He signals coming out of Obama'sWashington DC and the message conveyed by foreign secretary of UK, David Miliband during his trip in India (January 2009) are concerted. Miliband conveyed in no uncertain terms that Kashmir is an issue and India should get a move on with the Kashmir issue and not stick to the status quo. So there is a method and it is designed to take the eye off the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Israel's invasion in January 2009 of Gaza was brutal and has been condemned by global human rights activists. It has attracted tremendous media coverage all over the world. Israel continues to occupy illegally large chunk of Palestinian land in the West bank. It continues to expand its illegal settlements on Arab land and construct more concrete walls, complete with barbed wire and watch towers, to cut off Arabs from their cultivable lands, schools, mosques etc which become reachable only through check-posts.
Initially President Obama toyed with the idea of appointing Richard Holbrook, as a Special South Asia envoy and bringing the Kashmir issue under his purview, integrated with the Pakistan-Afghanistan imbroglio. Hard-nosed Indian diplomacy has made him change tack and Holbrook has been made only a Pakistan-Afghanistan envoy. But India should not think that Democrats in America has gone off their pet Kashmir theme. The statements coming out of Washington and London in late March and April 2009 show that western powers are once again submitting to Pakistani blackmail and are once again connecting war against the Taliban in Af-Pak Theater to a shift from status quo in Kashmir to Pakistan'ssatisfaction. The renewed and massive infiltration of terrorist columns across the LoC, even before the snow has melted, in April 2009 is a Pakistani tactic to goad the West to pressurise India.
In an article, titled, ?Obama Magic Unlikely to Work with India?, Harsh V Pant (Ref; Feb. 1, 2009, Special to The Japan Times, http://search.japantimes.co.jp), says,
…clearly the most troubling aspect of Obama'sforeign policy for India is a suggestion gaining ground in the policymaking circles in Washington that the success of US endeavours in Afghanistan depends on greater American activism with regard to Kashmir. It is the sort of muddle-headed approach to South Asia that historically has made US policy toward the region such a catastrophic failure, and it is once again coming back with a vengeance.?
I discover a calculated and calibrated method where Harsh V. Pant discovers only a ?muddle-headed approach?. To start my arguments I must first give the reader an idea of the clout wielded by Jewish Americans and Jewish Britishers, while the former in very large numbers hold dual citizenship of Israel and USA. Jewish financiers such as George Soros and the Rothschilds and their likes hold an enormous stake in the banking and finance industry of the USA and UK. The number of Jewish millionaires in both these countries is out of proportion to their number in the population. The Jews have a huge control on the mass media such as the print media and film industry. They are more than well represented in the senate and Parliament, in the membership of both the mainstream parties (Republican and Democrats in the USA; Conservatives and Labour in the UK) and the corridors of power. USA and UK are consistently following a policy in geo-politics for the last two decades that is influenced by the Western-Christianity-Judaism-Kinship factor or in short WCJK factor. I have opted to use the term Western-Christianity instead of Protestant-Catholic because Samuel Huntington uses this term in his famous book ?Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order?. He deliberately avoids clubbing Judaism and Israel along with Western Christianity in the same ?civilisation group? and avoids discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a ?Fault-Line Conflict?. His motive, I suspect, is to avoid rubbing the powerful Jewish lobby in America the wrong way up and embarrassing the American foreign policy top brass (Ref: Ghosh Kunal (2007), ?Strategic Alliance with the USA in a World of ?Civilization?-based Alignment, Mainstream, New Delhi, Oct 26 – Nov 01, pp. 15 – 22).
The western policy
The policy, referred to above, is simple. It conveys an unambiguous message to the Palestinian freedom fighters and their Islamist-terrorist global allies that if they attack America, West Europe or Israel, the retribution would be swift and Western powers would come down on them like a ton of bricks and smash them to smithereens. But if they attack other countries/civilisations such as Orthodox Russia and Serbia, Hindu India, Buddhist Thailand or Communist China, then they can expect at least moral support and in some cases even material support from the Western powers. The appeasement of Islamism in certain locations/situations is necessary to counter-balance the hostility the West manifests to Islamic sentiments in the Israeli-Palestinian Theater or wherever there is a conflict between Western Christianity and Islam. It should be expressly noted that the Western economies depend much on the petroleum issues of the Islamic world. I shall cite five examples to prove my point: 1. Indonesia-East Timor, 2. Serbia-Kosovo, 3. Kashmir of India, 4.. Xinjiang of China, and 5. Russia-Chechnya.
Indonesia-East Timor
Here is an example of how the West acts, under the influence of the WCJK factor, against the legitimate sentiments of a Muslim majority country just because a Catholic Christian kin is involved. Portugal had a tiny enclave of a colony in the Indonesian archipelago called East Timor. It was the eastern half of a small island called Timor, with a population of less than a million (lesser than the cities of Agra or Mysore) and size of approximately 69 miles by 80 miles (5500 square miles). Before colonial times all of Timor had been a part of different kingdoms, usually based on Java, ruling the Indonesian archipelago. During the Portuguese rule the eastern half of the island became Catholic Christian majority, although a small Muslim and Hindu minority remained. In 1975 Portugal relinquished control and East Timor declared independence, but Indonesian army promptly occupied it. Since then there was a resistance movement against Indonesian rule led by Leftist FRELIMO guerrillas. General Suharto, the army strongman who ruled Indonesia, crushed the Left all over Indonesia and also East Timor, and his American mentors were quite happy. In late 1980s and early 1990s the Soviet Union collapsed, China embraced Capitalism in the garb of Market Socialism and there was a decline of the Left in the East Timorese resistance. The resistance movement started aligning more and more with the ex-colonial master Portugal and the Catholic element came to the fore. Bishop Carlos F.X. Belo travelled widely in the West, championed the cause of independence from Indonesia and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996. In late 1990s all of South East Asia suffered an economic melt down and Indonesian military dictatorship became weak. It wilted under Western pressure led by Australia and America and gave independence to East Timor that immediately adopted a Portuguese name, Timor Leste, and the Portuguese language as the official language.
East Timor'shistory is very similar to India'sGoa which was liberated by the Indian army from Portuguese rule in 1961, except that Goa never became Catholic majority in spite of the strenuous and highly coercive efforts of Saint Xavier. What is the justification of separating such a tiny economically unviable one-half of an island, Timor Leste, from Indonesia? The only justification seems to me that it has a Catholic majority population and therefore is a part of a civilisation characterised by Western Christianity, a la Huntington (Ref: Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order, published in 1996). Timor Leste'sindependence in 1999 was immediately followed by large scale Muslim-Christian violence in different parts of Indonesia. In my opinion the Wahhabisation process of Indonesia and growth of radical Islam started in true earnest from that event. The world still remembers the Bali terrorist bombings of 2002 and 2005 that killed more than a hundred Western tourists.
(To be continued)
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