8 Gulf Daily News Sunday, 12th October 2014 Islamic State vs Jewish State By JAMAL KANJ I HAVE read or heard countless of analysts in the last few weeks discussing the war on Islamic State (IS). Unquestionably, putting an end to IS is a step in the right direction. But if anyone has the delusion that defeating IS militarily is the answer, I suggest they take a look at Afghanistan and Waziristan in Pakistan. After more than a decade of war and bombardment, the “defeated” Taliban has expanded into Pakistan while Al Qaeda sprouted in Iraq, Libya and now in Syria. The killing of Bin Laden brought us Al Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed new Muslim Caliph. The powers that helped the Taliban and Al Qaeda to fight the Soviets, and then used Israeli lies to destroy Iraq, are unqualified to put an end to IS. Instead of air strikes, the international community must first consider drying the swamp that allows IS to flourish. IS is the product of regional politics and foreign invasions combined with US and Western powers’ unchecked diplomatic and financial support for the “Jewish State” (JS). IS flourishes thanks to Western pandering of JS as an exceptionalist state beyond reproach, defying UN resolutions with complete impunity. For the majority of people in the Arab and Muslim world, there is no difference between a dagger held to the neck of innocent Westerners by an IS member or a blown-up brain of a six-month-old baby by American-made JS planes. The JS slaughter of innocents, the continued starvation diet imposed on women and children in Gaza, the appropriation of Muslim and Christian properties in the holy city of Jerusalem and land confiscation in the West Bank to benefit “Jewish only” colonies are lifelines for IS. IS exploits peoples’ anger to recruit frustrated young men and women, aiming to establish a utopian religious state, just as the Zionists have done. How could the West accept JS’s claim of a special covenant with a god to displace non-Jews from their homes, but deny IS the right to claim the same with their god? IS and JS are two states proclaiming monopoly over the absolute truth to justify the most abhorrent acts in the name of God. Western support for JS while it condemns IS must stem from hypocrisy, racism or both. While almost everyone knows about IS’s crimes and self-righteous interpretation of religion, JS’s crimes are sanitised and very few are exposed to its pretentious monopoly on God. In the JS, the late chief rabbi Ovadi Yosef, founder of a major Israeli party, proclaimed once that Israel’s god created non-Jews for the sole purpose of serving “the People of Israel”. He went further in a religious sermon to explain that gentiles were like “one’s donkey”, they live to work and plough so a Jew can “sit like an effendi”. About killing Palestinians, the Israeli chief rabbi said: “It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.” Explaining Hurricane Katrina in the US, Yosef blamed the disaster on African Americans’ lack of “enough Torah study”. “Black people reside there... (God said) let’s bring a tsunami and drown them,” he said. This is the philosophy of a highly decorated Jewish authority in JS, Talmudic scholar and a spiritual leader for the closed club of the “effendi” chosen race. Muslim scholars have joined forces to unequivocally condemn IS acts. But where are the Jewish and Western voices to condemn JS excesses against Christian and Muslim Palestinians? War might force IS to retreat, but the jihadists’ idea will grow for as long as the US continues supplying oxygen to regenerate bacteria in a cesspool replenished by Western double standards. IS and JS share the same philosophy, the only difference is their point of reference. Imperfect world n Smoke rises after a US air strike on Islamic State militants in the Syrian Kurdish border town of Kobani yesterday T HERE is a common saying that “no man is perfect”, so we slide below that standard of worthiness into imperfection with seemingly popular consent. Look around and see the results: a lack of aspiration and falling standards, both externally and internally, because of imperfection – because we have accepted that man can possess all the vices, because we think them to be the basic ingredient of human nature. I believe with this we are now teetering on the brink of personal and global collapse. In scientific terms, perfection is accuracy and precision. Everything is in its appropriate proportion and position as well in human behaviour. Perfection is the Published letters are not balance between necessarily the views of the the various states of Editor. Readers wishing to consciousness. It is the make a complaint through balance that comes the GDN should provide full when the thoughts details of the complaint and actions are totally together with their contact harmonised in truth. telephone numbers. Perfection is understanding that every action, every thought, every breath would be geared towards a specific purpose and direction – that of total positive self-realisation. To realise ourself with clear vision and accurate knowledge is to be perfect. Ali Al Aradi Down on Downton HAT is it about Downton Abbey that W gets the pundits purring? I just don’t get it. Granted, the programme is well filmed and the house is certainly the star of the show. But surely its success internationally only strengthens the outdated stereotypical image of Britain and its people that the rest of the world has of it being a nation trapped in its past. It’s not as if the programme bears any resemblance to the reality of life in the early 20th century and the gulf that existed between servant and master. Jeeves TODAY is Sunday, October 12, the 285th day of 2014. There are 80 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date: 1492 – Christopher Columbus makes his first landfall in the New World, in present-day Bahamas. 1822 – Brazil becomes independent of Portugal. 1908 – South Africa Constitutional Convention meets in Durban. 1915 – English nurse Edith Cavell is executed by the Germans in occupied Belgium during First World War. 1925 – Uprising in Syria. 1934 – Peter II becomes King of Yugoslavia following the assassination of his father, King Alexander. 1938 – Japanese troops seize Canton, severing the railway to the temporary Chinese capital in Wuhan. 1942 – American forces defeat the Japanese in Battle of Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal in Second World War. 1945 – Allied Control Council in Germany orders dissolution of Nazi Party after Second World War. 1951 – Under attack by French planes, the Viet Minh rebels suffer one of their worst defeats of the civil war with 1,200 dead and 5,000 captured, in an attempt to take Nghialo. 1956 – Britain tells Israel the English will assist Jordan if it is attacked. 1960 – Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev upsets the decorum of UN General Assembly by pounding the desk with his shoe during a dispute. 1962 – India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru says Indian Army has been ordered to remove Chinese forces from Indian territory near Tibetan border. 1964 – US forces take control in South Vietnam, toppling government of Maj Gen Nguyen Khanh in bloodless coup. 1969 – Soviet Union launches Soyuz VII spacecraft with three men aboard to join two men in orbit in Soyuz VI. UK wrong on rights HE UK is quick to criticise other countries Tcountry on human rights, but this is the same in which migrants claiming asylum are being put up in hotels, even though many of them arrived illegally. When will the UK take the ‘kick me’ sign off its backside? It must be the laughing stock 1973 – US President Richard Nixon nominates House minority leader Gerald R Ford, to succeed Spiro T Agnew as vice-president. Agnew resigned after the Justice Department revealed he had taken kickbacks. 1975 – Pope Paul VI canonises an Irish archbishop, Oliver Plunkett, who was executed by the British in 1681. 1977 – Sweden agrees to cancel over $200 million in debts owed by eight Third World nations. 1984 – An Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at a hotel in Brighton, England, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is attending a conference, killing five people. 1989 – Rejecting democratic reforms, a high-ranking East German official says socialism will continue to dominate society. 1990 – A federal district court judge in Boston orders Eastman Kodak to pay $909.5 million to Polaroid Corporation for infringing patents for instant photography cameras and film. 1991 – Pope John Paul II makes his second visit to Brazil in an effort to renew interest in the Roman Catholic Church at a time when it’s losing many Brazilian adherents to Protestant groups and African mystical cults. 1992 – A strong earthquake near Cairo kills 450 people and injures 4,000. 1993 – German Chancellor Helmut Kohl pledges to move most of nation’s government to Berlin from Bonn, the current capital, by the end of the year 2000. The move will cost $18.5 million. 1994 – US spacecraft Magellan, launched in 1989 on a mission to study Venus, concludes its mission with a final experiment, to make a suicidal descent towards Venus’ surface, where temperatures reached 482C. 1995 – Panama grants asylum to Haiti’s Raoul Cedras, who had taken power in a 1991 coup. of Europe. If migrants enter the UK illegally they should be turned away immediately, not left to have a holiday at the public’s expense. How many in Britain today have not had a vacation for years owing to financial constraints? The other insanity is hearing how Britain 1996 – Commander Ramona of the Zapatista rebel movement marches into Mexico City at the head of a demonstration by indigenous people on the 504th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in America. 1997 – Cuban President Fidel Castro appoints his brother Raul as successor and urges the party to be unified in maintaining Communism. 1998 – Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agrees to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, initiate peace negotiations with ethnic Albanians and allow an international observers to ensure UN demands are met. 1999 – A military coup throws Pakistan into political disarray as conflict with India continues over the disputed Kashmir territory. Army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf becomes the new leader and promises to hold elections. 2000 – Seventeen sailors are killed in a suicide bomb attack on the US destroyer Cole in Yemen. 2001 – The UN and its secretary general Kofi Annan win the Nobel Peace Prize. 2002 - A bomb explodes in a resort area on the Indonesian island of Bali, destroying two nightclubs, killing more than 180 people and wounding nearly 300 others. 2004 - Nine bodies in Tokyo are found in two parked cars with charcoal stoves at their feet and the windows sealed from inside in what is believed to be Japan’s largest group suicide pact. 2005 - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatens to kick some Christian missionaries out of the country, as he presents property titles to indigenous groups who he said had been robbed of their ancient homelands. 2006 - Britain and Ireland announce they will present a plan to Northern Ireland’s rival leaders spelling out how to resurrect a Catholic-Protestant ad- ministration as the province’s peace deal intended. 2007 - Former US vice-president Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. 2008 - A Soyuz spacecraft with two Americans and a Russian on board lifts off from Kazakhstan for the international space station. 2009 - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows never to allow Israeli leaders or soldiers to stand trial on war crimes charges over their actions during last winter’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip, furiously denouncing a UN report in a keynote address to parliament. 2010 - A US prosecutor tells a jury a man accused of helping to build a truck bomb used in a 1998 terror attack on a US embassy in Africa was a member of an Al Qaeda cell that was determined to kill Americans. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to face a civilian trial. 2012 - Thousands of supporters and opponents of Egypt’s new Islamist president clash in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the first such violence since Mohamed Mursi took office more than three months ago, as liberal and secular activists erupt with anger accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of trying to take over the country. 2013 - Secretary of State John Kerry says a partial agreement is reached with Afghanistan on a security accord, but the potentially deal-breaking issue of jurisdiction for American forces remains unresolved. THE wise man is astonished by anything – Andre Gide, French author and critic (1869-1951).