I am a secularist but, I have to admit, I believe Zaid Hamid more than Paracha. Here's why.
To me, Paracha has lost all credibility. He is a complete sellout, a pseudo-intellectual and an 'honorary white' as SinoIndusFriendship calls it. In past decades he used to write against capitalism -- he was an avowed marxist and communist -- but now he has jumped on the anti-Islam bandwagon. Bashing Islam and muslims is all the rage these days. It is a very profitable enterprise, as Salman Rushdi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and countless others have figured out. The Western (and Indian) media love anyone, especially a muslim, who rants against Islam.
This is not to say that muslims don't have problems -- God knows we are stuck in the Middle Ages and need our own Reformation and Renaissance -- but there is also no doubt that outside forces, inimical to our interests, are exploiting our situation.
I don't know everything Zaid Hamid says, and he may go off the deep end sometimes, but he does make some valid points. The Western media is engaged in a calculated plan to discredit Islam and is creating a generation of people worldwide who are biased against muslims. This is not a conspiracy theory -- this is plainly visible to anyone who watches or reads Western media. Any time a muslim commits a crime, however minor, their religion is highlighted. When others commit crimes, they are either not reported widely or their religion and ethnicity are not mentioned. When a muslim minority in a country fights a non-muslim majority, they are insurgents or terrorists. When a non-muslim minority fights a muslim majority, they are oppressed people fighting muslim 'domination'.
We know for a fact that the RAW, CIA and Mossad have engaged in subversive activites in other countries (Sri Lanka, China, Bangladesh, Iran, ...) so it would be ridiculously naive to think that they are not active in Pakistan. I agree that, at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves why our people are so easily used by these foreign agencies and many of the reasons -- lack of education, poverty and alienation, lawlessness and extremist mullahs -- are our own fault. We need to fix these faults for our own sake, not just to undermine RAW/CIA/Mossad's subversion -- that will be a bonus -- but simply to lift our society from its present morass.
Finally, on the issue of conspiracy theories, 9/11 or otherwise, the first rule in the book is to infiltrate the conspiracy theorists and discredit them by proposing ever more ridiculous scenarios. Thus many of the so-called '9/11 truthers' are actually pro-government agents who deliberately come up with patently falsifiable claims to discredit the whole truther movement.
However, the fact remains that it stretches credibility to accept that two fully fueled jetliners burned for hours and brought down two skyscrapers, yet the passport of one of the hijackers -- which he presumably kept in his breast pocket like most people -- managed to survive intact and was recovered from Ground Zero. Or that a novice pilot who could barely fly a cessna-150 somehow managed to fly a fully loaded 747 for miles, below radar, through the most heavily guarded and monitored airspace in the world and crashed into the Pentagon where the plane, along with its titanium engines, vanished in a puff of smoke.
after each sentence. why do you think he is popular among Indian!!
at ZH's famous "Ajmal kasab is Amar Singh" video. Does he still believes it?
