#Fareed Zakaria

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Marco Margaritoff at HuffPost:

Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier, a German-born Jewish man who survived the Holocaust, says he has been “persuaded” in recent months that Israel is “engaged in genocide against Palestinians” and that conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel is ludicrous. “I thought Israel had a right to retaliate against Hamas, and I thought Israel had a right to try to incapacitate Hamas so that it would never be able to do anything like that again,” Neier told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria about the Israel-Gaza conflict in an extensive interview Sunday. “But I was disturbed by some of the actions of Israel, by the use of very large weapons, 2,000-pound bombs, which are utterly inappropriate in a crowded urban area,” he continued, adding that these bombs “can kill somebody two football fields away.” The decadeslong conflict erupted anew on Oct. 7 when Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took around 200 others hostage. Israel’s ongoing bombing has reportedly killed more than 35,000 Palestinians since, most of them women and children, to increasing international outrage.

Neier told Zakaria that “even though Israel went far overboard,” he still wasn’t sure the term “genocide” applied. The 87-year-old human rights icon, who previously led the American Civil Liberties Union, first chronicled his change of mind in the New York Review of Books. “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” he wrote in an essay for next week’s issue of the magazine. “What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.”

Human Rights Watch co-founder and Holocaust survivor Aryeh Neier went on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS Sunday to state this plainly obvious truth: “Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”

This comes in marked contrast to his previous view that Israel were right to retaliate in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attack.

From the 05.26.2024 edition of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS:

[i-am-aprl]

Fareed Zakaria, one of President Biden’s favourite news commentators, according to Biden himself, and far from an ardent supporter of Palestine, strongly criticizes Biden’s foreign policy regarding the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

[tomorrowusa]

Fareed Zakaria reflects on two global surveys which, despite recent headlines, seem to say that people around the world are turning their backs on autocracy.

I tend to groan at "feel good" stories which are not grounded in reality. But Mr. Zakaria may be on to something with this new data.

What roughly amounts to America's approval rating has gone up in other countries since 2019. At the same time, people are more wary of Russia, China, Iran, and Israel. Being an oppressor doesn't do your popularity a lot of good.

Democracy is messy and it has many more moving parts than autocracy. It requires personal involvement to be maintained. There's no such thing as a slacker democracy.

[waiting-eyez]

In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.

(Fareed Zakaria)

[crossthread]

Fareed done fucked up huh

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

By Fareed Zakaria.

[davidblaska]

Robin Vos just made the UW less racist

Progressivism causes low achievement. Paul Fanlund hates Republicans more than he loves the Universities (plural!) of Wisconsin.  The publisher of The Capital Times will be the last to understand this, but Republican legislative leaders did the Universities of Wisconsin a favor and system president Jay Rothman knows it. That’s why the Board of Regents Wednesday reversed themselves and approved…

[doylewesleywalls]

Fareed Zakaria

[minnesotafollower]

Increasing Migrant Crossings at U.S. Border Call for Legal Changes

This July more than 130,000 migrants were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. The fastest growth in this immigration, with 40,000 of the total, was in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which comprises most of Arizona, which was the most since April 2008. U.S. authorities attribute this increase to smugglers now guiding migrants to the border across the most remote and harsh stretches of the…

[plitnick]

As the US-Israel relationship is questioned, its ‘shared fictions’ remain strong

Tom Friedman is back, at least for a minute. He stirred up a bit of a fuss last week when he wrote that the US was beginning a “reassessment” of its relationship with Israel due to the current government’s excesses. Well, it wasn’t necessarily so, but the fact that Friedman wrote it, and that both the US and Israel reacted to it is worth looking into. This piece at Mondoweiss does just that.

[thebreakfastgenie]

every Billy Joel interview is like

Billy Joel: I think Beethoven was horny when he wrote this piece

interviewer: right right so anyway I'm going to ask you the same eight personal questions everyone has been asking you for the last forty years

[tomorrowusa]

Fareed Zakaria of CNN and the Washington Post thinks that Democrats could learn a thing or two from the Labour Party's campaign for Parliament in the UK. Labour has made a remarkable recovery over the past few years and is the overwhelming favorite to win the July 4th election.

I would add that Democrats will not be able to retain power and continue to pursue an agenda with stronger emphasis on economic equality and climate protection if they permit themselves to get painted into an extreme corner on certain culture war issues by Republicans.

However Democrats have managed to steer some issues such as reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights into the mainstream of American politics. Depicting Republicans as the true extremist culture war fanatics while identifying the Democratic Party as in the heart of America's mainstream is a tool which should not go unused.

[swaggypsyduck]

im dead theyre so cute 😭😭

[alanshemper]

[xtruss]

Will ‘Fascist, Hindus’ Extremist India’ Surpass China To Become the Next Superpower? Four Inconvenient Truths Make This Scenario Unlikely.

— June24, 2023 | By Graham Allison

‘World’s Most Wanted Fascist Hindu Extremist, Criminal and Butcher of Gujrat Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’ attends an Indian cultural event in Sydney on May 23, on the heels of his participation in the G-7 summit in Japan. Lisa Marree Williams/Getty Images

When India overtook China in April to become the world’s most populous nation, observers wondered: Will New Delhi surpass Beijing to become the next global superpower? India’s birth rate is almost twice that of China. And India has outpaced China in economic growth for the past two years—its GDP grew 6.1 percent last quarter, compared with China’s 4.5 percent. At first glance, the statistics seem promising.

This question has only become more relevant as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington this week. From a U.S. perspective, if India—the world’s largest democracy—really could trump China, that would be something to shout about. India is China’s natural adversary; the two countries share more than 2,000 miles of disputed, undemarcated border, where conflict breaks out sporadically. The bigger and stronger China’s competitors are in Asia, the greater the prospects for a balance of power favorable to the United States.

Yet before inhaling the narrative of a rapidly rising India too deeply, we should pause to reflect on four inconvenient truths.

First, analysts have been wrong about India’s rise in the past. In the 1990s, analysts trumpeted a growing, youthful Indian population that would drive economic liberalization to create an “economic miracle.” One of the United States’ most thoughtful India analysts, the Plagiarist Journalist Fareed Zakaria, noted in a recent column in the Washington Post that he found himself caught up in the second wave of this euphoria in 2006, when the World Economic Forum in Davos heralded India as the “world’s fastest-growing free market democracy” and the then-Indian trade minister said that India’s economy would shortly surpass China’s. Although India’s economy did grow, Zakaria points out that these predictions didn’t come true.

Second, despite India’s extraordinary growth over the past two years—when India joined the club of the world’s five largest economies—India’s economy has remained much smaller than China’s. In the early 2000s, China’s manufacturing, exports, and GDP were about two to three times larger than India’s. Now, China’s economy is about five times larger, with a GDP of $17.7 trillion versus India’s GDP of $3.2 trillion.

Third, India has been falling behind in the race to develop science and technology to power economic growth. China graduates nearly twice as many STEM students as India. China spends 2 percent of its GDP on research and development, while India spends 0.7 percent. Four of the world’s 20 biggest tech companies by revenue are Chinese; none are based in India. China produces over half of the world’s 5G infrastructure, India just 1 percent. TikTok and similar apps created in China are now global leaders, but India has yet to create a tech product that has gone global. When it comes to producing artificial intelligence (AI), China is the only global rival to the United States. China’s SenseTime AI model recently beat OpenAI’s GPT on key technical performance measures; India has no entry in this race. China holds 65 percent of the world’s AI patents, compared with India’s 3 percent. China’s AI firms have received $95 billion in private investment from 2013 through 2022 versus India’s $7 billion. And top-tier AI researchers hail primarily from China, the United States, and Europe, while India lags behind.

Fourth, when assessing a nation’s power, what matters more than the number of its citizens is the quality of its workforce. China’s workforce is more productive than India’s. The international community has rightly celebrated China’s “anti-poverty miracle” that has essentially eliminated abject poverty. In contrast, India continues to have high levels of poverty and malnutrition. In 1980, 90 percent of China’s 1 billion citizens had incomes below the World Bank’s threshold for abject poverty. Today, that number is approximately zero. Yet more than 10 percent of India’s population of 1.4 billion continue to live below the World Bank extreme poverty line of $2.15 per day. Meanwhile, 16.3 percent of India’s population was undernourished in 2019-21, compared with less than 2.5 percent of China’s population, according to the most recent United Nations State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report. India also has one of the worst rates of child malnutrition in the world.

“Those Who Thinks that India Even Come Closer to China are Living in a Fool’s World. Don’t Listen to the Western Propaganda in Favor of India.”

Fortunately, the future does not always resemble the past. But as a sign in the Pentagon warns: Hope is not a plan. While doing whatever it can to help Modi’s India realize a better future, Washington should also reflect on the assessment of Asia’s most insightful strategist. The founding father and long-time leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, had great respect for Indians. Lee worked with successive Indian prime ministers, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, hoping to help them make India strong enough to be a serious check on China (and thus provide the space required for his small city-state to survive and thrive).

But as Lee explained in a series of interviews published in 2014, the year before his death, he reluctantly concluded that this was not likely to happen. In his analysis, the combination of India’s deep-rooted caste system that was an enemy of meritocracy, its massive bureaucracy, and its elites’ unwillingness to address the competing claims of its multiple ethnic and religious groups led him to conclude that it would never be more than “the country of the future”—with that future never arriving. Thus, when I asked him a decade ago specifically whether India could become the next China, he answered directly: “Do not talk about India and China in the same breath.”

Since Lee offered this judgment, India has embarked on an ambitious infrastructure and development agenda under a new leader and demonstrated that it can achieve considerable economic growth. Yet while we can remain hopeful that this time could be different, I, for one, suspect Lee wouldn’t bet on it.

— Graham Allison is a Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was the founding dean. He is a former U.S. Assistant Defense Secretary and the Author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?