Pakistan Horn About To Isolate From West (Daniel 8:8)

Pakistan will not accept India as UNSC permanent member: Nawaz

SATURDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2015 – 10:48

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif expressed these reservations while speaking with US President Barack Obama on the phone, the PM House said in a statement.

The prime minister said India cannot become a UNSC permanent member due to its non-compliance of all the resolutions passed by UN regarding Kashmir, added the spokesman.

The US president called Nawaz in the evening where both the leaders discussed issues of mutual interest and those related to regional stability and peace for over half-an-hour, said the statement.

The spokesman said the prime minister made it clear upon the US president that permanent slot for India at the UNSC will not be tolerated at any cost as India has not fulfilled any resolution passed by UN aimed at assuring the right of self-determination for the people of Kashmir.

During his visit to India last month, Obama had lent his support to India’s bid for UN Security Council’s membership which was seen in Pakistan as contempt of democracy and human rights.

“India is by no means eligible to become a permanent member of UN,” the prime minister was quoted as saying. Nawaz also conveyed Pakistan’s desire to become a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Meanwhile, Obama informed Nawaz about his recent trip to India and also congratulated the prime minister on the success of Operation Zarb-i-Azb.

Barack Obama visited India on January 25 and became the first US president to make two official visits to India during his tenure.

During the trip Indian Premier Narendra Modi and Obama announced they had reached an agreement to provide civilian nuclear technology to India that was signed in 2008 but had been held up by US concerns over liability in the event of a nuclear accident.

During his visit to India, Obama also became the first US president to attend the spectacular military and cultural display in a sign of the nations’ growing closeness. (Dawn News)

The Shia Horn Of Iran Will Destroy ISIS (Daniel 8:3)

IRAN DISREGARDS WESTERN THREAT, SUGGESTING CONTINUATION OF SECTARIAN POLICIES

13 January 2015
BY INU Staff

INU- The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday that General Ramezan Sharif, the Public Relations Department General of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, had issued another in a series of Iranian statements disregarding the possibility of Western military actions or threats against the Islamic Republic. “the enemy has grown disappointed at military confrontation with the Islamic Republic and has now resorted to a clash of wills, views and insights to change the Iranian nation’s behavior,” Sharif said.

Similar comments in recent weeks and months have come from various officials including other Revolutionary Guards and ranging up to the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said after the lapse of the previous nuclear deadline that the Western powers had tried and failed to “bring Iran to its knees.” The extension of the talks was characterized by Khamenei and others as a victory by Iran over the West, and this rhetoric has been accompanied by public dismissals of the Middle East activities of the US and its allies, especially including bombing campaigns against the Islamic State.

US President Barack Obama has reportedly reached out unsuccessfully to Khamenei in pursuit of partnership against that common enemy. Iran, for its part, has suggested that with the help of a few regional actors it could effectively replace the US-led coalition against the Islamic State and prosecute the war on its own. Independent analysts generally conclude otherwise, noting that Iran’s forces and funds are stretched thin across several battlefields and have been insufficient to make real progress in Syria.

But the rhetoric and the material reality of the situation indicate that Iran will continue to pour its own resources into Iraq over the long term, unless outside pressures check its advance. This is the conclusion presented on Monday by Christian news source The Trumpet, which recalled the death in Iraq of IRGC Brigadier General Hamid Taqavi.

Crucially, the justification for Iran’s involvement is primarily related to the nation’s religious identity, insofar as Tehran claims that its soldiers in Iraq have died defending Shiite shrines. Concordantly, Iran’s approach to the conflict has heavily involved recruitment and financing for Shiite militias, giving the entire crisis an increasingly sectarian quality.

One could expect that Iran’s promotion of Shiite militancy beyond its borders might also reflect upon the nation’s domestic policies and upon social trends among its staunch Shiite supporters. Providing evidence in favor of that conclusion, on Saturday that Iranian security had blocked members of its Sunni minority from accessing a Sunni prayer site on Friday, the Muslim holy day.

Interestingly, this move came on the last day of Shiite-Sunni “unity week,” an observance that the Iranian government uses to claim that it is tolerant of its largest religious minority. But of course, as a theocratic government, Iran heavily privileges Shiite Islam and is infamous for varying levels of persecution against its several minority faiths. Yet despite this and despite a consistently poor human rights record as determined by the United Nations and international activists, Iran publicly claims to defend the rights of its citizens, including those who are members of minorities.

These claims progressed on Monday when, according to Tasnim News Agency, the deputy head of the Iranian Judiciary’s Human Rights Council claimed that far from being guilty of rampant human rights abuses, the Islamic Republic is one of the world’s leading defenders of human rights.
“Most advanced laws for the protection of human rights are enforced in Iran,” Kazem Gharibabadi said to attendants of a ceremony at Tehran University, adding, “Iran is placed in a privileged position in the world in terms of its structure for the protection of human rights.”

Gharibabadi also praised Iran for the status of free speech in the country, citing the volume of publications and news agencies while disregarding the fact that a number of these are state run and others are tightly controlled. Iran is known to be one of the world leaders in imprisonment of journalists, and in early January the regime shut down 17 foreign-based satellite television networks as part of an ongoing effort to limit sources and types of information in the country.

Of course the main focus of these efforts is now the internet, and it is well known that Iran has officially banned access to Facebook, Twitter, and a variety of other sources of information deemed undesirable by the Shiite clerical government. This month it was claimed that those restrictions would be somewhat loosened as the regime began to implement a “smart filtering” system that would allow access to all sites but filter out objectionable content.

Indeed, even after the smart filtering plan was announced, the Iranian judiciary ordered the wholesale ban of three more social media apps. Far from becoming freer, the internet stands to potentially become even more restricted in Iran, and the International Campaign finds that a system is being developed whereby each internet user would be personally identifiable, allowing the regime to filter content for specific groups that it designates.

This is in keeping with the Islamic Republic’s past approach to the issue, which has not only maintained vigorous censorship but has also maintained double standards, with government officials having accounts on the very same social networks that are banned for citizens.

The prospective enhancement of restrictions may well be spurred on by the regime’s dismissal of foreign threats and influence and the general lack of pressure on this issue from the US and other governments. In its coverage of Susan Power’s comments to congressional Republicans, the Associated Press points out that she raised the issue of Cuba alongside that of Iran. But it was only in the former case that the UN ambassador brought up the issue of human rights abuses.

The release of Cuban dissidents, Power said, “does not resolve the larger human rights problems on the island.” Meanwhile, at least three Americans remain imprisoned in Iran – Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian, Christian Pastor Saeed Abedini, and former US Marine Amir Hekmati – and there is no indication that their release has been pursued as a prerequisite for a nuclear agreement or further diplomatic relations between the US and Iran.

The West Created The Third Nuclear Horn Of Pakistan (Daniel 8:8)

Pakistanisation of India

Dec 27, 2014

Manish Tewari

Ever since this government came into existence, it has left no stone unturned to polarise society. From ‘love jihad’ to religious conversions they have run the entire gauntlet.

Are there any takeaways for India from the sickening slaughter of hundreds of innocent school children, teachers and other enablers at the Army school in Peshawar? Was it an act of utter depravity by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan which underscores that no abomination is beyond them? Was it unfortunately a cataclysm waiting to happen with the cycle of violence becoming all the more brutal in Pakistan? To answer these questions one has to take a step back into history. A recap is imperative to contextualise the chronicle.

It all began four decades ago, after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. Pakistan, that had been formed in the name of religion, tore itself apart in the name of ethnicity. The West Pakistani Punjabi was not able to accommodate the East Pakistani Bengali. The flower of the Pakistani Army 90,000 officers and men became Indian prisoners of war. The largest number in any single conflict, post the Second World War. Pakistan was aching for revenge.

Fully cognisant that India held the strategic advantage in conventional military terms around the middle of the Seventies, Pakistan honed a three-pronged approach. The first was the quest to acquire nuclear arms ominously articulated in the words of late Zulifkar Ali Bhutto: “Pakistanis will eat grass but we will get a nuclear bomb”. The second was the journey to Islamise the Pakistani armed forces and the larger social milieu in an attempt to define the identity of Pakistan by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq. The third was the mission to bleed India with a thousand cuts.

By the beginning of the Eighties, all three projects were well underway. A.Q. Khan, ably assisted by the Pakistani intelligence services, was stealing nuclear technology wherever it could be purloined from. The transformation of the Pakistani armed forces from an institution incubated in British traditions to an Islamic military was on a roll. A proxy war against India, first targeting Punjab and, by the late Eighties, encompassing Jammu and Kashmir was being implemented.

What proved to be providential for the Pakistani establishment through the Eighties and later became their Achilles’ heal was its voluntary enrolment as a frontline cat’s-paw in the West’s cold hot war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ubiquitously referred to as the “Afghan jihad”.

Advantageous because it gave Pakistan access to billions of dollars and sophisticated weaponry that it was able to divert into funding and equipping its proxy war with India. Expedient because it provided the human resource in the form of internally displaced Afghans who had crossed over from Afghanistan to Pakistan to execute its diabolical agenda. Disastrous because the legacy of those years the use of religious institutions to radicalise young minds to keep the human resource for the Afghan jihad and the proxy war against India flowing, coupled with the adoption of terror as an instrument of state policy has brought Pakistan to the state it finds itself in today.

By the end of the Eighties, the Cold War had ended, the Soviets went back over the Amu Darya, but Pakistan could not dismount the tiger it had willingly straddled petrified that it would devour it. Pakistan, therefore, did what it thought would provide it strategic depth: unleashing the Taliban on the war ravaged people of Afghanistan and broadening the proxy war with terrorist strikes deep into Indian mainland.

By the time the millennium turned the Al Qaeda had already attacked American assets worldwide from its safe havens in Afghanistan. On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda launched the most audacious outrage on the American mainland that dwarfed even Pearl Harbour. The Americans came back to the Afghanistan they had abandoned a decade ago. Pakistan, under the threat of being bombed back to the Stone Age, was again a frontline state in the notorious “war against terror”, overcharging and shortchanging its allies simultaneously.

In this process, the major fatality was the collective ethos of Pakistan. To sustain these multiple conflicts Pakistan had to demonise other nations and peoples, especially India. It had to patronise multiple terrorist groups. What it did not perhaps visualise is that when hate and negative energy begin to override national impulses, then all that you are doing is traipsing on the edges of a catastrophe. That is the tale of Pakistan over the past four decades.

This is exactly the tutorial that the Bharatiya Janata Party government, its fellow travellers and doctrinal mentors need to absorb. Ever since this government came into existence, it has left no stone unturned to polarise society. From “love jihad” to religious conversions they have run the entire gauntlet. What is playing out is a very insidious attempt at the “Pakistanisation” of India. Just as in the late Seventies, President Zia-ul-Haq erroneously thought that the idea of Pakistan should begin and end with a strictly circumscribed Islamic identity, similarly our home grown zealots speciously think that the philosophical postulate that should underpin the Indian identity should be that of a “Hindu rashtra”.

The reason why the idea of India survived and has thrived in the past 67 years is primarily because of its holistic and pluralistic conception what is often referred to in a dismissive manner as pseudo-secularism nowadays. This perhaps is the most vital ingredient that has held India together, notwithstanding the multiple stresses and strains on its substance and structure.

The cause for Pakistan to go belly up was the proclivity to move away from the conception of Pakistan as envisaged by its founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, howsoever hypocritical it may have been, to the vision of Zia-ul-Haq.

Just as in the Eighties and the Nineties, the toxic hot mix of the politics of identity and religion the ubiquitous “Mandal and Mandir” left in its wake a noxious legacy whose after-affects the nation has to still contend with, the attempt to equate national identity with a undenominational religious identity is a very hazardous hand to play.

If there is one message that the Peshawar massacre sends out, it is that a radicalised society, a polarised nation and a myopic notion of national priorities eventually debases populaces, leading to the basic tenets of humanity being cynically sacrificed for objectives wrongly interpreted as being divinely ordained. Social conflict is the bane of national security. The BJP should reflect on this before leading India down that path.

The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari

Khamenei Says Iran About To Defeat The West

Khamenei says West will not defeat Iran

 

Khamenei has so far backed the nuclear talks and his reference to the future indicates that the extension of the talks would have his approval as well. (File Photo: Reuters)

 

By Staff writer | Al Arabiya News
Tuesday, 25 November 2014

Western powers will not be able to bring Iran to its knees in nuclear negotiations, the Associated Press quoted the website of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as saying Tuesday.
“On the nuclear issue, the United States and European colonialist countries gathered and applied their entire efforts to bring the Islamic Republic to its knees but they could not and they will not,” Khamenei said, speaking to a group of clerics.

The remarks were the first by the Iranian leader. He has final say on all state matters.
His comments come a day after Iran and major global powers agreed to decide by March 1 what needs to be done and on what kind of schedule. A final agreement is meant to follow four months later.

Khamenei has so far backed the nuclear talks and his reference to the future indicates that the extension of the talks would have his approval as well, the AP said.

Earlier on Monday and in a nationwide broadcast, Iran’s President Hassan Rowhani told his nation that it “has achieved a significant victory” and that talks would “lead to a deal, sooner or later.”

Rowhani also said many gaps in the talks “have been eliminated.”

But he also vowed that Iran would not relinquish its right to nuclear capability.

The United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, have engaged in intensive negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran has denied its nuclear research has any sort of military dimension.

(With AP)