Peace and Justice Post

patta patta boota boota: Drama Mirza Ghalib

Editor’s comment: On the sad occasion of the mass  killings  in Norway and the bombing of the  official buildings by a Norwegian fascist, who stands against social  democracy,  democratic values and is a committed crusader against Muslims and the Muslim world while being a devotee of Zionist world-view and Israeli policies, I reproduce the following  you tube video.

The setting of the scene is in mid-nineteenth century  Delhi. It was just before the British took possession of the whole of India. The major revolt against the  farangi rule (common name for the British foreigners then) took place in 1857. The British prevailed and the atrocities they committed defy description. 

 The minstrel here is singing a poem by the great Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810). The greatest Urdu poet, Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869, in white robes in the drama) acknowledges the poetic genius of Mir.

It is a  sad lyric. Only those who know Urdu or Hindi will know the deep pain it conveys in a poetic form.

My own personal agony and the pain I have felt on the massacres in Norway are best represented in this poem.

By Toby Axelrod, jta.org,  July 24, 2011

BERLIN (JTA) — The confessed perpetrator in the attack in Norway that killed at least 76 people espoused a right-wing philosophy against Islam that also purports to be pro-Zionist.

Anders Behring Breivik is charged with detonating a car bomb outside Oslo’s government headquarters, which houses the office of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, that killed eight people and of shooting and killing at least 68 mostly young people at a political summer camp on nearby Utoya Island. The July 22 massacre reportedly was the the worst attack in Norway since the end of World War II.

In numerous online postings, including a manifesto published on the day of the attacks, Breivik promoted the Vienna School or Crusader Nationalism philosophy, a mishmash of anti-modern principles that also calls for “the deportation of all Muslims from Europe” as well as from “the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

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Gilad Atzmon, MWC News, July 26, 2011

Thanks to respected anti-Zionist Jeff Blankfort (who provided me with a crucial link) I have now learned that, just one day before last Friday’s Massacre in Norway, former Trotsky-ite turned neo-con David Horowitz carried an article by Joseph Klein in his Front Page magazine, entitled “The Quislings of Norway,” which might as well have provided mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik with all the motivation he needed to commit his crime.

You are advised to read the article in full here

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by Ron Ridenour, Dissident Voice, July 26th, 2011

Fifty-eight years ago, on July 26, 1953, 160 Cuban rebels attacked Moncada Barracks near Santiago de Cuba. Had the rebels been able to take the fort with 1,000 troops—a good possibility—it would have started a revolution that might well have defeated the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista within a short time.

The main cause for failure was a missing vehicle with their heavy weaponry. Nevertheless they were able to cause three times the numbers of casualties that they suffered. Nearly one-half of the rebels were killed but most of them died under or following torture.

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As soon as the shocking and tragic news from Norway hit the airwaves, it was entirely predictable that various right-wing Islamophobes would type first and think later. They were so eager to exploit the tragedy to peddle their pre-existing policy preferences that they blindly assumed the acts had to have been perpetrated by al Qaeda, by its various clones, or by some other radical Muslim group.

This is the sort of bias one expects from an ideologue like Jennifer Rubin (who gets taken to task for her rush-to-judgment by James Fallows here). Sadly, it is also not out of character for the supposedly respectable Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page has been a reliable source of threat-mongering and distortion for years. Even as Norwegian officials were cautioning that they had no reason to suspect Islamist groups, the Journal was plunging ahead with an editorial entitled “Terror in Oslo,” which drew the following utterly bogus conclusion:

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Chris Hedges,Truthdig.com, July 26, 2011

AP / Frank Augstein

People embrace and mourn at the massive flower field laid in memory of victims of Friday’s twin attacks in Norway.

The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.

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I share the fear and pain of my country – but in Norway this kind of insane act has always had its origins in the far right

• 
• Aslak Sira Myhre
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 24 July 2011

Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg embraces a survivor of the Utoeya island shooting. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

Like every other citizen of Oslo, I have walked in the streets and buildings that have been blown away. I have even spent time on the island where young political activists were massacred. I share the fear and pain of my country. But the question is always why, and this violence was not blind.

The terror of Norway has not come from Islamic extremists. Nor has it come from the far left, even though both these groups have been accused time after time of being the inner threat to our “way of living”. Up to and including the terrifying hours in the afternoon of 22 July, the little terror my country has experienced has come from the far right.

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The activists who sailed to Gaza are determined and enthusiastic, but they still have something to learn about the siege that began in 1991.

Amira Haas, Haaretz, July 24, 2011

The glittering lights of the magical Greek island of Kastelorizo, from which we had distanced ourselves only two to three hours earlier, once again came into sight on Saturday night, July 16. For the 12 passengers on board the Karama – including crew and journalists whose presence the coast guard had permitted – the boat was too small. The French delegation in the flotilla had bought a pleasure yacht, called it “Dignite” (karame, dignity ) and turned it into a floating situation room, a sauna full of stale cigarette smoke, with eight sleeping berths without water for showering, a deafening motor and poisonous diesel fumes.

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Embattled Libyan leader says ousted Egyptian President should be honoured instead of being humiliated.

Middle East Online, July 25, 2011

Clinging to power

TRIPOLI – Libyan leader Moamer Gathafi heaped praise on toppled Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, describing him as “poor and modest” and saying he deserved honour rather than humiliation.

“I know Hosni Mubarak, a poor and modest man” who loves his people, Gathafi said in an audio message broadcast on state television late Saturday to mark the anniversary of the 1952 coup in Egypt led by Gamal Abdel Nasser against the monarchy.

This “revolution,” Gathafi said, had inspired him to lead a coup in Libya that toppled Western-backed King Idriss on September 1, 1969.

“Instead of being humiliated, Hosni Mubarak should be honoured,” Gathafi said.

Mubarak, 83, whose three-decade rule ended with a popular revolt in February, is expected to go on trial on August 3 with his two sons on murder and corruption charges.

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