Biden's Hypocrisy: Putin is a Killer But Modi is a US Ally

"Putin is a killer", declared President Joseph R. Biden in a recent interview with George Stephanopoulos  of ABC News. This stands in sharp contrast to what former President Donald J. Trump said in a 2017 Super Bowl Sunday interview Fox News when host Bill O'Reilly  authoritatively declared Russian President Vladimir “Putin’s a killer.” Trump replied with the question: “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

President Biden with Prime Minister Modi

Biden is declaring Putin a "killer" while at the same time embracing India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has killed thousands of Muslims. In fact, Modi was shunned by the United States and much of the civilized world for over a decade for his part in the 2002 Gujarat massacre of Indian Muslims. His policies as prime minister indicate that he's not a changed man. 

Biden needs to understand that Modi's Hindutva and America's Christian White Supremacists who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 have a lot in common. He should listen to Meena Harris, Vice President  Kamala Harris' niece, who recently tweeted: "It’s time to talk about violent Hindu extremism”. Referring to a headline about "violent Christian extremism", Harris said "it's all connected". Hindu trolls have launched hateful misogynistic campaign against Harris and other western female celebrities who have recently tweeted in support of farm protesters. 

In response to a Hindu troll accusing Meena Harris of "Hinduphobia", she tweeted: "I'm a Hindu. Stop using religion as a cover for fascism".  

Rihanna, Greta Thunberg and Meena Harris

It started when singer Rihanna, who has more than 100 million Twitter followers, tweeted “why aren’t we talking about this?!”, with a link to a news story about an internet blackout at the protest camps where tens of thousands of farmers have been protesting for over two months. Teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg also tweeted a story about the internet blackout, saying: “We stand in solidarity with the #FarmersProtest in India.” Both drew threats of rape and violence from hordes of Hindu trolls rampaging Twitter.  Some hailed the 2009 violent assault on Rihanna by singer  Chris Brown and said it was well-deserved. 

Meena Harris Tweet. Source: Twitter

"Is Rihanna Muslim" started to trend on Google. Many Hindu trolls talked of links between Rihanna and Muslims, Khalistan and Pakistan and even claimed  Rihanna was paid to tweet in support of farmers. 

India Leads the World in Internet Shutdowns in 2020 Source: Access Now

The phenomenon of Hindu trolls issuing threats of violence and rape is not new.  It has been well documented by Indian journalist Swati Chaturvedi in a book entitled "I am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of BJP's Digital Army" as far as 2017. She found that the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi follows hundreds of twitter accounts regularly tweeting abuses and threats of rape and other forms of physical violence against Indian actors, artists, politicians, journalists, minorities in India and individuals of Pakistani origin.
Until recently, the main target of violent Hindu extremists have been primarily Muslims and liberal Hindus. But now the threats of violence and rape against western celebrities are beginning to expose the ugly face of violent Hindu Nationalism. It is  now getting coverage in mainstream western media. 
Meena Harris is absolutely right in her assertion that "it's all connected". It is a historical fact that Hindu Nationalist ideology draws its inspiration from violent European movements like Fascism and Nazism. B.S. Monnje was the first Hindu nationalist who met Mussolini in 1931. 
Hindu nationalists, now led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India, have a long history of admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, including his "Final Solution". In his book "We" (1939), Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, the leader of the Hindu Nationalist RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) wrote, "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."  
It is important to note that the vast majority of Indian-Americans vote for Democrats but most still support India's Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Modi who endorsed former President Trump in 2020 presidential elections. In December 2020, the Carnegie Endowment published a study detailing the political attitudes of Indian Americans: 56 percent of Indian Americans self-identified as Democrats, 22 percent as independents, and 15 percent as Republicans; 72 percent of Indian Americans planned on voting for Biden this election, while 22 percent responded with support for Trump. The same survey found that while Indian American Trump voters and Republicans were much more enthusiastic about Modi, a majority of all Indian Americans supported Modi
Here's a video clip of American historian Dr. Audrey Truschke on the Nazi inspired Hindutva ideology:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/XbFrxTbxBAw"; width="560"></iframe>" height="315" src="https://img1.blogblog.com/img/video_object.png" width="560" style="cursor: move; background-color: #b2b2b2;" />
Here's a video of American journalist Mike Wallace asking Louis Farrakhan about Nigeria, calling the most populous African country "the most corrupt nation in the world": Here's Farrakhan's response: Every nation has its problems. Nigeria has serous problems. But it's only 35 years old. And America have been around for over 200 years and it is in no position to judge others on corruption and democracy. Black people in America got the right to vote only a few decades ago. And America has blood on its hands, the blood of millions of native Americans and the blood of the Japanese who died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let's not moralize. Let's help them.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/DfXLC4jQZ2M"; title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>" height="315" src="https://img1.blogblog.com/img/video_object.png" width="560" style="cursor: move; background-color: #b2b2b2;" /> 

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Comment by Ameer Alam on March 18, 2021 at 12:00pm
Biden is making sure that India sustains its pressure on Pakistan.
Comment by Riaz Haq on March 19, 2021 at 7:32pm

Mr. Biden, Enough With the Tough Talk on China
Modest measures can reverse the dangerous decay in relations.

Ian Johnson
By Ian Johnson
Mr. Johnson was a China correspondent for two decades.

March 19, 2021

These harsh exchanges will only contribute to the dangerous decay in relations between the world’s two most powerful countries. Both sides seem to be trapped by a need to look and sound tough. That stance may play well domestically in both countries, but it complicates doing what is really needed: engaging, with realistic expectations, with the other side.


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/opinion/us-china-biden.html

Since taking office nearly two months ago, the Biden administration has been a whirlwind of activity in reforming and revisiting almost every key problem area but one: the chaotic and incoherent China policy it inherited from the Trump administration.

Top U.S. and Chinese officials met Thursday in Alaska for the first time since the new administration took power. The meeting, framed as little more than a chance for each side to state their well-known positions, fell short of even those low expectations.

In a series of blunt remarks, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said that the U.S. government had “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States and economic coercion toward our allies” — actions, he said, that “threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.” In a lengthy presentation that went well over the agreed-upon time limit, China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, countered that the United States was the “champion” of cyberattacks and that “many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.”

These harsh exchanges will only contribute to the dangerous decay in relations between the world’s two most powerful countries. Both sides seem to be trapped by a need to look and sound tough. That stance may play well domestically in both countries, but it complicates doing what is really needed: engaging, with realistic expectations, with the other side.

Now that each government has had its say, the United States should take the high ground and find ways to reduce tensions, even if those can partly be blamed on China’s recent actions.

One way forward would be to reverse some of the Trump administration’s burn-the-bridges measures, like its ending academic exchanges, expelling Chinese journalists and closing consulates.

The Biden administration has sought to characterize its China policy as more nuanced than that of the Trump White House. Shortly after taking office, the president said that the United States sought “extreme competition” with China but not conflict. Mr. Blinken said in Tokyo this week, during his first official trip abroad, “The relationship with China is a very complex one: It has adversarial aspects; it has competitive aspects; it has cooperative aspects.”

But the administration’s actions so far have largely followed the Trump playbook.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 19, 2021 at 7:33pm

U.S., China exchange strong words, but both label talks constructive

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-china-exchange-strong-words-b...


Susan Thornton:

Yes, I think this meeting was about restarting diplomacy with China after a four-year hiatus, basically, under the previous administration.

And you do diplomacy to engage counterparts in private to try to find a way forward on areas where you have overlapping interests. And Secretary Blinken mentioned there at the end a number of areas, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, climate change, where there are overlapping interests.

And to sit together with the other side and find out where those areas are and a way forward, that's the art of the goal. So I think that the circus in front of the cameras to start off was a bit unfortunate. I am not sure that that is necessarily a productive way to start this off, but it looks like they were able to savor something for the end.

---------

Susan Thornton:

I think that there is a lot of continuity that we see with Xi Jinping. And I am not that surprised by anything we see in China.

There's — it is not coming out of the blue. Certainly, there has been regression on human rights and in a lot of practices domestically, in China's domestic politics, certainly now also vis-a-vis the United States. They are starting to pursue a policy of indigenization of their technological industries.

But I think, in general, the error that the U.S. makes is in thinking that we are going to have some kind of fundamental way of changing China. I personally don't think China represents an existential threat. I think we need learn to live with China and coexist. They are not going anywhere, but we are probably not going to be able to change them fundamentally.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 19, 2021 at 7:51pm

Parsing the tense diplomatic exchange between US and China


Normally, diplomats are, well, diplomatic. Not so on Thursday in Anchorage, where high-level US and Chinese officials gathered for the first time since Joe Biden became president. In the public setting of a photo op, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign minister Wang Yi tossed verbal barbs at each other. Marco Werman untangles the exchange and what it means for US-China relations with Susan Thornton, a retired career diplomat focused on China and East Asian affairs, who is now a senior fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center.


https://www.pri.org/file/2021-03-19/parsing-tense-diplomatic-exchan...


Susan Thornton: It was a very unusual opening of a diplomatic meeting by Tony Blinken...The obsession by the US of coming from a position of strength are a bit overweening....the Chinese had to respond to the way they did.....I'm very worried...we'll see a new low....a growing estrangement...if we can not find a way to move forward we could be seeing what happened before WWI...a Thucydides Trap...fears that US and China could be destined for war.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 20, 2021 at 5:04pm

India Romances the West
In a deepening geopolitical shift, New Delhi is inching closer on many fronts.

By C. Raja Mohan


https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/19/india-modi-west-quad-china-bid...


In affirming that the “Quad has come of age” at the first-ever summit of the Quadrilateral Dialogue with the United States, Japan, and Australia last week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sent an unmistakable signal that India is no longer reluctant to work with the West in the global arena, including in the security domain. The country’s new readiness to participate in Western forums marks a decisive turn in independent India’s world view. That view was long defined by the idea of nonalignment and its later avatar, strategic autonomy—both of which were about standing apart from, if not against, post-World-War-II Western alliances. But today—driven by shifting balance of power in Asia, India’s clear-eyed view of its national interest, and the successful efforts of consecutive U.S. presidents—India is taking increasingly significant steps toward the West.

The Quad is not the only Western institution with which India might soon be associated. New Delhi is set to engage with a wider range of Western forums in the days ahead, including the G-7 and the Five Eyes. Britain has invited India to participate in the G-7 meeting in London this summer, along with other non-members Australia and South Korea. Although India has been invited to G-7 outreach meetings—a level or two below the summits—for a number of years, the London meeting is widely expected to be a testing ground for the creation of a “Democracy Group of Ten,” or D-10.

In Washington today, there are multiple ideas for U.S.-led technology coalitions to reduce the current Western dependence on China. Two initiatives unveiled at the Quad summit—the working group on critical technologies, and the vaccine initiative to supply Southeast Asia—underline the prospects for an Indian role in the trusted technology supply chains of the United States and its partners.

Along with Japan, India also joined a meeting of the Five Eyes—the intelligence-sharing alliance between the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand— in October 2020 to discuss ways to give law enforcement agencies access to encrypted communications on platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Five Eyes is a tightly knit alliance, and it is unlikely India will be a member any time soon. But it is very much possible to imagine greater consultations between the Five Eyes and the Indian intelligence establishment.

To be sure, India’s engagement with Western institutions is not entirely new. India joined the British-led Commonwealth in 1947, but only after India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, made sure the forum was stripped of any security role in the postwar world. Refusing to join military alliances was a key plank of India’s policy of non-alignment.

Many concluded in the 1970s that anti-Americanism was part of India’s genetic code.

Nehru turned to the United States when his policy of befriending China and supporting its sensitivities collapsed by the end of the 1950s. Facing reverses in a military conflict with China on the long and contested border in 1962, Nehru sought massive defense assistance from U.S. President John Kennedy. With the deaths of both Kennedy and Nehru soon after, the prospects for strategic cooperation between New Delhi and Washington receded quickly.

The 1970s saw India drift away from the West on three levels. On the East-West axis, it drew closer to the Soviet Union. On the North-South axis, it became the champion of the Third World. This was reinforced by the sharply leftward turn of India’s domestic politics and a deliberate severing of commercial cooperation with the West.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 21, 2021 at 10:32am

How Close Are China and Germany? Consider ‘Little Swabia.’
The city of Taicang illustrates the tight ties between the countries — and how difficult it could be for President Biden to win allies in his campaign to isolate Beijing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/business/china-germany-economy-t...

In December, Germany played a dominant role in hammering out an initial European Union investment protection deal with China, despite objections from the incoming Biden administration. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has defended the agreement as necessary to help European companies make further gains in China. She signaled in January that she does not want Germany to take sides in a new Cold War, telling the World Economic Forum, “I’m not in favor of the formation of blocs.”

------------


Taicang epitomizes the deep ties between the world’s second- and fourth-largest economies. The Chinese city is so tightly knit with Germany’s industrial machine that some people call it “Little Swabia,” after the German region that the owners of many of its factories call home.

But the relationship has also raised concerns that Germany has become overly dependent on China. That could be a particularly thorny problem for President Biden, who has made isolating Beijing on trade and geopolitical issues a major part of his overall China strategy.

---------------

“If you don’t touch politically sensitive issues, it’s a very friendly environment,” said Matthias Müller, the managing director of the German Center for Industry and Trade in Taicang.


----------------

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 23, 2021 at 12:48pm

Fareed Zakaria on GPS March 21, 2021:

"Consider two contrasting exercises of power. America's F-35 fighter jet program, devilled by cost overruns and technical problems, will ultimately cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion according to a document obtained by Bloomberg. China will likely spend a comparable amount of money on the belt and road initiative, an ambitious set of loans, aid and financing for infrastructure projects across the world aimed at creating greater interdependent with dozens of countries that are important to Beijing."

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/2103/21/fzgps.01.html

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 24, 2021 at 7:17am

Hell hath no fury like a superpower in decline – Responsible Statecraft
Inbox


https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/03/22/hell-hath-no-fury-than...


The U.S. leadership must have set some kind of new record in managing to personally insult the leadership of the two other great powers of the world within 48 hours of each other in these early days of Biden administration foreign policy. Almost as if they were graduates of “The Donald Trump Charm School.”

It is simply astonishing that in approaching a new course of relations with Russia, President Biden should have called Vladimir Putin “a killer” and lacking “a soul.”

It is similarly astonishing to have chosen an important opening moment in our delicate relationship with China to employ derogatory language. Did Blinken believe that flashing testosterone at the first high-level meeting of Beijing’s foreign policy leadership would help achieve the diplomatic goals Washington seeks? One wonders who the secretary of state was trying to impress — Beijing or a U.S. domestic audience?

Antony Blinken, seemingly without embarrassment, speaks of the United States as upholding “the rule of law globally” in the self-deception or the belief that such is the case. In fact, Washington has always expected other countries to support the international rule of law — although exempting good friends like Israel and Saudi Arabia. The United States invariably defends its own “exceptionalism” in pointedly not signing onto International law when it suits its interests. That includes foreign assassinations and the launching of several wars without authorization at the international level, provoking “Color Revolutions,” and refusing to ratify UN Conventions on the Law of the Sea or the Rights of the Child, or honor adverse judgments by the International Court of Justice. And It is difficult to understand how Blinken feels comfortable at lecturing China on its domestic failings at a time when U.S. democracy and social policy have never presented a more damaging face to the world.

Surely such self-righteousness on the administration’s part shows a lack of seriousness and honesty about U.S. history and positions. Or, more disturbingly, it suggests that Washington lacks all capacity for self-reflection and self-awareness.

In the end, this initial high-level diplomatic encounter is perhaps most distressing given the high hopes that many Americans held that so many of our problems would vanish with the departure of Donald Trump – rather than undertaking a necessarily painful examination of the inherent deep-seated flaws within the American system.

Perhaps I am wrong in making these harsh observations. Maybe, coming on strong with all guns blazing — Hollywood cowboy style — at these first public confrontations will cause Moscow and Beijing to reflect and even retreat a bit. But I doubt it. I fear these two linked events simply hammer a few more nails into the coffin of cherished American aspirations to global leadership and dominance. In that case, we may be our own most dangerous enemy if we continue to look with nostalgia at former American hegemony. That global dominance, for better or for worse, is increasingly a thing of the past. It represents a failure to recognize the unique circumstances by which America happened to play a major positive global role immediately after the collapse of Europe, Japan, and China after the brutal ordeal of World War II. Arguably, those conditions will not return, which means that the United States will be facing a very uncomfortable future reality for which it seems psychologically ill-prepared.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 25, 2021 at 11:02am

#China Doesn’t Respect #US Anymore—for Good Reason. At #AlaskaMeeting , #Chinese officials made it quite clear that they no longer fear our criticism, because they don’t respect us as they once did, and they don’t think the rest of the world does, either.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/opinion/china-america.html?smid=...

Yes, China has huge problems. Its leaders are not 10 feet tall, but they are focused on real metrics of success. “China’s leaders are fierce but fragile,” argues James McGregor, the chairman of the consultancy APCO Worldwide, Greater China. “Precisely because they were not elected, they wake up every day scared of their own people, and that makes them very focused on performance” — particularly around jobs, housing and clean air.

By contrast, many U.S. politicians these days are elected from safe, gerrymandered districts and seek to stay in power by just “performing” for their base with populist theatrics.

Whenever I point this out, critics on the far right or far left ridiculously respond, “Oh, so you love China.” Actually, I am not interested in China. I care about America. My goal is to frighten us out of our complacency by getting more Americans to understand that China can be really evil AND really focused on educating its people and building its infrastructure and adopting best practices in business and science and promoting government bureaucrats on merit — all at the same time. Condemning China for the former will have zero impact if we’re not its equal in all of the latter.

At last week’s Alaska meeting between America’s and China’s top diplomats, Chinese officials made it quite clear that they no longer fear our criticism, because they don’t respect us as they once did, and they don’t think the rest of the world does, either. Or as Yang Jiechi, China’s top foreign affairs policymaker, baldly told his U.S. counterparts: “The United States does not have the qualification … to speak to China from a position of strength.”

Surprised? What did you think, that the Chinese didn’t notice that our last president inspired his followers to ransack our Capitol, that a majority of his party did not recognize the results of our democratic election, that a member of our Congress believes that Jewish-run space lasers cause forest fires, that left-wing anarchists were allowed to take over a section of downtown Portland, creating havoc for months, that during the pandemic the U.S. printed money to help its consumers keep spending — much of it on Chinese-made goods — while China printed money to invest in even more infrastructure, and that gun violence in America is out control?

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 26, 2021 at 11:26am

Fareed Zakaria on GPS March 21, 2021:

"Consider two contrasting exercises of power. America's F-35 fighter jet program, devilled by cost overruns and technical problems, will ultimately cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion according to a document obtained by Bloomberg. China will likely spend a comparable amount of money on the belt and road initiative, an ambitious set of loans, aid and financing for infrastructure projects across the world aimed at creating greater interdependent with dozens of countries that are important to Beijing."

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/2103/21/fzgps.01.html

https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/03/21/exp-gps-0321-fareeds-take.cnn


https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/03/21/exp-gps-0321-minton-beddos...

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