Peshawar school attack – Why blame India
It should really come as no surprise that Pakistani Muslims are up in arms over the Peshawar school attack. Over a hundred children murdered in cold blood, and of course those dastardly Indian Hindus are behind it, right?
Wait…what?
Yes, you heard that correctly, according to many in the Pakistani media, and former military dictator Pervez Musharraf, it wasn’t the Islamists in the Taliban that were behind the attack. Nope. It was all India. Even the Indian media is blaming…the RSS? I had no idea that the ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms was such an important element of the Muslim faith, as really only that kind of delusional intoxication could be responsible for those kinds of wacky conspiracy theories.
I mean, really? I guess the Pakistani educational system is too busy teaching children that India is “bad”, and all non-Muslims are “evil” to bother including any discussion of critical-thinking skills, or even a cursory examination of “Occam’s Razor”. For any Pakistanis reading this, let me sum it up as the principle that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. While other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, in the absence of certainty, the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.
In simpler terms, the simplest explanation is probably the right one.
So basically, if a group of Islamic terrorist members of the Taliban, a group known for committing Islamic terrorist attacks, commit an Islamic terrorist attack, the simplest explanation is that, you know…it was an Islamic terrorist attack, right?
“Not so!” say the people who support Islamic terrorist attacks, as long as they happen in other countries than their own. For some reason, they think it’s far more likely that the Indian Government, a Government that has never carried out an Islamic terrorist attack, and which gains absolutely nothing from doing so, concocted a secret conspiracy so top secret that even the Islamic terrorists carrying out the attack weren’t aware that they were working for India! (Oh, those ingenious Indians!)
I mean, when I think of the Modi administration, I think, “I bet he can’t wait to fund Islamic terrorist attacks in Pakistan, am I right?”
This is the same kind of absurdity that led to some American conspiracy theorists to believe wacky things about the September 11, 2001 attacks. Some people concocted wild theories about “The Jews”, while others suddenly became amateur engineering majors and concluded that the airplanes couldn’t have caused the towers to fall, and that instead, explosives were planted by the Bush administration as part of an “inside job”. Yeah, because the simplest explanation is that President George W Bush is such an intellectual genius that he pulled off the greatest conspiracy in the history of Western Civilization, in order to convince Americans to go to war in the Middle East? Right. Sure. Keep telling yourself that. If you think Americans need that kind of trickery in order to declare war on a Middle Eastern country, then I would propose that you don’t know many Americans. We will bomb the living @#$% out of anyone, for just about any reason (especially if there’s money to be made). It’s not one of our more endearing qualities, but I don’t think anyone disputes its existence.
In short, if you think that the Indian Government is behind the Peshawar school attack, then you are either delusional or easily swayed by propaganda. And unfortunately, that describes entirely too large of a segment of the population of Pakistan.
