Baithak World Apr 15: Khushwant Singh, Aboriginal Site, Wajahat Ali, Ten Commandments for Iraq, Jimmy Carter, Uri Avnery, Ehud Olmert, Robert Fisk, Z

Prejudice is like poison. Unless purged out of one’s mind in early stages, it can spread like cancer and make one incapable of differentiating between right and wrong. Of the many kinds of prejudice, the worst is to believe that one’s own religion is superior to all others, which may be tolerated but never taken seriously or accepted as equally valid as one’s own. The most misunderstood of the major religions today is Islam, which, after Christianity, is the second most widely practised religion in the world. It also gains more converts than any of the other religions. Prejudice against Islam was spread in Christendom from the time Muslims gained dominance in the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. Christian crusaders failed in their missions to crush Islam in its homeland but continued to vilify its founder, Mohammed. The emergence of militant Islamic groups like al-Qaida and taliban gave them reasons to do so. The attack on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001 provided fresh ammunition to vilifiers of Islam. Since then Islamophobia has been deliberately spread throughout the non-Muslim world. The two principle contentions of the anti-Islamists are that Islam was spread by the sword and that its founder-prophet was not the paragon of virtue that Muslims make him out to be. It can be proved by historical evidence that Islam was not forced upon the people; it was readily accepted by millions because it offered them new values, principally equality of mankind and rights to women that were unheard of in those times. In countries like Indonesia and Malayasia, Islam was not forced on the population by Muslim invaders but by Muslim missionaries. A messiah for our time - Khushwant Singh

Aboriginal tools found in Western Australia and dating back 35,000 years are surprisingly sophisticated and varied, archaeologists say. And they believe the site may yet reveal artefacts up to 45,000 years old, making it older than the internationally famous Mungo Man site found in New South Wales. Archaeologists hired by one of the traditional owners in the Pilbara region, the Martidja Banyjima people, uncovered the ancient tools at a rock overhang on the site of the A$1 billion Hope Downs iron ore mine. The site, which is about 300 kilometres south of Port Hedland, has been named Djadjiling by the Banyjima people. Aboriginal site among Australia's oldest - Dani Cooper

"The Visitor," one of the first great movies of 2008, was released in select cities this week and manages to portray Muslims as realistic, complicated, nuanced, and - for the first time in a long time - actually good looking human beings trying to live the "American Dream". Unfortunately, the Muslim characters in The Visitor have traded their dream for a nightmare, as the film highlights a paranoid, security-obsessed, anti-immigrant, post-9/11 world. Generally, tales of immigration, multicultural America, and "East meets West" culture clashes either immerse themselves in clichéd, cartoonish, stereotypical comedies or overt, bleeding heart, political slogans masquerading as plot narratives. Thankfully, Tom McCarthy, director of the runaway Sundance hit The Station Agent, creates a realistic, warm-hearted relationship drama about communication, redemption, and frustration focusing on the unlikely friendship formed between Walter, a depressed widowed university professor, and Tariq, his good natured Syrian musician immigrant friend. In the course of teaching Walter the drum, their relationship blossoms and grows to include Tariq’s beautiful but reserved Sengalese girlfriend, Zaynab, and his widowed, Syrian mother Mona. altmuslim associate editor Wajahat Ali recently talked to director Tom McCarthy and lead actor Richard Jenkins about this new movie. “I’ve got to put this character in a movie”- Wajahat Ali - altmuslim's Wajahat Ali interviews director Tom McCarthy and actor Richard Jenkins to find out how they balanced themes from East and West in "The Visitor".

This is a surreal situation. The war drones along on autopilot, but it's already finished. It's a dead war walking. We're just waiting for George W. Bush to leave. In Vietnam, the slogan was "How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?" In Iraq, it's "How do you ask someone to be the last man to die so that the worst president in U.S. history can keep his doomed war going until he leaves office, so he can blame his successor for losing it?" Bush will face the judgment of history, and it will not be forgiving. But that is not our immediate concern. The most important thing now is to recognize the mistakes that led us into the most disastrous war since Vietnam -- a war that will thankfully cost America many fewer lives than Vietnam, but that has had far worse strategic consequences. If we don't want to repeat those mistakes, there are 10 lessons we must take away from Bush's war. In honor of the recently departed Charlton Heston, let's call them the Ten Iraq Commandments. Iraq: The ten commandments

Former US president Jimmy Carter on Sunday defended his plan to meet with Hamas leaders as he kicked off a trip to the Middle East, amid criticism from Washington and Israel. Carter, who reportedly plans to meet exiled Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in Syria, said he viewed Hamas's inclusion in peace talks as "very important" and stressed he was not traveling as an official US negotiator. "It's very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and to cooperate with the Fatah as a group that unites the Palestinians," Carter told ABC news. - Jimmy Carter: 'I'll Meet Hamas Because Someone Has to'

True, at different points in time the Zionist movement has drawn up maps. After World War I, it submitted to the peace conference the map of a Jewish state extending from the Litani River in Lebanon to El-Arish in the Sinai desert. The map of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, which became the Irgun emblem, copied the borders of the original British Mandate on both sides of the Jordan. Israel Eldad, one of the Stern Group leaders, distributed for many years a map of the Israeli Empire that reached from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates and included all of Jordan and Lebanon, with great chunks of Syria and Egypt thrown in. His son, the extreme right-wing Member of the Knesset Arieh Eldad, has not given up this map. And after the Six Day War, the map favored by the right-wing covered all the conquests, including the Golan Heights and the entire Sinai peninsula. But all these maps were only games. The real Zionist vision does not recognize any maps. It is a vision of a state without borders - a state that expands at all times according to its demographic, military and political power. The Zionist strategy resembles the waters of a river flowing to the sea. The river snakes through the landscape, goes around obstacles, turns left and right, flowing sometimes on the surface and sometimes underground, and on its way takes in more springs. In the end it reaches its destination. Manifest Destiny? Uri Avnery


No matter what Israel offers, the Palestinian Arabs as well as Israel's neighbors cannot accept a permanent Jewish state. Sadat was right: Egypt is the only state in the region, and it could make peace with Israel as a matter of state interest. How long the Egyptian state will last is another matter. But the secular nationalism that created the modern Egyptian state half a century ago is a dead letter. Islamic governments cannot accept the return of the Jews to Zion according to Biblical prophecy, for this would question the Koran's claim to be a final revelation to supplant the Judeo-Christian scriptures. The Arabs are a failing people, I have argued in earlier studies (see Crisis of faith in the Muslim world Asia Times Online, October 31 and November 5, 2005). It is not only the triumph of globalized Western culture over traditional society that threatens them, but the ascendancy of Asia. Last week's food riots in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East bring the point home. Arabs are hungry because Chinese are rich enough to eat meat, and buy vast quantities of grain to feed to pigs and chickens. If the rise in Asian protein consumption portends a permanently higher plateau of food prices, the consequences are dire for populations living on state subsidies, from Morocco to Algeria to Cairo to Gaza. A people that have no hope also have nothing to lose. Ehud Olmert on the Damascus road By Spengler

Robert Fisk is one of the most famous journalists in the world, and one of the most divisive. Many revere him both for the muscular quality of his reporting - in a world numbed by 24/7 television, he makes news seem gripping and important and full of pity - and for his refusal to shy away from saying that which few other writers dare to put down on the page. No one escapes the heat of his ire: neither Bush nor Blair, neither Israel nor the Arab dictatorships. For him, journalism is about 'naming the guilty' and sod the consequences. In his more than 30 years as a Middle East correspondent - during which time he has survived bombs, bullets, two kidnap attempts and, perhaps most notoriously, a thorough beating at the hands of a group of Afghan refugees in Pakistan - he has won more awards than any other foreign news journalist and has written two bestselling and acclaimed books: Pity the Nation, a devastating history of the Lebanese civil war, and The Great War for Civilisation, a 1,300 page history, with eyewitness accounts lifted directly from his own notebooks, of the 'conquest' of the Middle East (his latest book, The Age of the Warrior, a collection of his journalism, has just been published). Fisk's lectures sell out across the world; at his book signings, the queue extends out of the door. [thanks YA]

Journalist Robert Fisk.- Rachel Cooke Photograph: Mick Tsikas/EPA

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American envoy to the United Nations and an influential figure in the Bush administration, may run against Hamid Karzai for the Afghan presidency after resigning from his post. Mr Khalilzad, who is Afghan-born, fuelled recurring reports of his political ambitions by appearing on television in Kabul to announce that he is to leave his job and wants to be "at the service of the Afghan people". Although Mr Khalilzad, who holds US citizenship, added: "I have said earlier that I am not a candidate for any position in Afghanistan," his decision to step down from the prestigious UN job has been widely regarded as clearing the way for a run at the Afghan leadership, with President Karzai facing serious and mounting internal and international criticism. Another Neoconzix to be parachuted

Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have more in common with the big cat entertainers Siegfried & Roy than any of us can be comfortable with. The Las Vegas magicians call themselves "Masters of the Impossible" and have been fascinating audiences for decades by getting snow-white tigers to leap through burning tires. The legendary Federal Reserve Chairman and his successor were equally adept at fascinating their audiences -- with a policy of miraculous monetary growth that gave America one of the longest periods of economic expansion in modern times. Many saw them as "Masters of the Universe." It seemed as if the central bankers had tamed predatory capitalism with their constant interest rate cuts. The Madness of Ben Bernanke - Gabor Steingart

The sacking of the library that began April 11, 2003, was a bad one. The current Director of Iraq's National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad Eskander, estimates that over three days, as many as "60 percent of the Ottoman and Royal Hashemite era documents were lost as well as the bulk of the Ba'ath era documents … [and] approximately 25 percent of the book collections were looted or burned." Other Iraqi manuscript collections and university libraries suffered similar fates. Since then, Iraqis have once again tried to rebuild their library. The occupying powers have played along, but like so much about the Iraq War, their effort has been marked by ineptitude, hypocrisy and a cruel disregard for Iraqi people and culture. Iraq's Ruined Library Soldiers On By R.H. Lossin

Paul Jay presents RealNews

Reconstruction in remote parts of Baghdad Alive in Baghdad: Grass-roots approach to reconstruction in Sadr City view Blast hits Iranian mosque Ongoing investigation as to whether blast was an accident or intentional view