Diplomacy or dhimmitude? Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses Pakistan and its relationship with the U.S.:
For decades Pakistan has been the spoiled child of American diplomacy. Infuriated by Krishna Menon and what was seen as Bandung-conferencing Indian diplomats (who often did deserve our scorn), the Americans made the mistake of thinking that "Islam is a bulwark against Communism." That was all they knew, and all they needed to know, about Islam. And besides, those mustachioed Pakistani generals, ramrod-straight backs, seemingly straightforward in speech, were such splendid fellows -- you know, the same impression that Musharraf, the meretricious Musharraf, gives. We just can't quite comprehend how deeply dyed by a culture of nonsense and lies and taqiyya that comes with mother's milk, so that even those who seem to Westerners to be most full of rectitude are offering up some version (from mild to hot and spicy) of their refusal to come clean with the Infidels about Islam and what it inculcates, and how it shapes the attitudes, pervades the atmosphere, and is instinct in everything, that we find in Muslim societies such as Pakistan.Pakistan is a particularly grim place. It has Islam and nothing but Islam. It is a country whose people define themselves solely by Islam. If, in Malaysia, or in Indonesia, one can find communities of non-Muslims and some awareness of a pre-Islamic or non-Islamic world, that helps to introduce a slight syncretistic note. In Pakistan, while those non-Muslim communities are there, the relaxation and syncretism are not. Pakistan is full of people who have taken Arab names. Many of them -- all those Sayeeds -- seem to think they are descendants of the Prophet or his tribe or of other 7th century Arabs, and the ridiculous results are there for all to see. Meanwhile, their real origins -- descendants of Hindus who could stand the Muslim oppression of non-Muslims no longer -- are ignored or treated with contempt.
For decades Pakistan received great amounts of American military aid. There was money, training, and equipment, including top-of-the-line planes. During the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan was both the conduit for and recipient of a great deal more aid, and helped to establish the view that the Soviet Union was the sole problem, and nice Mr. Bin Laden and his friends and family all part of the "solution." And meanwhile, the Pakistani ISI (a wholly-owned subsidiary of those same rectitudinous generals) was doing all kinds of things. It was funding, and encouraging, and rewarding, Dr. A. Q. Khan, who worked busily aday, stealing nuclear secrets here, getting equipment there, and who has endangered the United States more than anyone else -- including Bin Laden. And it was allowing those madrassa students who metastasized quite naturally into the murderous Taliban to grow and grow and grow.
And what has happened since 9/11? It's the mixture as before. Pakistan is "our friend" and "our ally." Pakistani debts have been cancelled. Pakistani goods are now flowing into the United States, while American military equipment flows -- free of charge -- into the hands of the splendid, trustworthy, mustachioed General Musharraf and his splendid fellows, each more trustworthy, more mustachioed, and more "moderately" Muslim than the last.That is our policy. It is based on not understanding of Islam and not being able to recognize that every Muslim who does not come clean about Islam is himself part of that unending problem. Musharraf is not our friend, and can never be. Pakistan is not our friend, and can never be.
After CENTO, after the billions in aid and diplomatic support over the years, after the exchanges of our officers, after the opening up of our markets, after the cancellation of debts, after the bribe after bribe to get the Pakistanis to collaborate, Pakistan is still not our friend. Oh sure, they collaborate with us, carefully calibrating the exact amount of highly-visible "collaboration" they will offer, never to really damage their friends, but just enough to keep the Americans happy.
Not everyone in the State Department is a fool. Not everyone in the government, or in the press, on right and left, is a fool. But a great many people are.
The Revolution started with the phrase "No taxation without representation." Perhaps not a stirring phrase, but it stirs me.
Now we hapless Infidels are being taxed, against our wills, to pay jizya to various Muslim states. Not all of them ask it of Americans alone. Libya, for example, has told Italy that it will only collaborate on the problem of illegal immigration into Italy from boats leaving Libyan shores if the Italian government agrees to build, at its own expense, a coastal highway that runs along the whole length of Libya's coast. So far Italy has rejected this absurd suggestion.
And the American government, if it has its wits about it, will reject these continuing transparent and disgusting attempts to do two things: to extract even more aid out of us, the Infidels, on behalf of Muslims (despite the fact that the beneficiaries of the largest transfer of wealth in human history, the OPEC oligopoly, consists almost entirely of Arab and Muslim states) and to continue to insist, against all the evidence, and to the great harm of Infidels who continue to be misled, that "poverty" is the problem that explains Muslim misdeeds, Muslim hysteria, Muslim malevolence toward all Infidels, when all of it can so easiy be explained by reference to the texts, tenets, attitudes of Islam.
Here's a motto for today, tomorrow, forever:
"No To The Jizyah-Tax -- We May Be Infidels But We Are Not Dhimmis"
A bit of a mouthful even for the bumpersticker on a widebody, but perhaps our bumpers can make a little room, and tuck that sentiment on, or into, their Procrustean metallic beds.
I see that our Jizyah tax is being used to buy 5 nuclear reactors from China (see report on the BBC website).
We should be shutting down their current reactors and seizing their bombs.
Re Italy. What they need to do is beef up their navy and start sinking those boats. A drastic solution - yes; but word would quickly get back to North Africa and they'd stop coming. The alternative is the "Camp of the Saints" scenario predicted 30 years ago by Jean Raspail; only this time with an Islamic twist making it even more horrendous.
Of a directive from Moscow to the British Communist Party, Mark Steyn writes, "They were concerned that, while the top ranks of A-list Stalinists were doing a cracking job, the grass-roots organisations weren't pulling their weight. Hence: "The lower organs of the party must make even greater efforts to penetrate the backward parts of the proletariat.""
"Pakistan is full of people who have taken Arab names."
-- From the above essay
Fake religion yields fake identity.
Our own Hugh Fitzgerald has just published an article at Campus Watch entitled ‘Columbia's Hysterical Arabist: Zainab Bahrani.’
It is an admittedly pretty good piece of work, but it isn’t until Hugh’s final paragraph/sentence that we are treated to the clarity and conciseness we’ve come to expect from him.
Read it for yourselves folks:
“Actually, this book does what it set out to, for it does manage to break away from all Eurocentric approaches to discourses of subalternity, or even of meta-alterity, and comes so subversively close in its disjunctive interrogation of the counter or anti-mimesis which is inherently essential to Mesopotamian thought, for as a native of Baghdad and hence a non-European, Bahrani is certainly perfectly placed to perform such a mission of interrogating all postcolonialist as well as narrativised specificity, but obviously not, at the same time, either poststructuralist or post-postmodern universalism, with its customary relativised discourse analysis which seldom lends itself to anticipatory prolepsis, but on the other hand her critique is obviously deeply rooted in Western thought with its alien constructions of identity that give rise to post-essentialism which, in a larger sense, serve merely to violate all the strategic critiques of hegemonic historiographical constructions of essences, whether of the Orient or of scholars who deny the self-referentiality of all postcolonialist essentializing.”
For those who would describe the above sentence as a standing monument to its author’s intellectual vanity, who might suggest he is so utterly infatuated with his own verbosity that he’s willing to sacrifice clarity and cogency just to impress, who would wonder what attentions the author might have been deprived of in childhood that at this stage of middle age he is compelled to engage in such blatant posing, I would answer that you‘re missing the point. It doesn’t matter that 95% of his audience would have great difficulty just getting through the sentence, much less comprehend its essence. All that really matters is that this penetrating analysis has been bequeathed to the world.
Hugh finishes off the piece: “I hope that is clear.”
Most definitely.
"Spoiled child"? I'd say "spoilt" - yet another potato/tomato moment.
Whether it's through oil or through aid, or through Westerners making allowances and holding them to a lower standard, the Islamic world is one big spoilt child, no less dangerous for being childish. They even lie like spoilt children. Nothing is their fault.
Cornelius - not as good as Hugh's parody, naturally, but there is a Postmodernism Generator that you may find amusing. Each time you go to the site, it generates a different load of drivel. This is what was on there when I last visited:
Cornelius,
I believe that paragraph above is Hugh's parody of Ms. Bahrani's writing style. Where is your sense of humor?
If that's the case Rebecca, then the joke's on me.
I'd assumed Cornelius got it, and was doing a kind of double bluff.
God, all this parody - I'm in danger of disappearing up my own backside.
Cornelius...possibly Hugh just has a strange sense of humor... I kind of like looong sentences, I have written some myself...not as long as Hugh's though. I can only hold a thought so long before it degenerates into food and sexual desire...
Packistan is like sleeping with a poisoness snake. Watch where you put your hands and your feet. The whole place should be defanged...
possibly Hugh just has a strange sense of humor
Perhaps good enough to qualify as humour.
I recall fondly the old days when the poseurs wrote latinate. Now things are written in greekoid. Some advancement of learning.
Advancement of learning? Oh, I meant mimetic Eurocentric meta-narative. I should get my subaltern to proofread for me. The stupid blond one who goes all squirmy when I mention Palestinians.
Stasiphrasis!
For all the (justifiable) concern about Iran's nuclear ambitions, Hugh reminds us that in the bipolar world of muslims and infidels, the dark side already has employed the stolen nuclear technology. Eradication of Pakistan's arsenal should be high up on the "to-do" list once the civilized world (especially India) wakes up.
The posting above by someone doing his unsurpassable imitation of Wile E. Coyote, by taking with complete seriousness an obvious parody of a certain kind of academic gobbledygook, and then, even more amusingly, solemnly taking its author to task for writing such highfalutin' and incomprehensible stuff, deserves to be immortalized.
Now and again, and especially in great haste, one can miss a joke. Now and again, one can make a fool of oneself through displays of illogic or wilful refusal to read clearly or to comprehend, or to ignore, for the nth time, a detailed response to every objection that has been put forth. But when such an uninterrupted series of hoist-by-your-own petard explosions is offered, when so many deliveries from the Acme Missile Company go up in hopeless smoke, any sympathy that might once have been felt long ago dissolved into laughter.
Perhaps it is a good thing for the website. After all, the main feature here, the subject under discussion, is such a somber one, that visitors may welcome these Road-Runner cartoons by way of comic relief.
Now and again, and especially in great haste, one can miss a joke.
It happens to the best of us. The best of you, rather.
(Throwing down a gauntlet here. If I miss a joke on this site, I'll eat humble pie - crow? - as well as my hat.)
Hugh - check out that website I linked. It really is a scream.
Meep meep! That's about all there is left to say. ;)
I took a look. The site is funny, but one thing keeps me from being more enthusiastic: parodies of certain kinds of academic mumbo-jumbo need to constantly be deviating into near-sense, or even go on skirting for a paragraph or two a kind of sense, but always turning away just in time. Mind-crafted nonsense can do this; computer-generated stuff doesn't do it as well, but does what it does endlessly.
I want the cruelly exact human behind the words, not the placid Hal, whirring indifferently along.
The thud you just heard was Wile E. Coyote hitting the ground after the long descent from the canyon top.
Then again, Hugh's frequent use of excruciatingly interminable sentences here at JW was the perfect ploy to set me up.
He's a diabolical genius!!!...(which is less painful than acknowledging any other possibility)
Fair enough.
Hugh,
Excellent posting. Pakistan is indeed a grim place. I have never been happier to leave a country in my life. I was releieved to leave Lahore and find myself in Amritsar, in India.
One wonders how the US can end up with such a misfit country (the essence of Pakistani nationalism is that Pakistanis are Indians who avoid being Indians) as an ally.
Hugh
Excellent article.
While it is true that Krishna Menon was an ally of India's communists and India did deserve the scorn, the foreign policy of India was an implementation of Nehru's fantasy world, where the West was the root of all evil. Even the so called "Non-Aligned Movement", which he co-founded w/ Comrades Tito & Nasser, was an euphimism for a bunch of pro-Soviet tinpot regimes, including Cuba & Vietnam. Given that India chose to be an adversary of the West, I don't think it is fair to fault successive US administrations at the time w/ a negative attitude towards India.
However, in the 70's, under Nixon/Kissinger, the US did have a wierd set of policies, be it courting China, supporting Arab states against Israel, and the tilt policy towards Pakistan was an extension of that. Islam was nowhere in the equation - the Arab bloc was pretty much split along the Nasserite Arab nationalists like Egypt, Syria, Iraq & Libya, while the Islamist section of the Arab bloc was all the West had. Guess who they picked?
And it wasn't the US alone that followed this wacko policy. India, under the Nehru-Gandhi (Indira) doctrine, aggressively followed a policy that exceeded dhimmitude - they were trying to out-Arab the Arabs. This policy continued as long as Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi were running things, so at the time, it wouldn't have made sense to use Islam as the criteria for picking friends and foes.
Hence you had the backing that the US had for generals like Yahya Khan and Zia ul Haq. As long as that rivalry w/ India continued, the US didn't have much of a choice, although one could argue that the US could have backed countries like Nepal & Sri Lanka, which had their own problems w/ India.
What ended this break was the death of Rajiv Gandhi. Note that a month before his death, he was busy lobbying world leaders like Gorbachev to put pressure on US to go easy on Saddam, so had he survived his assassination, India would still have been an adversary. But w/ his death, the new Indian leadership - be it Congress or BJP - had no stake in maintaining the fantasy world of Nehru, and w/ the collapse of the Soviet Union, mending fences w/ the US made sense. Hence, you had the restoration of relations w/ Israel (terminated during the Lebanon war), the improvement of ties w/ the West, and so on. Also, the rise of a nationalist government in India in 1998 almost paralleled the rise of Putin, then perceived as a Russian nationalist. With this, India could improve relations w/ the US w/o jeopardizing it w/ Moscow.
Where I do think the US dropped the ball was after 9/11. In the weeks following the attacks, India offered the US all types of assistance in its efforts. By snubbing India, and going for Pakistani support instead, the Bush administration did a fantastic job of turning Indian public opinion against it. The policy since then of regarding Pakistan a frontline ally, authorizing the sale of F16's, lifting of sanctions that followed their nuclear tests, etc has pretty much soured public opinion, which is why India didn't see any reason to support the US in Iraq. However, the involvement of Indian officials (like just resigned Natwar Singh) in the Oil for Palaces, er Food scandal didn't do India any favors either.
On the subject of Pakistan itself, the whole rationale for that country existing was simple: Muslims couldn't and can't co-exist w/ Hindus. That is why you have Pakistanis pretending to be Arabs. Iran and Indonesia could remain Iran and Indonesia, whether they are Islamic or not. On the other hand, taking Islam out of Pakistan (or Bangladesh) would be like taking Communism out of East Germany or North Korea - there wouldn't be a good rationale for these remaining separate countries. Although I believe that most Indians would be opposed to re-integrating Pakistan or Bangladesh because of the damage it would do to India's economy.
For all the (justifiable) concern about Iran's nuclear ambitions, Hugh reminds us that in the bipolar world of muslims and infidels, the dark side already has employed the stolen nuclear technology. Eradication of Pakistan's arsenal should be high up on the "to-do" list once the civilized world (especially India) wakes up.
- Infidel33
Infidel33
Eradication of Pakistan's arsenal is beyond India's capability right now. You think India wanted it? Reason Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal is that the Bush administration does not have a problem w/ it. If this arsenal is to be destroyed, the only country that can do it w/ a few ICBM's is US. While India has been getting a few defensive missiles like Israel's Arrow, it can't knock off Pakistan's nuclear arsenal in a pre-emptive strike.
Also, while India has its share of dhimmi politicians who suck up the Mohammedan vote, they are all united as far as Pakistan goes. Reason is that whenever Pakistan is a political issue, all the vote bank calculations that allows certain parties to wield the Muslim vote banks to ride to victories go out the window. While a segment of the Muslim population is pro-Pakistan, that also tends to polarize the rest of the country against any politico inane enough to run on such a platform.
Pakistan is the worst hell hole that I have been to. They hate the west and especially the Americans. I don't understand how the US governments from the 1950's to this day have a cosy relationship with the ruling Generals.
Pakistan has the most amount of Islamic radicals and fanatics. The madrases are like "hate" factories that pour out Jihadis with such hatred of the West , Christianity & Hindus. Go to any city in Pakistan and ask them what they think of the US and one will get a mouthful of abuse.
"Indian diplomats often did deserve scorn." Not only in the past, present Indian policy makers(Congress and Communists)deserve a boot from the people who believe in democracy,freedom and secularism---------- these wisemen of India have invited Saudi King as Chief Guest for 56th. Republic Day of India on 26 Jan.2006. Saudi Arabia is most religiously intolerant country in the world. Saudis are responsible for Global Jihadi Terrorism. For Saudis, (Hindu) India is an unfinished agenda of Islam. For muslim vote bank,Indian politicians can do any thing. Traitors deserve nothing but BOOOOOT.
Iqbal
I assume you are taking the name of the Urdu poet, and that you are not a Muslim.
Anyway, did the issue of the Kerela Muslim sentenced to a blinding get resolved? If he was spared, that's the only reason such a decision could be justified.
Iqbal
I assume you are taking the name of the Urdu poet, and that you are not a Muslim.
Anyway, did the issue of the Kerela Muslim sentenced to a blinding get resolved? If he was spared, that's the only reason such a decision could be justified.
Iqbal
One more thing. More than Saudis, I'm sure there are enough Pakistanis who would like to re-conquer India and re-create the Moghul empire. Kashmir is only step 1.
It was also disgraceful of India to resume the bus services and open the border for the Pak earthquake. Same for the decision to resume cricket relations.
Only problem - the BJP is in too much of a mess to do anything to highlight any opposition.
Kerala Muslim has been sentenced for taking out one eye(not blinding).This Shariat punishment has been awarded to a Believer. First of all sufferer himself should condemn Shariat Laws,only then others can do anything to help him. India(Hindu India) is an unfinished agenda of Islam,which includes all muslims including Indian one. India should never close her people to poeple contact with Pakistani muslims as these are are former Hindus, who may be brought back in case Islam implodes in near future(which very likely).
Carlo Panella had a very good article on Pakistan in Il Foglio back in July 2005, after 7/7. He reached much the same conclusions as Hugh, except he gave attention to the British role in setting up Pakistan. Now there's something to the credit of American diplomacy. The State Dept didn't set up Pakistan; the British had much more to do with that.
Rocky mentioned Lahore. I've never been there, but I have my own Lahore story. A Britisher named Thomas Hughes put out a very good Encyclopedia of Islam [or Dictionary of Islam] in the 19th century. This was reprinted several times in Lahore under British rule. It was also reprinted after Pakistan was set up. But the post-independence editions kept getting thinner and thinner, because the publishers were eager to eliminate anything and everything offensive to Islam from their editions, whether manifestly true or not. They even invited the public to notify them of Islamically offensive material. Hence, the ever shrinking encyclopedia.
By the way, one of the encyclopedia items that substantially shrank was the one on "Jews," as if you couldn't guess. Hughes' original item was quite informative and extensive in size... but post-1947 Lahore editions...
"A Britisher named Thomas Hughes put out a very good Encyclopedia of Islam [or Dictionary of Islam] in the 19th century."
-- from a posting above
Still excellent, and still to be obtained, in its unexpurgated and unabridged form, not from Pakistani sources, but from the Indian publisher Rupa and Co., in New Delhi. Last reprinted 1999, from the original edition -- which does not date, and is far more accurate than esposito-like productions put out today in order to fool Infidels -- of 1885.
Can be bought via the Internet.