is even likely to pursue the case to its obvious conclusion.

Meanwhile Qadri is making YouTube videos from jail of himself singing Islamic hymns and over 70 pages on Facebook have appeared in his support (and thankfully been pulled down rapidly by Facebook Inc).

Pakistan is pivotal to global security not just because it is a nuclear armed state in a condition of almost permanent conflict with its neighbour India. (Imagine the consequences of another Mumbai massacre around now and imagine the Indian reaction.) A stable Pakistan is pivotal to peace in Afghanistan, the Middle East and the west's dealings with Iran. Yet its borders with South Asia, Central Asia and the Arabian Gulf are not just a matter of geo-politics.

Although the Gulf Arabs may have provided the cash, it has been Pakistani militants who have been the harbingers and sustainers of Islamic militancy in this region. Al-Qaida could never have survived after 2001, nor spread its wings to Yemen and Somalia, without the unstinting support, sanctuaries and sacrifice offered by Pakistani militant groups.

Unchecked for the past 10 years, partly due to the connivance of various Pakistani actors including the military and partly due to the failures of the west to stabilize Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine or deal with Iran, Pakistan's militants now have what they consider to be an opportunity of coming out of the shadows and challenging the legitimacy of an entire state and even encouraging its collapse.

The real fear amongst Pakistan and its neighbours is not the strength of the militants who remain a small minority and vastly unpopular, but the weakness of the state that is opposing them. The government is faced with a burgeoning economic crisis with massive price increases, 15% inflation and severe gas, electricity and fuel shortages.

A vital International Monetary Fund loan has been suspended due to the failure of the political elite to carry out economic reforms.

There is a spiralling political crisis (although the government patched up with its enemies over the weekend sufficiently so as not to be immediately dismissed). There is a half a million strong army that insists that its main enemy is India not extremism even as it fears that the militants may have entered its own hallowed portals. All this is grist for the militants' mill offering opportunities for success.

There is nobody to save Pakistan except Pakistanis, and it is we and our civil organisations and institutions who have to be strengthened and supported while we and the west have to convince the army to stop fighting proxy wars with India and Afghanistan and get down to helping push back the wave of extremism. It's a tall order but nothing less will do.

o o o

(ii) 

The Express Tribune, 9 January 2011

THIS IS JINNAH’S PAKISTAN

by Ayesha Siddiqa

One hopes that after December 4, the ruling elite will realise that the majority of people are not peaceful onlookers, but a mob which will happily condemn people to death without understanding their logic. Salmaan Taseer was against a law which targeted the poor and the powerless. The fact is that it was a miniscule minority which came forward to mourn his death. The support of the killer’s action, on the other hand, is widespread.

I will exclude the PPP vote-bank from the above classification due to the fact that, while they have protested the killing, it is not certain how much of this is out of conviction for what Taseer was trying to achieve — a change in the notorious blasphemy law that punishes the powerless. The law is based on a problematic system of evidence and this seems to allow a mob to punish defenseless minorities.

Interestingly, the numbers of the silent supporters of the blasphemy law far exceed the vocal minority who support change in laws that supposedly have sanction of religion. While the PML-N and PML-Q comprise a majority of those that consider man-made laws such as Hudood and blasphemy as untouchable, there are many in the PPP itself who don’t think any differently. For example, the group of pirs are silent on the issue of how the government will deal with the law.

The silence of the pirs, especially Yousaf Raza Gilani, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Makhdoom Amin Fahim and others, is understandable considering that they don’t want to annoy their spiritual-cum-political constituency. Notwithstanding the claim that the silent majority follows the more peaceful Barelvi and Sufi Islam, the fact of the matter is that the majority of ulema and pirs do not really take alternative positions on such issues. The pirs definitely don’t have a new thinking, mainly because of their ignorance of religion. Interestingly, two out of three of the Federal Shariat Court judges that opposed changes in the Hudood laws were also appointed as judges by the PPP.

Salmaan Taseer’s murder could not have been avoided, considering that mainstream Islamic discourse in Pakistan is influenced by the Saudi brand. This also includes the Barelvi and Sufi school of thought. This could have changed through ijtihad and ijma. However, the ulema, mashaikh and pirs are all reluctant to review laws for the benefit of the common man. The fact that the educated elite were not conversant in religious discourse and, in fact, kept itself aloof from religion did not help either.

The elite group’s knowledge of religion and active involvement in setting the pace of religious discourse was necessary in a country which was formed in the name of religion. Irrespective of the secular claims about Jinnah’s August 11, 1948 speech, it was not possible to keep a state, which drew its legitimacy from religion, secular. Unfortunately, the elite took refuge in their secularism and left religious discourse at the behest of clergy.

Moreover, the elite continued to strike a Faustian bargain with the clerics every time it ran short of political legitimacy. Most seemingly secular leaders pretended to clothe their policies in religion to seek greater legitimacy. They acted in Jinnah’s footsteps, who had borrowed the concept of Muslim identity without thinking about the rest of the package.

Sixty-three years hence, it is immaterial to argue whether the country was made in the name of Islam or for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. The educated, liberal elite had no role in giving direction to religious discourse which was always determined by clerics. Educated people’s intervention made by, for example, Allama Iqbal, was totally missing after 1947.

The marriage of religion with politics also meant that the clerics stuck to the status quo and spent more time thinking of wrangling state power from non-religious leaders. It also seems that in the past couple of decades or a bit more, the clergy shifted its focus from winning elections to capturing the main state narrative. They are in a comfortable position since they were the only ones defining religion and religious norms.

Now, we must await more killings and bloodshed.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 9th, 2011.

(iii) [Finaly a peace movement grouping in India expresses solidarity with the Pakistanis]

Date: 8 January 2011

PEACE MUMBAI CONDEMN'S TASEER’S KILLING

Peace Mumbai strongly condemn's the brutal assassination of Salman Taseer, the Governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province, on Tuesday. He was shot dead by his security guard for taking a principled position on the controversial Blasphemy Law.

Mr.Taseer was in favour of amendment to the Blasphemy Law. Recently a Court in Sheikhpura near Lahore sentenced to death Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman, for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad. The sentence has yet to be confirmed by the High Court and Supreme Court and it will take couple of years. Taseer wanted to secure pardon for Aasia Bibi from the death penalty. This was the first time in the history of Pakistan that a woman has been sentenced to capital punishment under the Blasphemy Law. The Blasphemy Law is wielded primarily against minorities and is often used to settle personal scores. Many a time, local people take the law into their own hands and lynch individuals accused of blasphemous acts.

It is a matter of concern that people are coming out in open support of the killer of  Mr.Taseer on various social networking websites and expressing joy at this ghastly murder. Rising religious extremism has to be curbed and the Pakistan government must act strongly against forces promoting hatred and violence.

We demand that the Pakistan government take stern action against the people who issued death threats against Salman Taseer, Sherry Rehman and others. The government must strive to ensure the safety of Sherry Rehman for taking a courageous stand and introducing an amendment to this Law in the National Assembly.

Jatin Desai
Sukla Sen
Asad Bin Saif


o o o

(iv)

The Observer, 9 January 2011

ONLY RELIGIOUS THUGS LOVE BLASPHEMY LAWS

Blasphemy is not a protector of religious freedom, as the UN maintains, but its mortal enemy

by  Nick Cohen

If the circumstances were not so hideous, the successful attempt by Pakistan to persuade the UN Human Rights Council to condemn blasphemers who defame religion would have been a black comedy. Every word its diplomats used in 2009 to protest against Islamophobia turned out to be a precise description of the prejudices the Pakistani state was appeasing at home.

They told the UN it must approve a universal blasphemy law to protect religious minorities from "intolerance, discrimination and acts of violence". If they were not the hypocrites they appeared, but honourable men, who wanted to help all minorities and not only Muslims, they must now accept that Salmaan Taseer was butchered for protecting Pakistan's religious minorities from its own blasphemy law.

Taseer did not go so far as to assert that the Qur'an, like the Talmud and the Bible, was the work of men, not God, or criticise the teachings of Muhammad. His crime was to stand up against the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries, a subject that the media of the supposedly warmongering, culturally imperialist "crusaders" of the west barely mention for fear of causing "offence". He denounced the treatment of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five. She had argued with Muslim women who refused to drink water she had carried because she was impure and therefore the drink she carried was contaminated. They told the local cleric she had taken Muhammad's name in vain.

That was enough for the judge to order that she be hanged by the neck until she was dead. Not much respect shown for her minority rights, then. Nor for the rights of Salmaan Taseer, whose last sight on earth was of Constable Mumtaz Qadri firing 26 bullets into his body, while other members of his bodyguard stood by and let him do it.

"Defamation of religion is a serious affront to human dignity leading to a restriction on the freedom of their adherents and incitement to religious violence," thundered the Pakistani officials to the UN in 2009.

Mutatis mutandis, Pakistan has become a country so scared of the inciters of religious violence that liberals stay silent for fear the assassins will come for them; a land so benighted Jamaat-e-Islami and other mobster theocrats can get away with blaming Taseer for his own death and treating his killer as a hero for enforcing the will of god.

"RIP Pakistan," sighed Salman Rushdie after Taseer's murder. "What should one say of a country in which an assassin is showered with rose petals while a decent man lies dead?" Despair is a reasonable response to a failed state. When Islamists have penetrated the bodyguards of leading politicians and threaten one day to capture nuclear weapons, it may be the only response. But the relativism which asserts that human rights are all well and good for us but not for the peoples of the poor world is no response at all.

Pakistan is not a land apart, living in another century. Notice how it was able to dress up its assault on freedom of speech in the modern language of human rights. Notice, too, that the UN Human Rights Council approved its duplicity. Admittedly, the council is not so much a black comedy as a sick joke, whose members include China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and many another human rights abuser. Nevertheless, it remains astonishing that a United Nations the gullible still see as a moral arbiter endorsed blasphemy.

It is the most pernicious of attacks on free speech because defendants can never know the nature of their offence. Who is meant to be their victim? Are they meant to have injured the feelings of believers, whose faith is so weak mockery and doubt can threaten it? Perhaps they stand accused of assaulting whatever god or gods the faithful follow. In which case, are the deities in question so feeble and thin-skinned they demand that criticism be punished with human sacrifices?

In November, Freedom House published a report on the abuses of power that follow the endorsement of such a nebulous offence. It documented how Islamic states and religious vigilantes use blasphemy laws to persecute Christians, Ahmadis and Muslims who believe that Muhammad was not the final prophet and, of course, ex-Muslims such as Rushdie who decide to change or renounce their faith, as free men and women should be entitled to do.

In Iran and Egypt, blasphemy is used to prosecute political opponents of the regime. And everywhere the malicious call on it to pursue petty vendettas, as poor Mrs Bibi learned to her cost. Blasphemy is not a protector of religious freedom, as the UN maintains, but its mortal enemy. If free speech is absent, citizens are not free to argue for and practise their beliefs without the fear of state or clerical intimidation.

Let us forsake pretence and acknowledge that that same fear has caught our tongues. We, too, are scared. But instead of acknowledging our fear we dress up our refusal to speak plainly in woozy therapeutic language. We talk of our "respect" for diversity and our determination to protect "the other" and fail to notice that we are abandoning "the other's" victims and aiding and abetting their enemies. Islamists threatened Ahmadis in Surrey, but the story passed virtually without comment in the British press.

When Ireland published a law that said it was a crime to "outrage a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion", the Organisation of Islamic Countries took up Dublin's dangerously vague definition to help in the oppression of their own people's freedom of thought. And it is not only brave politicians and intellectuals such as Taseer and Rushdie who suffer.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing the marvellous Norwegian singer Deepika Thathaal (Deeyah). To Norway's shame, religious thugs harassed her and her family and drove her out of the country for the crimes of being glamorous and sexy and singing about freedom.

She came to Britain, and to Britain's shame, our religious thugs called her a "whore" and threatened to kill her too. She fled to America and told me that if white racists had driven an Asian singer from two countries, her case would be a cause celebre. As it was, the bigots who persecuted her had brown rather than white skins, so Europeans looked away.

She has learned what many dissidents from the Muslim world already know: it has become an act of some courage in the 21st century to make the sensible point that there is no god and we should grow up.

_____


[2]  India: Hindutva Terror


Mail Today, 9 January 2011

Editorial : TIME TO CONFRONT RSS MAN ON HIS TERRORIST LINKS

THE confession of one of the accused in the 2007 Mecca Masjid terror attack, Swami Asimanand has nailed the role played by elements within the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It gives the lie to the claims of senior RSS leader Indresh Kumar that the allegations against him are nothing but a fabrication of the Central Bureau of Investigation at the behest of the United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre.

Not only has he emerged as one of the key conspirators, Asimanand claims to have told the slain RSS activist Sunil Joshi — who allegedly supervised the planting of bombs at the Mecca Masjid, Ajmer Dargah and the Samjhauta Express — that his life was in danger from Mr Kumar. The investigating agencies must now break from their cautious attitude towards Mr Kumar as Swami Asimanand’s confession is should be sufficient basis for a chargesheet against the RSS leader.

The revelations have also exposed the sinister nature of the Hindutva terror module and their diabolical motives. The pretext of being a response to Pakistan- sponsored terror attacks seems to have been nothing but a facade for their true motives — to create communal tension across the country. A case in point is the reason cited by Asimanand for choosing the Dargah of Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti in Ajmer as a target — “ to scare the large number of Hindus who visit the shrine”. It is time the Bharatiya Janata Party got out of its denial mode and acknowledged the threat that Hindutva terror poses to the country, especially as the name of one of its own leaders — Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath — has also come up during the course of the investigations. Instead of continuing to castigate the investigating agencies, the party must impress upon its parent organisation — the RSS — to suspend its functionaries who are under the scanner. The largest opposition party cannot be seen to be having double standards on an issue like terrorism.

A sad aspect to the Swami’s confession is his claim that he was prompted to confess his involvement in the attacks as an act of repentance following his interaction with a Muslim boy Abdul Kaleem at the Chanchalguda jail in Hyderabad. Interestingly and perhaps symbolically, Kaleem had been earlier wrongfully detained and tortured by the Hyderabad police in connection with the Mecca Masjid blasts.

_____


[3]  India: Human Rights

WHY IS DR. BINAYAK SEN BEING JAILED? 
An Animation Film on the Dr. Binayak Sen Case produced by Balaji Narasimhan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA7sn_ain2Y

____


[4]   Kashmir

Magazine - The Hindu, 9 January 2011

WOUNDS OF WAR

by Nirupama Subramanian

Living from moment to moment in a conflict zone can exact a heavy price. Kashmir today has an alarming number of mental health patients, bereft of traditional support structures or modern mental healthcare facilities… Will they ever get the chance to heal?


It is noon at the Government Psychiatric Diseases Hospital in Srinagar's Rainawari neighbourhood. In a clinic at the hospital, Dr. Mushataq Margoob is sitting at his table at one end of the room. Flanking him on either side are two junior doctors.

The rest of the room is packed with people. Outside, more people are waiting. The doctors' assistant will open the door a crack to let a couple of people in, but only if someone inside is preparing to leave.

Unfazed, the three doctors work their way methodically through the crush of patients, speaking softly with each person to find out what is wrong, asking for the symptoms, a background about the family or significant episodes in the life of the patient before proceeding to prescribe medicines.

The rush never ends at this hospital, the only government mental health hospital in J&K. People come here from all over the state. Established as a mental asylum in the mid-1950s, it has stood a lonely witness over the last two decades to the terrible wounds that the conflict in the Valley has left on the minds of those who have lived through it.

Despite the stigma that is still attached to those afflicted by mental health problems, the numbers attending the hospital have risen exponentially.

Escalating numbers

The increase began around the same time as the troubles in the State. In the 1980s, it saw 1,500 to 1,700 patients annually; in 1994, five years after Kashmir plunged into militancy, the numbers rose to 19,000; by 2002, more than 40,000 people were seeking treatment at the hospital as outpatients. Today, that number is close to 1,00,000.

The World Health Organisation has predicted that by 2020 depression would rank as the second biggest contributor after cardiovascular diseases to “disability adjusted life years”, the sum of years of potential life lost due to premature mortality and the years of productive life lost due to disability. Dr. Margoob says that has already happened in Kashmir.

“Here it is the direct impact of moment-to-moment living, for more than two decades,” he says. Nearly 19 per cent of Kashmir's adult population, Dr Margoob says, currently suffers from depression.

A dishevelled-looking man from Pampore has come to renew a prescription for his wife's medicines. Dr. Marghoob asks after his wife as he writes out the medicines. Seven years ago, she saw a child getting shot in an exchange of fire between militants and security forces. “She has not been able to forget that incident,” the man says later outside the OPD, before shuffling off to collect the medicines. “She remains sad all the time. The doctor says she has an illness in her mind”.

Back in the clinic, a woman has been waiting patiently. Her flaming red cheeks hardly look like a sign of good health. She has been a regular at the clinic since her husband disappeared 10 years ago. The woman told the doctor that some unidentified men, often a euphemism for militants, took him away. She has a daughter who is now 19 years old.

“She suffers constantly from aches and pains. She has a gloomy and pessimistic picture of her life. In addition, she is also suffering from hypertension. Because she has no money, she keeps missing her medicine doses,” Dr. Marghoob said.

For more than 20 years, militancy, the overwhelming presence of the armed forces, bomb attacks, untimely deaths, disappearances, curfews, protests have all had an adverse impact on individuals as well as on the social fabric of communities. Not all cases of mental ill health have a direct link to the volatile situation in Kashmir. But, says Dr. Margoob, even such patients who would have fared better had it not been for the overwhelming conditions of stress in the environment.

A study by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) conducted between June 2005 and August 2005 in the two districts of Badgam and Kupwara, published in 2008, found shocking levels of exposure to violence. Nearly 86 per cent had been exposed to crossfire; 82.7 per cent had been exposed to round-up raids; almost three-quarters had witnessed physical or mental ill-treatment. Over two-thirds had seen someone being tortured. Over 40 per cent had witnessed a killing, over 13 per cent had witnessed rape.

The study found over one-third of the respondents were suffering from psychological distress, and one-third had contemplated committing suicide. The most common ways in which people coped were by withdrawal, isolating themselves from the people around them, or with displays of aggressive behaviour.

For all this, J&K has abysmally inadequate mental health facilities. The state has not more than 16 psychiatrists, most of them working out of private clinics in the capital. A private mental health hospital opened three years ago with in-patient facilities. But professional mental healthcare in rural areas is unheard of, and most people who want help must make the trip to the capital city.

With increasing awareness about Kashmir's mental health issues, the postgraduate Institute of Mental Health, the teaching facility attached to the hospital that Dr. Margoob heads, is now engaged in training psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, psychiatric nurses and social workers. He points to the two junior doctors working alongside him in the clinic. One of them is last year's topper from Srinagar's government medical college, the other is from a family of opthalmalogists in Jammu. “They have willingly chosen to take up psychiatry. It is an encouraging sign,” he says.

According to Dr. Margoob, family and religion have played a big role in compensating for the inadequate professional mental healthcare facilities in helping people cope with their trauma. But even these have limitations. Of the tens of thousands of orphans in the state, a large number have no family support, ditto for the widows, and the “half-widows”, women whose husbands have disappeared after being taken away either by security forces or militants.

Dwindling support

He cites the example of a patient, a 23-year-old girl, who saw her father being killed by a notorious counter-insurgent when she was only nine years old. Some years later, her mother also died of a kidney problem, leaving her brother to look after the family. Even after the passage of 14 years, the girl, who comes to see him once a fortnight, continues to get seizures. The attacks could be set off by anything that triggers a memory of the killing, such as a knock on the door. Recently, she has developed keratoconus, a degenerative disorder of the eye, which can be corrected with surgery. She has no money for this, and feels let down by her extended family.

“She tells me that as long as her father was alive, the house always seemed to be full of aunts and uncles, but they are nowhere in the picture now. There is no one to help her,” Dr, Margoob says. “Once the immediate incident is past, people move on, they vanish, and the affected persons are left to fend for themselves”.

In this summer's unrest in the Valley, the youth who made up the bulk of the stone-throwers all belong to a generation that was born and grew up in the shadow of the gun in Kashmir. Children are daily witness to the helplessness and inability of their parents to control the circumstances around them, and have internalised the older generation's feelings of insecurity. Peer groups offer a lifeline, and their collective attempts to fight the insecurity manifests itself in increased risk-taking behaviour. On the other side are parents, who want to hide their helplessness from their children.

“Here in Kashmir, the modes of communication and resolving age-related issues have broken down. How do you expect it not to be a challenge for a parent who has not lived normally for even a second of his life for the last 20 years?” asks Dr. Margoob.

____


[5] South East Asia:

Inter Press Service

PHILIPPINES : CATHOLICS RISK EXCOMMUNICATION OVER REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

by Kara Santos

MANILA, Jan 6, 2011 (IPS) - Support for reproductive health legislation, popularly known as the RH Bill here, has snowballed on social websites and among peer networks, yet passage and funding of the bill remain uncertain. Catholic bishops have long used the threat of excommunication in the raging debates over use of modern contraceptive methods - such as pills, IUDs and condoms - in the Southeast-Asian nation of over 92 million, 85 percent of whom are Catholic.

In response to the Catholic Church’s vehement opposition to the bill, activists staged the first ‘Excommunication Party’ as 2010 closed.

The event dubbed, "If Supporting the RH Bill Means Excommunication, Excommunicate Me!" was hosted by secular group Filipino Freethinkers and was advertised as a night of "dinner, entertainment and dissent."

There are six RH bills pending at the House, all allowing the use of artificial methods of family planning, like condoms and pills - the Church allows couples to use only the natural family planning method.

It is estimated that 4,000 babies swell the country’s population every day.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has threatened excommunication for politicians who support the RH Bill, which provides for universal access to methods and information on birth control and maternal care. Catholic groups have claimed that some artificial contraceptives actually induce abortion and that the RH Bill promotes a "culture of death and immorality" by promoting abortion and promiscuity among youth.

In a recent incident at the Manila Cathedral, members of Pro-Life Philippines - led by Eric Manalang, their president and one of the RH Bill’s most outspoken opponents - barred a group of students, urban poor mothers and young professionals from attending a prayer service tackling the RH Bill.

"Satan, get away from us! You should have asked your mother to abort you," were just a few of the statements hurled by Pro-Life members in a video captured by the Filipino Freethinkers, which was screened during the party.

"Manalang called even the devout Roman Catholics among us Satan," said Red Tani, president of the Filipino Freethinkers in a statement. "He branded the Catholics among us oxymorons, as if it were a contradiction to be pro-RH and remain Catholic. If the church hierarchy thinks supporting the RH Bill means heresy, then by all means - excommunicate us!" Tani said.

Said to be the first of its kind, the excommunication party featured live music, solidarity messages by pro-RH personalities, improvisational poetry and theatrical performances on reproductive health issues and abortion and adult games. Guests also signed a symbolic "excommunication document," a copy of which would be sent to each participant’s parish and the CBCP, to show their support for the cause.

"I think it’s wonderful that freedom of expression means something - that people are finally speaking their mind and expressing what they feel in a very creative manner," performance artist and activist Carlos Celdran told IPS.

In September, Celdran was jailed for "offending the feelings of the faithful" after he protested against the Catholic Church’s opposition to the RH Bill during an ecumenical service at the Manila Cathedral.

Of the harassment of students at the Manila Cathedral, Celdran had this to say: "Whatever was done was done in a very peaceful way. It was an absolute epitome of freedom of expression and you should not give it up and take it for granted."

A message board near the entrance of the venue became a graffiti wall for people to weigh in on their thoughts about excommunication and RH debate. "Keep your dogmatism to yourself," one person wrote directing their statement to the Catholic Church. "Stay out of my vagina, my vagina my rules!" wrote another.

In his Christmas message, CBCP president Bishop Nereo Odchimar equated the RH Bill to terrorism and said that: "With the approval of RH Bill, a woman’s womb can be a ferocious threat to those who are yet to be born," he said in an official statement.

Sylvia Estrada-Claudio, professor and director of the University of the Philippines Centre for Women’s Studies (CWS) told IPS that the high turnout at the event was emblematic of the public’s reaction to how the church had been playing the "excommunication card" wrongly in the country.

"It amazes me that so many people who are Catholic, and who don’t even want to stop calling themselves Catholic, came here for an excommunication," said Claudio. "Perhaps there’s something about how Catholic spirituality is breaking away from traditional standards of uncritical acceptance to a spirituality that is more personal."

Despite the hasty organisation of the event, tickets for the excommunication party were sold out and statement shirts were in high demand - reinforcing public support for the passage of the RH Bill.

The latest surveys from public opinion polling body Social Weather Stations (SWS) show that 71 percent of Filipinos favour the passage of the RH Bill, while 76 percent want family planning education in public schools.

In a press statement Elizabeth Angsioco, National Chair of the Democratic Socialist Women of the Philippines (DSWP), which was part of the group blocked during the mass, said that lives were being lost while the debates over the RH Bill raged on.

"We believe the bill’s passage is imminent. This is long overdue," said Angsioco. "Poor women continue to die of preventable pregnancy and childbirth complications. These unnecessary deaths and almost-deaths must end."

Figures from the United Nations Development Fund For Women (UNIFEM) show that at least eleven women die every day in the country due to childbirth-related complications. (END) 


____


[6]  Europe and North America:


From: New York Review of Books Blog

THE FADING DREAM OF EUROPE
by Orhan Pamuk

A portrait of Atatürk in the Cağaloğlu neighborhood of Istanbul; photograph by Andreas Herzau from his book Istanbul, which collects his images of the city and includes an essay by Elif Shafak. It has just been published by Hatje Cantz.

In the schoolbooks I read as a child in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe was a rosy land of legend. While forging his new republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which had been crushed and fragmented in World War I, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fought against the Greek army, but with the support of his own army he later introduced a slew of social and cultural modernization reforms that were not anti- but pro-Western. It was to legitimize these reforms, which helped to strengthen the new Turkish state’s new elites (and were the subject of continuous debate in Turkey over the next eighty years), that we were called upon to embrace and even imitate a rosy-pink—occidentalist—European dream.

The schoolbooks of my childhood were texts designed to teach us why a line was to be drawn between the state and religion, why it had been necessary to shut down the lodges of the dervishes, or why we’d had to abandon the Arab alphabet for the Latin. But they were also overflowing with questions that aimed to unlock the secret of Europe’s great power and success. “Describe the aims and outcomes of the Renaissance,” the middle school history teacher would ask in his exam. “If it turned out we were sitting on as much oil as the Arabs, would we then be as rich and modern as Europeans?” my more naive classmates at my lycée would say. In my first year at university, whenever my classmates came across such questions in class, they would fret over why “we never had an enlightenment.” The fourteenth-century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun said that civilizations in decline were able to keep from disintegrating by imitating their victors. Because Turks were never colonized by a world power, “worshiping Europe” or “imitating the West” has never carried the damning, humiliating overtones described by Franz Fanon, V.S. Naipaul, or Edward Said. To look to Europe has been seen as a historical imperative or even a technical question of adaptation.

But this rose-colored dream of Europe, once so powerful that even our most anti-Western thinkers and politicians secretly believed in it, has now faded. This may be because Turkey is no longer as poor as it once was. Or it could be because it is no longer a peasant society ruled by its army, but a dynamic nation with a strong civil society of its own. And in recent years, there has of course been the slowing down of talks between Turkey and the European Union, with no resolution in sight. Neither in Europe nor in Turkey is there a realistic hope that Turkey will join the EU in the near future. But to admit to having lost this hope would be as crushing as to see relations with Europe break down entirely. So no one has the heart even to utter the words.

That Turkey and other non-Western countries are disenchanted with Europe is something I know from my own travels and conversations. A major cause of the strain in relations between Turkey and the EU was most certainly the alliance that included a sector of the Turkish army, leading media groups, and nationalist political parties, all combining in a successful campaign to sabotage negotiations over entry into the EU. The same alliance was responsible for the prosecutions launched against me and many writers, the shooting of others, and the killing of missionaries and Christian clerics. There are also the emotional responses whose significance can best be explained by the example of relations with France. Over the past century, successive generations of the Turkish elite have faithfully taken France as their model, drawing on its understanding of secularism and following its lead on education, literature, and art. So to have France emerge over the past five years as the country most vehemently opposed to the idea of Turkey in Europe has been heartbreaking and disillusioning. It is, however, Europe’s involvement in the war in Iraq that has caused the keenest disappointment in non-western countries, and in Turkey, real anger. The world watched Europe being tricked by Bush into joining this illegitimate and cruel war, while showing immense readiness to be tricked.

When looking at the landscape of Europe from Istanbul or beyond, the first thing one sees is that Europe generally (like the European Union) is confused about its internal problems. It is clear that the peoples of Europe have a lot less experience than Americans when it comes to living with those whose religion, skin color, or cultural identity are different from their own, and that many of them do not warm to the prospect: this resistance to outsiders makes Europe’s internal problems all the more intractable. The recent discussions in Germany on integration and multiculturalism—particularly its large Turkish minority—are a case in point.

As the economic crisis deepens and spreads, Europe may be able, by turning in on itself, to postpone its struggle to preserve the culture of the “bourgeois” in Flaubert’s sense of the word, but that will not solve the problem. When I look at Istanbul, which becomes a little more complex and cosmopolitan with every passing year and now attracts immigrants from all over Asia and Africa, I have no trouble concluding that the poor, unemployed, and undefended of Asia and Africa who are looking for new places to live and work cannot be kept out of Europe indefinitely. Higher walls, tougher visa restrictions, and ships patrolling borders in increasing numbers will only postpone the day of reckoning. Worst of all, anti-immigration politics, policies, and prejudices are already destroying the core values that made Europe what it was.

In the Turkish schoolbooks of my childhood there was no discussion of democracy or women’s rights, but on the packets of Gauloises that French intellectuals and artists smoked (or so we thought) were printed the words “liberté, égalité, fraternité” and these were much in circulation. “Fraternité” came to stand for the spirit of solidarity and resistance promoted by movements of the left. But callousness toward the sufferings of immigrants and minorities, and the castigation of Asians, Africans, and Muslims now leading difficult lives in the peripheries of Europe—even holding them solely responsible for their woes—are not “brotherhood.”

One can understand how many Europeans might suffer anxiety and even panic as they seek to preserve Europe’s great cultural traditions, profit from the riches it covets in the non-Western world, and retain the advantages gained over so many centuries of class conflict, colonialism, and internecine war. But if Europe is to protect itself, would it be better for it to turn inward, or should it perhaps remember its fundamental values, which once made it the center of gravity for all the world’s intellectuals?

—Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely

December 25, 2010 midnight

o o o

The Independent, 7 January 2011

'LE BATMAN FRANCAIS' FINDS A FORMIDABLE FOE IN RIGHT-WING AMERICA

By John Lichfield in Paris

=Holy baguettes, Batman. Your brand-new French lieutenant – aka "le Batman Francais" – is already in trouble. This must be a job for the caped crusader, or maybe the crusader with a képé.

The American right has attacked the comic-book creators of Batman and Robin for introducing a "French Batman", who is "not French, but Muslim". The new superhero, introduced in DC Comics' Batman Annual 2011 last month, is called Nightrunner.

He is a 22-year-old French man of Algerian origin, who lives in Clichy-sous-Bois, the town north of Paris where the 2005 suburban riots began. His "real" name is supposed to be Bilal Asselah. After brushing with riots and crime in the multi-racial French banlieues as a teenager, he is chosen by Batman to become his French representative in the struggle against Evil. This is part of the Dark Knight's drive to build a crime-fighting network all over the globe – and a drive by DC Comics to franchise the lucrative Batman legend to other countries and cultures.

American right-wing commentators and bloggers see nothing wrong, in principle, with extending US comic-book culture to the land of the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys". Yet they are incensed that DC Comics should have chosen not a blond, blue-eyed Frenchman in a beret – but, instead, a young man of Algerian origin.

The right-wing blogger, Warner Todd Huston, wrote on his website Publius Forum: "Apparently Batman couldn't find any actual Frenchman to be the 'French saviour'.

"In this age when Muslim youths are terrorising [France], heck in this age of international Muslim terrorism assaulting the whole world, Batman's readers will be confused by what is really going on in the world."

On the ultra-conservative website The Astute Bloggers, which sees manifestations of a "left-wing agenda" under almost every bed in the US, Avi Green wrote: "How about that. Bruce Wayne goes to France where he hires not a genuine French boy or girl with a real sense of justice, but rather, an 'oppressed' minority."

French observers have been amused by the controversy but also rather startled by the portrait of France painted both by DC Comics and by the right-wing bloggers. The 2005 riots were not "Muslim riots" but involved young people of many races and backgrounds. A young man born in France of Algerian origin is, whatever Mr Green or Mr Todd may think, an "actual" or "genuine" Frenchman.

The issue of the comic book featuring Nightrunner also paints a rather lurid picture of police-immigrant warfare in the French banlieues and makes Clichy-sous-Bois look like only a lightly gallicised version of Gotham City.

Politically correct characters in Batman comics of the 21st century are not new. The current Batwoman is a lesbian. The new French Nightrunner wears a superhero outfit that looks vaguely like the baggy clothes favoured by French suburban youth, complete with a face-covering hood. He is also adept at parkour, the acrobatic sport in which people jump from buildings and leap over walls.

The writer, David Hine, who is British, said DC Comics wanted to avoid old national stereotypes in creating new Batmen based in other countries.

____


[7]  UPCOMING EVENTS:

http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/01/announcement-beyond-ayodhya-judgment.html

Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University [New Delhi]

INVITES YOU TO A WORKSHOP ON BEYOND THE AYODHYA JUDGMENT

January 10, 2011
SSS I Committee Room
10 am – 6 pm

Inaugural Remarks
Romila Thapar

Framing the Questions for Historians
Neeladri Bhattacharya

The Judge as “Historian”
Radhika Singha, Janaki Nair

Judging History-Evidencing the Past in the Ayodhya Judgement
Rohit De

The Uses of Archaeology
Supriya Varma

Erasing the Mosque
Najaf Haider

Citing Sanskrit Sources
Kumkum Roy

Politics of Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid
Tanika Sarkar

Ramlalla as Juridical Entity-Precedents and Implications
Anupam Gupta


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. An offshoot of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/


DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.