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News reports relating to such realities as four children getting sexually abused every day in Bangladesh are not only extremely disturbing for us; they also paint a wretched picture of a society we have created for ourselves, where we cohabit with an air of apparent dispassion, and the one that we will leave behind for the coming generations without any pang of conscience maybe. By no definition of the term we may say that it is a safe society for our children as they continue to remain so atrociously vulnerable to the lewdness of lecherous people in our midst. Some horrendous facts have been revealed in a report of the Mass-line Media Centre on Sunday on the state of child sex abuse in the country wherein it has been said that 612 children were raped and 128 sexually abused between January and June 2005, and of the rape victims 46 were killed and 429 received some form of injury while going through the ordeal. Our trepidation turns for the worse when we are told that officials of UNICEF in Bangladesh have commented that those figures were only the tip of an iceberg and that the number of unpublished cases would be more than that of published ones.
   Abuses that are sexual in nature have far reaching physical, mental and social ramifications as far as the victims are concerned. The physical pain the children suffer may go away after a while but the wounds inflicted on their minds go deeper than we can see from outside and the scars take a much longer time to heal, if they heal at all. The situation for a girl victim becomes more complicated and heart-rending when a section of the media violates accepted ethical standards by publishing her name and details of her sufferings. Instead of doing any good to her cause, this puts the unfortunate victim on a double-edged sword in a community that suddenly begins to harbour silent contempt in their hearts for her because of her predicament.
   What are the social leaders and law enforcing agencies doing about the growing incidence of sexual abuse of children in the country? Surely they cannot just keep their eyes closed hoping that one day this will go away? No, this will not go away just by wishing so. To reduce the number of cases of sexual abuse of children, wide-ranging social awareness programmes have to be undertaken and some perpetrators of sex abuse will have to be exposed and given exemplary punishment. In the West, police raids on gangs of criminals running child sex trade and pornography networks have yielded the desired results. We feel it is high time such actions are directed against abusers in this country to scare off future perpetrators. We are confident all human rights organisations, UN agencies and relevant government agencies will willingly join the law enforcers in the noble mission.

Mischievous Netanyahu

Binyamin Netanyahu has regularly had a capacity for making mischief. He has shown yet once more just how good he is at such games. In resigning from the position of finance minister in Ariel Sharon’s cabinet, Netanyahu has tried telling Israelis that by withdrawing from Gaza the prime minister is actually undermining the national cause of all Israelis. Netanyahu’s idea of a Jewish homeland is not confined to the land mass that formed the state of Israel till the June 1967 six-day war. He truly believes, in the manner of David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin of yore, that all the land around Israel as it was constituted in 1948, again on opportunistic considerations, should belong to Jews. And in line with such reasoning Netanyahu has now quit the government. In doing so, he has turned himself into a darling of Israel’s extreme right. To what extent he now succeeds in derailing Sharon’s withdrawal plan remains a matter of conjecture.
   Men like Netanyahu are perennially a symbol of danger, and not just for their own countries. In a stint as prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu held up any progress in the Middle East though his belief that toughness would compel Palestinians into coming to terms with him. No such thing happened. It was not until Ehud Barak took the country’s Labour Party to electoral victory that the peace movement began once more to inch forward. We say once more because in the early 1990s Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the first time agreed, per courtesy of Bill Clinton, to work together in the search for a homeland for Palestinians. It was a deal Netanyahu, then opposition leader, railed against. His tirades led eventually to the assassination of Rabin. The dead man’s wife Leah never quite forgave Netanyahu for the incitement he provided to the killer of her husband, but that did not prevent Netanyahu’s rise to power. He achieved nothing where the future state of Palestinian-Israeli ties was concerned. When he lost power, he made it hard for Barak to work out a deal with Arafat, in the end making it possible for Ariel Sharon to ride to prime ministerial office.
   In the era of openness, men like Netanyahu are an anachronism. Even so, the truth is that there are hard-core Israelis who still regard him as a heroic defender of their rights. If Netanyahu could scream his way into the public consciousness enough to cause the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, he might now well have the capacity of making things quite fraught for the current Israeli leader. And if he can do that, there is certainly no knowing where things might lead. Given that there are arch conservatives like Netanyahu spread all around, George W. Bush for instance, it is quite possible that conditions in places like the Middle East could turn murkier than they are already. Note the pressure on Iran and Syria, whose leaders have been meeting in Tehran.

Have the London explosions that killed 52 innocent people changed the Iraq policies of the political establishments in Washington and London for any better? The answer seems to be a visible ‘no’.
   President George W Bush has clearly said he has no immediate plan to withdraw troops from Iraq. ‘We’re at war... If we put out a [pullout] timetable, the enemy would adjust their tactics,’ Reuters quoted Bush as saying on August 4.
   Prime Minister Tony Blair has also vowed stringent measures to take care of terrorists at home and abroad.
   Meantime, the Al-Qaeda network warned European nations, on July 16, to pull their troops out of Iraq within a month or face more attacks like the London bombings.
   ‘This message is the final warning to European states. We want to give you a one-month deadline to bring your soldiers out from the land of Mesopotamia [Iraq],’ said a July 16 statement by an Al-Qaeda group, reports AFP from Dubai on July 19. ‘After August 15, there will be no more messages, just actions that will be engraved on the heart of Europe.’
   The US reaction to the threat got clear expression in a July 23 New York Times article, written by Stephan Hadley and Frances Fragos Townsend, two top presidential homeland aide. ‘The terrorist hardcore is beyond appeal and must be hunted, captured or killed,’ the article said. ‘The sanctuary provided by sympathetic governments willing to look the other way when terrorist training camps are set up within their borders can be denied through military action.’
   Clearly, there is no good news for the peace-loving democratic people of the world. Then, what should they do?
   
   THAT the July 7 London bombings, which brutally took 52 innocent lives, is a ‘barbaric’ event is an undisputable truth, but the same observation becomes nauseating particularly when it comes from official political establishments of the United Kingdom and the United States, led by Tony Blair and George W Bush.
   When the explosions of killer bombs took place, Bush and Blair, each others comrade in both arms and ideology, particularly in terms of masterminding barbaric destruction and slaughter in the Arab world, came up with similar reactions to the London bombings.
   ‘They have such evil in their hearts that they will take the lives of innocent folks,’ said Bush. ‘The war on terrorism is on.’
   Blair’s reaction was similar in spirit: ‘Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations throughout the world.’
   Bush’s statement is sickening because the last series of the barbaric acts of taking innocent lives in the Arab world was inaugurated by his administration. An estimate ,the most conservative one so far, by the Oxford Research Group reveals that in July ‘almost 25,000 Iraqi civilians have died since US and British troops invaded the country, an average of 34 every single day’. Subsequently AFP reported from Baghdad on July 25 that ‘coffin sales have surged’ in Iraq ‘in the last 18 months’. Haitham Fadhil Girgis, an Iraqi carpenter specialising in coffins, reportedly told the news agency that his business ‘had never been so good’.
   Blair’s reference to the ‘civilised nations in the world’ vis-à-vis the ‘barbarism’ of those behind the bomb attacks only suggests his lack of knowledge in history. He does not seem to be aware of the fact that the Arab ‘bombers’ of the day have the history of great civilisations behind them — the civilisations that were flourishing when Blair’s Europe was festering in the Dark Ages.
   History says that the world’s first cities appeared beside the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, just north of what is now called the Persian Gulf, as far back as 3450 BCE. The old Babylonians were using advanced mathematical operations such as multiplication, division and square roots in 1800 BCE. Besides, they were using a duodecimal system, a system based on 12 and 6, to measure time, which the modern world still uses for counting minutes and hours.
   And as for Baghdad, now under the brutal occupation of the US and British armies, the city’s roots date back to ancient Babylon, a settlement as far back as 1800 BCE, while its fame as a centre for commerce and scholarship began in about 762 AD, when the Abbasid dynasty moved the capital of its empire to the newly-founded city of Baghdad. For the next five centuries, the city enjoyed the reputation of the world’s centre of education and culture. Those days the scholars of the Arab world made important contributions to both the sciences and humanities:  medicine, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, literature, etc.  Under Abbasid rule, Baghdad became a city of museums, hospitals, libraries and mosques.
   Between 9th to 13th centuries, one of the most famous centres of learning in Baghdad was Bayt al-Hikmah (House of Wisdom) that attracted scholars from all over the world, from many cultures and religions. The House of Wisdom was home to, among others, the most famous mathematician of the time: Al-Khawarizmi, the ‘father’ of algebra, which is named after his book called Kitab al-Jabr.
   Before the city was trashed by the Mongols in 13th century AD, Baghdad was known as the world’s richest and most intellectual city of the time, and was second in size only to Constantinople. Helegu Khan’s warriors burnt the Baghdad Library in 1258 AD. The act of barbarism led to the destruction of thousands of valued manuscripts including rare translations of ancient Greek texts.
   The Baghdad Library was set alight again, in 2003 this time, under the watchful eyes of the occupying armies of the US and the UK, while invaluable documents of the Ottoman period lay scattered and burnt on the pavements outside. The Baghdad Museum contained antiquities that dated back to the early Mesopotamian civilisation, where writing was invented in 3500 BC. But after the Anglo-American occupation the US army’s tanks shells destroyed the front door of the historic museum, and thieves were allowed to ransack the building.
   The irony of the history is that the new Mongols like Blair and Bush now talk about their civilised world, when they are directly responsible for destroying the treasures of ancient civilisations in the Arab world.
   Blair’s statement is nauseating, particularly when it pre-supposes or deliberately tries to give an impression to the British public that the objective of those who were behind the bombings is to destroy ‘what we (Britishers) hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations…’
   What was the reason for these bombings? An unambiguous reply came from Hamdi Issac, a suspect in the failed London bombings on July 21, who was later arrested in Italy. ‘The bombs of July 7 in London? That happens every day in Iraq,’ an unrepentant Issac told the Italian police during his interrogation, reported AFP from Rome on July 24. Clearly, it was a barbarism of the weak in reaction to the barbarism of the strong.
   The attacks in London, however, did not come from the blue. “‘If you bomb our cities, we will bomb yours,’ Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent video tapes,’,” Robert Fisk reminded the Blair administration the day after the blasts in London on July 7. ‘It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush’s “war on terror” and his invasion of Iraq,’ Fisk wrote in the London-based Independent.
   Refuting Blair’s dishonest interpretation of the objective behind the bombings, Fisk also wrote, ‘They are not trying to destroy ‘what we hold dear’. They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his alliance with the United States, and from his adherence to Bush’s policies in the Middle East.’ Then he drew the most pragmatic conclusion: ‘If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe insurgency won’t come to us?’
   The unfortunate thing is, as Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, observed: ‘The attack was not on the rich and the powerful (who are responsible for indiscriminate murders of innocent people in Iraq), but on the working people of London (many of whom opposed the re-election of Blair in favour of the cause of the Iraqi people).’
   Livingstone was one of those prominent Britishers who, in his bid to dissuade Blair from preventing UK from attacking Iraq, had argued that ‘an assault on Iraq will flame world opinion and jeopardise security and peace everywhere’.
   He again wrote in the Guardian, on August 4, ‘Britain must withdraw its troops from Iraq in order to prevent further terrorist attacks.’
   It is not only Fisk and Livingstone. David Clark, a former adviser of the Labour government, feels the same way. ‘In Iraq we allowed America to rip up the rule book of counter-insurgency with a military adventure that was dishonestly conceived…Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed and maimed by US troops uninterested in distinguishing between combatant and non-combatant, or even counting the dead…There can be no hope of defeating terrorism until we are ready to take legitimate Arab grievances seriously,’ wrote Clark in the London-based Guardian three days after the July 7 bombings. ‘…Their long history of engagement with the West is one that has left many Arabs feeling humiliated and used…’
   Blair also knows it. ‘The world must deal with the underlying causes of terrorism,’ Blair admitted to BBC radio two days after the London blasts. ‘Among measures that need to be taken are improving understanding between religions and easing the Middle East peace process.’ But the politics and ideology, politics of imperialism and ideology of religious fundamentalism, that his administration is the victim of, cannot afford to allow him to take such measures.
   
   ‘HOW do we make use of this opportunity?’ was reportedly the question that Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, asked her staff immediately after the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The aftermath is known to all: invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, murders of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children in those countries, and asserting the political, economic as well as strategic interests of the West in general and the United States in particular.
   Clearly, the September 11 tragedy was nothing more or less than an ‘opportunity’ for the Bush administration to advance the causes of US corporate capital in the oil-rich Arab world. The Bush administration also used the opportunity inside the United States to curb the ‘inalienable’ rights of the citizens that they had earned through decades of democratic struggle, that particularly include ‘freedom of expression’, ‘freedom of movement’ and the right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty in a competent court of law.
   The Bush administration has already abolished the civil rights in question in the name of patriotism! The arbitrary arrests of people, without court orders, are now regular phenomena in the United States. Besides, journalists who ask biting questions are considered ‘unpatriotic’ these days.
   ‘Since the September 11, 2002 attacks, US reporters these days are simply too afraid to ask uncomfortable questions that could kill their careers,’ said a famous American journalist, Greg Palest, in his book ‘The Best Democracy Money Can Buy’. In support of the proposition, Greg Palest quoted another American journalist, Dan Rather, who reportedly said on Newsnight: ‘It’s an obscene comparison, but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people’s neck if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions…’
   Many still remember Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who broke in the Washington Post the news relating to the hidden truth of the Watergate scandal in 1972 that eventually brought down Nixon from presidency. The reporters concerned attributed a ‘well-placed’ source for those earth-shaking reports; they were not required to disclose the identity of their source. The identity of that famous source is now known to all, but it remained hidden until the source, W Mark Felt, number two in the FBI in the early 1970s, decided this year, at the age of 91, to disclose it himself.
   But those days are over in the United States. Only the other day, on July 6, a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was sent to jail ‘for refusing to divulge the name of a source who blew the cover of an undercover CIA agent’.
   ‘The case, arising from the political tempest whipped up by president George W Bush’s rationale for the Iraq war, prompted sharp warnings that US press freedom was in peril,’ reported AFP on July 8 from Washington. ‘If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality, then journalists cannot function. There cannot be a free press,’ Miller reportedly told the judge in a face-to-face statement, of course without any positive result.
   The situation in the UK is not much better. The Blair administration is also out to use the July 7 bombings as an ‘opportunity’ to gag the comparatively vibrant English media on the one hand, and expunge many civil rights that the Britons had earned through decades of democratic movements. Who could imagine, even in the near past, that the British police would demand the authority for extra-judicial killing, by way of demanding the authority to ‘shoot-to-kill’. But Blair confirmed to the press, on July 24, that his police had really been demanding such authority. What is important is to realise that they want this undemocratic authority ‘in order to protect policy’, the policies of the Blair administration — the kind of policies that cannot be protected without being undemocratic.
   Blair has also announced on August 5 a ‘heavy agenda’ that includes enactment of a ‘new anti-terrorism law’ to take care of those ‘condoning or glorifying terrorism’, and application of laws to strip citizenship of the ‘naturalised citizens engaged in extremism’, etc. Nobody knows whether people like Livingstone or journalist like Fisk would come under the purview of those laws because of their objective interpretations of the violent reaction of the frustrated Arabs to the West’s policy of violence in the Gulf region.
   Besides, Blair has reportedly decided to deport some 500 Muslims, representing diverse countries and cultures, from the United Kingdom! The whole world knows about the Christian fundamentalist bias of ‘crusader’ Bush, now it is the turn to know Blair’s bias for religious fundamentalism as well. It is not for no reason that Polly Toynbee of the Guardian New Service pointed out in July that ‘a third of all state schools [in the UK] are religious’. ‘Labour [government] has let 40 more non-religious state secondaries be taken over by the Church of England in the last four years, with another 54 about to go,’ Toynbee wrote quoting a recent report of the London’s National Secular Society.
   
   Clearly, the political establishments, headed by Bush and Blair, not only have turned the whole world into a battleground, but are also out to destroy many a finer democratic right that the peoples of the US and the UK hade earned through decades of painful political struggles and has been serving as an inspiration for many struggling nations across the world.
   The democracy loving people of the world have, therefore, been left with no option but to make concerted efforts to stop the advances of the US and UK policies of the day, home and abroad. The sooner the better.
   The writer is the executive editor, New Age and can be reached at nurulkabir@newagebd.com