Jihad Watch Board Vice President discusses realities concerning our friend and ally Pakistan:
“When we speak of democracy in Islam it is not democracy in the government but in the cultural and social aspects of life. Islam is totalitarian — there is no denying about it. It is the Koran that we should turn to. It is the dictatorship of the Koranic laws that we want — and that we will have — but not through non-violence and Gandhian truth.” — Raja Sahib Mahmudabad, chief lieutenant of Mohammed Ali Jinnah (thanks to commenter Frank)
Pakistan continues to be described in the press as a “key ally” in “the war on terrorism.” If this “war on terrorism” is to mean something, it should mean a “war” to “prevent constant replenishment of the ranks of terrorists” and not merely “searching, over a wide area, and many years, for those terrorists who are already known to exist and who have attracted the most attention (i.e., the leaders of Al Qaeda).” Their numbers are limited. They can be replaced.
In what way is the government of Pakistan helping to lessen the likelihood of that replenishment? How is it acting to change the understanding of Islam so that the Jihad against the Infidels is de-emphasized, or perhaps even, by textual or ideological escamotage, made to disappear altogether?
There is no such way. The government of Pakistan does nothing to prevent jihad from being jihad — that is, it does nothing to prevent the widespread dissemination of hostility and hate toward Infidels.
No state that fails to change, or even to attempt to change, that ideology, can be called an “ally” or a “key ally.”
Pakistan is neither. It is a country filled with people hostile to Infidels They vary mainly in the degree of that hostility, and in their willingness to carry out acts of aggression against those Infidels. Pakistan is not a “key ally.” It is not an “ally.” It is, and permanently will be, a menace to all Infidels. Though Mohammed Ali Jinnah himself was relaxed, drank wine, and did not foresee quite the Islam-only state that Pakistan became, he was, being a worldly and less fanatical Muslim, one more of those fooled by the power of Islam itself. In this respect Jinnah was like those Iraqis in exile who forgot what Islam was like. He forgot, just as they have now, the seething resentments, irrationality, inability to control rumor and conspiracy theories, and inshallah-fatalism in both economics and politics that it has inspired. It was no accident that the first response of the Iraqis to the coming of American troops was not to pitch in to rebuild their country, but to exhibit a “wake me when it’s over attitude” toward the Americans — as if those Americans did not do enough in upending Saddam Hussein, but now must turn Iraq, and pronto, into New York and Los Angeles.
If one cared about the people of Pakistan, one would wrack one’s brains trying to find ways to limit the power of Islam. A beginning might be made by the government were it to insist on cuttying off all Arab (i.e. Saudi, U.A.E.) funds for madrasas that churn out tens of thousands of students completely unequipped for the world, but well-equipped mentally for Jihad. That could be accompanied by a campaign based on encouraging resentment by Pakistanis against the “rich Arabs.” Nothing need be made up. It is rich Arabs who treat Pakistani servants terribly in the Gulf, just as they do all other wage-slaves. It is rich Arabs who come to Pakistan for such diversions as bustard-hunting. They are famous for completely ignoring the wildlife preservation laws. It is rich Arabs who import tiny boys from Pakistan, allow them to be mistreated, tied onto the tops of camels in order to engage in that great Arab sport of camel racing, and whoever manages not to be thrown and trampled, but to survive, will eventually be discarded, as so many non-Arab servants of the rich Arabs are discarded, not always in a metaphorical sense, once they have served their purpose. Is it beyond the wit of Pakistani journalists to record and then to vividly retell for massa audiences, the behavior of the rich Arabs toward those tiny Pakistani boys, or toward Pakistani or even Indian Muslim girls, used up and discarded like kleenex. It is rich Arabs who, as a way of islamically compensating for the demonstrated decadence of their own lives, instead of ceasing to be decadent, as religious recompense supply the funds to pay for these madrasas in Pakistan that churn out millions of students who have spent their earliest years memorizing the Qur’an in a language they do not understand, and who are prepared not for any useful task but for more Qur’an — which is to say, more Jihad, more aggression, more inability to live in the world with Infidels. Unlike the poor Pakistanis whose lives and real needs they treat with such disdain, rich Arabs need not worry about making a living. They never have had to; the oil money keeps gushing.
A sensible government in Pakistan would try to raise these matters, and to use them to encourage a distancing from those Arabs. Perhaps they would even begin to raise that most delicate of subjects for Muslims in the sub-continent: what was it in the past that caused the ancestors of those Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian Muslims, to convert — to be converted not always at the point of a sword (though there was often that) but because the conditions of dhimmi (in the subcontinent, zimmi) status were simply unendurable?
What Pakistani journalists will begin, inside or outside Pakistan, to begin to hint at these things? And what officials will take them up, and to hammer home the theme of Arab mistreatment of Pakistanis and of other non-Arab Muslims, Kurds and Berbers and blacks in Darfur, all of which might begin to raise that issue that lurks beneath the surface of Islam: Islam as the Arab religion, the vehicle for Arab supremacism, for Arab cultural and linguistic imperialism that is far more devastating to other cultures and other histories than anything imposed by European imperialism.
Will those Pakistani political figures and journalists take up this theme, as they should for the good of Pakistan — or are they now, or hoping to be, on the Arab take?