Solthechef,

You compare India with Israel - the fact that India has had a Muslim president. But of what significance is this - what is the reality - what does India experience ...

Whilst levels of tensions and violence vary from state to state, religious riots and killing still occur in India. In May last year, J. S Bandukwala, a campaigner against religious extremism, admitted this could not be controlled, even by police. Others also have addressed religious violence in India.

In an address to the Carnegie Council in 2002, highly respected and internationally acclaimed academic Professor Ashutoch Varshney, previously a consultant to Human Rights Watch, and the World Bank, and writer for “World Politics,” “The Journal of Democracy”, “The Encyclopedia of Democracy” and prestigous newspapers, stated:

“... powerful politicians who polarize Hindus and Muslims along religious lines, must be restrained” ... “such politicians polarize communities by provoking and engineering communal violence”.

Varshney continued:

“ ...the possibilities of ethnic violence are quite high, given a spark. That spark can emerge in the form of an attack on a train, the rumor of a rape, defeat of ethnic political parties in elections, desecration of a mosque or a temple, or something as apparently trivial as a Hindu boy going out with a Muslim girl, or vice-versa. Sparks can emerge at any time and in any town. The real issue is whether there are networks that can manage or extinguish those sparks. If they are not there, these sparks can become fires.”

Varshney found Hindu/Muslim riots and deaths were concentrated in urban areas; state and national politics often providing the sparks, but it was the local, city-level mechanisms being activated. People were moving from different areas for the sake of physical safety.

Varsheny unequivocally stated that India’s government cannot resolve these serious issues. These can only be resolved by civil society or civic life - the non-political arena of life.

cont ...

Whilst Varsheny did not address caste violence, he sees this also a grave issue, which other researchers are currently investigating:

“Caste violence is different from Hindu-Muslim violence. In the hierarchy of the caste system, the upper castes were indisputably upper, and have been so, ritually and otherwise, for centuries. This kind of hierarchy did not apply to Hindu-Muslim relations. Violence takes place in a vertical structure, and violence in Hindu-Muslim relations is more horizontal than vertical.”

Varsheny addresses the issue of religious violence, democracy, and possible resolution in “Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India” (Yale University Press, 2003)

http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

Perhaps Lamm and others should read Avnery a bit more often and get some facts straight.

Paul,
I resume you realise that there’s no cigar and no cake either in terms of Muslim members of Knesset. [Not all Muslims in Israel are Arabs and not all Arabs in Israel are Muslims].While I’m happy to accept the designation of Arab to the Druze minority, they probably won’t agree.

I’m curious to where you get your 15 per cent figures for the percentage of Arabs in Israel. Israel’s Central Bureau of statistics gives 19.7 per cent http://www1.cbs.gov.il/publications/isr_in_n07e.pdf (page 10). Somehow I trust them over you.

At any rate there is no point comparing apples with pomegranates. If you wish to use government posts in India used that for Israel as well. I frankly don’t care which one you want to compare: Government ministers (Lamm’s original point), MPs, judges, government employees or any other criterion you care to choose so long as it is the same for both countries. Apples with Apples please. If the Israelis are twice as good as the Indians at ensuring adequate representation if any of the four criteria that I enumerated above you get a cake. If you don’t, you may end up with a crucial cake ingredient on your face

Sol

Marilyn, I see you're still lurking. How about responding to the questions I asked you?

Or shall I take your silence as an admission that your original claims were incorrect?

The difference between you and people like Lev is that he's prepared to debate the issues but you're simply intent on posting unsubstantiated, unbalanced nonsense and then disappearing when someone challenges your position. Hardly a way to conduct a civilised discussion, is it?

Marilyn,

If I had been a person living in the Middle East, I would have deeply resented the fact that colonialist countries not only treated me as a third class - indeed a non-citizen, but also had carved the territory up into artificial states forcing disparate peoples, often with long hatreds and enmities, to live together. Even part of Iran has been incorporated into Iraq - indeed, look at the horrors which have emerged in Iraq. More bloodshed has occurred between and within Arab states, than there has been with Israel.

On the other hand, when Emir Faisal ibn Hussein, the Hashemite son of Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, Keeper of the Holy Places, considered by many to be a direct descendent of the Islamic Prophet Mohammad, who became King of Syria and later King of Iraq, and who headed the delegation of Arab representatives of Paris Peace Talks where the League of Nations was established, and who deeply welcomed and signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement, January 3, 1919, I would have applauded and supported him.

In a letter to Felix Frankfurter, Harvard Law School Dean and later US Supreme Court Justice, Emir Faisal ibn Hussein, confirming his vision of two states - a Jewish state alongside an Arab state, wrote:

“We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race, having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.

We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

cont ...