The truth about the corrupt, crony-corporate NGO, backed by the US government, big corporations and banks that rakes in $56 million dollars a year, yet begs for money constantly and can’t find enough victims for its services:

“Safe Horizon’s financial statement for the year 2012 reveals that the NGO invested over $10,500,000 (Over `65 Crore) in bonds, mutual funds and shares. The NGO which claims to work in areas like domestic violence, criminal justice and human trafficking is funded by big corporates like AGT International, AVON, US government agencies, Philips Van Heusen Corporation and Capital One Bank.

Its expenditures are more intriguing including an average $161,000 or `1 Crore on lobbying every year. It pays its high flying CEO more than $339,000 or `2 crore per annum. A US based group Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) claimed money paid by Safe Horizon is more than what a member of the US House of Representative receives as annual salary.

“The federal government spends $1 billion a year for programmes to curb domestic violence. But these programmes lack accountability and transparency, giving rise to bloated salaries, mismanagement and outright theft,” SAVE claimed.

A political commentator Carry Roberts who exposed several frauds masterminded by US NGOs wrote in ‘Renewamerica’ that “victims of battering are in short supply these days. So when no victim is known to exist, the solution is obvious: fabricate one.”

“Like other abuse shelters, Safe Horizon makes a grand show of being perpetually hard-up for cash…..But how many would-be donors know Safe Horizon resembles Citicorp or Bank of America, far more than a grass-roots organisation dedicated to providing succour to persons down on their luck?” Roberts wrote, adding that Safe Horizon rakes in nearly $56 million every year and pays skyscraper salaries that would put many bail-out bank executives to shame.

US state attorney Preet Bharara was peeved that Indians were not talking about hapless and real victim Sangeeta, who is now at the mercy of the US Department of Justice and Safe Horizon. Perhaps Bharara is not aware of the conflict of interest between Safe Horizon and the US Justice department. In its financial statement, the NGO claimed it received money to the tune of $ 952,000 from the Justice Department which will announce the judgement on the plea of the NGO it fund.”

A brilliant piece by Satybrata Pal in The Hindu about the flagrant US breach of protocol and law in the maid case:

“While the U.S. argues that anyone in New York paid less than the minimum U.S. wage is being ill-treated, what is in fact the case is that anyone who has to live only on that wage is — as the U.S. NGOs so vehemently argue — condemned to a life of poverty and hunger. Forbes pointed out in an article earlier this year that the unemployed who live on welfare get more in several States than those who work for minimum wages. In New York, Forbes calculated the annual take-home from welfare at $43,700 a year, or $21.01 an hour, almost three times the minimum wage.

It is important to remember this because a help employed by an Indian diplomat has none of the expenses that are assessed to compute either a minimum or a living wage. She stays in a room in the diplomat’s house, with her food, clothing, medical bills and transportation all paid for. Every dollar she earns is saved. If Sangeeta Richard was paid $500 a month, she was saving that a month. No one living on minimum wages in the U.S. has savings; most are up to their eyes in debt. Saving $500 a month for them is a pipe dream. The black and Hispanic women who work as domestic help and charwomen in the U.S., and form its underclass as the societal and lineal descendants of slave labour, would happily trade places with Sangeeta Richard.

Members of our civil society who argue that she was bonded labour, as defined in our Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, perhaps do not know the terms under which domestic help are employed by Indian diplomats. Neither that Act, nor any of the judgments of the Supreme Court which interpreted it, applies to them.

Convention and obligations

Those who claim that the Indian government has no interest in protecting domestic workers, and therefore is indifferent to Sangeeta Richard’s plight, ask why it has not ratified Convention 189 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) “Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers,” which came into force in September 2013. This is unfair because the government of India voted for the draft, and has since prepared a draft “Policy for Domestic Workers,” incorporating many of the provisions of the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act (UWSSA), 2008.

It is also not germane to this case because ILO Convention 189 would protect a domestic worker abroad only if the host government has ratified it. Like India, the U.S. government also voted for the Convention in 2011, but made a remarkably candid statement in explanation of vote: “In the case of the United States, a number of the provisions present complex issues with respect to our existing law in practice, including in regard to our federal system of government. Accordingly, we want to make clear that our vote to adopt this Convention entails no obligation by the United States to ratify it.”

Convention 189 offers all the protections that the U.S. claims Sangeeta Richard was denied. If these are already statutory requirements in the U.S., it is hard to understand why the convention presented it with “complex issues,” which had to be reconciled with its laws.

What is disturbing is that the U.S. “evacuated” the Richard family after issuing them “T-visas,” given to the next of kin of victims of human trafficking. This meant that, in its view, Sangeeta Richard was a victim of human trafficking as defined in the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, which supplements the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC).

The protocol defines “trafficking in persons” in detail. None of the conditions precedent applies to Sangeeta Richard, and a person travelling on an official passport of a democracy run by the rule of law by definition is not someone who is being trafficked. Moreover, when the Indian Embassy had asked the U.S. government to help trace her when she absconded, the T-visas in response make it clear that the U.S. considered the Indian government complicit in human trafficking.

It follows that the U.S. does not have the slightest intention of abiding by Article 8 of the Protocol, which sets out the terms under which a victim of trafficking is sent back to her country. In turn, this violates the assurance the U.S. gave when it ratified the protocol, to which it entered a reservation, but clarified that “this reservation does not affect in any respect the ability of the United States to provide international cooperation to other Parties as contemplated in the Protocol.”

Iran case

Instead, the U.S. claims that its laws were broken, and since a consular officer does not have the full immunity of an accredited diplomat, Ms. Khobragade was not immune from either arrest or subsequent prosecution. This, though, is not what the U.S. argued as the applicable international law when its diplomatic and consular staff were taken hostage in Iran in 1979, and the government in Tehran threatened to prosecute them for acts that were, in its view, crimes in Iranian law. The U.S. moved the International Court of Justice and in its submission, claimed inter alia that: “Pursuant to Articles 28, 31, 33, 34, 36 and 40 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the Government of lran is under an international legal obligation to the United States to ensure that … the consular personnel of the United States be treated with respect and protected from attack on their persons, freedom, and dignity; and that United States consular officers be free from arrest or detention. The Government of Iran has violated and is currently violating the foregoing obligations.”

The court ruled in favour of the U.S. on all points, by a large majority on most, but unanimously on the U.S. contention, examined at length in its judgment, that the Iranian threat to prosecute diplomatic and consular staff was a violation of the Vienna Conventions. The court held that: “no member of the United States diplomatic or consular staff may be kept in Iran to be subjected to any form of judicial proceedings or to participate in them as a witness.”

The U.S. therefore does not really have a case, on either moral or legal grounds. What is surprising is that it was prepared to offend a country that is now of some strategic and commercial interest to it, and so blatantly breach the Vienna Conventions that protect its diplomatic and consular agents as much as they do all others. Except, it seems, in Iran in 1979 and in the U.S. in 2013.

(Satyabrata Pal, a former High Commissioner to Pakistan, is a Member of the National Human Rights Commission.)

I have been blogging repeatedly about this case, because I’ve felt instinctively that it was only the tip of the iceberg.

As I’ve shown at my blog, there has been a history of what looks, to an impartial observer, like unfriendly acts by the US toward India.

I am not sure this whole story wasn’t engineered in some way. Diplomatic rows often precede economic…and even military…rows.

It’s to be hoped it won’t go that far, but in a time of recession, it’s easy to whip people up against dark-skinned foreigners, with a culture and appearance you don’t like. Displaced anger is perfectly understandable in the population.

But from the media?

The so-called intelligentsia has been inflaming and exaggerating dozens of issues (from rape to trafficking to Indian labor to the financial crisis) in the most irresponsible way. What is their responsibility?

BBC:

“India has asked the US to withdraw an official from its embassy in Delhi in a row over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York……

In requiring the US to remove one of its diplomats from Delhi the Indian government is effectively treating the departure of its own diplomat from the US as an expulsion.

The question now is whether this draws a line under the messy diplomatic spat between the two countries.

Of greater importance is the longer-term impact this may have on bilateral ties. India, a democracy and rising power in Asia, is seen in many quarters in Washington as a natural fit to become a special partner of the United States. The US has sought a closer strategic and military partnership with Delhi but to a large extent has been rebuffed.

India is cautious about advancing ties too quickly. It doesn’t want to antagonise Beijing and many Indians still see the US as having been far too close to Pakistan.

Ms Khobragade has always denied any wrongdoing.

Some local reports say Washington has been asked to withdraw a diplomat of a “similar rank” as Ms Khobragade from its Delhi mission.

Others quote an unnamed government official as saying the US official was involved in the case relating to Ms Khobragade – although this is yet to be confirmed.”“

NDTV describes the US diplomat being expelled as someone who had instigated and assisted in spiriting Sangeeta Richard out of India in contravention of Indian laws.

Ernst Nolte: “The Gulag came before Auschwitz.”

Robert Conquest:

“For Russians – and it is surely right that this should become true for the world as a whole – Kolyma [one part of the Gulag] is a word of horror wholly comparable to Auschwitz … it did indeed kill some three million people, a figure well in the range of that of the victims of the Final Solution.”[9]

Excerpted from Ralph Raico: “The Taboo Against Truth,” LRC, June 8, 2010

Gary North:

“The time to tell all is when you’re in power. The second best time to tell all is just after you are fired for having told all. You go public. Better yet, do not volunteer in the first place.”

More evidence in this piece that the human trafficking crisis is one created by the NGOs (backed by the CIA and the Rothschild cartel)with little purchase in reality:

“Facts, lies and statistics

One of the pre-requisites for dealing with this problem is the availability of accurate data from reliable sources. Media coverage on trafficking of women and children clearly reveals scanty and unverified data. Often, data is cited without quoting the source, and even when sources are quoted, the data is varied and contradictory. What is of more concern is that inaccurate ‘facts’ are regularly recycled in the media in the face of evidence that reliable data is scare. Discrepancy in agency reports is particularly significant, because the same report is picked up by publications across India, almost assuming the status of ‘fact’.

There are conflicting statements given out on these issues by organizations such as the UN and the NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau). One such instance is about the main region from where the majority of women are trafficked. Nepal, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal are variously quoted, with these reports finding their way into the press. Another such glaring dichotomy is evident in that a Press Trust of India (PTI) report quotes Malini Bhattacharya, member of the National Commission for Women, India, calling human trafficking a “kind of international terrorism”. Yet, the same news item says that it is estimated that 90% of India‘s sex trafficking is internal. The usual stereotype in press accounts is of equating trafficking with prostitution, as evidenced by the “selling girls for prostitution” reported from various police stations in the country. Further, by mentioning ‘girls’, it is not clear if it actually means minors, or whether ‘girls’ also includes adult women. Such ambiguity does not enable an accurate assessment of the problem.

Very little data is available on the actual implementation of the anti-trafficking law, and convictions arising out of this. A rare report can be found on nepalnews.com date November 2, 2007 (‘5,000 sex workers in Valley: A study’). According to this report, “About 7% out of the total of 2,210 prisoners are serving jail terms in the Kathmandu

valley in cases related to human trafficking. Most of the imprisoned male traffickers are from Sindhupalchok, Nuwakot, Dhading and Makawanpur districts.” However, no source for this data is quoted.

Recycling unverified data

The analysis of newspaper clippings and electronic clips revealed that published data tends to make the rounds of media outlets. Even if the data is not attributed to any reliable source, it is quoted repeatedly. The following is one such example:

The Dainik Bhaskar (Hindi), New Delhi, of January 14, 2007, in a report titled ‘Deh vyapar ka karobar ek lakh karod ka’ (Flesh trade to the tune of one lakh crore) contains some interesting facts and figures:

1. After drugs and arms trafficking, trafficking in children and women is the next biggest money-spinner in the world.

2. These women and children are used in the sex trade, and the business amounts to 10 billion dollars annually.

3. India shares 1/4th of this booty.

4. In India, 1 crore women are trafficked, and 1 lakh crore rupees change hands.

5. In Mumbai, the women involved in sex trade goes up to 1 lakh.

6. In India, there are 500,000 women from Nepal and Bangladesh.

7. Every year, around 10,000 women from Nepal, and 7,000 women from Bangladesh are trafficked to India on the promise of employment and better marriage prospects.

8. Most of these are below 16 years of age.

9. The girls from Nepal are sold for Rs 2000-60,000.

10. According to the Centre for Development and Population Activities, 200 women are added to the sex trade in India everyday.

A point to note is that the source for the data for points 1 through 9is attributed to “various human rights agencies and NGOs” without naming them.

Significantly, these statistics were quoted in two news reports on major TV channels in India: The report ‘Tackling Trafficking’, aired on NDTV 24×7 on December 4, 2007, while reporting the newly launched Ujjwala scheme, quotes the Dainik Bhaskar data, but no primary source. Similarly, a report on Doordarshan on the same day (December 4, 2007) on the Ujjwala scheme, also quotes the same Dainik Bhaskar figures. Journalists must be alert to the process of recycling data without checking original sources, especially when the data thus quoted is contradictory.

Getting off the beaten track

The majority of the reports that appear in the media can be called hand-out journalism – either from official sources, press releases, or NGO publicity materials.”

And here is a detailed academic analysis: The NGO-ification of the anti-trafficking movement in the United States,” Jennifer Musto, University of California, Los Angeles.

It deals with the confusion in the way the issue is conceptualized; the extensive government funding of these so-called “non-governmental organizations”; the ambiguity and falsity in measurement and statistics churned out by the industry; and the problems for victims, tax-payers, and sovereign nations, created by the funding imperative.

Yet again, you have to turn to the conservative papers to find one dissenting voice in the rest of the media-driven babble.

Didn’t anyone learn anything from the build up to the Iraq war? Remember all the rhetoric about Iraq, Iraqi culture, their mistreatment of women? Did anyone actually bother to dissect the statistics?

Brendan O’Neill in The Telegraph does that:

“Why is the secretary general of the United Nations making solemn statements about the dreadful rape and murder of a woman in Delhi?

[Lila” Because this is an NGO manufactured crisis, to be followed by deconstruction of the unreconstructed Indian male, not before first subjecting to him a barrage of pornography and drugs, courtesy of the heroin trade (beloved of the BCCI and the CIA black ops) now routed through Goa and Kochi.]

Since when was it the job of the UN to comment on horrific crimes that are executed, not by states or armies or guerrillas, but by a handful of depraved men? I don’t remember the UN aiming stern warnings at the United Kingdom when, in 2006, the Ipswich serial killer murdered five prostitutes, or at Belgium in the late 1990s when a warped man raped and murdered five girls. Yet now, following the death of the physiotherapy intern who was gang-raped on a bus in Delhi on 13 December, the UN is telling India to get its act together and protect its women.

The reason for this double standard seems pretty clear. The Ipswich killings were not seen as being indicative of British culture in general, as a sign that British society and all those who inhabit it are rapacious and repulsive, but the Delhi gang rape is being treated as the logical end result of the allegedly depraved culture and attitudes of India and its “hyena-like” populace (as one Times writer refers to Indian men). The Delhi rape/murder is being held up, not simply as evidence that the men who carried it out are craven individuals who deserve the severest punishment, but as evidence that India itself is craven, that its hundreds of millions of men have been so warped by “macho culture” that they are one Bollywood film screening away from becoming rapists. That is why the UN is getting involved: the Delhi rape is being used to induce collective guilt in India, over everything from its morals to its mad males to its economic growth.

Almost as soon as it was announced that the still unnamed rape victim had died, Western observers rushed to condemn all of India. In The Times, Libby Purves skated on very thin ice when she decreed that “murderous, hyena-like male contempt is a norm [in India]”. Echoing those Victorian ladies who visited faraway continents and were shocked by the sexual depravity of foreign menfolk, Purves claimed that in the subcontinent “sexual harassment and assault” are looked upon as a “male birthright”, especially in Delhi, where there are “tens of thousands of newly urbanised [men], from villages still almost medieval”. Other female columnists have used the Delhi rape case to riff about the time they were propositioned or felt up by men in India, as if unwanted sexual attention and the most horrific gang rape you could imagine are just different sides of the same coin of “macho culture”; as if there is not a profound difference between experiencing a come-on from an over-eager Indian male and suffering an extreme violent assault on a bus.”

The author makes a further excellent point:

“A handful of observers have challenged the sweeping demonisation of India and its people in the wake of the Delhi rape – but strikingly they have done so on the basis that we in the West are just as rapacious as the “hyena-like” men of the subcontinent. In the past, progressives would have critiqued the heaping of collective guilt on to foreign nations on the basis that it was inhumane and inaccurate; now they critique it on the basis that rape is not just “a cultural phenomenon in India”, but is “endemic everywhere”, with verbal or violent misogyny “happening all around us”, including in civilised countries like Britain. In other words, it isn’t just Indian men who are hyenas – all men are.””

And at the Eurasia Review,  Gajanan Khergamkar makes the same point about the vastly higher rape rate in the US.

The Reformed Reader.org

“1:19 And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew {g} women [are] not as the Egyptian women; for they [are] lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them.

(g) Their disobedience in this was lawful, but their deception is evil.”

I have been trying to learn more about the Geneva Bible, the original translation into English by William Tyndale, to find out how its attitude to the state differed from that of the more familiar King James Version. The King James Version was based on the Geneva Bible, but it was authored by the very powers that had persecuted Tyndale.

Anyway, in researching the Geneva Bible,  I came across the passage I just quoted.

The passage describes how during the Egyptian captivity of the Jews,  Pharaoh was worried that the Hebrews were multiplying faster than the Egyptians and would overtake them in power.

He orders all Hebrew male children be killed.

Two  Hebrew mid-wives defy his order and deliver the children, making up a story that the Jewish women were livelier than the Egyptian women ( more animal-like) and thus gave birth even before the arrival of the mid-wives.

In this way, the Hebrew children were saved.

The Bible records that God blessed the women for this act of disobedience.

But, what the Geneva Bible adds, and the King James version doesn’t, is that while God approved of the midwives’ disobedience, he also regarded the “deception” they used as sinful.

This version of the story clarifies the Bible’s teaching on something that has been worrying me.

To what degree can we be deceptive when flouting what we consider unjust state actions?

For me, this translates into the question of how can one justly deconstruct imperial propaganda without being guilty of the kind of subversion/revolution that the Bible condemns?

Apparently, the Biblical answer is that if one challenges the state, for the challenge to be moral, it has to be done in the open.

Incidentally, this is exactly what Gandhi also taught.

In other words, you cannot hide your purpose in deconstructing or opposing what you consider unlawful authority. You can’t fly under false colors. No red herrings.

In that sense, Wikileaks, Greenwald, and many others, who, I believe, do genuinely oppose the unlawful actions of the state, are proceeding immorally  – from the point of view of this text – by trying to use subterfuge to avoid the wrath of the state.

Self-preservation seems like a rational and logical (and moral) thing to do for “natural man.” After all, human nature demands self-preservation.

Unfortunately, it’s not what Christianity seems to demand.

Christianity seems to require a degree of fool-hardiness.

I don’t know if it expects you to stand in front of tanks, but, at least here, the Bible seems to say that there is a degree of subterfuge in disobeying  authority that is unacceptable.

You’d think that healthy subterfuge would make the chances of defeating unjust laws much better.

But the Bible doesn’t say that.

It suggests instead a degree of openness, of vulnerability, in confronting something wrong. It’s as though one’s expected to convert one’s opponent, not just defeat him. …

And to convert him, you have to show him your neck…

You have to trust him in some way.

At least, that’s how it reads to me.  Even though it’s not particularly a message I want to hear….

Times of India:

“In a letter to the judge, prosecutors said there was no need for an arraignment because Khobragade had “very recently” been given diplomatic immunity status and left the United States on Thursday.

The letter said the charges will remain pending until she can be brought to court to face them, either through a waiver of immunity or her return to the US without immunity status.

“We will alert the court promptly if we learn that the defendant returns to the United States in a non-immune capacity, at which time the government will proceed to prosecute this case and prove the charges in the indictment,” the letter from the office of US attorney Preet Bharara said.

Lawyer says Devyani remains in US

The lawyer for an Indian diplomat accused of lying about how much she paid her housekeeper says she’s still in the United States, despite a prosecutor’s claim that she left.

Attorney Daniel Arshack said in a statement on Thursday that Devyani Khobragade was at her New York City apartment. Shortly after he issued the statement, a spokesman for federal prosecutors said the state department had told prosecutors that it had asked her to leave the country on Thursday afternoon.

Questions about her whereabouts arose after prosecutors announced that she’d been indicted on criminal charges of visa fraud and making false statements.”