South Asia Citizens Web

Fear of appearing Islamophobic is silencing criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood, under whom assaults have increased

Those who are obsessed by language finally come to the conviction that there is nothing but interpretation: Stanley Rosen in Hermeneutics as Politics(1987)
It seems almost unnecessary to note that this theoretical perspective is matched by the self-abnegation of its praxis. To be sure, postmodern theory itself arose due to the bad faith that parts of the left had kept with Stalinism. The failure of the Stalinist state prompted Adorno and Horkheimer, under the influence of Weber, to suggest (…)

globalisation – which has accelerated ecological crises has also given rise to a burgeoning, noisy media which has found it in its interests (up to a point of course) to put out information about such problems. Anxiety sells. So at least a part of the explanation for the greater awareness is this. But there are deeper explanations for the growing public awareness, which have to do with the fact that the ordinary people of this beleaguered country have been raising hell and drawing attention to vanishing frontiers – of forests and meadows, rivers and coastlines. It is difficult to overestimate the democratic contribution they are making to alert downtown India about so many environmental tipping points which the market mechanism so favoured by economists routinely fails to register. One wishes that educated India would take their warnings more seriously – ultimately for its own long-term good.

Two years ago, on this day, an earthquake and tsunami wiped out a fair section of Fukushima prefecture. The independent commission appointed by the Japanese parliament to investigate the accident observed that while natural disasters may have triggered the nuclear events, the meltdown itself was “profoundly man-made”.

The Forum for Secular Pakistan strongly condemns the attack on the Christian Community of Joseph Colony, Badami Bagh Lahore, in which 178 houses of the low-income community, as well as shops and 3 churches were looted and burnt to ashes, the Pastor was attacked and the father of Savan Masih, the youth falsely accused of blasphemy, was beaten up and subsequently arrested.