Features

“This is the last step in the destruction of Gaza”

Published

2 years ago

2024/05/19

Thilina Walpola

South Africa files case with International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

This essay is not meant to be a commentary of the current strife continuing in increasing intensity of violence in Rafah in Southern Gaza and the soon-to-be-extinct nation of Palestine. It is a ridiculously oversimplified account of the anti-Semitism that has plagued the world for centuries. And the imminent establishment of the Jewish State of Israel.

As Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu said last week, “The war will continue until we have achieved complete victory. If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone. If we need to, we will fight with our fingernails. But we have much more than fingernails”.

Complete victory is not limited just to the release of hostages or the elimination of Hamas. Complete victory, in Netanyahu’s mind, and the minds of the radical-right Israeli coalition Zionist government, is the displacement, by genocide or any other means, of the entire race of Palestinians, Muslim and Christian, and the establishment of the single, sovereign Jewish State of Israel.

Anti-Semitism has existed in Europe and Russia for centuries, and has flourished in the USA since the Europeans “discovered” the Americas. Pogroms, a Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently”, have been inflicted on Jewish populations living as legal citizens in European countries, especially Russia, for centuries. They increased in their intensity since the anti-Jewish riots that erupted in Odessa in 1821, and the southern and western provinces of the Russian Empire later that century.

Pogroms were usually perpetrated by anti-Semitic mobs with government and law enforcement encouragement. The attackers raped and murdered their Jewish neighbors, and looted their property with impunity, with the full knowledge that their crimes would go unpunished.

To use a word commonly used by Hitler and Mussolini, now brought back into fashion by Donald J. Trump, Jews were “vermin”, routinely and regularly exterminated, much as the infestation of cockroaches and rats that are routinely obliterated by modern civilized society. Genocide is a process, not an event, rather like pest control. When you dehumanize certain ethnic groups, likening them to rodents carrying disease capable of destroying humanity, killing them is not only necessary, it becomes an imperative. Of course, Trump has been more inclusive in his reference to additional and different varieties of vermin, like Muslims, Hispanics, Blacks, people from “shithole countries” – who knows what goes on in that lunatic piece of cruelty masquerading as a mind?

What is the cause for this age-old discrimination of one specific ethnicity, the Jews, persecution that has escaped the many other races that lived in Europe? The public persona of the Jews in the middle-ages in Europe was that they were sickly and prone to disease (Judenkrankheit, the Jewish malaise), and seen as an ethnic sub-class (untermenschen, or subhuman). However, Jews had achieved prominence in medical, legal and financial professions in Europe since the 12th century. Today, in the USA, they are “accused” of controlling the banking, legal and medical professions, even Hollywood. And they face hostility, as if the perceived inherent inferiority of white community has been, in some perverted way, caused by the Jews.

Pogroms reached their logical and brutal climax with the Holocaust in Germany in the 1930s, when Hitler and the Nazis committed genocide of six million Jews from 1935 to 1945. At the end of the war, when the Allies and the Americans were confronted with the horrors of German concentration camps, they were struck with a collective guilty conscience, and forced to accept and condemn the reality of Hitler’s barbarous methods of extermination.

What to do? European and American anti-Semitism did not suddenly disappear with the Holocaust. In fact, there were significant anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler movements in America in the 1920s and 1930s. Prominent Americans like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were friends with Adolf Hitler and led these anti-Semitic and isolationist movements in America. Anti-Semitism lingers in Europe and the USA to the present day, a deepening resentment against the prominence and success of Jews in public, professional and economic life.

The 2017 anti-Semitic riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, with its slogan “The Jews will not replace us” epitomizing the white-supremacist, neo-Nazi movement, had the support of a significant section of the white population, including the president of the nation. This white supremacist movement, which now encompasses in its hatred not only Jews, but Blacks and non-white immigrants, is the phenomenon that keeps an evil monster like Trump currently in line for a second term of the presidency.

Hatred of immigrants, fleeing personal threats to their lives and liberty from their home countries, “yearning to breathe free” – the very definition of asylum seekers – has increased in intensity after the Trump years. Perhaps after the election of the nation’s first Black president. These are the wretches, the huddled masses, brutally and frequently abused by Trump in his political rants as assassins, rapists, drug traffickers, denizens of mental asylums, the latest a comparison to the fictional movie cannibal Hannibal Lecter. And of course, dark-skinned people from “shithole countries” who poison the blood of the citizens of a country of immigrants with the most mixed blood – poisonous and pure – from every country in the world.

The inhumane barbarity of Hitler’s “Final Solution”, when six million Jews and five million human beings of “impure blood” were tortured and exterminated in gas ovens in concentration camps, was exposed to the world after WW II. And the world’s fingers were pointed not only at the Nazis, but at all those Europeans who had committed anti-Semitic violence in the past and Germans who did nothing while Hitler committed genocide, the smoke and stink of human flesh billowing from concentration camps right before their eyes.

Unlike numerous previous genocides, improved communications ensured that the Holocaust was too well known in the world as a crime against humanity to be swept under the carpet, or justified in the name of “civilization”.

So the Western Allies, the Rulers of the post WW II world, came to a decision, to the advantage of both themselves and the Jews. The Balfour Declaration, issued by the British government in 1917, justified Western Allies’ support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

In 1947, as much as 97% of the land in Palestine was owned by Palestinian Arabs and Christians, just three percent by Jews. Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, constituted the vast majority of the population of Palestine. After World War II, Jews in Europe were encouraged to emigrate to the “Holy Land”, with the added incentive that the land had been promised to the Jews by the Christian God, Yahweh Himself.

An article written by Dr. V.J.M. de Silva, “The Israeli Palestine Conflict – Some Random Thoughts” (The Island, August 12, 2014) tends to support colonial conquest of Palestine by European Jews, citing the verse found in Genesis 17.8: “And I will give unto thee (Abraham) and thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession and I will be their God”, which gave divine legitimacy to the Jewish occupation and ownership of Palestine. The Promised Land.

The late Hameed Abdul Karim, Sri Lankan journalist and activist in the defense of the Palestinian cause, responded, “the media has projected the Palestinian catastrophe as a Muslim issue and not a humanitarian one, as it certainly is: that the conflict in Palestine is between Jews and Muslims. They have subtly left out of the picture the Palestinian Christians, who made up 20% of the population (in 1947)”. Mr. Karim goes on to say that the first village destroyed during the 1948 Israeli war against Palestine (named The Nakba, literally “the catastrophe”) was a Christian Village named Deir Yassin, when over 240 Palestinian Christians were lined up against walls and shot in cold blood by a Zionist terrorist organization, Irgun, headed by future Israeli Prime Minister and co-recipient with Egyptian President Sadat, in 1979, of the Noble Prize (for Peace, no less), Menachem Begin.

Since the Nakba, Jews, with the unqualified financial and military support of the Americans, have accelerated the establishment of a single-state Jewish state of Israel. There have been proposals over the years by various international mediators to establish a two-state solution, which have all failed because no agreement as to the proposed terms of settlement could be reached by the protagonists.

The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which seems to have all the elements of a false-flag operation, with the complicity of Netanyahu and his radical right-wing cabinet, have given the perfect excuse for the Zionists to complete the job – the original goal of the extermination of the Palestinians and the establishment of the Promised Land.

President Biden may have at last realized that the ultimate motive of the right-wing Israelis was always the establishment of the sovereign Jewish state of Israel, that the Jews, especially under the leadership of Netanyahu, never had any intention for a two-state solution. Biden has threatened Netanyahu that unless the Israeli Defense Forces cease their genocidal operations in Rafah in Southern Gaza, work towards a negotiated ceasefire and a two-state solution, Americans will be forced to suspend military and financial aid to Israel. To which, as noted above, Netanyahu has thumbed his nose, saying that they will stand alone, that they already have the necessary weapons, including an estimated stockpile range of between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads – provided by the USA over the past 76 years – to complete the job.

Of course, the nations of the Arab world are prohibited by the United States from developing a nuclear arsenal as a defense against a possible nuclear attack by Israel, on pain of being bombed to the Stone Age. The hallmark hypocritical double standard of the “Free World”.

Biden’s demands for a ceasefire and political negotiations for a two-state solution has aroused vociferous protests from the powerful American Jewish lobby, members of which have always identified themselves as Jews first, Americans second.

The International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, opened hearings on Thursday, May 16 on a case filed by South Africa “that the situation in Gaza has reached a new and horrific stage, that Israel’s actions in Gaza are part of the end game. This is the last step in the destruction of Gaza”.

The election of Trump in November, which according to current national polls, seems, incredibly, an even money chance, will help Israel expedite the complete destruction of Palestine. Trump will also encourage Russia to invade other independent European nations after Ukraine, seeing that Trump is a good buddy and admirer of both Netanyahu and Putin. And with the current bromance flourishing between Putin and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, who are currently celebrating 75 years of diplomatic relations in Peking with majestic pomp and military circumstance, Trump will be drooling for the day when he may be accepted, even as a lowly, lapdog partner, of this unholy alliance of his pantheon of strongmen.

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Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

7 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)

Features

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

8 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

8 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins