Hep Eksildik, Hala Eksiliyoruz!

“Gidiyorum Ekrem, benim üzerimde de, kızın üzerinde de çok hakları var. Gözümüzün önünde kesecekler adamları. Yok bana hiç bir şey olmaz, Türk’üm ben! Hele bir yeltensinler.” diyen Meltem Hanım, 6 Eylül gecesi soluğu Rum komşularının evinde almıştı.

6 kişilik ailenin artık havasızlıktan boğulmak üzere oldukları, tahta-bina evin bodrumundan önce “Elefterya neredesiniz?” diye bağıran bir kadın sesi duyuldu. Mutfağa düşen bir taşla başlayan yağmalamadan kaçmak için tek yol kiler olarak kullandıkları yarı-bodruma saklanmaktı.

Elefterya, Meltem’in sesini tanımış, bodrumun merdivenlerinin yarısını çıkınca “Sadece mala zararla kalmayacaklar gibi, cana da zarar gelebilir, katliamlar olacak diyorlar, siz bu gece gelin bize kalın Allah aşkına!” dediğini duymuştu. “Tamam ama gelin alın bizi…” diyebildi.

Meltem, tekrar eve döndü, kocası Ekrem’i ve oğlu Erol’u da alıp Elefterya’ların evinin önünde durdular, savaş alanına dönmüş Çengelköy’deki komşularını karşıda bulunan kendi evlerine bir “operasyon” yaparcasına geçirdiler.

O zaman liseli bir kız olan Yasemin, Meltem’in kızı, tüm bunları bir savaş muhabiri gibi karşı camdan seyrediyor, beraber yaşadıkları bu insanlara neden saldırıldığını anlayamıyordu, diğer taraftan “Ne olur Eli teyzelere bir şey olmasın Allah’ım” diye yakarıyordu.

Eleftarya içeri girdiğinde biraz rahatlamıştı, demek ki kendilerine sahip çıkacak kadar seven tek de olsa bir aile çıkmıştı. O an Ekrem’in annesi “Atatürk’ün evini bombalamak da ne demek, yılan beslemişiz bağrımızda” dedi.

Selanik’i hiç görmemişti Eleftarya, yurdu yâri İstanbul’du. Demek beraber yaşamamışız, bizi beslemişler Türkler diye düşündü. Daha fazlasını hissedemeyecek kadar acıya boğulmuştu… Yaşlı kadının dedikleri değen ama acıtamayan kurşunlardı…

İki komşu aile, o gece hiç olmadıkları kadar yakın, diz dize oturdular.

İki komşu aile, hiç içmedikleri kadar çok çay içtiler.

İki komşu aile, hiç korkmadıkları kadar korktular.

Ve iki komşu aile, hiç susmadıkları kadar susmak zorunda kaldılar.

Yıl 1955’du.

Devlet, “milliyetçi güçleri”, Kıbrıs politikası için halk desteği sağlamak amacı ile uydurduğu bir yalan haberle galeyana getirmek için kullanmıştı.

“Rumlar Atatürk’ün evini bombaladılar” yalanı, plana uygun şekilde gazetelerde yayınlanmasının hemen ardından, halkın “milliyetçi” duygularını coşturan öncü kuvvetler vazifelerini yapmış, zaten üzerinde çalışılan “gavur nefreti” hedefini bulmuştu.

6-7 Eylül’de Beyoğlu, Kurtuluş, Şişli, Nişantaşı, Eminönü, Fatih, Eyüp, Bakırköy, Yeşilköy, Ortaköy, Arnavutköy, Bebek, Moda, Kadıköy, Kuzguncuk, Çengelköy ve Adalar’da yaşanan olayları, Cumhuriyet Dönemi’nde “Beraber Yaşama” hayalinden İstanbulluları istemeden de olsa vazgeçiren en önemli olaylardı.

Binlerce ev, binlerce işyeri yağmalandı.

Kiliselere saldırıldı, bazı kilise papazları kiliseye kitlenerek yakıldı, şansı olanlar yükselen kahkahalar eşliğinde serseriler tarafından sünnet edildi.

Mezarlıklar yağmalandı, ölüler kabristanlarından çıkarılıp sürüklendi, cesetlerin ağzında altın dişler arandı…

Gayrimüslimlerin bu topraklardan temizlenmesi, DP’ye CHP’den miras kalmıştı.

DP’lilerin “biz bir iki cam kırılacağını sanmıştık” sözleri boşundaydı, yüzlerce kızın ırzına geçilmişti. Rumların yanında Ermeniler, Yahudiler, bir gecede herksin “kanlısı” olmuşlardı.

Devlet “bir taşla çok kuş” vurmuştu.

Bu uyduruk vatanperverlik ile Kıbrıs görüşmelerinde kullanacağı şantajı bulmuş, kapitalin el değiştirmesi için önemli bir operasyon yapmış ayrıca, 1960 darbesinde DP hükümetinin yargılanması sağlayacak önemli golü atmıştı.

Toplum psikolojisi. İnsanları evlerde tutamadık. Halkın iradesi vs. boş laflardı.

Devlet bu topraklarda beyin yıkamayı, hedef göstermeyi hep iyi bilmiş, halk saldırmayı hep sevmişti.

1955 yılının 6 Eylül’ünde dışarda hala kan gövdeyi götürüyordu.

Yasemin, komşularının çayını tazelerken bir taraftan da çeyizlerini düşünmeden edemiyordu. Elefterya’nın dikip hazırladığı çeyiz sandığı, Elefteryan’nın evindeydi. Babası “bu ne bolluk, gözünüz doysun!” diye söylenmesin diye “güvenli” bir yerde muhafaza etmeyi daha doğru bulmuşlardı.

Yasemin usulca, eve alelacele giren ağabeyi Erol’un kolunu tuttu, “Ağabey, sandığı, alsak mı?” dedi. Soluklanayım, dedi Erol. Annesi ceketini çıkar oğlum dedi, biraz hızlıca çekince, Erol’un cebine sakladığı taşlar ceketin cebinden döküldü.

Meltem hanım utançtan yerin dibine batarken, ne diyeceğini şaşırmıştı. Evlerinde sakladıkları Rum komşular, başka bir Rum evini taşlamak için istiflenen “mühimmattı” görmüşlerdi.

Elefterya göz yaşlarını tutamadı o an, “Biz ne fenalık yaptık evladım size” deyince Melten oğluna ancak “Git gözüm görmesin seni” diyebildi.

Tüm bunlar olup biterken, Çengelköy Rum Kilisesi’nin çanı genç “vatanseverler” tarafından sökülüyordu. Orta yaşlı “vatanseverlerin” “Helal Olsun” naraları vatanseverlikleri sınır tanımayan gençler, her gün Rum balıkçılar ile sohbet ettikleri sahilden söktükleri çanı atıp, huzur içinde başka evler yağmalamaya gittiler.

İki gün sonra Elefterya sevdiği İstanbul’u bırakmamak için kendini kandırmaya, her gün selam verdiği insanların iki gece önce ailesi gibi yüzlerce aileyi yok etmek istediklerini unutmak istercesine evine doğru giderken yan evdeki Ayşe Hanım’ın selamını alır ümidi ile kafasını kaldırdığında, pis bir gülümse ile karşılaştı.

“Dün Şeker Bayramıydı, Yarın Kurban” dedi Ayşe hanım sinsince…

Zülüm ne tanıdık, düşmanlık ne değişmez değil mi?

O yıllarda bunu yapanlar, günümüzde beyinleri yıkanmış herkesi düşman gören “vatandaşlıktan çıkaralım, asalım keselim, evlerini karılarını alalım” diyenlerin torunları…

Devletin her düşman bildiğini, her işine gelmeyeni “parçala” emrini sadıkça yerine getiren ardından da paylarını almak için ağzından salyalar akan canavarları hiç değişmediler.

Sustukça, sıra hepimize geldi. Ermeniler, Rumlar, Kürtler, Müslümanlar… Rejim kimi hedefe koyduysa sorgulamadan kervanlara katıldık.

Sıra bize gelince “Biz size ne ettik” diye sorduk ama sıra onlardayken “onlar size ne etti” diye birlik olamadık…

Yasemin, 65 yaşında, geçen hafta konuştuğumuzda “… Bu nefret, bu dışlama bana o günleri hatırlatıyor,” dedi. Haklı. Çünkü nefret hedefi farklı bile olsa hep aynı.

Yasemin’in anlattığı çan hikayesine, Yani Vlastos’un muhteşem kitabında (“Baba Konuşabilir miyim?) yer verilmiş. Vlastos olaylardan sonra dalgıçlıkta usta Rum gençlerin çanı çıkarıp yerine tekrar astıklarından bahsediyor…

Yaseminle konuşurken çandan da bahsettim sevinçle. “ Anlattığın çanı, meğer koymuş yerine Rumlar, senin haberin yok muydu?” dedim…

“Ne fark eder. Zarar gördüler, korktular, kovuldular, kalamadılar, koruyamadık ve çok eksildik…” dedi.

Hep eksildik, hala eksiliyoruz…

Melis Burgaz, Kronos

A Quiet Kind of Fascism

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us. In these years after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world absorbing its wisdom and resources for one’s own personal use. Americans abroad now do not have the same swagger, the easy, enormous smiles. You no longer want to speak so loud. There is always the vague risk of breaking something.

**
We were all patriotic, but I can’t even conceive of what else we could have been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We went to church on Sundays, until church time was usurped by soccer games. I don’t remember a strong sense of civic engagement. Instead I had the feeling that people could take things from you if you didn’t stay vigilant. Our goals remained local: homecoming queen, state champs, a scholarship to Trenton State, barbecues in the backyard. The lone Asian kid in our class studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale. Black people never came to Wall. The world was white, Christian; the world was us.

We did not study world maps, because international geography, as a subject, had been phased out of many state curriculums long before. There was no sense of the US being one country on a planet of many countries. Even the Soviet Union seemed something more like the Death Star – flying overhead, ready to laser us to smithereens – than a country with people in it.

**
In 2007, after I had worked for six years as a journalist in New York, I won a writing fellowship that would send me to Turkey for two years. I had applied for it on a whim. No part of me expected to win the thing. Even as my friends wished me congratulations, I detected a look of concern on their faces, as if I was crazy to leave all this, as if 29 was a little too late to be finding myself. I had never even been to Turkey before.

In the weeks before my departure, I spent hours explaining Turkey’s international relevance to my bored loved ones, no doubt deploying the cliche that Istanbul was the bridge between east and west. I told everyone that I chose Turkey because I wanted to learn about the Islamic world. The secret reason I wanted to go was that Baldwin had lived in Istanbul in the 1960s, on and off, for almost a decade. I had seen a documentary about Baldwin that said he felt more comfortable as a black, gay man in Istanbul than in Paris or New York.

When I heard that, it made so little sense to me, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment, that a space opened in the universe. I couldn’t believe that New York could be more illiberal than a place such as Turkey, because I couldn’t conceive of how prejudiced New York and Paris had been in that era; and because I thought that as you went east, life degraded into the past, the opposite of progress. The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed America’s race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalising international context. I took a chance that Istanbul might be the place where the secret workings of history would be revealed.

**

American exceptionalism did not only define the US as a special nation among lesser nations; it also demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were somehow superior to others. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it.

**
A friend had told me that Emre was one of the most brilliant people he had ever met. As the evening passed, I was gaining a lot from his analysis of Turkish politics, especially when I asked him whether he voted for Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP), and he spat back, outraged, “Did you vote for George W Bush?” Until that point I had not realised the two might be equivalent.

Then, three beers in, Emre mentioned that the US had planned the September 11 attacks. I had heard this before. Conspiracy theories were common in Turkey; for example, when the military claimed that the PKK, the Kurdish militant group, had attacked a police station, some Turks believed the military itself had done it; they believed it even in cases where Turkish civilians had died. In other words, the idea was that rightwing forces, such as the military, bombed neutral targets, or even rightwing targets, so they could then blame it on the leftwing groups, such as the PKK. To Turks, bombing one’s own country seemed like a real possibility.

“Come on, you don’t believe that,” I said.

“Why not?” he snapped. “I do.”

“But it’s a conspiracy theory.”

He laughed. “Americans always dismiss these things as conspiracy theories. It’s the rest of the world who have had to deal with your conspiracies.”

I ignored him. “I guess I have faith in American journalism,” I said. “Someone else would have figured this out if it were true.”

**
The deep state – a system of mafia-like paramilitary organisations operating outside of the law, sometimes at the behest of the official military – was a whole other story. Turks explained that the deep state had been formed during the cold war as a way of countering communism, and then mutated into a force for destroying all threats to the Turkish state. The power that some Turks attributed to this entity sometimes strained credulity. But the point was that Turks had been living for years with the idea that some secret force controlled the fate of their nation.

In fact, elements of the deep state were rumoured to have had ties to the CIA during the cold war, and though that too smacked of a conspiracy theory, this was the reality that Turkish people lived in. The sheer number of international interventions the US launched in those decades is astonishing, especially those during years when American power was considered comparatively innocent. There were the successful assassinations: Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1961; General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, also in 1961; Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, in 1963. There were the unsuccessful assassinations: Castro, Castro, and Castro. There were the much hoped-for assassinations: Nasser, Nasser, Nasser. And, of course, US-sponsored, -supported or -staged regime changes: Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Congo, Syria, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. The Americans trained or supported secret police forces everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia, the Philippines to Peru, Iran to Vietnam. Many Turks believed that the US at least encouraged the 1971 and 1980 military coups in Turkey, though I could find little about these events in any conventional histories anywhere.

But what I could see was that the effects of such meddling were comparable to those of September 11 – just as huge, life-changing and disruptive to the country and to people’s lives. Perhaps Emre did not believe that September 11 was a straightforward affair of evidence and proof because his experience – his reality – taught him that very rarely were any of these surreally monumental events easily explainable. I did not think Emre’s theory about the attacks was plausible. But I began to wonder whether there was much difference between a foreigner’s paranoia that the Americans planned September 11 and the Americans’ paranoia that the whole world should pay for September 11 with an endless global war on terror.

**
The next time a Turk told me she believed the US had bombed itself on September 11 (I heard this with some regularity; this time it was from a young student at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University), I repeated my claim about believing in the integrity of American journalism. She replied, a bit sheepishly, “Well, right, we can’t trust our journalism. We can’t take that for granted.”

The words “take that for granted” gave me pause. Having lived in Turkey for more than a year, witnessing how nationalistic propaganda had inspired people’s views of the world and of themselves, I wondered from where the belief in our objectivity and rigour in journalism came. Why would Americans be objective and everyone else subjective?

I thought that because Turkey had poorly functioning institutions – they didn’t have a reliable justice system, as compared to an American system I believed to be functional – it often felt as if there was no truth. Turks were always sceptical of official histories, and blithely dismissive of the government’s line. But was it rather that the Turks, with their beautiful scepticism, were actually just less nationalistic than me?

American exceptionalism had declared my country unique in the world, the one truly free and modern country, and instead of ever considering that that exceptionalism was no different from any other country’s nationalistic propaganda, I had internalised this belief. Wasn’t that indeed what successful propaganda was supposed to do? I had not questioned the institution of American journalism outside of the standards it set for itself – which, after all, was the only way I would discern its flaws and prejudices; instead, I accepted those standards as the best standards any country could possibly have.

**
By the end of my first year abroad, I read US newspapers differently. I could see how alienating they were to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were America’s misbehaving children. I listened to my compatriots with critical ears: the way our discussion of foreign policy had become infused since September 11 with these officious, official words, bureaucratic corporate military language: collateral damage, imminent threat, freedom, freedom, freedom.

Even so, I was conscious that if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldn’t know it – even if I understood the history of injustice in America, even if I was furious about the invasion of Iraq. I was a white American. I still had this fundamental faith in my country in a way that suddenly, in comparison to the Turks, made me feel immature and naive.

I came to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey – the liberal ones – were indeed questioning what “Turkishness” meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history; about Atatürk, Turkey’s first president; about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs; about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders; and about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish republic.

“It is different in the United States,” I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. “We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isn’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.”

“Wow,” a friend once replied. “How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isn’t it?”

It was a quiet kind of fascism that would mean I would always see Turkey as beneath the country I came from, and also that would mean I believed my uniquely benevolent country to have uniquely benevolent intentions towards the peoples of the world.

Suzy Hansen, Guardian
 

German Study Finds Radicalized Muslims Have Little Actual Knowledge Of Islam

Extremists and Islamophobes alike have attempted to paint violent factions within Islam as the true expression of the faith. But a new study gives credence to what countless Muslim leaders, activists and scholars have argued: that groups like the self-proclaimed Islamic State are Muslim in name alone.

A group of German scholars at the Universities of Bielefeld and Osnabrück analyzed 5,757 WhatsApp messages found on a phone seized by police following a terrorist attack in the spring of 2016. The messages were exchanged among 12 young men involved in the attack. The attack itself was not identified in the report. 

Deutsche Welle noted that the timeframe suggested it may have been a bombing at a Sikh temple in Essen carried out in April of that year by a group of German teens with reported links to Islamic extremism.

Researchers conducting the study said the young men’s conversations demonstrated little understanding of their professed faith and that the group constructed a “Lego Islam” to suit their purposes.

Bacem Dziri, a researcher at the University of Osnabrück and co-author on the report, examined the messages from an Islamic studies perspective and concluded: “The group had no basic knowledge about Islam.”

The scholars published their study as a book exploring the “violent Salafist youth scene in Germany,” according to the Amazon blurb, referencing an ultraconservative strain of Islam with which the young men were allegedly affiliated.

The Brookings Institute defines Salafism as “the idea that the most authentic and true Islam is found in the lived example of the early, righteous generations of Muslims, known as the Salaf, who were closest in both time and proximity to the Prophet Muhammad.” The movement has historically been apolitical and nonviolent, wrote researcher Mohammed Alyahya in a column on The New York Times. But Brookings notes that a smaller offshoot faction, called Salafi-jihadists, do promote violence as a “divine imperative” and include groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.

As one case study, the Amazon blurb highlights, the WhatsApp chats offer “insight into the group-internal dynamics of young Salafists” and their “radicalization processes.”

One thing that stood out, Dziri said in an email to HuffPost, was the extent to which the men had distanced themselves from local mosques and seemed confused about things as simple as how to go about conducting Friday prayers.

At one point in the exchange a young man asked if the faith permits cheating in school, the researcher said. “The answer was, that it is allowed to do everything with the unbelievers. And since nearly all other people are unbelievers, you can do everything with everyone,” Dziri said.

Another man admitted in the messages he didn’t have a copy of the Quran, Islam’s holy text. And the others agreed that they needed to purchase one. Dr. Rauf Ceylan, a professor at the University of Osnabrück and one of the study’s co-authors, said it was “striking” that the discussion about obtaining a Quran occurred well after the group had been established. 

“All religious conversations conducted up to this time were only content that has been learned from hearsay and rumors,” Ceylan told HuffPost.

When the group’s self-appointed leader called for a meeting, one participant fretted that he didn’t have any Islamic clothing. The leader responded: “You can also wear sweatpants or something like that. If you want I can loan you something for the day.”

The report is just a case study from one group of individuals, and its conclusions might not apply in all circumstances. But it echoes the conclusions of many Muslim scholars and activists who see little resemblance to their religion in such militant groups.

Ceylan and Dziri also noted that the 12 men involved in the WhatsApp chat appeared to have received little “religious socialization” and isolated themselves from other Muslims in their community.

“One of the main points for us is that these young radicalized people come mostly from a family which is remote from religion and they do not radicalize themselves in mosques,” Dziri said. “With a profound knowledge of faith, it would be impossible, or at least considerably more difficult to radicalize in that way.”

Terrorism is a Strategy of Weakness

Terrorism is a strategy of weakness adopted by those who lack access to real power. At least in the past, terrorism worked by spreading fear rather than by causing significant material damage. Terrorists usually don’t have the strength to defeat an army, occupy a country or destroy entire cities. Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million people, terrorists killed a total of 7,697 people across the globe, most of them in developing countries. For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda.

“How, then, do terrorists manage to dominate the headlines and change the political situation throughout the world? By provoking their enemies to overreact. In essence, terrorism is a show. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and makes us feel as if we are sliding back into medieval chaos. Consequently states often feel obliged to react to the theatre of terrorism with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force, such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.

Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the Middle East in the last decade. Islamic fundamentalists could never have toppled Saddam Hussein by themselves. Instead they enraged the USA by the 9/11 attacks, and the USA destroyed the Middle Eastern china shop for them. Now they flourish in the wreckage. By themselves, terrorists are too weak to drag us back to the Middle Ages and re-establish the Jungle Law. They may provoke us, but in the end, it all depends on our reactions. If the Jungle Law comes back into force, it will not be the fault of terrorists. 

The New Human Agenda

“At the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. ‘There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream.’ Going to the bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary. ‘Let’s see what’s on the agenda today.’

For thousands of years the answer to this question remained unchanged. The same three problems preoccupied the people of twentieth-century China, of medieval India and of ancient Egypt. Famine, plague and war were always at the top of the list. For generation after generation humans have prayed to every god, angel and saint, and have invented countless tools, institutions and social systems – but they continued to die in their millions from starvation, epidemics and violence. Many thinkers and prophets concluded that famine, plague and war must be an integral part of God’s cosmic plan or of our imperfect nature, and nothing short of the end of time would free us from them.

“Yet at the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up to an amazing realisation. Most people rarely think about it, but in the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war. Of course, these problems have not been completely solved, but they have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. We don’t need to pray to any god or saint to rescue us from them. We know quite well what needs to be done in order to prevent famine, plague and war – and we usually succeed in doing it.

True, there are still notable failures; but when faced with such failures we no longer shrug our shoulders and say, ‘Well, that’s the way things work in our imperfect world’ or ‘God’s will be done’. Rather, when famine, plague or war break out of our control, we feel that somebody must have screwed up, we set up a commission of inquiry, and promise ourselves that next time we’ll do better. And it actually works. Such calamities indeed happen less and less often. For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. In the early twenty-first century, the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at McDonald’s than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack.”

**
“Until recently most humans lived on the very edge of the biological poverty line, below which people succumb to malnutrition and hunger. A small mistake or a bit of bad luck could easily be a death sentence for an entire family or village. If heavy rains destroyed your wheat crop, or robbers carried off your goat herd, you and your loved ones may well have starved to death. Misfortune or stupidity on the collective level resulted in mass famines. When severe drought hit ancient Egypt or medieval India, it was not uncommon that 5 or 10 per cent of the population perished. Provisions became scarce; transport was too slow and expensive to import sufficient food; and governments were far too weak to save the day.”

**
“After famine, humanity’s second great enemy was plagues and infectious diseases. Bustling cities linked by a ceaseless stream of merchants, officials and pilgrims were both the bedrock of human civilisation and an ideal breeding ground for pathogens. People consequently lived their lives in ancient Athens or medieval Florence knowing that they might fall ill and die next week, or that an epidemic might suddenly erupt and destroy their entire family in one swoop.

The most famous such outbreak, the so-called Black Death, began in the 1330s, somewhere in east or central Asia, when the flea-dwelling bacterium Yersinia pestis started infecting humans bitten by the fleas. From there, riding on an army of rats and fleas, the plague quickly spread all over Asia, Europe and North Africa, taking less than twenty years to reach the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Between 75 million and 200 million people died – more than a quarter of the population of Eurasia. In England, four out of ten people died, and the population dropped from a pre-plague high of 3.7 million people to a post-plague low of 2.2 million. The city of Florence lost 50,000 of its 100,000 inhabitants.”

**
“The Black Death was not a singular event, nor even the worst plague in history. More disastrous epidemics struck America, Australia and the Pacific Islands following the arrival of the first Europeans. Unbeknown to the explorers and settlers, they brought with them new infectious diseases against which the natives had no immunity. Up to 90 per cent of the local populations died as a result.”

**
“Incidentally cancer and heart disease are of course not new illnesses – they go back to antiquity. In previous eras, however, relatively few people lived long enough to die from them.”

Dalai Lama: There Are No Muslim Terrorists

For the Dalai Lama, using religion to justify violence isn’t religious at all. 

During a visit to the European Parliament last Thursday, the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader pointed out that since all religions preach peace, calling someone a “Muslim terrorist” or a “Buddhist terrorist” is simply an oxymoron. 

“Buddhist terrorist. Muslim terrorist. That wording is wrong,” the 14th Dalai Lama said during a meeting with the parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs in Strasbourg, France. “Any person who wants to indulge in violence is no longer a genuine Buddhist or genuine Muslim, because it is a Muslim teaching that once you are involved in bloodshed, actually you are no longer a genuine practitioner of Islam.”

The Dalai Lama’s words were a response to a question from the floor about the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar, which has been fanned by nationalist Buddhist monks.

In the past, the Dalai Lama has urged Myanmar’s leaders to ease tensions between these two groups, saying that the Buddha would be for protecting the country’s Muslims.

He repeated that message of interfaith cooperation and harmony on Thursday.

 “All major religious traditions carry the same message: a message of love, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment, self-discipline - all religious traditions,” he said. “These are the common ground, and common practice. “On that level, we can build a genuine harmony, on the basis of mutual respect, mutual learning, mutual admiration.”

The Nobel Peace Prize winner has made interfaith reconciliation and harmony one of his main commitments in life. 

This isn’t the first time the Dalai Lama has spoken out as an ally for Muslims. When Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump reiterated his call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., the Dalai Lama said that although the candidate is entitled to his own opinion, scapegoating all Muslims for the actions of a few is “wrong.”

“You cannot generalize,” he said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dalai-lama-muslim-terrorist_us_57e17038e4b0071a6e09d2cb?section=&section=us_religion

Taliban

It seemed like the Taliban didn’t want us to do anything. They even banned one of our favourite board games called Carrom in which we flick counters across a wooden board. We heard stories that the Taliban would hear children laughing and burst into the room and smash the boards. We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He wouldn’t have made us all different.

**

The Taliban targeted not only politicians, MPs and the police, but also people who were not observing purdah, wearing the wrong length of beard or the wrong kind of shalwar kamiz.

**

Terror had made people cruel. The Taliban bulldozed both our Pashtun values and the values of Islam.

**

Yet my father remained hopeful and believed there would be a day when there was an end to the destruction. What really depressed him was the looting of the destroyed schools – the furniture, the books, the computers were all stolen by local people. He cried when he heard this, ‘They are vultures jumping on a dead body.

**

My father always said that the most beautiful thing in a village in the morning is the sight of a child in a school uniform, but now we were afraid to wear them.

**

I know my mother didn’t like the awards because she feared I would become a target as I was becoming more well known. She herself would never appear in public. She refused even to be photographed. She is a very traditional woman and this is our centuries-old culture. Were she to break that tradition, men and women would talk against her, particularly those in our own family. She never said she regretted the work my father and I had undertaken, but when I won prizes, she said, ‘I don’t want awards, I want my daughter. I wouldn’t exchange a single eyelash of my daughter for the whole world.’

My father argued that all he had ever wanted was to create a school in which children could learn. We had been left with no choice but to get involved in politics and campaign for education. ‘My only ambition,’ he said, ‘is to educate my children and my nation as much as I am able. But when half of your leaders tell lies and the other half is negotiating with the Taliban, there is nowhere to go. One has to speak out.’

Conditional Change

When my father was at home, he and his friends sat on the roof at dusk and talked politics endlessly. There was really only one subject – 9/11. It might have changed the whole world but we were living right in the epicentre of everything. Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, had been living in Kandahar when the attack on the World Trade Center happened, and the Americans had sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan to catch him and overthrow the Taliban regime which had protected him.

In Pakistan we were still under a dictatorship, but America needed our help, just as it had in the 1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Just as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had changed everything for General Zia, so 9/11 transformed General Musharraf from an international outcast. Suddenly he was being invited to the White House by George W. Bush and to 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair. There was a major problem, however. Our own intelligence service, ISI, had virtually created the Taliban. Many ISI officers were close to its leaders, having known them for years, and shared some of their beliefs. The ISI’s Colonel Imam boasted he had trained 90,000 Taliban fighters and even became Pakistan’s consul general in Herat during the Taliban regime.