Messages of Hate, and Sometimes Violence Too

When the government recently decided not to tax the text message service, I liked the decision, just as I would like lifting tax off of just about anything. But, a colleague commented, ‘Great, this just means more of these stupid forwarded messages’. Sadly enough, her comment has proven right more often than not.

I woke up this morning to a text message from a random number. It read, “APPLE MECCA, kya aap jante hain? America ki city NEWYOURK ke elaqa mid town main HELTON main ik shrab khana khul raha hai jis ka nam APPLE MECCA yani KAABA BAR hai. Wahan ke musalmano sey purzor ehtejaj ki darkhwast hai”. The message ended with the ominous 3-letter directive“4wd” (forward to other friends too).

The text message roughly translates to this, “The Hilton in New York City is opening up a bar called Apple Mecca, and all Muslims are called to protest against it”. First of all, the message sender (whoever began the notorious chain), does not know how to spell New York or Hilton for that matter. Secondly, ‘Apple Mecca’ does not translate into ‘Kaaba Bar’, this is a translation obviously (and perhaps maliciously) designed to incite.

This is not to say that mass messaging is used only to incite hatred. Some of the funniest jokes I’ve read have been sent to me via text messaging, or more importantly urgent blood donations have been made and lives saved owing to this technology. But, the penetration and adoption of such a technology can also prove to be rather disastrous for a society which is yet to be educated on the effects of cheap mass communication.

Latest statistics by the Pakistan Telecom Authority say the country now has a whopping 94.3 million mobile phone users, making for more than half the population of 172 million.
It is no surprise that the urban cellular market is showing signs of rapid saturation. Service providers are now focusing on Value Added Services to increase their revenue earning from existing users, like the Short Message Service (SMS) packages, making the texting service easily accessible to a large number of users.

This has given the youth a new kind of power to get organised fast, and cheap. So, protests are now organised with mass messaging instead of printing flyers or making phone calls. Thousands of the students who took to the country’s streets after Emergency Rule was imposed in 2007 had responded to text messages which guided them to the location of the demonstration and instructed them to ‘wear black armbands’ and ‘make banners’.

But, the technology was also partly responsible for herding together violent protestors and for the damage to many, some rather historical, buildings on the Mall Road in Lahore in the 2005-06 riots during the cartoon controversy (against the caricatures published by Jyllands-Posten in Denmark).

A private news channel had interviewed a young man locked up for destroying property during the riots. ‘What lead you to this kind of protest?’ and the man had no clue of what the issue was, ‘Amreeka, Amreeka ne hamarey Islam ko bay-izzat kia hai’ (It’s America, America has humiliated our Islam).

This highlights a fundamental problem with the “Short Message Service”, aptly named because it fails to convey the full message. Unless a text message calling for protest is going out to an aware and non-violent audience, the sender can never be sure how it will be received and what the reaction could be.

I remember the SMS that had circulated at that time, asking one to stop eating Danish cheese and cookies. Also, multimedia messages containing pictures of the Danish flag being used as a doormat in various Arab countries were circulated. Violent protests in some Arab countries had lead to widespread damage of their own property, and loss of more than a hundred lives by some counts. Bloodthirsty mobs had done no good by breaking windows of their own businesses and burning tyres on their own streets. Denmark had issued no formal apology to anyone in particular and had stood by what it claimed were standards of ‘free expression’.

Hateful text messages had made the rounds against a Danish filmmaker, who was later killed by a fanatic Muslim. Fatwas were handed down, and circulated through SMS, against watching such films or reading any ‘anti-Islam’ material. I never read a text message calming people down, and rebutting the claims made by the Jyllands-Posten caricatures, or the Danish film. There was never an SMS spreading what many would consider the true teachings of Islam as a religion. All I read everywhere were just messages seething with hate, ready to incite hate and ultimately spreading more hate in a world which could certainly do with lesser of the sentiment.

But the sad part is that most of us will end up forwarding such text messages, however nonsensical, to our entire phonebooks, without giving any thought to the action. The reason for this is possibly the same collective guilt that drives the Muslim majority in this country to bow their heads when a bearded man is talking, regardless of his words, or the same emotion that stopped so many of us from criticising the Taliban because they carried the unfathomable weapon of promising to propound ‘Shariah’- however twisted their version of the law may be. There is something wrong when people in a country have to debate on whether flogging a young girl is ‘allowed or not allowed’, ‘under which circumstances’, and ‘for what actions?’. Should there really be room for debate in such an action, even if it receives the Shariah stamp from some self-proclaimed cleric? And, should you really be forwarding an SMS that incites hatred, regardless of the commanding tone which tells you to ‘4wd’?