Malik’s blog entries from different web sites.
America’s festering run-ins with Turkey over Kurdish militants in northern Syria appear to be coming to a boiling point. Ankara has given two weeks to the militants they brand “terrorists” to clear three northern Syrian towns on the Turkish border. If they don’t, the Turks probably will launch a ground operation to chase them out...
WHEN INDIAN PRIME Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech, was extolling Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as one of India’s national heroes, Mahatma Gandhi’s soul must have responded, “I forgive you, Vinayak!” In 1965 an inquiry commission was set up under the former Indian Supreme Court Justice Jiwan Lal Kapoor to investigate the Gandhi assassination....
THE TALKS TO revive the Iran nuclear deal will resume “soon …within an acceptable period of time,” Joseph Borrell has announced. The deal was about curbing Iran’s nuclear program in return for lifting U.S. and U.N. sanctions on that country. Borrell, the European Union foreign policy chief, had been coordinating negotiations between the last Iranian...
AS AMERICA FLEES Afghanistan under the Taliban gun, I am wondering how far west Asian Muslim societies are from ridding themselves of Western hegemony. At an intellectual level, the global Muslim struggle against Western hegemony began in Afghanistan in the 1860s with Jamaluddin al-Afghani prodding King Dost Muhammad to oppose the British colonial power. By...
I WAS BUSY for two days getting ready to celebrate Eid al-Adha at my ancestral home in the Bangladeshi village of Mujahid Khani. And look what I missed. “President Bashar al-Assad took the oath of office for a fourth term in war-ravaged Syria on Saturday, after officially winning 95.1% of the vote in an election,” the...
Ethiopia’s liberal Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been assured a second term in office as his ruling Prosperity Party has won the federal parliamentary election by a landslide, capturing 410 of 436 seats. Elections to about a fifth of the seats have been delayed because of Covid-19, logistical problems and, in the case of Tigray...
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ISN’T serving Americans very well, not, at any rate, in their well-being. Nicholas Kristoff is making the point poignantly. America’s “greatest threat,” writes the Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, isn’t Communist China or authoritarian Russia “but our underperformance at home.” Kristoff cites data from several surveys to support his argument. Fifteen-year-old American kids...
SEVERAL NEWS OUTLETS have lauded President Biden’s meeting on Monday with Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “upbeat.” Have you been following Biden’s comments about Turkey and its president? In April he riled up the entire Turkish nation by labeling the 1915 Armenian tragedy Turkish “genocide.” Earlier he called the Turkish president an “autocrat,” proposed to support...
PRESIDENT BIDEN’S UNSWERVING defense of Israel’s relentless bombing of the Gaza Strip reminds me of my last meeting with a friend and colleague at the Hartford Courant newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut. On a spring day in 1985 my op-ed on the killing of several Palestinians by Israeli troops had appeared in our newspaper. Robin Frank...
I AM AN Asian American and a life-long Democrat, who has been rudely hurt by the recent racist attacks on Americans of Asian descent. I am disappointed, however, by Asian American Senators Tammy Duckworth’s and Mazie Hirono’s cynical use of the tragic incidents to advance their own careers. They have announced that they would boycott...