IF THE PEN IS LIKE A GUN - Conspiracies and Chewingum-itis The Thin Edge Ruchir Joshi There is a famous joke about the American president, Gerald Ford, where someone quipped that Ford couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. So the name I have for a widespread malaise affecting so many of the Left all over the world is ‘Chewingumitis’. Like the allegedly motor-challenged Ford, many in the Left today are, for some reason, intellectually disabled: they can’t seem to grasp that two warring parties or superficially contradictory ideologies could both be evil, like red and blue electric wires that are intertwined. Here is one quite obvious fact that seems impossible for their Progressive-Pinknesses to acknowledge: too many of the people the Left has embraced as comrades in its fight against the United States of America’s ‘War on Terror’ are, themselves, religious fascists of the worst sort. Here’s the twin-channel — or stereo — concept far too many Lefties can’t digest: the incarcerations and torture at Guantanamo and other American prison centres are totally unconscionable but this does not mean that all the people being tortured are themselves washed in pure milk; many of them are Islamo-fascists with horribly violent histories and agendas. What this means is, yes, we do have to defend the human rights of each and everyone, from the most fanatical jihadi to the innocent kid thrown in alongside him simply because he has the wrong skin colour or religion. This does not mean we let the incarcerated or ex-prisoner fascists claim to be champions of human rights themselves. Being against American military might does not absolve you from crimes you may have committed against innocents, against women, against gay people, against atheists, against people who didn’t share your exact religion. And being anti-Alliance, or an ex-Gitmo prisoner, doesn’t give you the licence to plan and execute such crimes in the future either. What kind of crimes am I talking about? Here’s one that everyone’s read about: last October, men from the Pakistani Taliban climbed on to a bus in Swat and shot three teenage girls who were on their way to school. Two of the girls were collateral damage, the terrorists’ main target was 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai and they shot her in the head and throat at point-blank range. They did this in the name of Islam but Allah-mian (or the aleatory forces of the universe) didn’t agree. As we know, Malala survived, recovered, and on July 12, her 16th birthday, she stood up in the United Nations assembly and gave a 19-minute speech in English, in a clear, north sub-continental accent. https://youtube/watch?v=QRh_30C8l6Y. The reaction of many Pakistanis was that the whole shooting was a CIA plot, carried out to make Pakistan look bad and the ‘white saviours’ look good. On our side of the border, the reaction of my comrade-friends was telling. One of them posted this vile piece of disparagement by Assed Baig: huffingtonpost.co.uk/assed-baig/malala-yousafzai-white-saviour_b_3592165.html. The only story Mr. Baig can find here is ‘the story of the native girl being saved by the white man’. Then he claims the assault on Afghanistan ‘de-stabilised the region’, as if, in mid-2001, there was no ongoing conflict in Kashmir, in Afghanistan, in the deepest innards of Pakistan. Then he conflates the general devastation caused by the Afghanistan and Iraq wars with this most brutally deliberate targeting of a young girl, making the absurd assertion that ‘the west have killed more girls than the Taliban have’, not sharing how he arrives at this absurd claim. Finally, after some small lip-service to what a bad thing it was that Malala was shot, he concludes that since Malala doesn’t talk about the US killer-drones, she is a puppet for Western propaganda. In the meantime, another comrade-pal posts this beauty from Farzana Versey: counterpunch.org/2013/07/15/a-mirage-called-malala/. Ms. Versey comes at Malala from a slightly different angle, she points out that Malala, at the beginning of her speech, refers to the shawl she is wearing as once having belonged to Benazir (Malala even says ‘Benazir Bhutto, Shaheed’), clearly making Malala a PPP puppet, a ‘cocooned marionette’, Versey reminds us that Benazir compromised with the Taliban and repealed no anti-women laws, then she likens Malala with child-soldiers everywhere, this time being used as a human propaganda ‘shield’ by the Americans and the Pakistani elite to cover up their misdeeds. Now, there are slightly annoying things about the speech. Jinnah is mentioned in the same breath as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, Gandhi and Bacha Khan come only later, clumped with Mother Teresa. There are some platitudes about love and peaceful religions and, as Versey points out, Hinduism is not mentioned among these for fear of offending Pakistanis. There are also a couple of risible moments when she refers to Gordon Brown as an honourable man and thanks him for his ‘leadership’. Finally there is the question of who, or how many people, wrote the speech along with Malala, though it’s evident that she fully understands what she’s saying, and saying it with feeling. But what Versey chooses not to hear or remember are the other bits. In the speech, Malala speaks eloquently of how the only thing the bullets destroyed in her was fear. She says clearly that extremists are afraid of books and pens and challenges them to educate their own daughters and sons properly. Finally, she says clearly, and these are hardly the words of a puppet of the Americans and British who are scrabbling to re-marry the Taliban (italics mine): “A deal that goes against the rights of women is unacceptable.” The right to life. The rule of law. The rights of women. In 2004, another young Muslim woman was shot in cold blood by a different bunch of thugs. Unlike Malala, Ishrat Jahan’s attackers made sure she was dead before they used her as a still marionette in the grotesque pantomime they were creating. Whether Narendra Modi had any foreknowledge of this planned execution we shall probably never know, what is certain is that this conspiracy was meant to bolster Modi’s image and to please him — Ishrat, with no previous record of any terrorist activity, was supposed to be part of a team on its way to assassinate the Gujarat chief minister. Now, when Modi refers to the pogrom of 2002 or the murders carried out in its long aftermath, in his tone he adopts a mixture of warm conciliation and a firm lack of regret. It’s a tone echoed by a soul-mate of Modi’s who keeps his base a bit north of Gandhinagar. In a letter to Malala triggered by her UN speech, telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/10185660/Senior-Pakistan-Taliban-figure-explains-why-they-shot-Malala-Yousafzai.html Adnan Rasheed, the head of the Pakistani Taliban, the TTP, lovingly tries to explain to her why he sent out a team to kill her. First of all please mind that Taliban never attacked you because of going to school or you were education lover, also please mind that Taliban or Mujahideen are not against the education of any men or women or girl. Taliban believe that you were intentionally writing against them and running a smearing campaign to malign their efforts to establish Islamic system in Swat and your writings were provocative. You have said in your speech yesterday that pen is mightier than sword, so they attacked you for your sword not for your books or school. There were thousands of girls who were going to school and college before and after the Taliban insurgency in Swat, would you explain why were only you on their hit list??? So, to have a pen, and to write with it, is exactly the same as wielding a sword or firing an AK-47. And, though Rasheed feigns otherwise, he understands for sure that if a pen is a sword then the school where the pen was taught to write is its whetstone, if a pen feels like a threatening gun then dangerous and proscribed books are, logically, its bullets. We don’t need to believe one word this barbaric man says about peace or love or education, we can even laugh out loud at his quoting of the kafir, unbeliever Bertrand Russell, but everyone attacking Malala should note that this 16-year-old has forced the Taliban to engage in a humiliating, damage-control PR exercise. Puppet or otherwise, this kid has just come out from being shot in the head, stood in front of a world assembly and achieved this. In this topsy-turvy, inside-out world, it is good to see that sometimes conspiracies and assasination attempts do backfire on the men who plan them, on the men who kill children without blinking.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 00:20:57 +0000
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