Salahadin
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Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: Indian-American organisations have formed a new ‘task force’ to advocate a tougher US stance towards Pakistan especially following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in late November, according to South Asia expert Vijay Prasad.
“But this is not just about justice for the victims of Mumbai,” he writes in an article that appeared on the CounterPunch newsletter’s website. “There is another dynamic involved, which is to walk the Jewish American road, to create an ‘India Lobby’ that resembles the ‘Israel Lobby’.”
“We’re fighting the same extremist enemy,” he quotes Charles Brooks of the American Jewish Committee as saying at a meeting of Jewish American and Indian American “partisans of the right”.
But Prasad says such rhetoric “fails to distinguish between the tactics that people use and the social and political conditions that generate their hostility”.
“To defeat those who use terrorism, one has to understand and deal with the conditions that produce those who take to terror,” he says. “From a security policy or even military standpoint, avoiding a broad analysis of the roots of terror is a serious error of judgement.”
The demands that the task force would make on the US Congress – to pressure Pakistan on the extradition of Mumbai suspects despite the absence of an extradition treaty, and the demand to close down all madrassas “which preach nothing but hate” – are “on the surface, quite bland, but also purposely naïve,” he says. “It deceives the citizenry with its simplicity, and yet it pushes adversaries into corners.”
LAHORE: Indian-American organisations have formed a new ‘task force’ to advocate a tougher US stance towards Pakistan especially following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in late November, according to South Asia expert Vijay Prasad.
“But this is not just about justice for the victims of Mumbai,” he writes in an article that appeared on the CounterPunch newsletter’s website. “There is another dynamic involved, which is to walk the Jewish American road, to create an ‘India Lobby’ that resembles the ‘Israel Lobby’.”
“We’re fighting the same extremist enemy,” he quotes Charles Brooks of the American Jewish Committee as saying at a meeting of Jewish American and Indian American “partisans of the right”.
But Prasad says such rhetoric “fails to distinguish between the tactics that people use and the social and political conditions that generate their hostility”.
“To defeat those who use terrorism, one has to understand and deal with the conditions that produce those who take to terror,” he says. “From a security policy or even military standpoint, avoiding a broad analysis of the roots of terror is a serious error of judgement.”
The demands that the task force would make on the US Congress – to pressure Pakistan on the extradition of Mumbai suspects despite the absence of an extradition treaty, and the demand to close down all madrassas “which preach nothing but hate” – are “on the surface, quite bland, but also purposely naïve,” he says. “It deceives the citizenry with its simplicity, and yet it pushes adversaries into corners.”
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