Email was invented by a 14year old Indian-born boy.

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai was 14 years old when he developed the technology we now know as email. But despite having received "official recognition" of his creation in the form of a government-issued patent, some still question whether he was the veritable founder.
Ayyadurai's former colleague Robert Field explained the discrepancy and defended Ayyadurai in a blog on The Huffington Post. According to Field, "multi-billion dollar defense company" Raytheon BBN Technologies generated "their entire brand ... based on claims of having 'invented email,'" then unleashed a PR campaign to "discredit email's origins" as well as Shiva's claim to having invented it.
Ayyadurai explained in a HuffPost Live interview on Thursday that he thinks these allegations stem from people who are both economically and racially prejudiced.
"The reality is this: in 1978, there was a 14-year-old boy and he was the first to create electronic office system. He called it email, a term that had never been used before, and then he went and got official recognition by the U.S. government," he told host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani, referring to himself.
Ayyadurai said his modest background prevented him from getting the recognition he deserved.
"After that took place, you have a sense of disbelief among people that comes from not so much the technology issue, but there’s a lot of economic issues associated here," he continued. "[The discovery] wasn't done at MIT; it wasn’t done at the military; it wasn’t done at a big institution. It was done in Newark, NJ, one of the poorest cities in the United States. It was done by a dark-skinned immigrant kid, 14 years old."
The creation of email falls under the pretext of the "American dream," Ayyadurai explained, and he feels that those who challenge him as the inventor are afraid of upward mobility and change.
"The narrative there is what changes and shocks certain people who want to control the narrative that innovation can only take place under their bastions," he said. "The truth is that the American dream is really about [the fact that] innovation can take place anytime, by anybody."

Oil -- not global terror.

By CJ Werleman 

 

We Aren't Trying to End Global Terror: We're After the Oil

 

 

Thirteen years after the attacks of September 11, and with much said and written about ISIS and the gruesome beheading of James Foley, America continues to misunderstand the roots of Islamic terrorism. We also fail to acknowledge that as long as we remain addicted to cheap oil we will be locked in a war in the Middle East. 

You won’t hear Middle East oil mentioned on the cable news airwaves. You will hear “clash of civilizations,”" religiously motivated terrorism,” and any number of similar phrases that are meant to distract and divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world: we are addicted to the oil beneath their feet, and we intend to dominate the land they stand on.
The Muslim world isn’t as ignorant as Christian crusaders, the military industrial complex and the vast know-nothing right wing would have you believe. After all, what uncivilized, stupid people could produce algebra, geometry and our concept of the rule of law? The Muslim world is smart enough to figure out that America has invested all of the past 70 years into dominating control of Middle East oil supplies. We have propped despotic regimes and brutal dictators, overthrown democratically elected governments and waged three wars in two decades on Muslim soil. All while we fund and are complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian land.
ISIS is the product of our own imagination and self-serving meddling. After we removed Saddam and his Sunni quasi-government, ISIS was the response by those Sunnis blocked from enjoying economic participation in Iraq.
It’s time to face reality and the monster in the mirror: we are not trying to end global terror, nor are we trying to promote Western secular democracy in the Middle East. Our motivations and desires are no secret. We do everything to ensure that we, and our allies, particularly Japan, have a reliable supply to the region’s liquid gold.
With a total of 44 U.S. military bases in the Middle East and the Central Asia, we have the Muslim world completely surrounded. From Turkey to Saudi Arabia, from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, our bases serve as a constant reminder to Muslims that we control their economic future and we are here to stay. And with an economic future that looks bleak for Muslims, the embers for Muslim rage are stoked.
“Terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease of life,” writes Robert Pape in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
The U.S. State Department has announced that Westerners, mostly British Muslims, are being drawn to ISIS. Media outlets everywhere ask why. The answer is clear. The UK has the greatest concentration of Muslims among Western democracies. Muslims were pulled from former British colonies during the 1940s to provide cheap labor for the reconstruction of Britain in the aftermath of the second world war. The textile and steel mills in the north of England were filled with Muslim migrants from Asia and Africa.
Industrial collapse turned these mills into dust heaps, and today Muslim urban ghettos in the UK now resemble the socio-economic conditions of predominately black urban ghettos in America. For British Muslims, high unemployment is the norm, as is racial discrimination and anti-immigrant violence. For many, economic and social oppression at home looks a whole lot like the social and economic oppression that is occurring in Muslim countries abroad. The collapse of liberal democracies in the face of unfettered capitalism has failed minorities everywhere in the West.
Socio-economic insecurity is at the heart of all self-proclaimed religiously motivated extremism. Where social justice prevails, and the state meets the economic needs of its people, hyper-religious ideologies lack appeal.
French political scholar Oliver Roy argues, “This notion of a globalized Islam is not the product of any specific ‘Islamist’ organization but a broad sociological trend that has developed across Europe as a result of racism, migration, and globalization.” In Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, Muslims have been oppressed and had war waged upon them. “In principle—all the struggles for Muslims around the world were to be regarded as equally important” in this global ummah, Roy writes. This is why we now find Western Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
In returning to the Middle East, and its oil, our posture and actions promise to become even more aggressive, as oil reserves inevitably diminish. In an in-depth look into Saudi oil production over the past 40 years, Matthew R. Simmons warns in his book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy that Saudi oil production is a far cry from the boastful claims long made by the kingdom regarding the robustness of its oilfields. According to Simmons, Saudi oil production peaked at 10 million barrels a day in 1981. Today it is 8 to 9 million barrels and falling. No super giant oil fields have been found in the region since the 1950s.
The very reason U.S. military bases, which are the size of small cities, exist in Saudi Arabia is to ensure our access to this diminishing supply. The oppressive Saudi regime wants us there to ensure neighboring countries don’t eye their oil. The central and founding charter of Al Qaeda was to remove our bases from the Holy Land. It was no coincidence that 17 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.
“We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly, and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both,” warns Chris Hedges. With our addiction to Middle East oil supplies, we can expect the latter, which means 2001 was the start of our endless war with the Muslim world.

Gaza is a crime made in America and Europe as well as Jerusalem.

By Seumas Milne

The carnage unleashed on the Palestinians is part of a decades-old routine that depends on western support.

Global revulsion at the mind-numbing carnage of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza seems finally to have spurred some of the western political class to speak out. The resignation of Sayeeda Warsi, Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister, in protest against her government’s “morally indefensible” stance, emboldened Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, to demand the suspension of arms export licences to Israel.

Last week it was Ed Miliband who condemned Israel’s invasion and the prime minister’s “silence on the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians”. Even the United States administration denounced its strategic protege’s “disgraceful” bombardment of a school, while Barack Obama described Palestinian suffering as “ heartbreaking” – as if he had nothing to do with it.

Now that Israelis and Palestinians have arrived in Cairo to turn the ceasefire into something more long-lasting, perhaps it feels safer to take a stand. But a month of indiscriminate brutality in which 1,875 Palestinians and 67 Israelis have been killed is still presented, grotesquely, as a war of Israeli self-defence – rather than as a decades-long confrontation between occupier and occupied, in which western governments stand resolutely on the side of the occupier.

And while the overwhelming majority of Palestinian dead are civilians – 430 of them children – and 64 of the Israeli dead are soldiers, it is Hamas that is branded terrorist, rather than the Israeli armed forces armed with the most sophisticated targeting technology in the world.

It’s only necessary to consider for a moment what the reaction would have been if the death toll had been the other way round to realise how loaded are the scales of western moral outrage and selective the appetite for action. And it’s only by ignoring the entire history of the conflict that it can be portrayed as the result of some wearisome ancient ethnic hatred.

This week’s centenary of the outbreak of the first world war should help. David Cameron claims it was fought for freedom. In reality, it was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of imperial powers to carve up territories, markets and resources.

Far from defending democracy or the rights of small nations, Britain and France ended the war divvying up the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Iraq to Palestine. A century on, we’re still living with the consequences.

In my own family, both my grandmothers lost brothers in the 1914-18 war. One was George Mackay Clark, who fought with the Royal Scots in Gallipoli and the campaign to conquer Palestine. He was killed in November 1917, just outside Gaza.

Ten days earlier, a British foreign secretary had signed the Balfour declaration, which on behalf of one people promised to a second the land of a third. Palestine would be a “home for the Jewish people” provided that nothing would prejudice the rights of the “existing non-Jewish communities”, as the Palestinians were described.

So began its full-scale colonisation by mainly European settlers – something that could have happened only under colonial rule – which three decades later would lead to the establishment of Israel and the dispossession or expulsion of the majority of the Palestinian people.

Four Arab-Israeli wars on, the 44% of Palestine allocated to the Palestinian majority under the 1947 UN partition plan had been entirely occupied by Israel – and the Palestinians were fighting a guerrilla war for self-determination and the refugees’ right of return.

The other day I came across a copy of Newsweek magazine from March 1978, with a picture of an Israeli tank on the cover under the headline “Israel strikes back”. Then it was south Lebanon that Israel was punishing, not Gaza – and the “terrorists” of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, not Hamas, that its forces were targeting.

Israel staged an even larger-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and occupied the south for another 18 years. Since the Oslo agreement of the early 1990s failed to produce the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza it was supposed to, Israel has colonised, bombed and reinvaded the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies (along with Syria and Lebanon) time and again: in 2002, 2006, 2008 and 2012.

The justification is always the same: the security of the occupier must be upheld against the resistance of the occupied and blockaded population. And at every stage Israel has had the military, financial and diplomatic support of the west, the US above all.

Despite the hand-wringing, that backing has been unwavering throughout the past month’s devastation of Gaza. Not only is Israel’s right of “self-defence” in a territory it illegally controls upheld, while the same right is denied to the Palestinians, but the US, whose military aid to Israel runs to $3bn a year, has been re-supplying it with weapons as its troops and aircraft pulverised and massacred their way through an impoverished territory from which its captive people are unable to escape.

Europe is in the same game. Britain has licensed the sale of a startling £8bn worth of military or dual-use equipment since 2010, and £42m of direct arms sales – including parts for drones and tanks used in the destruction of Gaza.

But a month on, Israel has failed to achieve its objectives. It has “mown the lawn”, as Israel’s military likes to describe its campaigns of destruction and bloodletting. But Hamas has been strengthened by its defiance and military performance; its rate of rocket fire was barely reduced by Israel’s attacks; and the united front with other Palestinian groups Israel is so keen to destroy has been shored up by the campaign.

If the Palestinians are going to break out of their current subjection, that will have to go further. For the rest of the world it’s the outrageous big-power backing for Israel’s 47-year illegal occupation, colonisation and denial of Palestinian rights – while orchestrating an endless phoney peace process that simply allows the land grab to continue – that has to be challenged and dismantled.

Global public opinion has shifted decisively in favour of justice for the Palestinians. What’s needed is to turn that into unrelenting pressure for an end to support for occupation, an arms embargo and sanctions, from above and below. The horror of Gaza is a crime made in Washington and London, as well as Jerusalem.