Happy Birthday India and Julia Child!

On How India is like Israel

Israel is a democratic ally in a neighborhood that includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and Turkey. India is a democratic ally which shares borders with Pakistan and China.

Both Hindu India and Jewish Israel are occupying lands wherein the majority of occupants are Muslims who believe their homelands have been unjustly annexed. Both India and Israel have nuclear weapons.

Summer of rage:

For decades, India maintained hundreds of thousands of security forces in Kashmir to fight an insurgency sponsored by Pakistan, which claims this border region, too. The insurgency has been largely vanquished. But those Indian forces are still here, and today they face a threat potentially more dangerous to the world’s largest democracy: an intifada-like popular revolt against the Indian military presence that includes not just stone-throwing young men but their sisters, mothers, uncles and grandparents.

... This summer there have been nearly 900 clashes between protesters and security forces, which have left more than 50 civilians dead, most of them from gunshot wounds. While more than 1,200 soldiers have been wounded by rock-throwing crowds, not one has been killed in the unrest, leading to questions about why Indian security forces are using deadly force against unarmed civilians -- and why there is so little international outcry.

Phone Cameras Fuel Kashmir’s ‘Intifada’



The US gives large amounts of foreign aid to Israel and Egypt so that they won't have a war. The US is trying to keep Pakistan focused on fighting the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, but Pakistan remains focused on its main enemy India. The Afghan Taliban are Pakistan's means to combat Indian influence in Afghanistan. (The Pakistani Taliban is the Muslim extremism of the Afghan Taliban metastasizing back into nuclear-armed Pakistan.)

The US needs to internationalize the Kashmir issue over India's objection so that the Pakistan can focus on the Taliban.