April 2020

Why should we stand with Zafarul Islam Khan?
By Abhay Kumar: Dr. Zafarul Islam Khan is the Chairman of Delhi Minority Commission. For a few days he has been a victim of severe attack from the Hindu communal forces as well as a section of media. They are targeting him for posting a tweet. The communal forces have alleged that he had threatened them of taking up the issue of Indian Muslims facing discrimination to the Arab world. In fact, the charges against him are politically motivated. He is being targeted for his identity. What has irked the communal forces is his work. Zafarul Islam Khan is not affiliated with any party. Nor is he under compulsion to please his political masters. He is well-qualified and knows his subject very well.  During the February Delhi riots, he was very active in giving relief to the marginalized sections and working for peace and harmony as the Chairperson of the Delhi Minority Commission. Read More

Will the Coronavirus Change the World?
Co-Written by  Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo: The prophecies are here and it is a foregone conclusion: the post-coronavirus world will look fundamentally different from anything that we have seen or experienced, at least since the end of World War II. Even before the ‘curve flattened’ in many countries that have experienced high death tolls – let alone economic devastation – as a result of the unhindered spread of the COVID-19 disease, thinkers and philosophers began speculating, from the comfort of their own quarantines, about the many scenarios that await us. The devastation inflicted by the coronavirus is likely to be as consequential as “the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Lehman Brothers,” wrote Foreign Policy magazine in a widely read analysis, entitled ‘How the World Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic’. Read More

The Digital Revolution:
Unlimited Ability to Spy and Control Populations: The Creation of a Police State Dystopia
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The digital revolution provides government and corporations with unlimited and unaccountable ability to spy and control populations.  Every word, deed, and movement of people can be tracked and a “social credit” dossier built for them.  China already has such a control system in place.  Those whose profiles are outside acceptable parameters are unable to function in normal society, being blocked from passports, driving licenses, employment, and activities reserved to those with acceptable social credit scores. Read More

Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth windfalls, tumbling taxes, and pandemic profiteers
Inequality.org: In its 34th annual list of global billionaires, published on April 7, 2020, Forbes reports a modest decline in the total number of billionaires from 2,153 in 2019 to 2,095in 2020. “The world’s richest are not immune to the devastating impact of the coronavirus,” noted Kerry Dolan, Forbes assistant managing editor of wealth. “The drop in the number of billionaires this year reflects the economic impact the pandemic is already having.”23The total combined net worth of the global billionaire class declined from $8.7 trillion in 2019 to $8 trillion in 2020, due both to the pandemic and to roiling global markets. A total of 267 affluents dropped off the list because their fortunes fell below $1 billion. Another 21 who made the 2019 list have since passed away. Read More

India's Charges Against Kashmiri Journalists Send Colleagues at Sword's Point
By Amir Malik: As the world fights coronavirus, the priorities of the Indian state remain vindictive against Kashmiris journalists that show the oppression and violence enforced in the occupied territories.  Kashmiri Prisons are blooming. Not by what “spring does to cherry trees,” but as coronavirus gave ample time to Indian authorities to attack the journalists in Kashmir and push them behind bars. Read More

Saudi Arabia bans flogging as punishment
Deutsche Welle: Saudi Arabia has abolished flogging as a punishment, its state-backed human rights commission said on Saturday, a move which comes as part of a wave of reforms pushed forward by the Saudi royal family.  The commission said that the move would ensure that no more convicts were sentenced to flogging. "This decision guarantees that convicts who would previously have been sentenced to the lash will from now on receive fines or prison terms instead," the commission's chairman, Awad al-Awad, said. Read More

Ramadan Reflections in the midst of Covid-19
By Dr. Habib Siddiqui: Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, is currently being observed by Muslims. However, this time, Muslims are either restricted or strongly discouraged from congregating in the mosques to pray their five-dailyprayers. My local Islamic Center has shut its doors for the past seven weeks. Thus, instead of congregational prayers, esp. for the Friday Jumu’ah and Taraweeh (special night prayers during the month of Ramadan), Muslims are now listening to virtual khutbah(sermon) over the computer and praying in their own homes. Read More

‘My first calling is to my Savior’:  Pompeo brags he is using role of Secretary of State to Evangelize world leaders
By David Badash: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not only admitting, but bragging that he is using his official government role to evangelize world leaders, apparently hoping to bring them to Jesus Christ. Pompeo is widely known for “brazenly inserting his evangelical Christian beliefs into discussions of foreign policy,” as The New York Times reported in earlier editions of this 2019 article. But it was not known until now that he has been ignoring the Constitution’s critical tenet of separation of church and state to preach the gospel to foreign leaders while on the taxpayers’ dime. Read More

Breakthrough hopes rise in virus vaccine trials
By GORDON WATTS: Scientists believe they are one step closer to a breakthrough in the race to immunize the human race against the deadly Covid-19 disease. Clinical trials are already underway across the world to find a vaccine to combat the virus. Earlier this week, it was revealed that a team led by Qin Chuan at China’s National Institutes for Food and Drug Control in Beijing had started human testing in Xuzhou, a major city in Jiangsu province.  Read More

Iran launches its first spy in the sky
By ALISON TAHMIZIAN MEUSE: The United States on Thursday said it was tracking two new objects in space, the Noor-1 satellite and a Qased rocket body, apparent confirmation that Iran’s first military satellite launch was a success. Iranian Major-General Mohammad Baqeri, chief of staff of the armed forces, hailed the Wednesday launch as a historic first. “Launching the Noor-1 satellite is regarded as a blessed dawn for boosting defense power by entering space and promoting science and deterrence power in line with maintaining self-sufficiency,” he said in a message carried by state media. Read More

Indian Media’s open war on Muslims
by Aijaz Zaka Syed: Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages, said Spiro Agnew. I wonder what the late US vice president would have thought of Indian media, especially the cacophonic television channels forever obsessing over the long vilified Indian Muslim. As if being Muslims in Modi’s ‘new India’ was not challenging enough, they now have to suffer the frenzied assault by an incredibly hostile media. As a Time magazine article headline recently summed it up, “It Was Already Dangerous to Be Muslim in India. Then Came the Coronavirus!” Read More

India Muzzles Fourth Estate
By Syed Rifaquat Ali: Freedom of expression in India is a thing of the past. The Fourth Estate ---Thomas Carlyle attributed the origin of the term to Edmund Burke, who used it in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of press reporting of the House of Commons of Great Britain --- is today in peril. The Bharatiya Janta Party ( BJP) has muzzled the press freedom, both print and electronic, to a great extent. The cronies of BJP in print and electronic media have contributed greatly to biased reporting and are dubbed as Godi media. Read More

What impact will the oil price crash have on the Arab world?
By Mohammad Ayesh: Oil prices have hit zero. Yes, oil was “sold” this week with producers only asking buyers to pay for transporting it to its final destination. This is the worst collapse in oil markets in history; it is unprecedented for oil to lose 94 per cent of its value in just one day. It is important to mention, though, that this price fall was related to US Texas crude oil for May contracts only. Prices for other contracts are still higher, but that does not mean that they are immune from collapse. There is still plenty of time before they are due and the price can go up or down. Read More

Oil prices plunge into negative territory for first time in history
Countercurrents Collective: U.S. oil market has crashed. The price of U.S. oil turned negative for the first time in history. The U.S. oil industry is facing a doomsday scenario. Hundreds of U.S. oil companies could go bankrupt. Many U.S. oil companies took on too much debt during the good times. Some of them will not be able to survive this historic downturn. West Texas Intermediate oil prices have gone negative in a record low for the U.S. benchmark, as the market continues to crater amid the general economic collapse. The price of U.S. oil turned negative means oil producers are paying buyers to take the commodity off their hands over fears that storage capacity could run out in May. Read More

Modi promotes Hindutva even in the pandemic
by BHIM BHURTEL: Amid an ill-considered nationwide lockdown, the PM timed his 'challenge the darkness' event around a date dedicated to a Hindu god. Modi, again quite characteristically, doesn’t care about facts. Through a video message on the ninth day of the nationwide lockdown, he urged the people of India to switch off their household lights for nine minutes at 9pm on Sunday and to light diyas (traditional Hindu lamps), flashlights, candles and mobile-phone lights in a symbolic act to “challenge the darkness spread by the corona crisis.” A majority of urban Indians turned off the lights in their residences and lit diyas, lamps, candles, and flashlights at their balconies and doorsteps Sunday, April 4, 2020 to respond to Modi’s call to “challenge the darkness” spread by the coronavirus crisis. Despite opposition leaders and other prominent people of India questioning Modi’s move and terming it superstitious, he has succeeded in promoting his Hindutva agenda even in the pandemic. Read More

Bangladesh hangs Captain Abdul Mazed,  a ‘killer’ of its founding father Sheikh Mujib
Q M Jalal Khan, the author of Bangladesh: Political and Literary Reflections on a Divided Country, writes on the execution of Captain Abdul Mazed: It was the midnight of April 11, 2020, at the start of the morrow. He whom millions of Bangladeshi nationals consider to be one of August 15, 1975 heroes was hanged to death, but they cannot speak up due to the severely authoritarian oppression and repression unleashed on them for about twelve years by the Hasina regime. Captain Mazed was also one of the fascist Hasina Wazed’s nearly a dozen judicial murders of nationally well-known political and military figures, let alone hundreds of thousands of extrajudicial killings, forced abductions, impious imprisonments and unlawful lawsuits, all combined. Read More

Get ready for an unacceptable “New Normal”: Censorship, extrajudicial arrests, is martial law the next shoe to drop?
By Stephen Lendman: Is America the way it was pre-COVID-19, warts and all, to be replaced by hardened rule? If COVID-19 abates and more greatly flares up this summer or fall will November elections be suspended or cancelled? Whatever may unfold ahead most likely was planned by the nation’s ruling class. It happened pre-and-post-9/11. It may be happening again now for ill, not good — including draconian mass surveillance more intensive than before, along with other police state policies. Is a dystopian future coming for ordinary Americans, resisters subject to harsh repercussions — constitutional rights declared null and void? What’s unthinkable may be planned and inevitable. Read More

Governments are using coronavirus to build “The Architecture of Oppression”, Warns Edward Snowden
by Countercurrents Collective: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked information on U.S. National Security Agency, has warned that governments may use the coronavirus to curtail freedoms. Snowden, in an exclusive interview with Vice, said that governments may take advantage of the pandemic to impose authoritarian rules on populations. Read More

Muslims in India – from Political turmoil to Pandemic, the case of 2019-2020
by Shambhavi Siddhi: Where do we begin? Shall we say it started in 2019 to keep it lighter or should we dive back into history and completely indulge ourselves in finding the origins of the political turmoil in India. The task is tedious, if not difficult, to research – pogroms, occupation, attempts to cleanse one particular community – what we see is a repetitive pattern of otherization in its extreme sense. Read More

200 Million Indian Muslims Vilified, now in the name of Covid-19
Supreme Court  refused to pass any interim orders in a petition seeking action against the media for communalising the coronavirus pandemic in light of the Tablighi Jamaat meeting held in New Delhi’s Nizamuddin area in March last. The petition, filed by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, had claimed that the media had communalised the Nizamuddin Markaz event and that some sections of print and electronic media had “demonised the entire Muslim community”. This has led to serious “threat to life and liberty of Muslims” and the violation of their “Right to life under Article 21”, the petition said, adding that most reports had used terms such as “Corona Jihad”, “Corona Terrorism” and “Islamic Resurrection”. Read More

Covid-19 is bringing us into a hyper-surveilled, highly policed fascist dystopia
By Rainer Shea: Assessing the ways governments and corporations are exploiting Covid-19. We must understand that the crisis we've entered into will never end, at least not for as long as our neoliberal capitalist system isn't replaced with a socialist model. In the U.S., as well as the other countries where austerity has wrecked healthcare systems, Covid-19 is going to cause societal disruptions for years as the virus partially subsides and then regrows. So will be the case for the other pandemics that are sure to  emerge in the coming years due to global warming and ecological degradation. This is aside from the collapse of the economy, which is going to put the capitalist world in a general state of crisis throughout the coming years and decades. Read More

Veiled Muslim women abruptly find acceptance amid coronavirus face masks: “Nobody is giving me Dirty Looks”
By Anna Piela: Americans began donning face masks this week after federal and local officials changed their position on whether face coverings protect against coronavirus. This is new terrain for many, who find themselves unable to recognize neighbors and are unsure how to engage socially without using facial expressions.But not for Muslim women who wear the niqab, or Islamic face veil. Suddenly, these women – who are often received in the West with open hostility for covering their faces – look a lot more like everyone else. Read More

The Political Toll of COVID-19
 By Dr. James J. Zogby: The COVID-19 crisis is taking a human and economic toll everywhere across the U.S. An additional casualty may be what it does to our political parties and our electoral processes, which were already struggling in a weakened state and may not survive the onslaught of this crisis.Take, for example, the news that the Democratic Party decided to move their national convention from mid-July to mid-August because of concerns with COVID-19. Since the danger of contagion will not have passed by then and it still won’t be safe to bring tens of thousands together to conduct party business, the extra month simply buys more time for the party to figure out how to create a viable and acceptable process in which it can elect a nominee, issue a platform, adopt rules that will guide the party forward during the next four years, and take steps to ensure party unity. Read More

The March to Madness of Massacre of Mid-night March 25
By Dr. Habib Siddiqui: March 25 is observed as a national holiday in Bangladesh commemorating massacre in East Pakistan (later to emerge as Bangladesh) in 1971. There were three major players in this historical drama – a military general who governed the state of Pakistan and two politicians from the two wings of the country that did not see eye to eye to resolve a political crisis that soon morphed into massacre of many – something that could have been avoided if they were sincere and willing to compromise for the greater good of the country. Each of these ‘makers’ of the history had huge support within the segment of population that they represented. Some background information of the event may help us to understand the situation better that led up to the killings and mayhems of March 1971. Read More

India’s Hate Muslim Media Factory- Case Study of Hindi daily ‘Dainik Jagran’
By Syed Ali Mujtaba: India’s Hindi daily Dainik Jagran, once the world’s largest read daily, with close links to the right wing Hindu outfits called “Sangh Parivar” is hate Muslim media factory. The vernacular newspaper with wide circulation in the communal tinderbox, Uttar Pradesh indulged in creating Islamophobia and communal polarization of the society when Covid- 19 pandemic‘s curve is steeply rising in the country. Read More

Indian Media Against Muslims
By Syed Rifaquat Ali: By and large, journalists in India, both electronic and print, have sold out their souls to the ruling party at the Centre: Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP). And the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, master-mind behind the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, makes hay while the sun shines. Read More

COVID-19 a Diabolical Totalitarian Plot?
By Stephen Lendman: Seasonal flu most often getting scant attention is what a real pandemic is all about. During the 2018-19 flu season in the US alone, running from October to May, there were more than 35.5 million flu illnesses, over 16.5 million medical visits, about 490,600 hospitalizations, and around 34,200 deaths — with no fear-mongering pandemic headlines. Read More

Fake Coronavirus Data, Fear Campaign: Spread of the COVID-19 Infection
Michel Chossudovsky: The unspoken truth is that the novel (COVID-19) coronavirus provides a pretext to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to trigger the entire World into a spiral of  mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair. Read More

COVID-19 pandemic will forever change the world order, says Kissinger
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger shared his diagnostic view of the COVID-19 pandemic on Friday, saying that it will forever alter the world order. While serving the secretary of state and national security adviser for the Nixon and Ford administrations, he contributed mainly to the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and China in 1987, making him living proof of Washington’s diplomatic achievements. Read More

Jared Kushner ripped by NYT columnist: He will ‘get us all killed’ with his incompetence
By Matthew Chapman: On Thursday, writing for The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg laid into President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who appeared at the day’s coronavirus press conference to blame states for the federal government’s slow response. “Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror,” wrote Goldberg. Read More

It was Jared Kushner who told Trump that New York didn't need all those ventilators
By Dartagnan: The hits just keep comingﾠfor Trump son-in-law, slumlord, real estate failure and so-called wunderkind, Jared Kushner. As reported by Vanity Fair, Kushner reportedly told President Donald Trump to “push back” against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, telling people in a White House meeting that Cuomo was exaggerating the need for ventilators in his state. Trump then followed up by echoing this position on Fox News, suggesting that Kushner’s belief has guided the administration’s policy on the issue. Read More

Draconian Lockdown Powers: It’s a Slippery Slope from Handwashing to House Arrest
By John W. Whitehead: Every day brings a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that are eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace. This is where we run the risk of this whole fly-by-night operation going completely off the rails.It’s one thing to attempt an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of this virus because we can’t afford to risk overwhelming the hospitals and exposing the most vulnerable in the nation to unavoidable loss of life scenarios. However, there’s a fine line between strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance. Read More

Governments caught flat-footed in tackling the corona virus
By Dr. Habib Siddiqui: As of early afternoon time EST (USA), April 1, some 918 thousand people are confirmed to have been infected by the Corona Virus (COVID-19) worldwide. More than 46 thousand people have reportedly died of this virus. The USA tops the list with nearly 205,000 confirmed cases and 4,502 deaths (accounting for roughly 10% of the total death toll). Italy has the highest number of deaths at over 13,155 followed by Spain at 9,126 (all these figures are increasing by minutes). In recent weeks most governments around the globe have declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency. Sadly though, many heads of the state lied and continue to do so about this once-in-a-generation crisis. Some of the heads of the state are still in denial of this deadly virus. Read More

ﾠCould COVID-19 Reshape Global Leadership?
Co-Written by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies: As U.S. COVID-19 cases double every few days and the death toll mounts, the U.S. seems to be caught in a “worst of both worlds” predicament: daily life and much of the U.S. economy is shut down, but no real progress has been achieved in its efforts to contain or eradicate the virus…. But international trade and travel will be severely depressed until the world as a whole recovers from COVID-19, so no country can fully recover as long as others are still in the grip of the pandemic. Different countries are trying different approaches to the problem based on their own economic, political and healthcare systems. We can all learn from each other and we will have to help each other get through this. COVID-19 has mainly hit the people of wealthier countries first, because they travel more and carry it with them from country to country. But unless and until it is eradicated globally, no country will be immune. Read More

On the release of Begum Khaleda Zia
On March 25, 2020, the Bangladesh government released Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chairperson and former prime minister Khaleda Zia from prison for six months. Here is an article written by Q M Jalal Khan, author of Bangladesh: Political and Literary Reflections on a Divided Country (2018) and Bangladesh Divided: Political and Literary Reflections on a Corrupt Police and Prison State (2019). Read More

Japanese Food Made Easy
Book Review By Syed Rifaquat Ali: Food stylist Aya Nishimura, coming from a family of chefs, has painstakingly portrayed the varied food habits of the Japanese people in her magnum opus 'Japanese Food Made Easy.' The paperback volume depicts each recipe in simple-to-understand language for every
chef and housewife, coupled with beautiful photographs/illustrations. The front and back covers are designed spectacularly. Read More
 

 The Journal of America Team:

 Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott

Special Correspondent
Maryam Turab
 

 

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