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Islamophobic way to success
Sir Rushdie: How far is his Nobel Prize?
Maswood Alam Khan
Salman Rushdie will from now on be addressed as 'Sir Salman Rushdie' by his fans and those who have successfully been made Islamophobic, thanks to an elaborate clandestine plan drawn and executed by a global network of intellectual mafias.
Rushdie first drew attraction of readers by his surreal novel Midnight's Children (no doubt, a literary puzzle portraying incestuous sex affairs). Second, world attention was drawn through his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses blaspheming Islam, a religion of 1.5 billion Muslims. Third, spontaneous reaction of the Muslim world condemning Rushdie thereby also helping focus "Satanic Verses" as a 'curious read' for those who would have otherwise invested their attention elsewhere; and fourth (but not the last), Rushdie's appointment as 'Knight Bachelor for services to literature' in the British queen's traditional 'birthday honours' just the other day.
Candidate for Nobel Prize?
Rushdie's knighthood may be a litmus test to assess his popularity and also to measure resentment of his antagonists before perhaps surprising the world by garlanding him with next year's Nobel Prize in literature.
Rushdie no doubt is by now a figure, however controversial, in the literary world who won not only 1981 Booker Prize but also the 'Booker of Bookers' in 1993, a rare accolade for his 'Midnight's Children' as the best novel received during the 25-year history of the awarding organisation. Only son of a lawyer turned businessman, Rushdie (reportedly born as a Muslim) got education from prestigious schools like King's College, Cambridge. His jugglery over English literature is rarely found in a non-English Muslim boy born and brought up in India.
Crooked channel
Rushdie is also talked about in ladies' clubs all over the world. Reportedly, hobnobbing and philandering with ladies and girlies (activities, ignored or forgiven by fans and critics alike, if indulged by the great) all his life and marrying already four women, Rushdie is, as usual, honeymooning with his present wife, Indian actress and the most challenging model Padma Laksmi.
Sitting relaxed on his easy chair Rushdie must be chuckling at one of those days in 1975 when bookworms window-shopping in bookstores didn't feel like even throwing a cursory glance at the cover of Grimes, his first mixture of novel and science fiction; that day he felt bad and took a vow to hook readers by a dragnet via a different crooked channel.
A failed but ambitious writer or a poet desperately looks around for a way like nudity, eroticism, blasphemy or a mere craze in his/her writings, dresses, behaviour, hairstyle or viewpoint to beat drums of attention so that people look at least at their weirdness.
Boating on a hill
In his inventive quest for an exceptional strategy to attract readers, he found to his chagrin that some Latin American authors like Chilean novelist Isabel Allende intoxicated readers by blending their fictions with some opium-like spices popularly known as a genre of 'magic realism' - a blend of reality and fantasy. Like instrumentalists fusing their normal musical tones with certain noises like the gentle rustling of leaves or a cuckoo's mid-noon calls to produce a magical aura of realistic music, some modern fictionists mesmerise their readers waving a magic wand and transport them anywhere they fancy---a boat ride over a hill or hauling a baby inside a basket from one side of the Atlantic up onto to the other.
Rushdie, before transfusing such opium into his future fictions, mulled over a plot to construct a novel a la magic realism; but his heart perhaps sank as he whisperingly spelled his own Muslim name, the way a peacock folds back its unfurled feathers as it looks at its unkempt legs. An English novel by an Indian Muslim in an English market - he perhaps mused - would be an attempt like riding tourists along New York's Park Avenue in a bullock cart.
Luring customers to a bank or exciting potential readers for a fiction, in an era when 80 per cent newspaper readers cannot afford time to delve into a story beyond its headline, is no more as easy as dressing a vase with flowers on the receptionist's desk.
A writer has to preside over a parley attended by his publisher flanked by veteran marketing gurus; the conferrers will draw blueprints of a plot that would help produce either a false alarm or a real big bang so that a motorist must brake his speeding vehicle on the highway and rubberneck to ask "what happened?" Rushdie, I guess, had such a conference with the regiment of his advisers, lieutenants and marketers before venturing into his future Booker winner to be immediately followed by a nitpicker of a great religion.
After his Midnight's Children was awarded and acclaimed he became greedily hungry for higher roads to fames. Like a tiger blending itself with surroundings of a jungle moving very little while stalking a prey, Rushdie silently hid himself behind a wall and eavesdropped on readers reading his parable on the child born at midnight of the 15th August, 1947; finding the readers raptly glued to his intoxicating fiction, Rushdie slowly turned his neck and zoomed his cold gaze on the vast demography of 1.5 billion Muslims.
Bashing Islam
Rushdie surmised, bashing Islam must hurt deep-seated sentiment of Muslims and cause a global uproar and a resultant backlash would send his name and works to all homes around the world. He then for sure will be catapulted on the crown of a mountain not many writers could dream of riding. Like a chess player moving his king, queen and castles, Rushdie embarked upon his "Satanic Verses" knowing full well the probable countermoves by his opponent.
And he was successful, at the expense of the conscience. Had we silently ignored the name Rushdie and lent a deaf ear to his works, "Satanic Verses" would not perhaps have been known to many of us. Inversely, had we not shouted against Rushdie he probably would have been awarded by this time Nobel Prize in peace, if not literature, for his blasphemous performance.
Intellectual mafias
World mafias, geared to tarnish the image and spread of Islam, who were planning a strategy like 'setting a thief to catch a thief' in their war against Muslims suddenly found on their laps a young and tall lady - by religion 'she doesn't know herself', by profession Rushdie's sister-poet and by passion a sadist---who started a crusade against those who were thwarting attacks on her own mother's religion.
Some of our Salman Rushdies like that lady also got accolades at home and abroad and made name and fame in the coffee parlors where the so-called intellectuals and poets swarm to seep coffee and smoke hashish while throwing plaudits at literary depth of a poem depicting erotic arts, composed by Rushdie's sister-poet. They pretend like erudite reviewers dissecting and analysing the characters of Midnight's Children by Rushdie; they discover similes between Shame by Rushdie and Lajja by his sister-in-blasphemy.
These mushrooming intellectuals are basically duplicitous. They overtly utter love words to their wives and covertly imagine faces of their concubines. They hate their own mother religion and love to sing hymns of a different one. They speak in English in distorted twang both in office and home in their attempts to mimic 'brown sahibs' and pronounce Bangla words like a babbler as if they learnt the mother tongue only a few weeks back. One of them starts the day wearing 'khadi' panjabi with a folded shawl strapped on his left shoulder in an attempt to imitate a 'bhadralok'; and to draw attention to his intellectuality or exceptionality he renames his daughter as 'Srabonti' erasing her original name 'Mariam', a Muslim name her grandma had chosen for the baby girl.
Rushdies and their comrades all over the world have now reasons to keep their fingers crossed for another dawn when Sir Salman Rushdie will be garlanded in Norway for Nobel Prize in literature---not at all an uphill job with lobbyists available here and there and some literary judges in the Occident like Booker's prize.
Islamophobia
To elaborate a bit, Islamophobia means prejudice against Muslims. American writer Stephen Schwartz has defined Islamophobia as the condemnation of the entirety of Islam and its history as extremist; "denying" the existence of a moderate Muslim majority; regarding Islam as a problem for the world; treating conflicts involving Muslims as necessarily their own fault; insisting that Muslims make changes to their religion; and inciting war against Islam as a whole." The largest project monitoring Islamophobia was undertaken by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). Their May 2002 report "highlighted the regularity with which ordinary Muslims became targets for abusive and sometimes violent retaliatory attacks after 9/11.".
50,000 people signed a petition urging French President Jacques Chirac to "consider Islamophobia as a new form of racism, punishable by law."
In March 2005 Queen Noor of Jordan, while on the BBC television programme "Breakfast with Frost", said, "What grieves me today, truly, is the fact that not only in the United States but also in Europe we've seen the rise, over the last few years, of Islamophobia," adding, "Muslim populations and the Muslim world have been increasingly...viewed as a menace, as alien, as, perhaps, incompatible with Western societies and values. And I passionately believe that that is not true..."
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UN: No progress in reducing global hunger
Kanaga Raja
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, has expressed outrage that global hunger is still on the rise despite commitments made by governments to reduce hunger in 1996 at the first World Food Summit and again at the Millennium Summit in 2000. In his report (A/HRC/4/30) to the fifth session of the Human Rights Council (11-18 June), the human rights expert said that there has been virtually no progress made on reducing hunger.
While in 1996, the number of people suffering from under-nourishment was estimated to be about 800 million people, latest estimates from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggest that there are now 854 million people who do not get enough to eat everyday.
6m children die
More than 6 million children die from hunger-related illness every year before their fifth birthday. "This is unacceptable. All human beings have the right to live in dignity, free from hunger," said Ziegler.
"Our world is richer than ever, yet more people than ever are suffering from malnutrition, hunger and starvation. The world produces more food than ever, it could feed twice the entire global population, yet millions go to bed hungry at night."
"In a world overflowing with riches, hunger is not inevitable. It is a violation of human rights. The right to food is a human right that protects the right of all human beings to live in dignity, free from hunger," said Ziegler.
At a media briefing, Ziegler said that the overall situation this year was worse than last year. There were 854 million people in the world - one in every six human beings - who were gravely undernourished. This represents an increase of 12 million, from 842 million people last year.
Ziegler said that this is happening on a planet where 12 billion people could be nourished normally every day.
In his report, the Special Rapporteur commended a number of positive developments by governments in combating hunger.
For instance, in September 2006, the Bolivian Parliament adopted a groundbreaking land reform bill, proposed by President Evo Morales to redistribute underused land to rural communities, especially indigenous communities. This new law states that only land that is unused or has been corruptly obtained will be used for redistribution.
Land distribution
If properly and efficiently implemented, this law could lead to redistributing up to 20 million hectares of land, mostly to indigenous people, and to improving their livelihoods and access to food. About 41 per cent of Bolivia's population, the majority indigenous people in rural areas, suffer from poverty and do not have access to adequate food each day, said Ziegler.
Venezuela has distributed more than 3 million hectares of land to farmers, and provided credit to more than 3 million farmers, as part of its land reform programme.
In 2005, 11.36 million Venezuelans benefited from Mercal food programmes on a regular basis. Mission Mercal, which was launched in 2003, is aimed at creating subsidised grocery stores through a State-run company called Mercal, to help communities to become self-sufficient by replacing food imports with products from local farmers, small businesses and cooperatives.
According to the Special Rapporteur, South Africa continues to be one of the best examples in the world of the justiciability of economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to food and the right to water, with positive impacts on the life of millions of people.
The South African Bill of Rights, which is incorporated into the 1996 Constitution, explicitly provides that every person in South Africa has the right to access to sufficient food and water, and that the State shall respect, protect and fulfil the realization of these rights.
The Special Rapporteur also called the Council's attention to several situations of serious concern related to the right to food, especially in the Darfur region of Sudan, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in countries in the Horn of Africa region and in North Korea.
Ziegler said that in the Darfur region of Sudan, violence is causing terrible human casualties and violations of the right to food, including the pillaging of crops, food and livestock, destruction of water points, the forced displacement of people from their lands and the disruption of food assistance.
The Special Rapporteur's report also focuses on the silent tragedy of children suffering and dying from hunger and malnutrition. About 5.6 million children die every year before they reach the age of five.
About one in every four children around the world is underweight for their age and more than 96 per cent of low birth weight babies are born to underweight mothers in the developing world, reflecting a generational cycle of under-nutrition, the consequences of which are passed along to children by mothers who are themselves in poor health and undernourished.
Although there has been some recent progress in reducing global levels of malnutrition, the Special Rapporteur raised concerns that the Millennium Development Goal to halve the number of underweight children by 2015 will not be met.
Under-nutrition causes more than half of all deaths of children under five years old. About 100 million children are still lacking sufficient vitamin A, essential for immune system functions and their survival, growth and development. Millions suffer from iodine deficiency disorders, which prevent normal growth in the brain and nervous system, yet it is easily preventable through the simple iodization of salt.
The report also said that unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation and hygiene every year kill more than 1.5 million children. Around the world, approximately 125 million children under five years of age have no access to an improved drinking water source, and around 280 million children under five have no access to improved sanitation facilities.
Ziegler said that the obligation to fulfil the right to food requires governments to take steps to address hunger and poverty of children.
School meal programmes are one example of measures to fulfil the right to food. To this end, the Special Rapporteur welcomed the examples of India, South Africa, Cuba and Brazil, which have been at the forefront of efforts to make school meals an entitlement.
The report also noted that in many regions of the world, particularly in Africa, famine, destitution and chronic hunger are forcing people to leave their homes, land and even their countries.
According to Ziegler, hunger and famine are due not only to drought, but also to economic problems as well as political problems of corruption and mismanagement. "It is also due to the hypocritical policies of developed countries on agriculture and climate change, which are further contributing to hunger, poverty and inequality in developing countries."
Yet hunger and violations of the human right to food are still not seen by the international community as good enough reasons or sufficient legal grounds for people to flee their countries.
Ziegler said that tens of thousands of people fleeing from hunger and famine and crossing borders, especially if they try to flee to developed countries, are treated as 'illegal migrants', arrested and held in often appalling conditions in detention and processing centres.
The situation is particularly dramatic for people fleeing from sub-Saharan Africa. It is estimated that about 2 million people try to enter the European Union illegally every year, and about 2,000 of them drown in the Mediterranean Sea.
In a world where the richer countries are getting richer and the poorer are getting poorer, migration is an obvious response, said Ziegler.
The report cited a new study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United Nations University, which shows how extreme global inequality has become, with most of the world's wealth heavily concentrated in North America, Europe and high-income Asia-Pacific countries, including Australia and Japan.
People in these countries collectively hold almost 90 per cent of the world's total wealth, while the poorer half of the world's population owns barely 1 per cent of global wealth.
"If migrants are fleeing from famine, chronic hunger and deprivation, then we must call into question whether such migration is 'voluntary'," said Ziegler.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world where levels of hunger have been constantly increasing since 1990. Between 1990 and 2001, the number of chronically undernourished people is estimated to have increased from 169 million to 206 million people.
Environmental degradation, desertification and global climate change are also exacerbating destitution and desperation, especially in the highly arid countries of Sahelian Africa, said the report. In 1995, the UN estimated that there were already 25 million people forced to leave their homes for environmental reasons, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa.
However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that, by 2050, there may be as many as 150 million 'environmental refugees' - people forced to leave their homes and lands for environmental reasons linked to global climate change, including desertification and land degradation.
Policies in developed countries are further exacerbating these effects - energy consumption in the North is contributing to global climate change, with the effects felt primarily in the South.
Agricultural policies in the North are also having destructive effects on agricultural livelihoods and hunger in the South.
At the media briefing, Ziegler said that the European Union is massively creating hunger in Africa through its agrarian dumping policies. The dumping policy of the EU is destroying African agriculture. Of the 52 countries in Africa, 37 are purely agricultural states.
The Special Rapporteur stressed that refugees from hunger should not be confused with other categories of so-called 'economic refugees'.
"An economic refugee may be somebody who seeks a better life by migrating to another country. He does so voluntarily. The refugee from hunger does not move voluntarily. He is forced to flee. Hunger is an immediate threat to his life, and the lives of his family. He has no choice."
Today, however, most governments treat crossing international frontiers to be free from hunger as an illegal act. Ziegler considered this response to be a shame on humanity.
The human rights expert's report made a number of recommendations including that governments should follow the recent examples of Brazil, Guatemala, India, South Africa, Venezuela and Bolivia in the implementation of the right to food at the national level.
Ziegler encouraged governments to adopt an adequate legal framework to ensure the right to food for all, including and in particular for the most vulnerable.
All governments should also take immediate steps to eliminate child hunger. This should include programmes to address food security and adequate livelihoods, as well as nutritional security, especially in vitamin A, iron and iodine deficiencies and the promotion of breastfeeding. School meal programmes should be universalized and should ensure adequate nutrition for all children.
- Third World Network Features
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