Islamist rant is music for some

The Pioneer ^ | 23 July, 2010 | Premen Addy

[James C. Bennett]

If Pakistan, bless its murderous soul, were to assume human form, it would have long been consigned to Broadmoor, Her Majesty’s special prison for the criminally insane, whose inmates usually remain incarcerated behind its forbidding walls until death do them part.

Irfan Hussain, doughty Dawn columnist, Pakistan’s principal English-language newspaper, relates a poignant tale of a Christian mother and her four children murdered in their home in Jhelum by an inflamed Muslim mob led by a fanatical mullah, while the husband and father, policeman Jamshed Masih, was away on duty. The family had apparently been told to move from the Muslim neighbourhood. When the youngest of the Masih boys, an 11-year old, went to a shop to make a purchase, he was refused service on the ground that he was an infidel. Thereafter, a mob led by one Maulana Mahfooz Khan entered the house and accused the youth of committing blasphemy and wanted him punished. His frantic mother pleaded with the intruders to await her husband’s return, but someone threw a stone at her head and all hell broke loose. The daughter managed to call her father, but the poor man arrived to the gory scene of a slain wife and four slain children. The local police chief would not register a case because of the Maulana’s connections in Islamabad.

Set against this was US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bearing an aid package to Pakistan worth $ 500 million, accompanied by honeyed words on a new beginning for US-Pakistan ties after years of mutual misperceptions. She hoped this would be a bridge to better mutual understanding between the nations. Jonathan Swift once observed: “When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are in confederacy against him.” Truth is that US President Barack Obama and Ms Clinton and their colleagues in Government fall well short of the most perverse and eccentric definition of genius, nor are we, the hoi polloi, a confederacy of dunces. The Pakistan they court, the Land of the Pure, where blasphemy is punishable by death, it would appear, is an amphitheatre of pornography. According to Internet provider Google, Pakistan is top dog in searches for pornography, whether this involved men, women, children or a variety of animals from camel to donkey to horse. A Congressional hearing in Washington on the subject would surely be the most riveting show in town.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan-born, London-based revolutionary, Tariq Ali, has taken up another of his lost causes, namely the one pertaining to the ‘liberation’ struggle for a ‘Muslim Kashmir free of Indian rule’. His peroration in the lazy left-liberal London Review of Books was a desperate rant, a farrago of fact, fiction and poisonous half-truth leavened by craftily camouflaged silences in a bid to confuse readers uninitiated in sub-continental history and politics. It was a clever ploy to refer ritually to India as America’s regional ally, when it is Pakistan that is Washington’s and Beijing’s true surrogate. Mr Ali’s reference to 9/11 and its impact on India is well taken, but his cunning silence on Mumbai’s searing 26/11 experience with the Pakistan-incubated terror attack and the national trauma, coupled with similar lack of reference to the bombing of the city’s suburban trains in July 2006, and to the commando-style assault on India’s financial centre in March 1993, was clearly part of special pleading. Hundreds of innocent Indian lives were lost, but India is expected to accept such karmic loses without demur. This also appears to be the case with the ethnic cleansing of the Hindu Pandit community from their ancestral homeland in the Kashmir Valley. There was no mention either of Hindu Jammu and Buddhist Ladakh, both integral parts of the disputed territory. Indian opinion has visibly hardened against Pakistan and Islamism, but Tariq Ali refuses coyly to reason why. Most absurd of all, he claims that Pakistan’s rulers had offered India a swap: “Give us Afghanistan and you can have Kashmir.” This is post-modernist vaudeville, with Tariq Ali as impressario.

Mr Ali’s reach into the upper ends of an establishment he routinely censures is something of a mystery. The historian and novelist David Caute wondered how a play as trite as Iranian Nights, satirising the Ayatollahs, which Mr Ali co-authored, could have been staged at the West End’s Royal Court Theatre when serious playwrights had to struggle through the proverbial eye of a needle to get there. One of his fictions was memorably reviewed by the critic Maureen Freely as a “talking and ejaculating novel” with cardboard cutouts as characters. Nevertheless, Mr Ali has an enviable knack of finding willing publishers.

Not very long ago, an agent, tried circulating a chapter from a VS Naipaul work through a circle of publishers, without giving away the author’s name, and asked if they would consider publication. They turned him down, one and all. So is this damning evidence of a collapse of literary taste or is Mr Ali Houdini reborn? Truth is that Mr Ali has long been a creation of the British entertainment industry; as an avowed Marxist, he is a rude take on the Marx brothers, Groucho, Harpo and Chico.

The silly season almost being upon us, British media pundits, currently lodged in India, have been indulging in subtle and crude India-baiting. As usual Kashmir tops their agenda. There are pious lamentations on the decline of democracy in the valley under Indian pressure; how odd that when the place was being ethnically cleansed of its Hindu Pandits, the event passed them by, unworthy, no doubt, of their exalted attention.

The broadside came from Jeremy Page of The Times. Everything in the kitchen sink was thrown at the country, which he clearly loathes. He blasts Delhi’s lack of infrastructure, and the seeming lack of preparation for the Commonwealth Games. Mr Page must be unaware of the travails of the London Underground. Habitual signal failures and a roster of suspensions of selected lines at weekends refract the network’s 19th century origins. Delhi’s Metro, on which I have travelled, is a 21st century marvel by contrast.

Meanwhile, oceans away, US Senators are aggrieved by the release of al Magrahi, the alleged Libyan Lockerbie bomber, on compassionate grounds (he is down with terminal cancer and is not expected to live) by the devolved Scottish Government in Edinburgh. They make no murmur about the 528 dead of the Air India plane, Kanishka, that exploded mid-air and came down over the Irish Republic in June 1985, the bomb planted by North America-based Khalistani terrorists. No arrests have as yet been made. What is sauce for the Herrenvolk goose is not sauce for Untermenschen gander.

[NavVet]

I was just talking to an American man who lives in Saudi Arabia and he shared some of the tricks that he and his fellow oil company employees use when smuggeling their personal bibles into the country.

I remember when the U.S. led the world in divesting from South Africa when they discriminated based on race, but when countries routinely murder Christians, and openly discriminate against Christians and Jews, our response is to order NASA to “reach out” to them and make speeches falsely giving them credit for historical accomplishments.