Author: Mustafa Malik

Ehtiopia’s nationalist journey

Mustafa Malik July 12, 2021

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 province, a secessionist movement.

Ethiopia has become a political laboratory in which Abiy is testing a high-stakes hypothesis. It’s that several dozen ethnic communities – a half-dozen of whom deeply estranged from one another – can be molded into a unified democratic nation. The Tigrayans under the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) have posed the most potent of the challenges to his mission.

The TPLF had dominated the federal government for 27 years even though Tigrayans make up only 6 percent of the Ethiopian population. Traditionally militarist, they dominated the Ethiopian federal bureaucracy since an uprising overthrew the Communist Dreg regime in 1991. The TPLF then led the formation of a coalition of ethno-nationalist parties named Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Through the EPRDF, the Tigrayan party institutionalized its principle of ethnic communities’ rights to self-determination and even secession. The 1994 federal constitution underpinned that centrifugal framework.

But despite Ethiopia’s loosely federal constitutional structure, the TPLF maintained an iron grip on the federal government and unleashed a reign of terror, muzzling and persecuting critical voices. Human Rights Watch termed their wanton persecution as “crimes against humanity on unimaginable scale.” During 2016-2018 the long-festering protests against the TPLF repression under the cover of EPRDF, exacerbated. Led initially by the activists from Omoria, the largest enhno-nationalist region in the coalition, and Amhara, the second-largest, the protests overwhelmed the government. In February 2018 Hailemariam Desalegn, Ethiopia’s beleaguered prime minister, resigned hoping to facilitate an end to the “unrest and political crisis.”

Several parties in the EPRDF coalition – especially the Omoro Democratic Party and Amhara Democratic Party – succeeded in picking the young, visionary Abiy Ahmed from Omoria as Hailemariam’s successor. Once in prime minister’s office, the reformist Abiy released thousands of political prisoners; lifted restrictions on the independent media; scrapped the anti-terrorism law, which was being used as a tool of oppression; ended the state of emergency, under which the TPLF was carrying on the witch-hunt of opposition activists; and invited the country’s once-banned opposition groups back into the country from exile. Among the leading political activists against whom Abiy dropped charges of anti-state activities were Jawar Mohammed, who has since turned into his fierce political rival; and Andargachew Tsege, who had been on the death row 24 hours before the prime minister met him in his office. Abiy stunned his country and the world by ending the decades-long war with Eritrea, which earned him the 2019 Nobel Prize for Peace.

Ethiopia is made up of 10 semi-autonomous federal states, organized along ethnic lines, and ethnic violence has soared in recent years. To pursue his liberal, nationalist agenda, Abiy led the formation of a new party, the Prosperity Party. Four of the EPRDF’s five political parties joined the Prosperity Party. The fifth, the TPLF, grumbling over its loss of three decades of domination of the Ethiopian government and politics, refused to join and began to organize Tigrayan activists into violence and rebellion.

The TPLF insurgency came to a head in November 2020 when armed Tigrayans attacked a federal military base in Tigray. The Abiy government dispatched a federal military force to subdue the rebellion, which was defeated by TPLF rebels. Apart from the Tigrayans, other ethnic groups are also carrying on violence and repression against rival ethnic groups. Amhara authorities annexed a vast part of western Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans to seek refuge elsewhere in the country and in nearly Sudan. Clashes between the Afar and Somali ethnic groups have cost many innocent lives. Benishagul-Gumuz is home to a host of ethnic groups including the Gumuz, Berta, Shinasha, Mao, Kimo, and Fadashi. Conflicts among them have caused continual blood-letting. And so on and on.

Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest nations, replete with a proud history and many cultures. In early youth I was fascinated by the legend of the Ethiopia’s Queen of Sheva. Narrated differently in the Quran and the Old and New Testaments, the saga of the queen is highlighted by her visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem and returning home after conceiving his son. The Ethiopian dynasty of Menilek I, who Ethiopian believe was Solomon’s son by Sheba, lasted until 1974 when the last monarch of the Solomonic dynasty, Emperor Haile Selassie, was overthrown in a pro-Communist military putsch.

Apart from my intellectual interest in Ethiopian affairs, I have been intensely curious about the Nobel-laureate Abiy’s mission to remold the interminably feuding Ethiopian ethnic groups into a unified, democratic nation “where every Ethiopian,” he said, “moves around relaxed, works and prospers.” Abiy’s vision of Ethiopia reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding fathers, respectably, of independent India and Pakistan. Oxford-educated barristers. They set up their multi-ethnic, multinational states as Westminster-style liberal democracies. Pakistan fell apart when Bengalee ethno-nationalists seceded from the old Pakistan, complaining of relentless political and economic repression by Punjabi ethnic elites. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India has eclipsed Gandhi’s secularist political model. Hindus, however, make up 82 percent of the Indian population, and Hinduization has overlapped ethnic fissiparousness in the Hindu heartland of the Indian plains. Secessionist movements fester in several outlying non-Hindu regions, especially in the Muslim-majority Kashmir.

My question about Ethiopia: Can Abiy really tame Ethnic fissures and recast the country into a nation whose “sovereignty is respected and feared, and whose territorial integrity is preserved,” as he has promised?

I see the idealist Ethiopian prime minister pursuing at best a long-term project. Today’s stable Western democracies such as Britain, the United States, France and Germany evolved through ethnic and religious conflicts and mayhem over centuries. Many post-colonial states were haphazardly created overnight as “nation-states” by cobbling together disparate ethnic and religious communities and are expected to function as unified nations. Examples include Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Democracy and elections often challenge their state structures, instead of integration them.

In 1970 Pakistan gave its feuding ethnic communities their first national elections, which allowed long-estranged ethnic Bengalees in the eastern province the opportunity to vote for secession and create independent Bangladesh. In multi-ethnic Iraq, America’s pie-in-the-sky neoconservatives prescribed elections, hoping to set up a Western-style secular democracy. The Iraqi Kurds used their votes to create all but independent Kurdistan. Shiite and Sunni Arab Iraqis are being governed, under the democratic system, by their religious (Shari’a) laws. In Lebanon, 78 years of democracy and elections have failed to integrate its half-dozen confessional communities into an integrated nation. Abiy thinks his electoral mandate would enable him to remake the multi-ethnic Ethiopian chimera into an integrated, liberal democratic nation.

Abiy’s mission is noble, but I think the best course for him to pursue it would be to open painstaking dialogue and negotiations among Ethiopia’s feuding ethnic groups for a unique brand of nationhood and type of national integration that would best fit the country’s unique communal history and behavior patterns. Today Ethiopia seems unprepared to achieve the national cohesion of contemporary America or Britain. The patriotic and visionary prime minister and Ethiopian political elites should, I think, settle for the level of national integration that is feasible today. And they may, if they want, to work toward ushering in the like of the British or American model in the future, if that is possible, hopefully without civil wars.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator, lives in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Pakistan could be in U.S. doghouse

Mustafa Malik June 27, 2021

PAKISTAN’S REFUSAL TO allow a CIA base in its territory has pissed off the Biden administration. The Americans also resent Pakistan’s close ties to China, their global adversary.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that, given Pakistani Muslims’ bitterness toward the United States, allowing Americans a base for hostile operations in Muslim Afghanistan would be “suicidal” for his administration.

Islamabad fears a downturn in its relations with Washington, which has almost always been the case after Pakistan failed to comply with a U.S. military or security demand. The worst case, some Pakistanis say, occurred when Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, decided to get rid of a U.S. military base in Pakistan to avoid antagonizing what used to be the Soviet Union. These Pakistanis link Liaqat’s decision to his assassination in 1951, referred to in declassified U.S. documents. Others, who included former Pakistani prime minister and my mentor Nurul Amin, accused the United States of orchestrating disruptions of Pakistan’s democratic process through its military and bureaucratic elements.

Amin told me in 1969 that the United States had got Pakistan’s second prime minister, Khwaja Nazimuddin, fired by the bureaucrat-turned Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad. Nazimuddin, Amin’s close friend, had refused to join the U.S.-sponsored Baghdad Pact unless the pact had a clause stipulating that America would defend Pakistan against “external threats” (India). My mentor said Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan, then commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, had carried the Pentagon’s instruction to Ghulam Mohammad and was sipping tea in Mohammad’s portico when the governor-general fired the prime minister. The governor-general, a titular head of state, didn’t have the constitutional authority to dismiss the prime minister and would not let Nazimuddin convene the parliament (Constituent Assembly) to demonstrate the support of a parliamentary majority behind him. But Gen. Ayub and the military brass signaled to the deposed prime minister that they supported the governor-general’s action.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto wrote in her autobiography that the United States was behind the overthrow and execution of her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, because Z.A. Bhutto had defied Henry Kissinger’s brutal pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear program.

President Biden’s announcement that all U.S. troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 has been followed by a dramatic Taliban offensive against the forces of the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, an American protégé. The George W. Bush administration had invaded and occupied Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which the United States had dislodged from power in Iraq and Syria, have also increased their activities in in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials have told Biden that even though the United States and its allies have “diminished” the militant forces in Afghanistan, they could threaten the U.S. homeland again in about two years. The Biden administration is looking desperately for CIA bases to keep them in check.

Pakistan’s rejection of the CIA base proposal follows a long and devastating “war on terror” in that country, sponsored by Washington. Mostly Muslim Pakistanis have always opposed their country being dragged into a U.S. war against Muslim forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still, Pakistan had to agree to participate in that war after Richard Armitage, then U.S. deputy secretary of state, threatened the head of Pakistan’s intelligence services that America would “bomb [Pakistan] back to the Stone Age” if it did not join the U.S. fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. More than 70,000 Pakistanis perished in that war, which was ratcheted up by President Barack Obama (after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize!), infuriating further Pakistanis of all political stripes.

Most Pakistanis, too, feel bitter about U.S. support for each of their four military dictators and America’s hostility to the democratic governments who failed to fulfill U.S. demands. Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Pakistani prime minister, had angered the Harry Truman administration, not only by asking America to pull out its base outside the Pakistani city of Peshawar. Liaqat was friends with then Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and had turned down an American plea to pressure Mosaddeq to drop his plans to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (predecessor of the BP). In 1953, four months after the Pakistani Prime Minister Nazimuddin had been overthrown, the CIA station chief in Tehran, Kermit Roosevelt, and the U.S. ambassador there, Loy Henderson, openly incited and bribed Iranian army officers and bureaucrats into staging a military coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, whom the Eisenhower administration replaced with the tyrannical dictator Mohammad Riza Pahlavi.

The United States has often had direct links to Pakistani army generals independently of the country’s civilian authorities, but Imran Khan doesn’t seem to be in the danger of being overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored military coup. Khan has been coopted by the Pakistani army generals and is running the country, especially its foreign relations, at the generals’ behest. The Pakistani decision not to have a CIA base was basically made by those generals, who know that a U.S. base could trigger civil unrest in the country.

The Pakistani economy is in shambles, and Islamabad fears that the Americans could deny it the needed economic support and punish it diplomatically and otherwise for rejecting their base request and also for maintaining Pakistan’s historically close relations with China. The Biden administration apparently believes that having had Pakistan’s giant neighbor, India, in its corner in an anti-Chinese alliance (Japan and Australia being the other partners), it can afford to sideline Pakistan. Washington seems indifferent to the possibility of Pakistan joining a growing number of unfriendly Asian countries including China, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

~ Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for the late Nurul Amin, Pakistani prime minister and vice president.

Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for Nurul Amin, a former Pakistani prime minister and vice president. He hosts the blog ‘Muslims and Liberals.’

Liberal democracy derails

Mustafa Malik June 24, 2021

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 can’t do as well in math as do their peers in many in less developed countries such as Latvia, Poland and Russia. One in five of these children can’t read as well as 10-year-olds do in many other countries. Even more depressing, America is “one of only three countries, out of 163, that went backward in well-being over the last decade.”

Many Americans would, of course, still argue that they are blessed with “the world’s greatest democracy,” which is “a beckon of freedom” for the rest of the world. I travel a lot and one of my favorite haunts is Kolkata (Calcutta), India, the hub of my native Bengali culture. Two years ago, my friend Susnata Sen, who teaches history at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata, asked me, in jest, if Trump had “lost his way to a lunatic asylum” and ended up at the White House! In 2008, in Doha, Qatar, a stringer for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun inquired of me “how in the world did you succeed in getting W” as our president?

I told them both that democracy is “a gift of the Enlightenment,” which had derailed through the “corruption of another gift of the Enlightenment,” liberalism.

Liberalism was originally conceived as the ideology of freedom of the individual from the tyranny of monarchy and religious bigotry and prejudices. The idea was that the human mind, disabused of these strictures and prejudices, would be free to inquire rationally about the world around it, develop the sciences and technology and pursue pleasure and happiness. It sounded as a momentous idea – the greatest message to mankind since Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon (in which the Islamic prophet abolished blood revenge, forbade usury, reminded men of their rights and responsibilities toward women and women’s rights over them, warned men against evil conduct, and so forth).

The one thing that was missing in the Enlightenment missive was, however, moral duty. John Locke, Voltaire or John Stuart Mill didn’t talk about men’s and women’s responsibilities to their kin and community. And that is reflected in the ideology of capitalism and free enterprise, whose corruption has been all but completed by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, the latest twist to capitalism, calls for the elimination of price controls, deregulation of capital markets, lowering of trade barriers, etc., unleashing the forces of wanton plunder and pillage on society, regardless of the poverty, privation and hardships they visit upon the masses. It’s all about making money and pursuing individual pleasure, caring little about kin, community, humanity or its fulfillment.

In 1991 I was researching U.S. foreign policy options in Arab societies with a fellowship from the University of Chicago Middle East Center and hired a research assistant from Washington suburbs. Abdul Matin (not his real name) was a hardworking immigrant from my native India. He took a second job and got his wife to work for another family to make ends meet. They had three children, born in India and Kuwait. One of them was a toddler, and the two others helped their parents around the house besides toiling over their hard schoolwork.

At my Washington office, an American friend used to drop by for coffee and chitchat and sometimes complained about his son not doing well in school because of an under-funded school with inadequately qualified teachers in a rather depressed area in the nation’s capital.

One morning Matin showed up for work with a smile stretching from one ear to the other. He showed me his young son’s school grade released the previous day. The boy got all A’s and just one B.

I congratulated Matin. “You have a brilliant boy!” I said.

“Well,” he replied, “most of the credit goes to my daughter,” he said. Matin had told the children that education was “the most important thing” for them to do in life. Every day his daughter made sure her younger brother did his homework diligently and checked out each of his report cards. Matin’s wife wasn’t educated enough to check up on the boy’s progress in school. And the girl “reports any problem” the boy had to the parents, Natin said.

I saved a copy of the boy’s grade report and showed it to my American friend on his next visit. I told him how the family helped the Hindi-speaking boy do so well in an English-medium school.

“I just have to get serious about my kid’s school work,” he said, pensively. “He has to cut back on his Nintendo games.”

Mustafa Malik worked three decades as a journalist for American newspapers and researcher of U.S. think tanks. He now lives in Bangladesh.

Joe Biden’s valued ‘autocrat’

Mustafa Malik June 18, 2021

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 Erdogan’s opponents during the next elections, and so on.

Yet after he met Erdogan for barely an hour, Biden declared the meeting “very good” and “positive and productive.” His Turkish counterpart called it “fruitful, sincere.”

What prompted the two to kiss and make up?

It reminds me of Erdogan’s first visit to the White House on December 10, 2002. Weeks before, his Justice and Development Party (AKP), rooted in Islam, had won a thumping majority at the Turkish parliamentary elections, routing the long-established, staunchly secularist ruling party. But the head of the victorious party, Erdogan, was still barred from coming into office as prime minister because of his earlier conviction in an ultra-secularist court for reciting an Islamic poem at a public meeting in 1997. (A piece of legislation would soon waive that prohibition.)

Erdogan needed to get Bush to push the European Union to advance Ankara’s membership issue at the bloc’s crucial summit at Copenhagen two days later. Before heading for the White House, the Turkish leader gave a previously scheduled talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, which I attended from the second row of the audience. As Erdogan was walking up to the podium to give his speech, the entire audience applauded him except three people on the front row. One was Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish neoconservative who was then deputy defense secretary masterminding the Iraq war, and two people who had accompanied him to the meeting.

The meeting over, I buttonholed Erdogan for about 10 minutes to ask him a couple of questions about his impending meeting with Bush. I had known him from several visits to Turkey. He said it was “important” that Bush put in a good word for Turkey to EU leaders before their Copenhagen meeting.

As Erdogan was getting up to leave me, I said, “Bush is a prisoner at the hands of Islam-bashing neocons who hate you. They call you an Islamist. Do you think you can get his support?”

“They need Turkey, not me,” Erdogan said, releasing my hand from his.

Now last Monday’s meeting. Erdogan was asked to explain what had made his meeting with Biden productive, the Turkish leader said, without elaborating, that he and the U.S. president had agreed on the need for “cooperation to promote regional security.” In other words, despite his tirade against Erdogan and the Turks, Biden realized that Turkey had a vital role to play for “regional security.” One such role had been announced just after the meeting. After American and allied troops would be pulling out of Afghanistan before September 11, Muslim Turks would be guarding and maintaining the Kabul airport, about the only venue through which America and the West would carry on their diplomatic, security and business affairs in Afghanistan. Troops from any Western countries would be easy targets from the Taliban and other Afghan forces, fuming over 20 years of American occupation of their country.

Secondly, Biden’s avowed mission on this trip was to recommit America to NATO and other alliances, which President Donald Trump had denigrated and alienated. To promote NATO, you need the alliance’s second-largest army, which is Turkey’s.

Thirdly, since the end of the Cold War America and NATO have continually been invading Muslim countries and otherwise attacking Muslim forces. Brown Muslim Turks are about NATO’s only shield, however tenuous, against Muslim accusations of it being a white Christian force refighting the Crusades.

Finally, spanning the Middle East and Europe, Turkey is the West’s only physical link to the Muslim world. The country is, as former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu once told me, “the bridge between Islam and the West.” Moreover, Gallup and other polls have found that Tayyip Erdogan is the most popular leader in the Muslim world. Biden can use him and his country productively to promote America’s much-needed outreach to Muslim societies.

Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, is an international affairs commentator, now living in Bangladesh.

Bennett to stick with apartheid?

Mustafa Malik June 13, 2021

THE SWEARING-IN of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of Israel’s pseudo-fascist Yamina party, and his Cabinet inaugurates an era for Israel without Benjamin Netanyahu in power.

Many Israelis think that this chimera of an ultra-rightist-centrist-liberal-Arab government is going to crumble soon over policy differences. If it doesn’t, what kind of an era that Bennett and the real architect of the government, Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party, are going to usher in?

Four of the eight political parties in the coalition government are rightist or religious. They don’t believe in equal rights for the Palestinians, who make up 20 percent of the Israeli population. The Palestinians are, in fact, living under an apartheid system under Israeli occupation. Is this regime going to restore real democracy in Israel? Or is it going operate as the last colonial power in the Middle East? And that in the 21^st century?

In 2015 when the Bennett was education minister, his policy of immersing science students in Torah and Mishna education prompted Haaretz writer Uri Misgav to warn Israelis that their country was “on the road to theocracy.”

Israel’s problem, he wrote, “is that religion is not separate from government, and over the years it has also become less and less separate from right-wing West Bank settler politics,” which at one point was spearheaded by Bennett.

Israeli society and politics have since been soaking deeper in ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Judaism. Are Bennett and other right-wing politicians in the coalition going to step back and let the four centrist and liberal parties restore democracy and sanity in Israeli public life? Can they, given their rightist and fundamentalist constituencies?

Israel had started out as a secular crypto-socialist state in 1948 under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Religious surge in the Israeli public life began three decades later under Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. That, in fact, coincided with the Shiite Islamic revolution in Iran, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and Islamist movements in many Sunni Muslim countries. More recently, Buddhist religious politics have been swirling in several South and Southeast Asian counties.

The renewed religious pursuit in politics worldwide reflects, partly, a deepening crisis in of liberalism. Liberalism and the attendant rational inquiry promoted science, technology and the pursuit of amenities for happiness and comfort. That spurred a centuries-long orgy of production and consumption of material things for individual happiness, downgrading people’s moral and human obligations to societies. We all are beneficiaries of it, but it has also triggered a dog-eat-dog scramble for material goods, warfare and violence.

Disillusioned by the liberal materialistic paradigm and the disruption of families and communities, people are grasping at their moral roots, usually inhering in ethnic communities and religious traditions and cultures. Many Western philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists have come to recognize this as a logical trend. The late Peter Berger, a foremost American sociologist who had been a devotee of secularism for decades, woke up to a “de-secularization of the world” and attributed it to a “cultural revolution” he saw sweeping Muslim societies for a century and a half. The famed Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has been writing about “post-secular” societies. And the celebrated German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who like Berger, used to dismiss the intrusion of religious values in the public sphere, now and vouches for the legitimacy of religious concerns and viewpoints in the public space.

Voters in most of the countries undergoing religious revival have had the sense not to turn their governments over to religious parties. Except for Iran and briefly for Egypt, no Muslim country has had voted for an Islamic government. That includes the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Indian Hindus have, of course, kept a Hindu nationalist government in power for seven years, but its governance has more to do with Muslin-bashing than setting up a Hindu theocracy.

Israel seems to an exception so far. I can see two obvious reasons for that. One is the blind American support or tolerance for Israel in its subjugation, dispossession and persecution of Palestinians. Under the superpower protection, Israeli rightists and Jewish supremacists have not yet had to face an accounting for their faith-based apartheid system and subjugation and persecution of Palestinians. We saw that, again, three weeks ago when President Biden blocked four U.N. Security Council calls for a ceasefire the Israeli-Hamas conflict, slaughtering 254 Palestinians and 12 Israelis.

Secondly, the Jewish religion basically doesn’t recognize the rights or dignity of non-Jews. The Talmud and Halakhic laws don’t permit “even temporary presence” of Gentiles in the midst of Jews except “when Jews are in exile, or when the Gentiles are more powerful than the Jews.” The Halakhah requires Jews to utter curses while passing by non-Jewish cemeteries, and while passing by a Gentile home, ask God to destroy it. All these are reflected in Israeli culture and right-wing political parties’ attitudes and policies toward the Palestinians. Albert Einstein turned down an invitation to become president of Israel, complaining that Israel’s Herut party was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

For Israel to function as a normal state it needs to reform the extreme features of its religious laws, at least as they relate to politics. I am glad that Netanyahu, who stoked religious bigotry for political purposes, is out of his job now. It’s about time Israel had its own Martin Luther, whose Protestant Reformation pulled Christianity out of its age of bigotry and unfreedom into the era of religious tolerance and social progress.

Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, worked for decades as an American journalist and researcher. He’s now an international affairs commentator Bangladesh.

Can Palestinians bypass Biden’s blind spot?

Mustafa Malik May 18, 2021

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 pinched me on my left arm as I was editing a story.

“Dinner at Gianni?” she asked, as I turned around and looked at her.

“Sure,” I said.

“At 7.”

Frank was a leftist Jew and a staunch Zionist. At our meetings at the Courant café and other places, we used to trash then-President Ronald Reagan’s latest dig at welfare programs, extol socialist leader Michael Harrington’s portrayal of poverty in America, Karl Marx’s pitch for ultimate freedom in his German Ideology, and so forth.

That evening, as we sat across a table at the Gianni restaurant, I was taken aback.

Frank’s eyes were burning with rage.

“I didn’t know that you hate Jews,” she said.

In the article I had criticized Israel’s “colonial occupation” of Palestinian territories and “brutal” treatment of Palestinians, etc.

Did I know, my friend asked, that Palestine had been “the land of the Jews for ages” but had been occupied by “nomads and yahoos” before the establishment of Israel?

I realized that Frank’s knowledge of Jewish and Palestinian history was based more on Jewish propaganda than facts. I told her that both Jews and Palestinians inhabited the same land since ancient times and lived peaceably together in the hills around Jerusalem. “I don’t hate Jews, Robin,” I said. Both Jews and Palestinians, I continued, were nomads before they settled down as peasants and artisans. “But your calling Palestinians yahoos seems to me to reflect your racial bias toward them.”

Robin stood up. “You called me a racist!” She exploded. She picked up her purse and stamped away, paying the bill at the cashier’s counter.

I wondered if Frank had invited me to the meal for a dressing down and wanted it to be our parting dinner. Later, I tried twice to have a conversation with her, but she didn’t have the time.

In any case, I still think that staunchly progressive on many issues as she was, Frank’s attitude toward Palestinians was tinged with racial prejudice. I bet I have prejudices of my own, which I am not aware of.

Joe Biden, a centrist-turned-progressive Democrat, has been known for his blind support for Israel, which I have been following since the 1970s, when he was a senator from Delaware. During the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, he has been the only world leader to offer a blanket defense of Israel’s bloody and devastating bombing of Gaza. In the 15-member U.N. Security Council the United States, under his orders, was alone in blocking two attempts at issuing a statement calling for an immediate end to the Israeli-Hamas hostility. He obviously wanted Israel to continue its slaughter and destruction in Gaza. Biden’s first public comment on the Israeli bombing of civilian targets in Gaza was, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” He did not answer Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) question if “the Palestinians have a right to survive.”

After the Netanyahu government had slaughtered more than a hundred Palestinians, including children and women, the American president proclaimed that Israel had not “significantly overreacted” to Hamas rockets, which had killed eight Israelis. In all this, Biden did not mention, even once, the Israeli raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque and its worshipers in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Neither did he comment on the Israeli initiative to expel Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem to make room for Jewish settlers. The two events had prompted Hamas to start firing rockets and missiles into Israel. When Biden was compelled by domestic and international pressure to try to stop the bloody Israeli aggression, he said he “support(ed) a ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas. He did not call for, let alone demand, a cessation of hostilities.

Biden’s utterly callous attitude toward the havoc Israel is wreaking in the abysmally impoverished enclave blockaded by Israel and Egypt flies in the face of his widely publicized human rights rhetoric and otherwise admirably progressive agenda. Biden plans to lower the eligibility age for Medicare; forgive federal loan debt for those making less than $125,000; raise $2 to $4 trillion in taxes to pay for progressive plans and programs; levy a 95 percent excise tax on pharmaceuticals if the industry doesn’t accept price controls, and so forth. His $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief law is probably the most progressive piece of legislation enacted by Congress since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In fact Bien’s strong support for black civil rights and other issues promoting black interests have made him quite popular in that community, which was pivotal to his winning the Democratic presidential primary against Bernie Sanders. But racial tolerance and empathy is selective in America. Many Americans, disabused of prejudice toward blacks, can be, and have been, hostile toward Arabs, Muslims and Asians. A brown-skinned Muslim, born in India, I have encountered racial gibes and taunts from progressive colleagues and acquaintances. (Where did I park my “camel”? Did I have a second wife tucked away in my “old country”? It was a reference to polygamy practiced by some Muslim men. How could I learn to write English so well? And so on.)

The Democratic Party, until the early 1970s, was honeycombed with anti-black racists. (Republicans by and large are racists.) The Democratic Party used to be the party of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, and segregationists. And many Democratic presidents, including the otherwise progressive ones, were diehard racists. Woodrow Wilson, who promoted freedom and the right of self-determination for peoples abroad, was an anti-black racist pig at home. He mandated racial segregation of the federal workforce, reversing the gains the blacks had made following Reconstruction. His segregation order hurt blacks most at the Post Office, in which 60 percent of workers were black; and the Treasury Department, which employed the second-largest number of blacks.

Monroe Trotter, the black editor and publisher of the Guardian newspaper, published from Boston, had campaigned for Wilson’s election. A brilliant Harvard scholar and civil rights leader, Trotter led a black delegation to the president to complain about his segregation order. Wilson argued that racial segregation would “prevent any kind of friction between the white employees and the Negro employees.” Trotter protested the president’s argument, citing “the established fact … that for 50 years white and colored clerks have been working together in peace and harmony and friendliness.” The 28th president replied that he had been “offended” by the civil rights leader’s insolence and ordered him out of the White House.

FDR is widely considered the most progressive among American presidents, and yet he was among the most racist of them. His internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II is widely known. Less known is his staunchly anti-Semitic attitude and policy. He persistently refused to allow Jews from Nazi Germany to immigrate to the United States. He suggested that they be resettled in Venezuela, Ethiopia or West Africa. He even opposed plans to resettle fleeing German Jews in the Dominican Republic or U.S. Virgin Islands because of those countries’ proximity to the United States, which, he feared, could enable them to infiltrate into America. When the passenger ship St. Louis with nearly 1,000 German Jews fleeing Hitler’s persecution headed toward the United States, Roosevelt did not respond to telegrams requesting that it be docked on the U.S. shore. The State Department forced it to return to Antwerp from where many of them were herded into concentration camps. In the end, wide circulation of the news of the Holocaust forced Roosevelt to admit some Jewish refugees. Historian Rafael Medoff wrote that Roosevelt’s anti-Semitism stemmed from his belief “that America was by nature, and should remain, an overwhelmingly white, Protestant country; and that Jews, on the whole, possessed certain innate and distasteful characteristics.”

Harry S. Truman was another innately racist Democratic president. He recognized Israel because Jews were among his ardent campaign activists. But he brushed aside reports of the harrowing ethnic cleansing of the new state of Israel of its Palestinian inhabitants. Jews, mostly from Europe, expelled 700,000 Palestinians (some of them were displaced by war) from their ancestral homes and lands. Truman also opposed interracial marriage. He often used racial slurs and told racist jokes. He accused civil rights activists of being masterminded Communists and called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a troublemaker.

The Democratic Party has shed much of its anti-black racism, thanks to the struggle and sacrifices of many blacks and whites in the Civil Rights Movement. Anti-black and anti-Semitic comments today are unacceptable in America. But anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Asian racism remains alive and well in American society. And in the halls of Congress, which strikes you when you listen to the comments of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), or Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) on the floors of the House and Senate.

But the tide is turning. Last week, for the first time in American history, the floor of the House of Representatives vibrated with biting criticism of an American president’s defense of Israeli aggression against Palestinians. Many critics of Biden’s and America’s callousness toward Palestinian dispossession, subjugation and persecution under Israeli occupation saw it as anti-Arab racism and likened it to racism against blacks.

“The Black and Palestinian struggles for liberation are interconnected,” tweeted Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), “and we will not let up until all of us are free.”

Mustafa Malik, editor and publisher of this blog, lives in Bangladesh.

Must skin tone replace values?

Mustafa Malik March 24, 2021

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 the Senate confirmation of any White House nominee for Cabinet positions unless he or she is an Asian American! Mediocre lawmakers as they are, they obviously are playing their Asian American card to secure plum jobs in the administration.

I am already put off by President Biden’s overuse of the skin tone and gender criteria to fill positions in his administration. I had hoped that progressive credentials and vision would be his main hiring criteria, while not, of course, making his administration a white monochrome.

I credit the administration for its 1.9 trillion measure that would attend to the needs of folks in the middle and lower-middle classes. But I am disappointed to see the White House being honeycombed with run-of-the bureaucrats with status quo and Cold War mentality.

I remember that a reporter had asked retired Justice Thurgood Marshall what his advice would be to President George H.W. Bush in appointing his replacement on the Supreme Court bench.

“Don’t hire the wrong nigger!” the black jurist admonished Bush.

It looked like Papa Bush was thumping his nose at Marshall, a progressive icon, when he nominated the black Clarence Thomas, one of the court’s most right-wing member ever, to the gifted and visionary black jurist!

It’s strange that the United States is the only democracy that is still hung up on skin color, gender and sexual orientation in politics and government, discounting competence, ideas and insights.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, is the host of this blog.

Biden’s war on racism nets UK war hero

Mustafa Malik January 22, 2021

ONE OF THE TOP items on President Biden’s agenda is fighting racism. So upon entering the White House on Wednesday he removed – again – the bust of the racist British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. President Barack Obama had put away the bust from the room but Donald trump, his successor, brought it back.

Told about Biden’s action, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he had no quarrel with the new American president decorating his “private office … as he wishes.”

But when Obama had removed the bust from the Oval Office, Johnson, then mayor of London, was furious. He fumed that the black Obama’s action had shown “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire.”

Johnson’s conciliatory gesture toward the 46th American president may reflect, in part, the Britts’ desperate need for good trade relations with the United States after their foolish breakup with the European Union. The Conservative British prime minister was wrong, however, to assume that Obama disliked Churchill because of Churchill’s or Britain’s legacy of imperialism, which doubtless was brutal and dehumanizing. Many people in the East – and now in the West – despise Churchill mainly for his rabidly racist views of non-white people and societies. He called them “barbaric nations” and “savages” whom he considered “a menace to civilized nations” in the West.

Churchill ardently believed in Social Darwinism, superiority of white races, and argued over and over that they have the inherent right to subjugate, dispossess and persecute non-whites. Intriguingly, Churchill considered Jews a white people and as British colonial secretary in the 1920s, he defended, strongly, the expulsion of Palestinians from the lands belonging to them for centuries by Jewish refugees from Europe. Churchill thought of brown-skinned Palestinians as some kind of beasts who had no right to challenge their dispossession by fairer-skinned European Jews.

“I do not admit,” he explained, “that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time.”

The British leader who led his nation to victory in World War II held the same view about Anglo-Saxons uprooting dark-skinned people from the United States and Australia and occupying their land. “I do not admit,” he said. “that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

Churchill’s view of non-whites being subhuman made him disregard the usefulness of their lives. A glaring example it was his role during the 1943 famine in the Indian region of Bengal, where I grew up and made my debut as a journalist. In other times when a food shortage had occurred in Bengal or any other part of British India, rice, and sometimes wheat, was rushed in from elsewhere to feed people. But in 1943 Britain was fighting a bitter war with Germany and, ignoring the Indian administration’s warnings about the approaching famine in Bengal, Prime Minister Churchill decided to divert food supplies for Bengal to British and other troops in Europe. The result was mass starvation of Bengalees, millions of whom perished from it. William F. Buckley Jr. called it a slaughter of “genocidal proportions.”

Finest Hour is a quarterly publication put out by the International Churchill Society. In an editorial (Nov. 18, 2008) entitled “Media lying over Churchill’s crimes,” an editor of the journal, Gideon Poyla, wrote: “Churchill is our hero because of his leadership in World War 2, but his immense crimes, notably the WW2 Bengali Holocaust, the 1943-45 Bengal Famine in which Churchill murdered 6-7 million Indians, have been deleted from history by an extraordinary Anglo-American denial.”

Reliable estimates have put the death toll from the famine at about 3 million.

In India, Churchill was the most hated British prime minister in history. He earned that infamy with his racist contempt for Indians (He called Mahatma Gandhi “a half-naked fekir,” or beggar), which he gushed out off and on and which was reflected in his disdainful rejection of Indians’ repeated pleadings and demands for autonomy or independence. As World War II began, many Indian, realizing that they won’t get their independence from the Churchill government, prayed for Hitler’s victory, which they hoped would dissolve the British empire and liberate them from British colonial rule and racist domination.

The Allied victory over Nazi Germany was a pyrrhic one for Britain. The war wrecked the British economy and military power so much so that within two years the Britts – who were never impressed by Gandhi’s non-violent mantra or tactic – were forced to concede the independence of India and Pakistan, which was followed in quick succession by the independence of other British colonies around the world.

Today even many Britts see Churchill as among the most notoriously racist leaders in their history. Last June protests over the killing of African-American George Floyd by a white American police officer spread to Britain. Soon the Churchill statue at London’s Parliament Square was found spray-painted with the words: “Was a Racist.” Sadiq Khan, then London mayor, got the statue boarded up to protect it from protesters’ rage. Undaunted, some of them wrote in big black letters on one of the walls around it: “Watch out! Racist Inside!”

America is going through a revolution to stamp out racism from its social fabric and has done away with statues, busts and pictures of most of its confederate heroes who used to defend racism. It’s crazy to try to have an arch-racist from abroad enshrined in the American political pantheon. Well, Trump was craziest of American presidents.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of this blog, is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

A crusader for the oppressed

Mustafa Malik December 4, 2020

By Mustafa Malik

THE 14TH ANNIVERSARY OF Mahmud Ali’s passing fills my mind with memories of the man I had come to know as a human incarnation of Pakistan. Among those memories was his forecast that Bangladesh would establish good relations with Pakistan “sooner than you think.” The last time he repeated this prognosis to me was in June 2000, when he was visiting with me and my family in Washington. I remembered his prediction just yesterday as I ran into the headline “Hasina calls for strengthening ties with Pakistan” in the online edition of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. Sheikh Hasina Wajed is the prime minister of Bangladesh.

Mr. Ali was the first of my two political mentors, the other being Nurul Amin, once chief minister of East Pakistan who became Pakistan’s last Bengalee prime minister. In 1970-71 both statesmen opposed the breakup of old Pakistan, which they had struggled onerously to help create, and they lived the rest of their lives in self-imposed exile in what was left of Pakistan after Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, had become independent. Years of repression and economic discrimination by West Pakistan-based military and political elites, culminating in a brutal military crackdown, led to Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan. The two countries have since been estranged politically, diplomatically and economically.

Mr. Ali (like me) was born in the British Indian province of Assam. In 1946, as the general secretary of the All-India Muslim League in Assam, the young leader helped split the old Hindu-majority Assam province through a referendum so our native Muslim-majority part of it could join the Muslim homeland of Pakistan.

Born into an aristocratic family, he cut his political teeth in the Pakistan movement and breathed his last during a speech in Lahore, having barely finished a sentence calling for the realization of one of Pakistan’s unfulfilled causes: the liberation of Indian-occupied part of the Jammu and Kashmir state.

Besides being one of Pakistan’s architects, Mr. Ali will be remembered as a top leader in its struggle to wrest democracy back from the clutches of military dictatorships. He was one of nine leading Pakistani statesmen who in 1962 issued the first clarion call to then military dictator General Mohammad Ayub Khan to restore democracy, which Ayub and a group of other army generals had usurped through a coup d’état.

It was Mr. Ali’s battle for “the emancipation of the peasants and workers,” as he termed it, which lured me to him at age 17. The 38-year-old revenue minister of East Pakistan was presiding over a public meeting in his native Sunamganj district, in a field covered with the stubble of a newly harvested rice crop. The crowd of peasants, fishermen and a smattering of students greeted other speeches with mild applause. But when Mr. Ali began denouncing, passionately, the “exploitation” of impoverished people by zeminders (owners of large landed estates), money lenders and industrialists, they went wild with the slogans: “Mahmud Ali Zindabad” (long live Mahmud Ali), “Pakistan Zindabad,” and “Krishok-Mazdur ek ho” (Peasants and workers, unite).

I had just finished my matriculation (high school graduation) exam and was attending the meeting as a campaign activist for a progressive candidate for election to the East Pakistan legislature, supported by Mr. Ali, and was deeply impressed by his speech. The meeting over, I met him at a nearby dak bungalow and embarked on my lifelong association with him.

I had opportunities to come in contact with most of Pakistan’s major politicians and interview many of them for my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital. Except for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, Mahmud Ali was the most politically courageous and ideologically committed statesman I have known in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Mr. Ali’s relationship with Sheikh Mujib alternated between close friendship and bitter ideological and political rivalry.

Bangladesh-Pakistan ties

Among the last of Mr. Ali’s political projects was the one to promote solidarity among Muslim communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir and other parts of the Indian subcontinent through his movement Tehreek-i-Takmil-i-Pakistan. He remained optimistic about this goal to the last days of his life.

During our discursive discussions, he recalled that “the enthusiasm that Muslims in Bengal and Assam” had demonstrated for the creation of Pakistan, they had never before shown for “any other movement of causes.” That was mostly because, he said, they saw Pakistan as a “promise of liberation from Hindu zeminders and money lenders. And from caste-Hindu oppression.” Lower-caste Hindus, he went on, also shared with Muslims that aspirations for “freedom from the oppression and suppression” and in the 1937 and 1946 elections in Bengal, many of them voted for Muslim candidates. Eventually, he predicted, Muslim communities in the subcontinent would revive some kind of “solidarity as they showed during the Pakistan movement.” Bangladesh and Pakistan would, he added, establish “good relations sooner than you think.”

The last time he shared this optimism with me was, as I mentioned, in our very last meetings during June 22-24, 2000. A federal minister in the Pakistan government, Mr. Ali was on an official visit to Washington. He was staying in Omni Sheraton Hotel in Washington but was kind enough to visit with me and my family for dinner on two of those evenings.

All his life, my mentor was a staunchly secular, progressive man, whose struggle for workers and peasants earned him the “Communist” label from his conservative political opponents. Among them was one of my uncles who warned me against associating with him because “Communists don’t believe in Allah or Islam.” In reality, Mr. Ali had plunged into the Pakistan movement because he saw it as a struggle to alleviate the suffering of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, who happened to be mostly repressed and impoverished, from exploitation of the landed and moneyed class, which happened to be mostly upper-caste Hindus.

In the course of his long political career Mr. Ali changed political parties and some of his political views. But he stuck with his two things that defined him. One was his trademark costume in social and political life, a sherwani and tight pajamas. The other was his advocacy of and deep empathy for the poor and oppressed.

Mustafa Malik is a writer in Washington. He hosts the blog Community.

Biden’s pursuit of LBJ legacy

Mustafa Malik November 8, 2020

“Our long national nightmare is over!”

So declared Gerald R. Ford on August 9, 1974, from the East Room of the White House. He was making his maiden speech to the nation as the 38th president of the United States. By ending the “national nightmare” the new president meant that his pardoning of his predecessor, the disgraced President Richard M. Nixon, was going to help heal the deep wounds that Nixon’s Watergate scandal had inflicted on America.

Two days ago I remembered watching Ford’s comment live from Frederick, Maryland, as I was reading Joe Biden’s victory speech on the Internet. A bit more modestly than had Ford, the president-elect said his victory over President Trump had ushered in a “time to heal” America’s wounds, caused by Trump’s disastrous presidency.

A mediocre politician without ingenuity or a vision, Ford did not accomplish much as president before he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 elections. Biden, too, is not known for political insights or vision, and his long career as a lawmaker and vice president has not left much of a footprint on America’s political landscape.

Can he do better as president?

He can and I am hopeful that he will, mainly because of the need of the hour and the progressive political and social climate he has inherited. Trump has vandalized America’s economy, fractured its race relations and brutalized its relations with most of America’s allies, except the murderous crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman; and the colonialist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has turned the Palestinian territory into an open-air prison and Israel into an apartheid state. America will be grateful to its 46th president if he can just start mending the economic and racial injustices at home and the alarming fissures in foreign relations that Trump has brought about.

I am a card-carrying “Berniecrat” who worked his tails off campaigning for Bernie Sanders’ unsuccessful presidential candidacy in 2016 and this year. (I still flaunt two “Bernie for President” stickers from 2016 on my car bumper.) I am still not a fan of Biden’s. I used to call him a standard-bearer of “the Republican wing of the Democratic Party” and a flunky of Wall Street, which has contributed lavishly to his presidential campaign.

Biden opposed school desegregation in the 1970s; befriended Strom Thurmond and other arch-racists; voted to trim welfare programs; overturn the Glass-Steagall law, deregulating banking and making many Wall Street banks too big to fail; pass the 1994 “tough on crime” bill, dumping many, mostly black, innocent and small-time offenders into prisons; launch the catastrophic Iraq war; and so on. In fact Biden did not face a war he did not support.

Yet I voted gladly for Biden on Tuesday, hoping that he would be able to do much of the mending I have just mentioned. Besides, Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s ultra-progressive presidential campaigns and a progressive surge in the Democratic Party and the country have moved much of America to the left, which was reflected in the platform on which the former vice president has been elected president. The platform’s embrace of Medicare-for-all, a Green New Deal, police reforms, and high tax on wealth accumulation, etc., prompted Trump to call Biden a “socialist.” Waheed Shahid of Justice Democrats has called the Democratic platform “the most progressive any Democratic nominee in the modern history” had campaigned on. On the stump Biden has also promised to quadruple federal spending on low-income housing subsidies; triple K-12 school aid in poorer areas; double Pell Grants for students and make community colleges free. Additionally, he has proposed to invest $100 billion in an affordable housing trust fund, $10 billion of which would be reserved for transit projects in high-poverty areas. It all is breathtaking, echoing, to some extent, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. It remains to be seen how much of this highly ambitious progressive agenda Biden can translate into reality.

In 1970 I was covering a public meeting of the would-be Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for the Pakistan Observer newspaper at Liaqat Bagh park in Rawalpindi. The populist, theatrical politician promised to make pullers of rickshaws – tricycles carrying passengers – owners of their vehicles. Most rickshaw pullers rented their rickshaws. Bhutto also promised to impose heavy taxes on corporations piling up “unconscionable” wealth; have a law passed increasing the minimum wage for factory workers; “try my utmost” to see that “no Pakistanis go to bed hungry”; and so forth. In a fit of excitement, he threw away his jacket, which landed on a child’s head, making him cry. The crowd was ecstatic and chanted deliriously: “Bhutto Zindabad!” Long live Bhutto.

The meeting over, I hired a rickshaw to return to my nearby hotel. “Bhutto Zindabad,” the man pedaling the rickshaw yelled, punching the air with his fist. I asked the shabbily dressed middle-aged man if he owned his rickshaw, and he replied that he had rented it.

“Do you think Bhutto will make you owner this rickshaw?’’ I asked.

He replied in Urdu, “Nahin, sahib, yeh kabhi nahin ho ga,” no, sir, that will never happen.

“Why are you then so excited by his speech?”

“Sahib,” he said, “woh to mera dil khush kar dia,” sir, he has made my heart happy.

The lanky, middle-aged man added that most other politicians did not talk about bread-and-butter issues with the passion that Bhutto exuded.

I have to see how many of his campaign promises Biden will be able to fulfill. For now, though, his progressive agenda has “made my heart happy.”

Prime Minister Bhutto turned out to be the most progressive statesman in Pakistan’s history who adopted a plethora of anti-poverty, pro-worker and other progressive programs that no other Pakistani prime minister, let alone military dictator, has dared to attempt to this day.

If Biden can deliver on half the promises he has made to America, he will turn out to the most progressive American president since Lyndon B. Johnson, also known as LBJ.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog Community, is a political commentator in Washington.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.