The Wrong Kind of Pakistani

[Spring Onion]

Anyone who denies others the right to hold their own views is a narrow-minded bigot, be it on the left or the right.

For example, if a majority of Pakistanis want Sharia to govern them and they can figure out which flavor, then so be it. But it has to follow due process, not forced. The same goes for a secular government.

AGREED 100%. having said that i believe there is another group too that is between sharia and secularism

 

[VCheng]

AGREED 100%. having said that i believe there is another group too that is between sharia and secularism

Of course, any other shades of thoughts, views and opinions must also be considered by due processes when deciding the direction of a functioning society, wherever that direction may lead. It is for the people to decide, and for the people to bask in the rewards or to bear the consequences.

That is why open discourse and discussion must always be promoted, no matter how disagreeable it may seem. No group has the right to shut any other group up. All should be allowed to speak freely, so that consensus has all the range of inputs.

 

[Kompromat]

The Pakistani military and the ISI built Jihad Inc in the 1980s to wage war against Afghanistan and India.

• Factually incorrect. The genesis of 'Jihad Inc' is well known.
• Written with a malicious intent
• Twisted to use as an argument for writer's own good

 

[karan.1970]

• Factually incorrect. The genesis of 'Jihad Inc' is well known.
• Written with a malicious intent
• Twisted to use as an argument for writer's own good

Please expand on item number 1. Seems like just a denial ..

 

[Kompromat]

Please expand on item number 1. Seems like just a denial ..

The 'Jihad inc' was the brainchild of CIA Director William Casey which of course Mr Dayan Hasan having worked for the US funded organizations is to hypocritical too name.

 

[Capt.Popeye]

Who are the "real moderates" though?

I always liked the idea of the "middle path". I.e. Not going towards one extreme or the other.

Hi CD;
All Religious Thoughts (even the Organised ones) seem to have the concept of the "Middle Path" embedded into them. This concept really speaking; is born out of Nature/Creation itself. Just that (for various odd and stupid reasons); people give absurdly extreme "spins" to the ideas contained. But that is a different matter altogether.....

The 'Jihad inc' was the brainchild of CIA Director William Casey which of course Mr Dayan Hasan having worked for the US funded organizations is too hypocritical too name.

View attachment 25416 View attachment 25417 View attachment 25418

So then; aeronut.......Jihad and all its ramification and interpretations thereof were creations of a certain CIA/ some guy called William Casey??

That's interesting, we have the same concept in Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism.

Yes, indeed. And it is not even exclusive to Confucianism or Buddhism......

 

[Sliver]

lets take his on face value:

- the people who support article (and the way of thinking) this will be called "hate mongers" , "truth twisters", "propagandist" by people who are all that in the first place.
- the reason why moderates are finding it hard to voice their opinions is because "voicing opinion against conspiracy, extremism, radicalism" is itself being used as "anti-moderate". (if you are a moderate, you have to allow our extremist views!)
- the extremism is existing and "thriving" because of "sanction of the victom" (Ayn Ryand - sanction of the victim)

"
then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”
"

We need the consciousness of the liberal to wake up and say "no" to this mindless violence under any pretext.

 

[karan.1970]

The 'Jihad inc' was the brainchild of CIA Director William Casey which of course Mr Dayan Hasan having worked for the US funded organizations is to hypocritical too name.

View attachment 25416 View attachment 25417 View attachment 25418

But did Pakistan have no role in creating this Jihad Inc?

 

[Dubious]

What exactly is the right kind of Pakistani? The kind in America watching his own people dying over tv?

Or the kind that just hurls hate over his background?

Or maybe the kind that leaches secrets of his country?

Or maybe the kind that launders money or steals money from his own land and people?

Maybe the kind who does some wrong gets shot (half the cases are usually related to family feud or some dirty secrets) ?

Who is the right kind of Pakistani we are looking for?

 

[Capt.Popeye]

But did Pakistan have no role in creating this Jihad Inc?

Are you talking about 'a reluctant virgin'?
Who was then led up 'a garden path'?

 

[Kompromat]

But did Pakistan have no role in creating this Jihad Inc?

Of course we did. I was merely pointing out to Dayan Hassan's blatant intellectual dishonesty and injustice to 'established historic facts'. When he blames Pakistan 'alone' for the Jihad inc, he does come off as a bigot!

 

[Multani]

A gritty but heartfelt read:



Ali Dayan Hasan: The Wrong Kind of Pakistani - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

The Wrong Kind of Pakistani
By Ali Dayan Hasan
April 21, 2014
On the invention of “the liberal extremist” and the attempted assassination of a friend.


I

On March 28 in Lahore, my friend of almost thirty years, Raza Rumi, journalist and much else, survived an attempted “targeted killing.” Miraculously, he emerged unscathed from the hail of gunfire intended for him. Raza is now in a secure location—outside Pakistan. He had no choice but to leave as the authorities felt no embarrassment in letting him know that they could not guarantee his life if he stepped outside his Lahore home. Some weeks later, the police “caught” the would-be-assassins who belong to the dreaded Taliban-affiliate Lahkar-e-Jhangvi. But police custody curtails neither the power of these terrorists nor the impunity with which they kill. The fact is that nobody can do anything to stop them and nobody will. Tens of thousands of our fellow citizens have already been killed by the same terrorists. On April 19, Hamid Mir, another journalist, was shot in broad daylight and survived. He too will live. But his attackers too, even if identified, will escape accountability.

I should just be grateful that my friend Raza is alive. I was. I am.

But then, to come to terms with my relief, I engaged in an act of self-destructive rebellion—foolhardy, irresponsible and potentially fatal. I went for a long drive through the streets of Lahore, alone. As people often do. As I did often until “security-related restricted movement” became an embarrassing part of my life. As Raza could have possibly, until recently, when the price of life became self-imposed house arrest or exile for him.

Raza is a political analyst, a TV anchor of late. I’m a human rights activist. My problem is, I am told, that I follow a “maximalist position” in my advocacy of basic human rights standards. I am unable to see how you can perform my role otherwise.

But as a television journalist, Raza had greater room for compromise. He could, and did, use more politic language, gloss over realities he found abhorrent, at times appease those who deserved his condemnation. But in Pakistan today, publicly arguing for relatively prosaic standards of sanity, however inoffensively, earns you the title of “liberal extremist.”

If you condemn prejudice, abuse and violence as categorically as those who perpetrate it, you are the other side of the same “extremist” coin. And the terrorist somehow is better because he is “indigenous and authentic” whereas the liberal extremist is a sinister Western Plant. This bogeyman is neither the creation of a state propaganda machine nor the murderous religious extremist. He is a creation of influential hate-mongering opinion-makers, their acolytes, apologists and understudies. It is a delegitimizing, dehumanizing term, and this villainous monster is made real by widespread social acceptance of his existence. This acceptance is no misunderstanding. It allows for a fictional place of ostensible social dignity, balance and moderation between sane humanism and nihilistic rage. It is also clearly nonsense. Unfortunately, it is murderous nonsense.

Liberal extremists love claiming they are under threat, they say. It is a hoax, pretention, paranoia, an attention-seeking device, a ploy to get donor funding. You almost want to believe it yourself. To be a fraud is easier than to adopt the lifestyle of constantly looking over your shoulder. But then it gets real. Raza’s 25-year old driver, Mustafa, did not survive the attack. Every one of the 12 odd bullets that hit him was intended for Raza. Mustafa supported an extended family of 10. Raza has elderly parents, young children—the usual web of family and responsibility that makes us all vulnerable and fearful and human.

Long, solitary drives are great for clearing one’s head.

I condemn the violent attack on Raza for what it is: an assault on freedom of expression and opinion. I condemn everything. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam. Yet, professional engagement with violence and living with the possibility of physical harm never prepares you for that moment when it enters the very personal domain—when it is you, your family or close friends and peers that are the “breaking news” horror of the day. I am not theorizing. It’s a lesson learnt over and over in the last few years.

There is of course, a withering critique of the Pakistani state, its political cowardice, incompetence and complicity in the mayhem that is Pakistan today. The Pakistani military and the ISI built Jihad Inc in the 1980s to wage war against Afghanistan and India. They mainstreamed Islamist extremism, used it as a national security tool and eventually allowed their creation to devour Pakistani society as they looked on. The Pakistani national security state is a two-faced callous bullying monster.

There is also a counter-argument, an apologia, we know all too well. The Pakistani military and the ISI built Jihad Inc in cahoots with, and at the behest of, the United States in the 1980s. The US selfishly and myopically moved on, leaving Pakistan to fend for itself. It only returned after 9/11 to demand an unrealistic dismantling of Jihad Inc that has pitted Pakistan against itself. It is American drones that destroy Pakistan and make the Taliban butcher Pakistanis in the thousands. The US is a two-faced callous bullying monster.

There is truth in all of the above. But this is not a political analysis. It is not even a human rights critique. One of the few rights we can still exercise unfettered is the right to sadness and sorrow.

II

Raza was some years senior to me in school. We grew up during the Zia dictatorship watching a freak-show featuring the General and an arcane Islam that had nothing to do with the already Muslim lives we lived. This new Islam was as alien as the protagonist of the blockbuster movie of the period—ET.

On August 17, 1988, the day General Ziaul Haq died in a plane crash, Raza and I were together in Karachi. “For the rest of our lives, things will get better in Pakistan,” I remember him telling me. I believed my older and, certainly then, wiser friend. He absolutely convinced me that a glorious future awaited us.

And why should we not have imagined such a future? Like the child of any working professional does, we knew that the quality of our education was going to determine the quality of our lives. So, we were academic achievers. And later, we became highly regarded professionals, employable across the world. Our credentials were earned rather than inherited and were our passports to a good life anywhere. But the good life elsewhere was a distraction. Above all, we earned what mattered most—the right to a life of respect and consequence at home.

So it was inevitable that Raza preferred a public life in Pakistan to a successful and lucrative international career. Just as it made perfect sense for me to persist with Human Rights Watch for 11 years in Pakistan rather than pursuing a better paid, less stressful life abroad.

This is not a function of a crude, unthinking nationalism. Nor is it a favor to anyone but oneself. Who doesn’t want a life with family and friends close by, if a decent one is within grasp?

It is, of course, a privilege to have a public voice, to participate in the “Big Conversation” anywhere. And Pakistan happens to be our area of professional expertise. But as Pakistanis rooted in and engaged with our own culture, history, politics and religion, it is particularly fulfilling to engage in that conversation. It is also a conversation that ought to be ours to participate in with the greatest confidence and fearlessness. But it is not ours, as it turns out. Not any more.

People are killed everyday in terror attacks, or by the state. Poverty is rampant and rising. There is no electricity. Endless unemployment. Disappearances. Drone strikes. This is self-indulgent whining. Sure.

I guess that’s what liberal extremists do. For American dollars. Before they die. Or escape.

III

There is this monstrous reality that looms over everything. We gloss over it because we cannot face its immense ugliness.

The horror is not just that terrorists kill on grounds of religion or opinion. It is not just that those who stand up against this inhumanity—human rights defenders, journalists, the odd politician, even schoolgirls—face exile or death. It is not just that we, especially we who challenge murderers and torturers, are only alive at their discretion. It is also not just that the state has given up even pretending it can save us.

The tragedy is that the “moderate,” the empowered and the affluent, are brazenly, smugly complicit in the mass cull of people and voices. The insurmountable obscenity is the ease with which the “respectable” can move from offering you cups of tea to rejoicing in the hateful, dehumanizing gaze of the killer upon you. It is the dead-end where blaming the victim is an act of compassion.

If you condemn targeted killings of Shias, goes the logic, then you must surely be Shia yourself. If you are not, you are a suicidal attention-seeker. You deserve even less sympathy than the Shia who could not help being killed because unlike him, you asked for it.

Raza Rumi asked for it.

Had Raza been mowed down, his death would have been met with broad acceptance—a regrettable but inevitable consequence of being himself. Condemnation would have given way to a social consensus on suicide-by-proxy. His family would have been looked upon pityingly as the victims of his stupidity, not of the killers’ murderous rage. It hardly matters that the same besieged islands of sanity scream in protest every time. And it hardly even matters anymore how we got here.

What matters is that we are here, at this ugly place of betrayal—choosing between, or forced into, silence or exile or death. And almost everyone looks the other way. Even our friends look the other way. We look away from each other. Even those who know they could be next look away. And then they are next.

IV

Raza and I profoundly disagree on many things both personal and political. Ours is not a friendship without its fissures and tensions. I had a bad feeling about his foray into television anyway. As his TV persona unfolded, I found some of Raza’s inevitable concessions to the Pakistani media’s toxic paradigm troubling. But equally, I knew that he could only concede so much and no more. And it would not be enough. He cannot look at the world from a place of endless unintelligent parochialism, prejudice, bigotry and delusion. This is not because Raza is a Western stooge, Indian agent or liberal extremist. Nor is it because he is a paragon of virtue and unyielding principle.

He’s just the wrong kind of Pakistani—the kind that is killed nowadays.

(Ali Dayan Hasan is the outgoing Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch. The views expressed above are personal and do not represent HRW.)

Basically what Dayan is saying is that there is a intolerance in Pakistan, to the point that it is life threatening. However, to be an open society, all opinions ought to be accepted. Dayan wants such a Pakistan.

He is expressing his disappointment with what he perceives as the negative state of Pakistanis. [ bigotry, delusion, prejudice, unintelligence]

 

[VCheng]

Basically what Dayan is saying is that there is a intolerance in Pakistan, to the point that it is life threatening. However, to be an open society, all opinions ought to be accepted. Dayan wants such a Pakistan.

He is expressing his disappointment with what he perceives as the negative state of Pakistanis. [ bigotry, delusion, prejudice, unintelligence]

That appears to be a reasonable summary of his point of view, except the very last word.

 

[Multani]

The tragedy is that the “moderate,” the empowered and the affluent, are brazenly, smugly complicit in the mass cull of people and voices. The insurmountable obscenity is the ease with which the “respectable” can move from offering you cups of tea to rejoicing in the hateful, dehumanizing gaze of the killer upon you. It is the dead-end where blaming the victim is an act of compassion.

Basically, what Dayan is saying is that the visible Pakistani is guilty of iniquity, hypocrisy, and derision.

The wrong Pakistani does not do iniquity, hypocrisy, and derision.

He is regretting these diseases of the heart found in the visible Pakistani. The above paragraph from the article summarizes the whole.

 

[VCheng]

Of course we did. I was merely pointing out to Dayan Hassan's blatant intellectual dishonesty and injustice to 'established historic facts'. When he blames Pakistan 'alone' for the Jihad inc, he does come off as a bigot!

He does not blame Pakistan alone. Perhaps you missed this portion:

"There is of course, a withering critique of the Pakistani state, its political cowardice, incompetence and complicity in the mayhem that is Pakistan today. The Pakistani military and the ISI built Jihad Inc in the 1980s to wage war against Afghanistan and India. They mainstreamed Islamist extremism, used it as a national security tool and eventually allowed their creation to devour Pakistani society as they looked on. The Pakistani national security state is a two-faced callous bullying monster.

There is also a counter-argument, an apologia, we know all too well. The Pakistani military and the ISI built Jihad Inc in cahoots with, and at the behest of, the United States in the 1980s. The US selfishly and myopically moved on, leaving Pakistan to fend for itself. It only returned after 9/11 to demand an unrealistic dismantling of Jihad Inc that has pitted Pakistan against itself. It is American drones that destroy Pakistan and make the Taliban butcher Pakistanis in the thousands. The US is a two-faced callous bullying monster.

There is truth in all of the above."