Here is a quote from Lord Macaulay‘s speech in the British Parliament on 2nd February 1835:
“I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”
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Manufacturing consent using Fake Videos: Chand Bibi of Swat was never spanked. Video not in Swat. The chasm between the so called elite and the common people is so great that there is no bridge. The inability of the Westernized elite to understand the problems of the poor Pakistanis is beyond comprehension. They are totally devoid of the compassion to realize the life and style of the poor and the struggling.
Writing against Islam and against Pakistan is a profitable business. Many rake in the Dollars.
The extremist agenda of the fundamentalist pseudo liberals (WOGs): Forcing Atheistic Secular Humanism on the rest of us. They are quiet about the human tragedy that has fallen on the Pakhtuns, but they are worried about the “human rights” of a section of the population.
While the usual gaggle of sycophants and media hive-minders — along with some ordinarily perspicacious analysts — tell us that Barack Obama literally changed the course of human history by disgorging a great load of thrice-chewed cud about nuclear disarmament in Prague this week, the high-tech drone war the great hero of peace is waging inside the sovereign territory of America’s ally, Pakistan, is helping drive tens of thousands of people from their homes and killing civilians almost daily. Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan, Hard Rain Keeps Falling By CHRIS FLOYD
The only way is “darmiyanah ravish“–the middle way.
British Pakistanis (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written
may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.” MaCaulay
Under the facade of schooling the locals, the British created the “Convents” to manufacture “Western Orientalized Gentlemen” (WOGs)–a cadre of aborigines who would speak and think like the English but would be local in color and ethnicity. The “wannabee goras” see no impact of the historical agression on Pakistani and Muslim societies. The WOGS, speaking their masters language squarely lay the blame of all ills on the local societies which are depicted as “tribal”. According to these “Blame Pakistan First”WOGs, it is the poor and aggressive cave dwellers who are bent upon world domination based on an intense hatred of the West. Some of this paid character assassins try to propagate the false cliche “They hate us because of our freedoms”.
- The headlines about Pakistan in the media: Understanding the Rupert Murdock-Neocon-Hinduvata doomsayer machine which is running scared of defeat and retreat
The resilience of Pakistan and the nation’s continuing collective refusal to do what the west would like it to do
It seems that the real “goras” did a good job, producing nincompoops like Mr. Alam and Ms. Jehangir who are now spewing venom in Pakistani newspapers when they are not visiting Bharat or the States. Communicating in elite languages these pseudo liberals are the darling of the West and the favorite pets of the NGOs.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is disgusting to read the claptrap of the self-described WOGs (Westernized Oriental Gentleman) half baked version of urban legends disguised as history.
Art in Saskatoon:Orientalism and Ephemera, Babak Golkar (Photo credit: luccawithcheese)
A country once callously shrugged off as India’s “lesser” neighbor now commands global attention and scrutiny as the next, crucial battleground in the never ending “war on terror. A much respected and prolific commentator, author and critic Tariq Ali observes in his new book “The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power,” the selfish, inequitable relationship between both countries has far reaching, historical roots directly contributing to the tenuous geopolitical stability of modern day Central Asia. Wajahat Ali, Editor, GOATMILK: An intellectual playground
There are the books written by Muslims awakening from the yolk of colonialism and rhetorical books written by Muslim authors full of hatred and feelings of deprivation. These books explain away all Muslim faults by blaming all problems on others. Then there are books written by Muslims, the Westernized Muslim apologist intellectuals who blame everything on Muslims themselves. Thes “Blame Muslims First” books on Muslims and Islam are written by the “Orientalists” among us.
English: The Muslim population of the world map by percentage of each country, according to the Pew Forum 2009 report on world Muslim populations. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Western authors who have for decades defined the “Orient”, it’s geography, it’s nomenclature (Occident and Orient, Middle East, Far East, and South Asia etc.).Once in a while there comes an author, who can go to the root causes of issues and really describe the issues and come up with solutions. Orientalism takes a deadly turn again!
Out of the various strategies employed by the Modern Orientalists is to exaggerate the problem, scare the people, list unrelated points, and join the dots in a manner that it serves their purpose of creates a rationale for their thesis or action items. Dr. Edward Said on Orientalism.
Orientalist Neocon thinking: Justifying war & murder. Dr. Edward Said was one such author. Much maligned in the press, he has been called many names, however his name stands out as one of the foremost writers who has changed many lives and he has surely transfigured the landscape of American literature and Columbia, where he was a profession. One thing that his “Orientalist” detractors could not do was to ignore him or his thinking. This is what Dr. Edward Said says about he Orientalism:
“It is not Islam’s so-called resistance to modernity or science or for that matter hostility to the West that can be attributed to the decline of Islamicate societies. Rather, it is the economic, political, social and technological factors that caused the peripheral countries to fall behind.“
Victorian orientalism (Photo credit: Jared Zimmerman)
Ahmed Quraishi is another one of those brilliant Pakistani analysts who calls a spade, and calls it the way he sees it. The American plan to remake the world used to be called the Plan for a New American Century (PNAC). Recently PNAC changed its name to the innocuous Foreign Policy Institute (FPI) to portray a more benign image of the Neocons. However the plans still are the same. Dominating the world through any means necessary. The plans have been exposed. An exposed plan is not worth the paper it is written on!
So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.
—Edward Said, The Nation
Should we start a civil war because some liberal extremists in our elite are upset about the alleged flogging video? Some occasions are not meant for settling scores. But a minority in our elite that has an ideological problem with religion is at it again. They are not even willing to stop and consider a range of possibilities, including the possibility of foul play. Now we have a statement from the girl named in the video confirming this is not her. She still lives in the village supposedly cited in the video and no one there has seen this flogging take place. There’s no question there have been atrocities committed in Swat before the peace deal in Feb. 2009. There’s also no question that everyone in Pakistan has condemned the video. But shouldn’t intelligent people also ask questions about where, when, and how it was filmed and by whom. Rationality demands that all possibilities be probed. We still don’t know how this video was simultaneously released to several local TV channels? And why the Presidency was quick to leak to the media that Mr. Zardari may not endorse the peace deal after this mysterious incident.
My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness….As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge Edward Said: (Orientalism, p. 204).
Edward Said also wrote:
My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting Edward Said: (p. 273).
real life orientalism (Photo credit: iamtdj)
Why was Mr. President so quick to make this indirect statement without even considering when this alleged flogging occurred: before or after the peace deal? Or was the objective to simply find an excuse to scrap the deal, which is what the Americans badly want and Mr. Zardari is more than happy to oblige without considering what it would mean: endless bloodshed and pitching our security forces against its own people, which is apparently what Washington likes to see? These ‘liberal extremists’ are also unwilling to consider the wider picture. We have reports of foreign elements inserted into our entire western and northern regions of Pakistan. We have reports that some of them could be covert operatives fluent in Pashto or Uzbek and hiding as Islamists and sent with the objective of inciting the local population to fight against their own country [Bagram air base near Kabul has secret American crack units that eat, live and operate separately from the rest of the U.S. army] and commit excesses against minorities, which justifies more U.S. intervention inside Pakistan. These terrorists were using Islam to kill innocent people. The government has called their bluff and implemented Sharia. Now anyone who decides to continue fighting can’t say he’s doing this for the sake of Islam. If this ensures end of bloodshed, what’s wrong with that? And why should our minority ‘liberal extremists’ echo everything America says?
Flag of Pakistan Esperanto: Flago de Pakistano Español: Bandera de Pakistán Français : Drapeau du Pakistan ??????: ????????? ?? ???? Italiano: Bandiera del Pakistan ????: ?????????? ????? ???????: ???? ????????? ?????: ???????????? ???? Türkçe: Pakistan bayra?? Slovenš?ina: Državna zastava Pakistana (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This group raising all this noise over the mysterious video is the same one that helped Mukhtaran Mai become a multimillionaire. Now we have the truth emerging that her famous rape case may not have been what it was portrayed to be. Initially she was shown to be a 19-year-old raped by the elders of her village. It turned out later she was 10 years older, divorced and had some other personal issues relating to marriage and men. That’s her business and it by no means demeans her and none of this is meant to justify any wrongdoing done to her. But the way she agreed later to become a pawn in the hands of western embassies and NGOs who used her to smear Pakistan and make money out of it was despicable, but that’s acceptable to our liberal extremist minority who also happen to be experts in ‘self-hatred’ and are ever ready to bad mouth their own homeland at the slightest chance. Former President Musharraf aptly described Mukhtaran as a woman profiting out of rape. And he was right.
There were people among our liberal extremists who encouraged her to follow the line given to her by anti-Pakistan western organizations keen to use this case to malign the country out of proportion. Our liberal extremists helped her make millions and never apologized when it turned out not all parts of her story matched. Now they are doing the same with this video. No one is bothered that there are so many conflicting stories about it [Was the flogged woman married and arrested for walking publicly with her father in law as Geo News said or was she unmarried and was set up by her former lover-turned-Taliban because she won't marry him as Dawn News or one of the other channels alleged?]. This business of ‘Asma-Jehangirism’ [making money and fame out of nonissues that appeal to the West] should end at some stage. It’s shallow and sickening.The Business of Asma-Jehangirism & Liberal Extremism Jump to Comments, By AHMED QURAISHI
Sex lies and videotapes are an integral part of todays culture. Videos are a great tool for maligning, demonizing and dehumanizing. A video was used in 2001 to show the world that the “Taliban” were Neanderthal thugs and inhuman. So it was easy attack them with Daisy Cutter bombs (one step below Nuclear bombs) which is one level below a Nagasaki class Atomic Bomb.
The Video of 2001 played a crucial part in “Manufacturing Consent” and preparing the way for a brutal and ruthless invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Today in the so called “Free Kabul“, there is more violence against women, more rapes of women and more murder of women. The First Afghan woman who came forward to speak up against the “Taliban” recently left Afghanistan saying that Afghanistan was safer under the Taliban then under Karzai.
A few days ago, a video appeared showing a woman being spanked in public. Now it turns out the so called victim in the video “Chand Bibi” claims that no such incident took place. Many analysts have claimed that the incident never happened in Swat, and that the video is about 2 years old, not a few days old as claimed.
Some have also claimed that the video actually was from Afghanistan and the woman is being spanked by cohorts of Mr. Karzai.
The entire Crusades were based on similar thinking “the hordes are coming and we need to destroy them“. Richard Fletcher in his book “The Cross and the Crescent” lists Islamphobic narrations by authors that go back centuries. Ammianus Marcelellinus, the last of the Latin historians of antiquity, writing towards the end of the fourth century, is representative. He considers “the Arabs a destructive people, who would swoop down like birds of prey to seize whatever they could find”.
American drone attacks on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are causing a massive humanitarian emergency, Pakistani officials claimed after a new attack yesterday killed 13 people. The dead and injured included foreign militants, but women and children were also killed when two missiles hit a house in the village of Data Khel, near the Afghan border, according to local officials.
“As many as 1m people have fled their homes in the Tribal Areas to escape attacks by the unmanned spy planes as well as bombings by the Pakistani army….
“So far 546,000 have registered as internally displaced people (IDPs) according to figures provided by Rabia Ali, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and Maqbool Shah Roghani, administrator for IDPs at the Commission for Afghan Refugees. The commissioner’s office says there are thousands more unregistered people who have taken refuge with relatives and friends or who are in rented accommodation. Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan, Hard Rain Keeps Falling By CHRIS FLOYD
These pseudo liberals are quiet about the suffering of more than half a million people who are suffering. They are always concerned about the Mukhtara Mai and Chand Bibi. They seem unconcerned about the 250,000 women who have suffering becuase of the US drone bombing.
Words are important. The good words spoken by Martin Luther about Islam are not mentioned by the Islamphobes. The West should change the approach towards Muslims. Pakistan is pivotal. Karen Armstrong. Islam’s positive influences on Europe (http://rupeenews.com/2008/05/15/how-inventions-by-muslims-transformed-the-planet/) are ignored and when mentioned are listed as Arab or Turkish. http://rupeenews.com/2008/05/29/confluence-of-civilizations-muslim-darwin-to-islamic-newton/
The more the Obama action plan is being unveiled the more difficult it is becoming to see the differences between the proposed policies and those of the Bush administration. Military operations in the tribal belt and unchecked flows of aid to military and civilian elites in Pakistan were the two main pillars of the policies of the Bush administration in Pakistan. The former has increased the recruiting power of the militant groups, the latter has built vested interests within the military and civilian elites to perpetuate militancy in Pakistan because the aid flows that these elites have so much started to enjoy are contingent on Pakistan continue to have militancy.
To say that pursing more of the same set of policies that have created a complete mess of Pakistan in the past seven years will deliver a new dawn is asking too much from the Pakistani public. Unless the US administration can show how its proposed military operations will differ from the options pursued in the past, it presents no hope for ordinary Pakistanis. The real cause of militancy in Pakistan as seen today are not the Taliban, it is the vested interests within the Pakistani elite who are using the myth of the Taliban to keep the Pakistani public and the world community hostage. Unless the US can figure out a way to deal with them, more aid will only mean more militancy in Pakistan.
- “A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.” (p. 1)
- “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’.” (p. 2)
- “A Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” (p. 3)
“…particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient.” (p. 6) - “A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts.” (p. 12) Edward Said.
The biggest concern however is that increasingly it is not clear why US is concerned about Pakistan. Is it actually that is fears an attack from likes of Baitullah Mesud or is it that after Sept 11, the US administration has to show the US public that it is doing something to fight Islamic militancy and having casualties in Pakistan just becomes a way of proving to the US citizens the government’s resolve to protect them. Who were the Pakistanis who were killed in these operations, and how these operations are destabilising the Pakistani nation are in then questions better not asked. The writer is a research fellow at the Oxford University. Email: mb294@ hotmail.com. Has America gone mad?Dissenting note, Friday, April 10, 2009, Dr Masooda Bano
The inability to create a facade of victory in Afghanistan creates an embarrassing situation for the incompetent Generals who have been painting a rosy picture for the American public. How long can General Patraeus, Admiral Mullen and Richard Holbrooke continue to fool the American people? The answer is obvious– not for very long.
“The best way to get out of Afghanistan fast is (for) people to think we’re staying.” Sen. John McCain of Arizona. WSJ
I think that Pakistan as a Muslim state is beyond dispute. The bulk of its population are Muslim. But the fact is that the dominant image of Pakistan in the West is that of jihadi terrorists threatening to take over the nuclear facilities is just wrong. The bulk of the country is not in favor of jihadi terrorism. It’s been made clear in election after election.
The religion of people in the countryside in the Punjab, in Sindh is essentially still, to a large extent, a reflection of Sufi existentialism, of each one finding the Creator as an individual, general hostility to organized religion as such, which is still strong in the countryside. It’s your middle and upper-middle classes, like those in India and, not to mention, the United States, who become very religious, attracted to religiosity, joining the Tablighi Jamaat organizations.
But the common people don’t show any signs of that. A tiny minority is attracted to jihadi terrorism, but given the size of the country, this is infinitesimal. So the real problem that confronts Pakistan is not a big rise of religion, but the total and complete failure of a corrupt and callous Pakistani elite to do anything for its people. Goatmilk. Tariq Ali.
Tariq Ali has hit the nail on its head. Just like the Indian elite that does not care a darn about the bulk of the population, it is the elite, it is this Pakistani elite that is pouring acid into the very foundations of Pakistan in the West. the likes of Tariq Fateh in Canada and others like him in the States are working full-time to pursue their filthy agenda.
