Will Pakistanis Listen and Act?

Re: # 128 I think we can arrive at a bit more clarity. There is OBL and cohorts who constitue the epicenter of terrorism. They have a certain political agenda based on a certain distorted worldview. They function in utmost secrecy yet there are agents among general populace who recruit and spread the gospel. They are able to do it because

i) They use a religious idiom preaching hate and superiority of Islam. While everyone can privately think that his religion is superior when mixed with a hateful and violent message it is very inciteful and lethal. It holds true even for Hindu fanatics. I need not elaborate.

ii) Then there is public at large. A large number of them actually celebrate every time there is an act of terror in Western capitals. They hold these suicide bombers as their heroes and martyrs. These guys are actually venting out their impotent anger at circumstances they are generally in. Democracy is said to act like a valve to release such pent up emotions in an institutionalised way. If they think there government is colluding with the West against their wishes people would recall such government. It is always better than emotional immature young men doing what they did. As I earlier said Pakistani Britons and Pakistanis diaspora in general stay Pakistanis and never (almost) identify with their adopted country fully. They are also not in sufficient numbers or do not hold sufficient financial muscle in these countries to actually change governments or influence policy significantly. Hence I said a feeling of alienation and powerlessness prevails. Situation at home is no better at home. The youth of this population irrespective of whether they are in Pakistan or outside are susceptible due to all these factors coupled with emotional immaturity.

iii) Therefore I propose that a line of action should be such that the catchment population is weaned away from the `epicenter` while engaging the actual combatant by force. The strategy can be manifold but empowerment of the man in the street is most important. Only way of doing that , I know of, is democracy across the Muslim world.

iv) Take the case of Hasba bill. The other day I opposed it but on this test I now think its better these guys do these things and feel powerful than shooting around.

I admit that at best the above is at best an amateur attempt. None of this in anyway means that I understand or support the ideology of hatred.

Re:southasian#129

Very interesting views. I have Pakistani friends and colleagues for many years in the US and I can say that most Pakistanis are very nice people. The question is why does a country with so much potential get involved with all these incidents around the world? How can that be changed?

My suggestion is that the Pakistani establishment, the intelligentsia, the media and moderate religious leaders must come together to provide a message of hope to the millions of Pakistanis. They must tell the people that - ok, we have grievances like Kashmir or Iraq or whatever. But these grievances can be solved by dialogue and negotiations. There is no need to go around blowing up yourselves and others because that will never solve ay grievances. Case in point is Kashmir. 15 years of fighting has yielded nothing. 1 year of peace has yielded bus service and softer borders. 15 years of peace will lead to much, much more where Kashmiris can lead a happy life. That sort of positive message must come from the top to the masses, so that it becomes part of their psyche. A top to bottom positive propaganda blitz can start healing the religious hatred.

In addition a complete cessation of support to any kind of violent activities as well as incitement to religious hatred in mosques etc is a must. This can really turn around Pakistan as a country, earn the goodwill of the rest of the world and enable it to reach its true potential.

Re: # 130 Yes, Amit. I agree with your views. There are of course vested interests. We Indians, however, should desist from seeking mileage from our neighbour`s predicament. We must act mature. Rejoicing in their crisis is not a good idea.

#130 by amit on July 24, 2005 3:40pm PT


Case in point is Kashmir. 15 years of fighting has yielded nothing. 1 year of peace has yielded bus service and softer borders.


Why don`t you ask your nice Pakistani friends what they think of this arrangement? Hint: They think musharraf sold out to the Indians...They think jihad is the way to go...even the paki visa moderates think this is the first step in a process that ends with Indian Kashmir falling in Pakiland`s lap...

If your paki friends are saying they don`t support jihad, they`re more likely to be worried about feds listening in on their conversations and sending them on a trip in a Gulfstream...

If you think the majority of your nice Pakistani friends in the US think otherwise, you`re seriously self-deluded...

Egypt and Pakiland....two nations whose existence is based in denial...(ana ;)

EDITORIAL: Terrorist link between Egypt and Pakistan

Egypt’s luxury resort at Sharm al-Sheikh on the Red Sea has been bombed, killing 88 and injuring 200. This surpasses the 62 killed at Luxor in 1997, after which President Hosni Mubarak had successfully suppressed the radical Islamists in the country, with the main Islamist organisation Ikhwan al-Muslimoon publicly abjuring terrorism. The resort attack was carried out by three suicide-bombers who were quickly owned by an organisation calling itself Al Qaeda, “as response to the global evil powers which are spilling the blood of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Chechnya”. It appears that the reprieve from terrorism that began in the wake of the 1997 killings is now over and Egypt, which earns $6 billion a year from tourism, is in for more trouble.

In many ways Egypt and Pakistan form the two poles of the same movement. The former produces the guides, the latter provides the training grounds and shelter. The blind orator Omar Abdul Rehman of Gama’a Islamiyya caused the greatest stir when he planned the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre through Ramzi Yusuf who was of Pakistani origin. Indeed, if Pakistan had been Arabic-speaking the power of the blind men of Saudi Arabia (Bin Baz) and Egypt (Kishk, Omar Abdur Rehman) would have doomed its population forever. However, money worked almost equal wonders, when Khalid Sheikh Muhammad sat in Karachi and guided all sorts of killer operations in Pakistan through Pakistani operatives — while Omar Abdur Rehman’s son was ensconced comfortably in Quetta organising the murder of Hazara Shias there on behalf of Osama Bin Laden, who in turn was supporting his son’s father-in-law, Mullah Umar.

Egypt produced the fiery exponents of violent change in Sheikh Umar Abdur Rehman, Sheikh Kishk and Shukri Mustafa. The mastermind of Al Qaeda today is Ayman Al Zawahiri whose grandfather was once head of the Al Azhar University in Cairo. It is no surprise then that the leader of the Hamburg Cell that attacked the World Trade Centre on 9/11, Muhammad Atta, was also an Egyptian. In all, over 500 Egyptians died fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the highest tally among the Arabs. In fact, as we witnessed the soul-searing attack on London’s subways on July 7, we recalled that London’s Finsbury Mosque cell of Al Qaeda was run by Abu Hamza Al-Masri, an Egyptian who had lost an arm and an eye fighting in Afghanistan. Al Masri published al-Ansar, the lethal weekly of the murderous GIA in Algeria, and got his son to abduct British tourists in Yemen for the sake of jihad. Al Masri has been in a British jail since 2004. Another Egyptian, Yasser al Sirri, headed the London-based Islamic Media Observatory, the news agency that provided letters of accreditation to the two fake journalists who killed the Afghan leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, in the north of Afghanistan three days before 9/11.

Egyptian Islamists were persecuted by President Jamal Nasser but befriended by President Anwar Sadat in the 1970s after Nasser’s death. In 1984, Hosni Mubarak released them from jail and sent them for hajj from where they boarded connecting flights, mostly to Peshawar. Many lingered in Saudi Arabia before going to Pakistan. It was Faraj, the theoretician of Sadat’s assassination after Sadat normalised relations with Israel in 1981, who laid down that although the enemy was abroad his supporters had to be attacked at home first.

Terror in Egypt was renewed after a number of mujahideen returned to Egypt from Afghanistan and began targeting the tourists to deprive the country of its foreign exchange earnings. After numerous attacks, it was the mindless massacre of innocent tourists at Luxor in 1997 that finally turned the Egyptian people against the Islamists and allowed President Hosni Mubarak to clamp down on them. Egypt’s salafist Islam of the Ikhwan has mixed well with Saudi Wahhabism to create the explosive chemistry unleashed by Al Qaeda on the world. Many scholars now think that the poison of violence is not sown in the Muslim mind by the madrassa but by the mosque. Not only the Finsbury mosque in the UK and the Al Quds mosque of Hamburg in Germany, but mosques all over the United States too are using hate literature penned by the late blind chief mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Bin Baz, and have attracted all sorts of middle class Muslims to suicide bombing.

The Sharm al-Sheikh bombings should alert us to the changing view of the Islamists in Egypt and Al Qaeda’s new strategy. Al Zawahiri had not only attacked Gama’a for going quiescent after the 1997 massacre at Luxor; earlier in his book, The Bitter Harvest, he had also attacked the Ikhwan for giving up violence. He held the view that Egypt had to be attacked because that was where the West had to be fought first. Sitting in Peshawar he repeatedly tried to assassinate Egyptian ministers and civil servants suspected of persecuting the Islamists. His recruits narrowly missed two government figures in Cairo but killed one informer. He tried to destroy the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in 1995, succeeding only partially. He was however more successful in fulfilling Osama Bin Laden’s agenda against the Americans after the setting up of Al Qaeda in 1998. He blew up the US embassy in Nairobi (partially) and tried but failed to blow up the one in Daresalam. These attacks were followed by more successful hits in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Egypt’s policy of defusing Islamism by being tough on the modernist-secularists is now likely to come under challenge, just as the British policy of affording civic rights to the Islamists has finally come apart. In Pakistan too the period of quiescence about the madrassa and mosque extremism must come to an end. With the UN’s Kofi Annan denouncing the Sharm al-Sheikh attack, a global consensus about tough domestic laws against Islamic extremists in general is clearly going to gel. America will likely renew its PATRIOT Act and lend a hand to the European Union in framing new laws that will infringe on what were earlier known as civic rights. After that happens, countries like relatively “democratic” Pakistan will have to get ready for the next Islamist onslaught even as the united Western pressure for getting rid of “extremism” increases. Is President General Pervez Musharraf ready for that? If not, God help him and us. *

Re: # 124
...and the famous `clever` baniya was hoodwinked into releasing all 90,000+ of pow without a single one being charged for war crimes...shows how stupid the so-called clever baniya is....right gujju...;)

Re: # 121
...hahahahha...zahra! that would have baffled the buffoon...;)

It is a well meaning article and, there is no reason to get worked up on the presumtion that
there is a hidden agenda behind or that it is espousing a holier than thou attiude at the cost
of Islam,Muslims,Pakistanis.At the rate at which we are killing each other in the name of
democracy,religion,state we dont need a meteoric kind of intervention to become extinct
a la the dinosaurs.To me the propogation of religion based or nation-state based identity
are the most sinister ideas which we have adopted in our fast forward desire to self-destruct.I want to ask a question supposing there were no countries or religion in the world would we
cease to exsist as humans? i dont think so!. All of us need to read bill brysons a brief history
of every-thing to understand and appreciate the fragility of our exsistence.

Re: # 106
Ah! a slave speaks...I do not take seriously when a slave speaks of her/his mentality. You were ruled by Muslims and now by the West, its just that you do not understand, for how can you you are but slaves...it just a matter of time, when Muslims or any one else will start ruling you next, your tone will be same against the West, like at the moment it is against Muslims and Pakistanis, and the wise people of the West will than ignore you just like us!

Re: # 136

And listen to John Lennon`s song ``Imagine``.

Re: # 106

Morarji Desai was a wonderful Indian PM, who like many pacifist co-religionists of the ilk we have on our hands here, used to drink urine daily. I don’t say that there is anything wrong with the partaking of that beverage if your heart so desires, but it seems from their gloating, and Paki/Muslim bashings, that maybe some of our Indi friends here have let the inebriating toxics from drinking too much of those body fluid discharges go to their heads a lot. Maybe they use stuff laced a little too heavily with brain numbing venom. Either that or maybe they are drunk with jobs like the destruction of Babri Mosque or the Gujrat blood letting, or maybe even rapine and pillage in Kashmir. Be that as it may, it would behoove everyone if we stop spewing poisonous vitriol against one another. There already is enough hatred in the world. As we know, Pakistan is not a perfect nation, but than neither is India such a wonderful bastion of angels. Remember, every time you point a finger at someone, three of your own fingers are pointing at you. After all, it was not so long ago when the Indians were so hard on the run that if someone would even murmur the word “Chinese!” they would forget putting on even their pants before scampering for dear life. But times change. Usually the bigger and more powerful nations condescend to offer assurance to the less powerful and fortunate, like China recently did in the case of India. As opposed to this, India is vying for a Security Council seat and posturing with the pomposity of a nation on the threshold of becoming some sort of a power, yet no Indi just can seem to get out of the rut of bashing Pakistan anywhere he can. A recent example being Jagmohan’s dig against Pakistan, while on trip to the US, and people like Kane, Arjun etc here. The US is being all hunky dory with the Hindis these days because they wish to use them against the Chinese, but probably they have not heard the saying we know since ages here, that a hundred crackers are worth a single blow from a truncheon.

(Its laughable to suggest that with your Indian looks you could escape racial profiling!).

this is more of an i-log titled ``my short, precise comments about musharraf`s speech`` .

rest - copied from another article.

:)

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Amit, SouthAsian

Thanks for those well-expressed opinions.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but your posts have normative flavor: Here is what good, right-thinking people should do. So if everybody does so, the problem in question can be solved.

Very much like: We should be gentle toward our neighbors, and help them. If we always did so, we will all live happily.

Sound, effective, enormously useful wisdom, but it does not always work. That`s why governments build prisons, and sometimes hang people.

---

Let`s begin with, what I believe are, timeless realities.


Some/many people will ALWAYS respond emotionally to anything that can be given religious flavor.

Some/many people will ALWAYS blame others rather than open themselves up to heart-wrenching self-examination.

There will ALWAYS be some/many vested interests.

Some/many people will ALWAYS try to take advantage of any situation if they are in a position to do.

Faced with completely contradictory messages, some/many people will ALWAYS be willing to trust others of their own type than others of a different type.

ANYTHING, no matter how irrational it may seem to others, can be explained to a man or a woman who is ready to believe.

There will ALWAYS be people who will gloat at the misery of people who they see as active opponents. Despite Jesus Christ, most of us love our friends, and dislike our enemies.

There is nothing more pleasant, to very many humans, than to see the enemy fall.

---

Could you please suggest solutions in light of these realities (if you agree with them). I think that is the only realistic endeavor. Don`t you?

I am very willing to examine where such an approach may be unreasonable.

Re: #123 by Khansaab

[Morarji Desai was a wonderful Indian PM, who like many pacifist co-religionists of the ilk we have on our hands here, used to drink urine daily. I don’t say that there is anything wrong with the partaking of that beverage if your heart so desires, but it seems from their gloating, and Paki/Muslim bashings, that maybe some of our Indi friends here have let the inebriating toxics from drinking those bodily fluid discharges go to their heads a little too much.]

That’s way better than salivating over 6-year old little children (By The way, while we are on the topic of Hindu-Muslim bad habits, does your father like to emulate Muhammed in this regard, or does he think he’s better than Muhammed?).


[Maybe they use stuff laced a little too heavily with brain numbing venom.]

Indian brains are at a premium everywhere around the globe.

But nobody has any use for idiot Paki brains.


[Either that or maybe they are drunk with jobs like the destruction of Babri Mosque or the Gujrat blood letting.]

They just look drunk because they’re happy. They think it’s payback for Godhra and Kashmir.

[Be that as it may, it would behoove everyone if we stop spewing poisonous vitriol against one another. There already is enough hatred in the world as it is.]

You behoove if you want to. We don’t want to behoove.

[As we know, Pakistan is not a perfect nation,]

NO? REALLY? YOU MUST BE KIDDING ME!!!

[..but than neither is India such a wonderful bastion of angels]

India is a wonderful bastion of angels like Gibreel.

[Remember, every time you point a finger at someone, three of your own fingers are pointing at you.]

Now how does that work? Unless someone has chopped off your fingers and is using them to point them at you?

Oh I see:
``Remember Allah inspired the angels: I am with you. Give firmness to the believers. I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: you smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off of them.`` (Koran, 8:12)
Very spiritual. And deep.
:-)

[After all, it was not so long ago when the Indians were so hard on the run that if someone would even murmur the word “Chinese!” they would forget putting on even their pants before scampering for dear life.]

You mean, like Pakis forgot to put on their pants after bending over for India after the Indo-Pak wars? Heh heh heh…

[But times change. Usually the bigger and more powerful nations condescend to offer assurance to the less powerful and fortunate, like China recently did in the case of India. ]

No, India condescended and gave assurances to China. Mullah-land doesn’t count, being too small and insignificant.

:-)

[As opposed to this, India is vying for a Security Council seat and posturing with the pomposity of a nation on the threshold of becoming some sort of a power, yet no Indi just can seem to get out of the rut of bashing Pakistan anywhere he can.]

But we like this rut of bashing Pakistan. It feels good. :)

[A recent example being Jagmohan’s dig against Pakistan, while on trip to the US, and people like Arjun etc here. The US is being all hunky dory with the Hindis these days because they wish to use them against the Chinese, but probably they have not heard the saying we know since ages here, that a hundred crackers are worth a single blow from a truncheon. ]

No. That would be “a hundred Paki are worth a single Indian”.


[Its laughable to suggest that with your Indian looks you could escape racial profiling]

That’s better than someone with your Pakistani looks being shot in the head in England. Heh heh heh….

:-)

Re: # 142 Kaalchakra
Operation Save the World
Objective: Contain/Eradicate terrorism
i) Short term
ii) Long term

Proposed Method: Bring about attitudinal change in the target population.

Pertinent Questions: Can attitudes be changed by converting people to your way of thinking by logical argument?

Answer: Most of the times, No. Proof: Chowk.

So it has to be done on an emotional level only. If they respond to religion give them religion. The credibility of the agent population with the target population increases with emotional warmth and genuineness of speech and action.

Moral of the story: Munnabhai ....

What to do with non-responders? Agent population has people of the target `type` too. Let them deal with it with force if necessary. Agent population of the other type should give moral help and material support if necessary.

Your turn ...