Earliest New World Writing

A pattern of insect, ear of corn, inverted fish and other symbols written on a stone tablet seems to be one of the ancient writings of the Western Hemisphere.

The pattern of symbols covering the face of the rectangular block also represents a previously unknown ancient writing system.

The text contains 28 distinct glyphs or symbols, some of which are repeated three and four times. The writing system does not appear to be linked to any known later scripts and may represent a dead end, according to the study.

Other experts not involved in the study agreed with Houston and his colleagues that the horizontally arranged inscription shows patterns that are the hallmarks of true writing, including syntax and language-specific word order.[Mysterious stone slab bears ancient writing]

Not all of these symbols are unfamiliar to archeologists. Mary Pohl at Florida State University is an expert on the Olmec. She’s analyzed Olmec symbols on jewelry and a cylindrical seal that dates almost as far back as the inscribed tablet. She says a few of the symbols are clearly written versions of carved stone objects, like an ear of corn, previously found at Olmec archeological sites.

“One sign looks actually like a corn cob with silk coming out the top,” Pohl says. Other signs are unique, she says, and never before seen, like one of an insect.

Pohl says these objects — and thus probably the writing — had a special value in rituals.

“We see that the writing is very closely connected with ritual and the early religious beliefs, because they are taking the ritual carvings and putting them into glyphs and making writing out of them,” Pohl says. “And all of this is occurring in the context of the emergence of early kings and the development of a centralized power and stratified society.”[Earliest New World Writing Discovered]

This stone tablet found in the Mexican state of Veracruz is believed to have been written by the Olmecs and is believed to be 2900 years old. The Olmec civilization existed from 1200 BC to 400 BC in south-central Mexico and are famous for the giant heads they carved on stone.

See Also: Enlarged image of the stone called Cascajal block

They need a new name

Here are some excerpts from the speeches from the Nonaligned Movement summit in Cuba

“When there no longer is a Cold War, the United States spends one billion dollars a year in weapons and soldiers and it squanders a similar amount in commercial publicity,” he said. “To think that a social and economic order that has proven unsustainable could be maintained by force is simply an absurd idea.” [Raul Castro]

“Under any scenario, we are with you just like we are with Cuba,” Chavez told Iran. “If the United States invades Cuba, blood will run. … We will not have our arms crossed while bombs are falling in Havana or they carry Raul off in a plane.” [Hugo Chavez]

So why is this called Non-Aligned Movement again?

Climate change created civilization

After flourishing from 2600 – 1900 B.C.E, the Indus Valley Civilization entered a period of decline. The various reasons cited for the decline include climate change, like the decline of monsoons. A crucial factor was also the disappearance of substantial portions of the Ghaggar Hakra river system, believed to be the mythical Saraswati.

Climate changes are sometimes responsible for the development of civilizations. For example, a pre-historic climate change in Eastern Sahara resulted in the rise of the Egyptian civilization. There is an argument that civilizations developed as a by-product of adaptation to climate change and hostile environments.

The early civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia, China and northern South America were founded between 6000 and 4000 years ago when global climate changes, driven by natural fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit, caused a weakening of monsoon systems resulting in increasingly arid conditions. These first large urban, state-level societies emerged because diminishing resources forced previously transient people into close proximity in areas where water, pasture and productive land was still available.

“Civilisation did not arise as the result of a benign environment which allowed humanity to indulge a preference for living in complex, urban, ‘civilized’ societies,” said Dr. Brooks.

“On the contrary, what we tend to think of today as ‘civilisation’ was in large part an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilisation was a last resort – a means of organising society and food production and distribution, in the face of deteriorating environmental conditions.”

He added that for many, if not most people, the development of civilisation meant a harder life, less freedom, and more inequality. The transition to urban living meant that most people had to work harder in order to survive, and suffered increased exposure to communicable diseases. Health and nutrition are likely to have deteriorated rather than improved for many.

The new research challenges the widely held belief that the development of civilization was simply the result of a transition from harsh, unpredictable climatic conditions during the last ice age, to more benign and stable conditions at the beginning of the Holocene period some 10,000 years ago. [Climate change rocked cradles of civilization]

Ghaggar-Hakra and Indus-Saraswati civilization

The Rig-Veda authors mention their land as that of seven rivers. Out of the seven only five exist now. The remaining two, Saraswati and Drishadwati have disappeared. Following the discovery of Mohenjo-Daro along the banks of Indus and Harappa about 350 miles away, archaeologists started looking for other sites in the area. New sites were discovered, but they were buried under the sand in the desert. Archaeologists knew that these towns could not survive in the desert and satellite images have now shown that in what is now Thar Desert, once traversed a river with its own fertile banks[2]. These dry channels of the Ghaggar-Hakra is considered by many to be the Saraswati river.

A recent paper by Fuller and Madella describe the importance of Ghaggar-Hakra system in Indus-Saraswati Civilization

Another factor in the Holocene environmental history of the northwestern sub-continent, overlooked in some discussions of Quaternary palaeoecology, is the changes in the river drainage system, especially the Ghaggar-Hakra system flowing roughly parallel but separate to the Indus . Archaeological research in Cholistan has led to the discovery of a large number of sites along the dry channels of the Ghaggar-Hakra river (often identified with the lost Sarasvati and Drishadvatirivers of Sanskrit traditions) . Along the Ghaggar-Hakra there is a relatively high frequency of settlements during the Mature Harappan (2600–2000 cal BC), which suggests a well-watered region that could support agriculture. This may be interpreted either as a river or an inland delta in the area around Derawar. By the time of the Painted Grey Ware period (ca 1200–500 cal BC) the river must have been dry, because several sites of this period are found in river bed contexts. This change, thought to have been brought on by tectonic uplift and the capture of the Ghaggar-Hakra headwaters by the Yamuna watershed, led to gradual desiccation during the Holocene, which was well underway by the period of the Harappan Civilisation The final desiccation of some of these channels may have had major repercussions for the Harappan Civilisation and is considered a major factor in the de-centralisation and de-urbanisation of the Late Harappan period. [via email from Carlos Aramayo]

Book Review: In Search of the Cradle of Civilization

In Search of the Cradle of Civilization by Georg Fuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley, Quest Books (September 2001), 341 pages.

In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British judge in Calcutta noticed that there were striking similarities in the vocabulary and grammar of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Gothic. This discovery resulted in the creation of a new field called comparative linguistics which led scholars to believe that all these languages were derived from a pre-Indo-European language which had its origins somewhere in Northern Europe, Central Asia, Southern Russia, India or Anatolia.

Soon we got the Aryan Invasion Theory, which claimed that Aryans, barbaric semi nomadic tribes who spoke the Indo-European language invaded India and then composed the Vedas. A date of between 1500 – 1200 B.C.E was also proposed for the invasion. The word Aryan comes from Sanskrit language and means “noble” or “cultured” and does not refer to a particular race or language The whole Aryan Invasion Theory is scholarly fiction according to authors Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley and they present both literary and archaeological evidence for it.

The literary history is provided by the Vedic literature from the Rig-Veda to the Upanishads. The Vedic Aryans were not just cattle and sheep breeding semi nomadic pastoralists, but city dwellers, seafarers and merchants whose business took them along the length of Saraswati, Indus and also into the ocean. In the ancient scriptures there is no reference to a five river system, but to a seven river system which was called sapta-saindhava (land belonging to seven rivers) and the center of the vedic times was not Punjab, but some place further east on the Saraswati.

Satellite images have shown evidence of paleo channels in Haryana believed to be this mythical Saraswati. According to geologists, before 1900 B.C.E, Saraswati had shifted course at least four times. Then major tectonic shifts occurred which altered the flow of the river resulting in the eventual drying. Following this people migrated to the Ganges valley which is described in the Shatapata Brahmana.

Following the archaeological discovery of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, hundreds of other sites were discovered in the region like Ganweriwala, Rakhigarhi, Dholavira, Kalibangan and Lothal. The Harappan culture area far exceeded the combined area occupied by the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations and has provided various seals of significance. This civilization declined around 1900 B.C.E and the cause is attributed to climate change or the disappearance of substantial portions of the Ghaggar Hakra river system.

The authors argue that the people of Harappa were Vedic Aryans who had reached India a long time back. Indo-European speakers are now thought to have been present in Anatolia at the beginning of the Neolothic age. Migrations would have happened during the Harappan times as well, but the new immigrants would have found a prominent Sanskrit speaking Vedic people in Harappa. It is possible that the Vedic people walked on the streets of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa and even possibly Mehrgarh and they did not come as conquerors or destroyers from outside India, but lived and even built the cities in the Land of Seven Rivers.

There are reasons to believe that the Rig-Veda was composed much before Muller’s imaginary date. The authors claim that some of the oldest hymns of Rig-Veda were composed before the decline of Saraswati. According to them, Rig-Veda fills the gap between the Neolithic town of Mehrgarh and the Indus-Saraswati civilization. One of the stellar patterns suggested by the hymns of the Rig Veda could only have occurred in the period from 4500 – 2500 B.C.E. Still Max Muller quite arbitarily came up with a date of 1500 – 1200 B.C.E for the Vedas and it has been repeated constantly by various historians. The Rig Veda speaks about the seven rivers and if they were composed by people who came from outside in 1500 B.C.E, then they would not have known about the two vanished rivers.

Among the artifacts obtained from the Indus-Saraswati region is the pashupathi seal named so after the Hindu God Shiva. The seal shows a seated figure, in a yogic posture, with headgear surrounded by animals. Rudra/Shiva is the most prominent deity of the Yajur Veda and this links the Harappan religion with Vedic texts. Polished stones which look like the linga and recently the swastika was also found in Indus Valley. Numerous clay figurines have been found in Harappa which show a Mother Godess cult and Godesses are common in Hinduism even now.

There is also evidence of tree worship in Harappan times as mentioned in Rig Veda and Atharva Veda. The core of the Vedic religion was sacrifice and fire altars have been found in several Indus sites. In Kalibangan seven rectangular fire altars have been found aligned north-south beside a well which parallels the six Vedic dishnya hearths. With all the evidence the authors conclude that the Vedic and Indus-Saraswati civilization is one and the same and Rig-Veda and other sacred hymns were the product of the people who created the urban civilization of the Land of the Seven Rivers.

According to the Aryan Invasion/Migration theory Aryans came and conquered the dark skinned Dasyus. In Sanskrit dasa means servant and could have been the opposite of the Aryans. The battle between the Aryans and Dasyus could be a metaphor for the fight between light and darkness like the struggle between the Egyptian God Ra and the demons of darkness or the Zoroastrian conflict between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. This reference which appears once in the entire Vedic literature became the cornerstone for the Aryan invasion theory. The Dasyus were not Dravidians or non-Aryans, but fallen Aryans or members of the warrior class who had become unspiritual. Arya and dasyu are terms not describing race, but behavior.

Some of their arguments are not that convincing. For example, they cite that priesthood played an important part of Harappans and similarly emphasis on priesthood is found in Vedic literature and hence Harappa was v
edic. Priesthood was an important part of Egyptians, and Zoroastrians as well. The authors believe that Indo-European peoples were at least present in Mehrgarh or that they could be the creators. This belief comes not from any archaeological evidence, but from the assumption that some hymns of Rig Veda could go back to the fourth millennium B.C.E. They even state that literary evidence is more important than archaeological evidence. In one case they go even as far as suggesting that ancient Egyptians got their wisdom from the sages of India since there was a colony of Indic people in Memphis around 500 B.C.E.

Recently there was a program on The History Channel titled, The Exodus Decoded, which tried to provide a scientific explanation to the Exodus and the ten plagues that struck Egypt. The Smithsonian of May 2006 has an article titled Mideast Archaeology: The Bible as a road map which talks about how an archaeologist identified a structure in West Bank which is believed to have been built by Joshua on instructions from Moses. In both these cases the Bible has been taken as a valid historical document and then archaeology was conducted to validate it. Today Biblical Archaeology is a scientific discipline in its own right.

When it comes to ancient Indian scriptures like the Vedas, scholars are not that lenient. They have always chosen to see in them literary creations of little more than mythological and theological significance. While they contain theology and mythology, it also reveals the names of rivers, astronomical information and gives geographical descriptions which could be valuable clues for historians. It gives us a glimpse of the world in which the authors of the Vedas lived. This book brings into attention many interesting pieces of information from various fields to make a strong case for the antiquity of Indic civilization and is highly recommended.
Note: This book is available from the varnam Book Store

Rejecting all candidates

In our elections most of the candidates put by political parties are career politicians or thugs or both. The public is left with no choice other than to vote for the lesser evil. Under the constitution, there is something called Section 49-O which allows the voter to reject all the candidates on the ballot

So what’s the big deal, you ask?
Well, here it is:apparently, if the election is countermanded owing to negative votes, not one of the candidates who stood for the earlier election can contest the re-election.
Now imagine the consequences. Imagine what would happen if each time a party put up a goon, the voters forced an expensive re-election. The mind boggles. [Just do it!]

For such an event to happen there has to be tremendous coordination by the non-political voters. There also has to be a grassroots efforts to make this into a mass movement within a constituency, which currently looks impractical. Even if a re-election is forced, career politicians will always find a way to get their folks in for in the circle of life, for every Lalu who is convicted, there is a Rabri Devi to take his place.

Exodus Decoded (2)

Read Part 1

The final pieces of the puzzle is the location of Mount Sinai, the place where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Currently it is believed to be in Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Mount Sinai. In the novel, The Last Cato, we saw the protagonists going there to retrieve some ancient parchments. According to Simcha Jacobovici, this place does not fit a single Biblical criteria and is not in any flock grazing distance. Then he identifies it as Gebel Hashem el-Tarif in Egypt because it has a cleft from which Moses could have preached, has the graves of holy men and there is a fresh water spring at the top, a rare thing in Sinai.

According to the Bible, Moses placed the ten commandments in a golden box called the Ark of the Covenant (the same artifact that Nazis and Indiana Jones fight over in The Raiders of the Lost Ark). In the tombs in Mycenae, Simcha Jacobovici finds an image of the Ark of the Covenant carved in gold. The documentary concludes that with all this evidence it is now sure that the Exodus is a historical fact.

This is documentary is filled with stunning graphics which I have not seen in any documentary, except maybe Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. The animations and the visuals are an absolute delight to watch, but still it could not convince Hershel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeological Society.

On the things I know a little about, I tend to disagree with you. Beginning with the Hyksos. This is an old idea. It’s hard to find a scholar today who subscribes to it. Among its many problems: Where were the Israelites for 300 years [from 1500 to 1200 BCE] after the Egyptian expulsion of the Hyksos/Israelites? (Incidentally, you’re not really changing Egyptian chronology, despite what you say. What you are doing is simply dating the Exodus to 1500 BCE.)

Or take the Semitic inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadem. You use a conjectural translation [“God, save me”] of [William Foxwell] Albright. This decipherment is really not secure. Kyle McCarter thinks he has accurately deciphered this writing. He has not yet published it. But everyone knows that Albright’s efforts are uncertain. But even if correct, “El” is not necessarily the Israelite God. It is the generic word for “God.” Many Semites used it. Everyone accepts the idea that Semites were worker/slaves(?) at Serabit. But you jump to the conclusion that they were Israelites—in the 16th century BCE.

Or take your identification of “Jacob.” This name appears fairly frequently at this time. But that doesn’t mean it refers to the Biblical Jacob. The appearance of the name is appropriately used to give a plausibility to the story, but not to say this is Joseph’s father. [The Exodus Debated]

The first historical reference to the Israelites date from 1207 BCE, which is a date much after the demise of the Harappan Civilization in India (to give a time reference). According to Ronald Hendel of the University of California, Berkeley, if the Exodus represents the expulsion of the Hyksos, then they would have been roaming in the desert for about 300 years, which is the same point Hershel Shanks makes. The entire documentary stands on the basis of this date of 1500 BCE, the time of the Santorini eruption. Also it seems the parallels between the Ahmose Stele and the biblical story of the ten plagues are not that identical.

In his defence Simcha writes that the basis of the date of 1207 BCE for first reference to the Israelites comes from the Merneptah stele which records Pharaoh Merneptah’s battles with the Israelites. If the Israelites were strong enough for the Pharoah to brag about it, then they would have been a strong force in 1207 and this can happen only in a time period of about 2-300 years after the Exodus.

The interesting part in this whole debate is the assumption that the Biblical text is a perfect historical document and all the details mentioned actually happened as told. Hershel questions this very basis.

You, on the other hand, start out with the assumption that your Bible is historically accurate, including the miracles, unless you can find some archaeological problem with doing so; and also accepting as proof anything archaeological that seems to confirm the historicity of the text, including the miracles.

You may deny this, but you do do it. As a kind of test, let me ask you if you would apply the same presumption of historicity to other ancient texts, such as Homer and Gilgamesh? Would you accept all the details in Homer as historically accurate, even the miracles and the acts of the gods? Do you accept as a historical fact that the wildman Gilgamesh was acculturated by a prostitute? How about his refusal of a marriage proposal by Ishtar, the goddess of Uruk? Do you believe that Utnapishtim is immortal (as the text says), perhaps still living in disguise somewhere in war-torn Baghdad?[The Exodus Debated]

The response for this from Simcha is that the Torah has been transmitted for over 2700 years without any errors, which makes it very credible. If during Sabbath Torah reading, a single letter is found smudged, the Torah is declared un-Kosher and removed. He says that no other text has such disciplined chain of transmission.

Probably Simcha has never heard of the Vedas which were transmitted exactly the same way. The largest surviving body of ancient literature has been passed down orally for over thousands of years. This Vedic lore, considered to be divine revelation was painstakingly memorized and even when the original meaning of the words were lost, the brahmins remembered and recited the hymns with the utmost fidelity[2]. Will scholars then give the same historical validity to the Vedas which they give the Torah and the Bible?

See Also: Exodus Decoded, Virtual Museum which shows all the evidence, Transcript of the program

Exodus Decoded (1)

The story of Exodus, the escape of Moses and the Israelites from Egypt to the promised land has all the ingredients of a fairy tale. The reason for the disbelief is due to various super natural elements of the story such as the ten plagues which includes the Nile turning blood red and all the first Egyptian male children dying. There is also the parting of the Red Sea and the swallowing of the Pharoah’s army by the same sea. In a new documentary, Exodus Decoded, which premiered on the History Channel about a week back, film maker Simcha Jacobovici and Executive Producer James Cameron (the same guy who made Titanic) prove that there is a scientific explanation for the Exodus.

Ahmose I was a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who reigned from 1550 to 1525 BCE . During his time the Hyksos, a group of Semites who were the rulers of lower Egypt rebelled and were expelled from Egypt. The documentary starts with a look at the Ahmose Stele stored in the Cairo Museum which records a tremendous catastrophe that struck Egypt which involved rain, thunder and storm. Usually all these do not happen in north-west Africa and was unusual. The Bible says that there was storm during the time of Exodus, so does the Stele. The Bible says there was darkness, so does the Stele. It is from this Stele that we get the name of the Pharoah as Ahmose which means brother of Moses in Hebrew. Simcha then goes to the museum and locates the mummy of Ahmose from among many mummies lying in various boxes.

Scholars have dated the Exodus to 1200 BCE, to the time of Ramesses II and the Hyksos were expelled hundreds of years before Moses. Simcha suggests a new date for the Exodus of around 1500 BCE to the time of Ahmose. He suggests that the Hyksos who were expelled were the Israelites and an expert suggests that the story in the Ahmose Stele and the Exodus refer to the same event.

The Hyksos ruled from the capital city called Avaris. Simcha films there, being the first film maker to do so. Then they find a tomb at Beni Hasan which shows evidence for the entry of Western Semitic people into Egypt. The hieroglyphs call them Amo, which means Gods people. It also records that one of the migrants rose to the highest power and his name was Joseph, son of Yakov (Jacob). Joseph wore on his fingers the seal of royal authority and Simcha shows such seals which were found through archeology. They also find a slave inscription in a cave which reads, “El, save me” which was a plea to the God of the Israelites.

About 3500 years ago, the Greek island of Santorini, located about 700 KM from the Egyptian coast had one of the largest volcanic eruptions believed to have led to the collapse of the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete.This same eruption according to the documentary explains the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea.

During the time of the wrath of God, besides the Nile turning blood red, the Egyptian statues were toppled and there was a hail of ice and fire. Locusts swarmed the place and there was darkness among other things. The explanation offered is that Egypt is located in a region filled with fault lines. The rift between the African and Asian plates go under Santorini. The gas released by the earthquake caused the Nile to turn red and the same phenomenon was seen in Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1984. The ash from the Santorini explosion caused the skies to turn dark.

While most of these plagues can be explained due to natural phenomena, the one most difficult to explain is the death of every first born Egyptian child one night. The documentary offers an explanation for this as well. It was the night of the first passover and all the Israelites were awake and celebrating it. The Egyptians slept at that time. In Egyptian society, the first born male had special privileges and slept in a low bed which was close to the ground, while most adults slept in the roof tops. The Carbon di-Oxide which rose due to the seismic activity fogged the land and affected the people who were sleeping low to the ground, which was the first born male children of Egypt. The same incident happened in Lake Nyos as well.

Then comes the major event of the parting of the Red Sea. It seems the Hebrew word, Yam Suf was mistranslated as Red Sea while it actually means Reed Sea. Instead of looking for the sea scholars should have been looking for a lake. Based on the new evidence, the film makers find the location of the Reed Sea, a lake currently dried up, due to the Suez Canal. Again, the parting of the lake is attributed to the seismic activity.

While most people followed Moses to the promised land, some people in fact boarded ships to Greece. In 1972, in Santorini they found Minoan style wall paintings depicting a journey from Egypt to Greece with a picture of Avaris. In Mycenae in Greece they have found 3500 year old tombs with tombstones depicting sequences which show the parting of the sea and people escaping through it. Actually one expert in the museum where the tomb stones are located says the depictions are too abstract to make such an interpretation.

Tomorrow: Mt. Sinai, Ark of the Covenant, and doubts on the evidence.

Zoroastrian temple in Kurdistan

The main protagonist of Gore Vidal’s novel Creation was Cyrus Spitama, the grandson of Zoroaster. Though the novel was set in the 6th century BCE, current scholarly consensus places Zoroaster’s time at 1400 –1000 BCE making him the founder of one of the earliest religions based on revealed scripture. Other dates place him in the time of the Axial age, the time of Vidal’s novel. Zoroaster lived in Bactria in present day Afghanistan and his religion was adopted by the Persian emperor Darius, whose empire at that time included modern day Iraq as well.

Now a Zoroastrian temple has been discovered in Kurdistan, Iraq.

Duhok’s Director of Antiquities, Hasan Ahmed Qassim, has announced the discovery of a Zoroastrian temple near Jar Ston Cave, a famous ancient site. The temple is believed to be the most complete to have been unearthed in the region. It is also said that it was a Metherani temple.”

The temple was dedicated to the deity Anna Hita, indicated by the discovery of Anna Hita’s holy star, and evidence of fires, as well as fireplaces and Zoroastrian holy sand stores have been found nearby,” Qassim revealed. He further described the temple as being made up of five sanctuaries, three of which were carved into rock, with the remaining two having been constructed from stone blocks.This discovery is being hailed as the most significant archaeological development in the region in recent times.

.”This new discovery will alter the history of the region due to its unique architectural style, which differs considerably from Zoroastrian temples previously discovered,” explained the Director of Antiquities.

“The temple’s style which looks toward the four-directions is a unique style ever discovered in the area; thus it becomes an entry to studying Zarathustrian arts and archeology.”At present archaeology teams are continuing work at the site to find out more about the temple’s history.[Kurdistan: Zoroastrian Temple discovered in Duhok]

Lebanon can learn from Nepal

The ceasefire mandated by the United Nations resolution 1701 has bought the cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. The ceasefire also calls also upon the government of Lebanon and UNIFIL to deploy their troops to South Lebanon and make sure that there will be no weapons without the consent of the government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the government of Lebanon. The Lebanese interpretation of this rule is that the Hezbollah can keep the arms so long as it does not display it in public. A Hezbollah leader said that they would just hide the weapons and melt into the local population which is a bad idea for the people of Israel as we know from the whole Soviet Union-Afghanistan-Pakistan episode.

After the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, the weapons supplied to the Mujahideen stayed with them. Many weapons were left unaccounted for. Later any terrorist groups wishing to inflict damage to the world could find the weapons in the open markets of Pakistan and these terrorists have been creating trouble for India and Afghanistan. Even now graduates from the center of the Jihadi universe are involved in every terrorist plot from 9/11 to the trans-Atlantic terror plot. Instead of waiting for the next Hezbollah attack on Israel, the United Nations should have worked towards disarming them like what they did in Nepal.

On June 16th, in Nepal, Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala and Maoist leader Prachanda reached an agreement in which the Maoists would join an interim government. The question then was if the Maoists would disarm before it. Though some Indian columnists (you know the more Catholic than the Pope types) wanted the world to accept the reality that the Maoists would not disarm, the Maoists agreed to have their arms counted and deposited under the supervision of the United Nations.

Now that the Israel-Hezbollah is over, Hezbollah has declared victory and the celebrations are going on. At the same time the Lebanese are roasting them for all the damage they caused. The leaders of the March 14th movement have demanded an investigation into the circumstances that led to the war. Prominent Hezbollah supporters like Michel Aoun has called for the Shiite militia to disband.

Hezbollah is also criticized from within the Lebanese Shiite community, which accounts for some 40% of the population. Sayyed Ali al-Amin, the grand old man of Lebanese Shiism, has broken years of silence to criticize Hezbollah for provoking the war, and called for its disarmament. In an interview granted to the Beirut An-Nahar, he rejected the claim that Hezbollah represented the whole of the Shiite community. “I don’t believe Hezbollah asked the Shiite community what they thought about [starting the] war,” Mr. al-Amin said. “The fact that the masses [of Shiites] fled from the south is proof that they rejected the war. The Shiite community never gave anyone the right to wage war in its name.”

There were even sharper attacks. Mona Fayed, a prominent Shiite academic in Beirut, wrote an article also published by An-Nahar last week. She asks: Who is a Shiite in Lebanon today? She provides a sarcastic answer: A Shiite is he who takes his instructions from Iran, terrorizes fellow believers into silence, and leads the nation into catastrophe without consulting anyone. Another academic, Zubair Abboud, writing in Elaph, a popular Arabic-language online newspaper, attacks Hezbollah as “one of the worst things to happen to Arabs in a long time.” He accuses Mr. Nasrallah of risking Lebanon’s existence in the service of Iran’s regional ambitions.[Hezbollah Didn’t Win (WSJ: subscription reqd)]

The problem is that Nasrallah doesn’t care much about Lebanese opinion. Known for his dictatorial style of working, the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers was ordered by him without informing the two Hezbollah ministers in the Siniora cabinet or the 12 Hezbollah members of the Lebanese parliament. He is accountable only to the Mullahs in Iran.

Now with an armed militia still around, what is to prevent him from conducting another attack against Israel?