Culture

By Daisaku Ikeda SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES MAR 5, 2015 As this year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, I believe that Japan should take this as an opportunity to renew its pledge to build lasting peace and step up its efforts to contribute to stability and development throughout Asia. Strengthening of cooperation to address environmental problems and disaster risk reduction is a particularly urgent priority. In November last year… continued here >

, Netanyahu began to talk about Iran going nuclear in a few years and being a threat to Israel and the world. This should also be the year in which Israel’s nuclear weapons come into international focus. One cannot feel safe with perhaps 200 nuclear weapons being at the disposal of a person operating on unreal enemy images and what is now known in Israel and internationally as flip-flopping on his policies and statements from one day to the next. It’s time to implement – seriously – the Middle East as a zone free of nuclear weapons. 161 countries in the UN general Assembly is for it; and Israel is the only state in the region refusing to become party to the Treaty. And it is time to treat Israel as a normal state with a duty like everybody else to adhere to international law, to end its out-of-proportion international...

Who wrote this? “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph”. “The Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd) – all Jews” “The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews – in Hungary” “The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany–preying” “-the schemes of the international Jews /against/ spiritual hopes” “-this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization” “-it played recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution” “-the mainspring in every subversive movement in the 19th century” Churchill did. Here quoted from Robert Barsocchini in Countercurrents in February 2015. His point was not that Jews were active in many places, the point is that for Churchill they were the cause of all the revolutions, the root of evil, not, for instance, feudalism gone mad. What does Churchill, a top politician, believe in? (same source): “-the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years” “-100,000 degenerate Britons sterilized /to...

…is the title of our conference. There will never be any such thing. “New”, yes; “World”, yes –“Order”, No. Wherever there is life there is contradiction, dialectic, forces and counter-forces. At the very obvious level the question arises – Order, in whose interest, against whom? Sow any new order and the seeds of its undoing are already taking root, sprouts are coming. As the Chinese say, “There are human beings without contradictions; they are called corpses.” Follow that hint; go to the moon. New moons once a month, and order, the order of death, of non-life. The Old Moon Order. As part of this Perdana Global Peace Foundation Conference, so well composed by Dr Hitam, President Tun Dr. Mahathir unveiled a giant copy of my book just published, Abolishing War: Criminalizing War, Removing War Causes, Removing War as an Institution (TPU and IIUM Press, 2015) together with a smaller book...

By Jonathan Power On Saturday President Barack Obama was at the commemoration ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the Selma March led by Martin Luther King which gave the push for legislation that ensured black people the right to vote. Obama’s speech was breathtaking oratory – surely one of the top three speeches in the American history of the last 150 years. The fifteen minute speech was delivered without script or teleprompter. It ranged from history to philosophy, from politics to poetry. Every sentence was perfectly structured. The arguments were sharp and delivered with awesome authority and soaring elegance. Obama is the poet of prose. For those who say the only significant thing about Obama’s presidency is that he is the first black to hold the post I tell them to watch this on YouTube. Obama’s speech should be remembered in 150 years time as much as is Lincoln’s...

By Gunnar Westberg The following question was asked to the ambassador of Israel to Sweden in one of the most respected programs on the Swedish Broadcasting (Sveriges Radio): “Do the Jews themselves carry any responsibility for the anti-Semitism we now see growing?”. (Translated by me from its official website). The ambassador refused to answer. At the end of the program the responsible editor expressed a profound apology: “We wholeheartedly apologize for the question. It leads in the wrong direction and puts the guilt on individuals and unexposed groups”. The section was cut from the program recording although the original is stored in a public archive. It seems like almost everyone in the media world agrees with this apology: “You should not ask such a question.” I agree. But we should ask “Does Israel carry any responsibility for the growing anti-Semitism?”

By Farhang Jahanpour After all the huffing and puffing and all the aroused expectations about the speech by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the joint session of US Congress, the speech proved a great disappointment and even an embarrassment. A great deal has already been written about it, and there is no need to repeat all that here. Here I only wish to draw attention to some of the glaring distortions in the speech and the harm that it can do to the cause of Iranian and Israeli rapprochement and, more importantly, to the cause of peace in the Middle East. The speech was a cynical use of the US Congress for domestic electoral ambitions. Recently, Netanyahu had been trailing the Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog in the number of projected seats in the forthcoming Israeli election. He certainly hoped that as the result of the publicity that...

Points of Departure Perhaps, the most hopeful recent development in human affairs is the emergence of Pope Francis as the voice of global conscience. Although Francis speaks with papal authority to the 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, he also increasingly speaks with human authority to the rest of us. How significantly this voice will resonate might be viewed as the ultimate test as to whether ‘soft power’ is overcoming the geopolitical death dance that imperils the human species as never before. When visiting occupied Palestine in May of 2014 Francis prayed at the notorious Israeli separation wall in Palestine that the World Court had ordered dismantled as unlawful back in 2004. The pontiff chose to pray near a scrawled graffiti that read ‘Pope, we need some 1 to speak about justice.’ While in the Holy Land Francis articulated what justice should mean in relation to the Palestinian reality: the...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> February 3rd 2015 The beheading of a Japanese journalist does not represent Islam. Saddam Hussein did not represent Islam. Bashar al-Assad does not represent Islam. Muammar Gaddafi of Libya did not represent Islam. The regular beheadings in Saudi Arabia for “crimes” such as adultery don’t represent Islam. Likewise, the US dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t represent Christianity. Nor did the torture practiced in Northern Ireland. Nor did the Buddhist-led atrocities against the Tamils of Sri Lanka represent Buddhism. Nevertheless, it is probably true that in the late twentieth century a high percentage of the world’s violent conflicts took place inside the Muslim world or against non-Muslims. But that does not mean they were supported by a majority of Muslims. Indeed, I would surmise that they were approved by less than 1% of Muslims.

2 February 2015 at the Penang Institute, Penang A theory serves comprehension, prediction and identification of conditions for change. Seven such historical-cultural pointers will be indicated for China; using the West in general, and the USA in particular, for comparisons. The presentation draws on countless dialogues in China over 40 years, since 1973. * China: in time, as dynasties; West: in space as empires. Look at a histomap combining world history and geography, time and space: China shows up through 4,000 years as relatively coherent dynasties with complex transitions – and the West as empires–birth-growth-peaking-decline-fall, like the Roman, UK and now US empires – duration vs bubbles that burst; as China-centric vs hegemonic.

Prefatory NoteThis post is a much modified piece published a few days ago in AlJazeera English, and republished elsewhere on line. As many have now done it tries to enlarge the context in which the Charlie Hebdo events are understood beyond a highlight film clip in ‘the war on terror.’ The alleged link between the Chouachi brothers and Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) allows the attack on Charlie Hebdo to be experienced as the French 9/11, and with this a return of France to a status of post-colonial geopolitical relevance. Without grasping the relevance of how the dominant treat the dominated within our societies and throughout the world, we are consigning ourselves to many repetitions of the private and public horrors experienced in France on January 7, 2015. There is some common ground, but not much. The killings in Paris last week were horrifying crimes that expose the...

Three, maybe four dramatic, global processes are unfolding. First, the West–particularly USA, Israel, France – fighting very violently and counter-productively to keep their grip on the world. Second, Eurasia, spearheaded by Russia-India-China in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) expanding and consolidating, successfully and nonviolently. Third, Islam expanding and consolidating, partly by conversion to Islam, partly through the dream of a new caliphate, partly violently. Fourth, Latin America and Africa in the old Third World expanding and consolidating, spearheaded by Brazil-South Africa in BRICS. If you want to live drama, you have chosen the right year. The basic conflict is the first against the other three; the declining against the emerging. After some time conflicts among the three will show up, particularly Islam with the other two. Economically right now