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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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Hypocrisy, hatred and the war on terror
'If the US attacks were an assault on "civilisation",
why shouldn't Muslims regard the Afganistan attack as
a war on Islam?'
"Air campaign"? "Coalition forces"? "War on terror"?
How much longer must we go on enduring these lies?
There is no "campaign" - merely an air bombardment of
the poorest and most broken country in the world by
the world's richest and most sophisticated nation. No
MiGs have taken to the skies to do battle with theA
merican B-52s or F-18s. The only ammunition soaring
into the air over Kabul comes from Russian
anti-aircraft guns manufactured around 1943.
Coalition? Hands up who's seen the Luftwaffe in the
skies over Kandahar, or the Italian air force or the
French air force over Herat. Or even the Pakistani air
force. The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a
few British missiles thrown in. "Coalition" indeed.
Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving
on to bomb the Jaffna peninsula? Or Chechnya - which
we have already left in Vladimir Putin's bloody hands?
I even seem to recall a massive terrorist car bomb
that exploded inBeirut in 1985 - targeting Sayed
Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual inspiration to the
Hezbollah, who now appears to be back on Washington's
hit list - and which missed Nasrallah but slaughtered
85 innocent Lebanese civilians. Years later, Carl
Bernstein revealed in his book, Veil, that the CIA was
behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to fund the
operation. So will the US President George Bush be
hunting down the CIA murderers involved? The hell he
will.
So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and
the BBC rabbiting on about the "air campaign",
"coalition forces" and the "war on terror"? Do they
think their viewers believe this twaddle?
Certainly Muslims don't. In fact, you don't have to
spend long in Pakistan to realise that the Pakistani
press gives an infinitely more truthful and balanced
account of the "war" - publishing work by local
intellectuals, historians and opposition writers along
with Taliban comments and pro-government statements as
well as syndicated Western analyses - than The New
York Times; and all this, remember, in a military
dictatorship.
You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East
and the subcontinent to
realise why Tony Blair's interviews on al-Jazeera and
Larry King Live don't
amount to a hill of beans. The Beirut daily As-Safir
ran a widely-praised editorial
asking why an Arab who wanted to express the anger and
humiliation of millions
of other Arabs was forced to do so from a cave in an
on-Arab country. The
implication, of course, was that this - rather than
the crimes against humanity on
11 September - was the reason for America's
determination to liquidate Osama
bin Laden. Far more persuasive has been as eries of
articles in the Pakistani
press on the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested
in the United States in
the aftermath of the September atrocities.
One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime
victim's diary", in The
News of Lahore, it outlined the suffering of Hasnain
Javed, who was arrested in
Alabama on 19 September with an expired visa. In
prison in Mississippi, he was
beaten up by a prisoner who also broke his tooth.
Then, long after he had
sounded the warden's alarm bell, more men beat him
against a wall with the
words: "Hey bin Laden, this is the first round. There
are going to be 10 rounds
like this." There are dozens of other such stories in
the Pakistani press and most
of them appear to be true.
Again, Muslims have been outraged by the hypocrisy of
the West's supposed
"respect" for Islam. We are not, so we have informed
the world, going to suspend
military operations in Afghanistan during the holy
fasting month of Ramadan.
After all, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq conflict continued
during Ramadan. So haveA
rab-Israeli conflicts. True enough. But why, then, did
we make such a show of
suspending bombing on the first Friday of the
bombardment last month out of
our "respect" for Islam? Because we were more
respectful then than now? Or
because - the Taliban remaining unbroken - we've
decided to forget about all
that "respect"?
"I can see why you want to separate bin Laden from our
religion," a Peshawar
journalist said to me a few days ago. "Of course you
want to tell us that this isn't
a religious war, but Mr Robert, please, please stop
telling us how much you
respect Islam."
There is another disturbing argument I hear in
Pakistan. If, as Mr Bushc laims,
the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault
on "civilisation", why
shouldn't Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as a
war on Islam?
The Pakistanis swiftly spotted the hypocrisy of the
Australians. Whilei tching to
get into the fight against Mr bin Laden, the
Australians have sent armed troops to
force destitute Afghan refugees out of their
territorial waters. The Aussies want to
bomb Afghanistan - but they don't want to save the
Afghans. Pakistan, it should
be added, hosts 2.5 million Afghan refugees. Needless
to say, this discrepancy
doesn't get much of an airing on our satellite
channels. Indeed, I have never
heard so much fury directed at journalists as I have
in Pakistan these past few
weeks. Nor am I surprised.
What, after all, are we supposed to make of the
so-called "liberal" American
television journalist Geraldo Rivera who is just
moving to Fox TV, a Murdoch
channel? "I'm feeling more patriotic than at any time
in my life, itching for justice,
or maybe just revenge," he announced this week. "And
this catharsis I've gone
through has caused me to reassess what I do for a
living." This is truly chilling
stuff. Here is an American journalist actually
revealing that he's possibly "itching
for revenge".
Infinitely more shameful - and unethical - were the
disgraceful words of Walter
Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, to his staff. Showing
the misery ofA fghanistan
ran the risk of promoting enemy propaganda, he said.
"It seemsp erverse to
focus too much on the casualties or hardship in
Afghanistan ... we must talk
about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and
how the Taliban have
harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close
up to 5,000 innocent
people."
Mr Isaacson was an unimaginative boss of Time magazine
but thesel atest
words will do more to damage the supposed impartiality
of CNN thana nything
on the air in recent years. Perverse? Why perverse?
Why are Afghanc asualties
so far down Mr Isaacson's compassion? Or is Mr
Isaacson just following the
lead set down for him a few days earlier by the White
Houses pokesman Ari
Fleischer, who portentously announced to the
Washington pressc orps that in
times like these "people have to watch what they say
and watch what they do".
Needless to say, CNN has caved in to the US
government's demand not tob
roadcast Mr bin Laden's words in toto lest they
contain "coded messages". But
the coded messages go out on television every hour.
They are "air campaign",
"coalition forces" and "war on terror".
Source: Independent
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