Liberal Fascists - Pakistan's Native Enablers

Liberal Fascists: Pakistan’s Native Enablers

Saad Hasan

At the height of fascism in 1935, the Nobel laureate, Sinclair Lewis presciently stated that “when fascism comes to American it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”. The conduct of US government subsequent to 9/11 along with the narrative emanating from the breath of American intelligentsia, opinion and policy makers, be it the right-wing ideologues or the bastion of liberalism, The New York Times, and some democratic stalwarts, at least symbolically affirmed Lewis’ morbid prophecy. Extrapolating the same prophecy onto the Islamic World and in particular Pakistan, it would be safe to say that fascism has entered the fray, ironically, wrapped in the flag of liberalism and carrying the banner of Orwellian “enlightened moderation”, a term championed by that quintessential third world dictator Pervez Musharraf and internalized by liberals of Pakistan to describe all those gathered under the auspices of American war of terror and in support of it’s execution.

In prosecuting Pax-Americana, read “war of terror”, the US government stopped short of reaching the extremes of 30’s and 40’s, at least in the domestic arena, but they did and continue to push the envelope in the Islamic World. In the process, a bevy of native enablers were and continue to be recruited, some willing and eager, others thronging of their own volition strictly to further their local agendas on the back of the imperial war chest and machinery.

Though it would be naïve to think of the native enablers as a homogenous monolith, in fact there is a confluence of forces from the length and breath of Pakistan that identify themselves as left leaning, liberal, and increasingly as secular. These forces have assembled under a liberal coalition of sorts, encompassing such diverse and often adversarial groups and political forces as the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) of the assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, a party with a stated socialist manifesto and covert kelptocratic and totalitarian ethos; the Awami National Party (ANP), the Pukhtoon-nationalist and socialist party which rules the North West Frontier Province and also boasts a sizable constituency in the largest city of Pakistan, Karachi; the ethno-fascist party of urban Sindh province, Mutaihida Quami Movement (MQM), a representative of the urdu-speaking (Indian immigrant) ethnic group, but with a modus operandi that is more of a hybrid between Mafia and quasi-Nazi (Video of MQM’s terrorism - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phwyu7jMfzM); the countless NGOs that have kept the female relatives of the rich, powerful and connected, gainfully employed as well as socially active, and happen to be mostly funded by “foreign” donors; and the English speaking urban elite, which despises all things Pakistani and is more interested in preserving the status quo, where there is an enormous socio-economical gap between the privileged elite and the impoverished masses.

In the aftermath of US invasion of Afghanistan and the later expansion of “war of terror” into Pakistan, staying true to the universal ideals of liberalism and in solidarity with their comrades around the world, one would have expected the liberals of Pakistan to be at the forefront of the anti-war and anti-imperialist movement, manifesting in protests and vocal opposition to Pakistan government’s role in facilitating the egregious American imperial crusade both within and beyond Pakistani borders.

However, the liberals of Pakistan have been the biggest unabashed cheer leaders and propagandist of the American “war of terror”, if not loyal foot soldiers, and therein lies the affliction of liberals in Pakistan, i.e. the absolute betrayal and counteraction of even an ostensible form of liberalism. Even those liberals who are not burdened by overt political affiliations and the compulsion to toe the authoritarian party line (dissent is not tolerated in the liberal Pakistani political parties), are constantly clamoring for the powers that be to employ some of the most brutal tactics in co-opting not only those who are in opposition of the belligerence of their American benefactors in the region but also whoever else happens to be averse to their agendas in the local socio-political environment.

These tactics make mockery of the universally accepted human rights, civilized conduct, and more or less constitutes war crimes. The drone attacks, which until last year had killed 700 Pakistani civilians and only 14 suspected terrorists, are not condemned; rather a persistent demand for their continuation and even expansion is evinced. It should be mentioned that drone attacks happen to be illegal under international law, even suspected or accused terrorists have to be afforded their proverbial day in the court. But when the likes of Asma Jehangir, the chairman of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and a liberal extraordinaire can be invariably seen on the Pakistani political talks shows, demanding the government to do more, read bomb more, in combating terrorism (her conduct leading up to the massacre in Lal (Red) Mosque of Islamabad was particularly despicable), very little can be expected from the champions of human rights and paragons of liberalism in Pakistan. As such, the deafening silence on and failure to oppose in a tangible way, the disappearance and subsequent sale to CIA of both innocent Pakistani citizens and foreigners by the Musharraf regime for the paltry sum of $5000 per head, was only natural for Pakistani liberals.

Meanwhile, the rhetoric often espoused by liberals of Pakistan in various fora is indistinguishable from the rhetoric that is typical of the right wing and neocon ideologues in America, right down to pejoratives used to describe the existential enemy, gross generalizations to broaden the targeted group, and astounding hubris to rally support from their respective bases. Labels such as Wahabis, Mullahs, Fundos (Fundamentalists in Pakistani vernacular) and Taliban are frequently used to describe those not on the “war of terror” bandwagon, in so far as one tends to believe it is Fox News they are watching and not one of the Pakistani TV channels.

There is also movement afoot to marginalize conservative or religiously-oriented Pakistanis which also coincides with the ethnocentric agenda of at least one major component of the “liberal coalition”, that is the ethno-fascist party of urban Sindh province, MQM. Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and capital of Sindh province has a sizeable population of ethnic pushtuns, most of who tend to be conservative and the same ethnicity as the Taliban. Since Karachi also happens to be the base of MQM and its dominion, it cannot tolerate another ethnic group prospering and diluting its power on its turf. Therefore, MQM often uses the boogey of Taliban to carry out pogroms against the Pushtuns in Karachi. One can see MQM’s stalwart mayor of Karachi, Mustafa Kamal, openly spewing his virulently racist views against Pushtuns of his city, in an interview of conducted by, of all outlets, NPR, and aired on June 3rd, 2008. Kamal, despite possessing a very crude and thuggish demeanor, evident in his many dealings with media, political opponents, and the ordinary citizens of his own city, and an equally poor command of the English language, is a blue-eyed native enabler of US state department. In one video on youtube, he can be seen telling President Clinton that the former Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif is a “Mullah”, though to Clinton’s credit, the latter is not impressed by the inane assertion. Kamal makes frequent trips to US and has just recently finished a lecture series at Ivy-league colleges. Being a foot soldier in the Imperial crusade does have its perks.

With Obama’s ascension into the presidency and given his lofty pre-election rhetoric, there was a mild sense of optimism that the ill-conceived policies of the previous administration if not reversed, would at least be recalibrated, resulting in a more nuanced rules of engagement in the region. Furthermore, instead of betting the house on the fickle and insidious “liberal coalition”, who like all native enablers across the Muslim world, have been taking the Americans for a ride, perhaps some small steps of cooperation could have been taken in taking the conservative, possibly even the Islamist forces in Pakistan on board. This would have gone a long way in further isolating Al-Qaida, thus allowing the “western coalition” to achieve some tactical goals in the “war of terror”, paving the way for even strategic alignment with the religious elements in the long-run. Alas, for all of Obama’s cerebral prowess, he ended up deferring to the fallacious and discredited wisdom and methods of Neocons. In the process he has assumed the patronage of ruthless opportunists, who can be best described as pseudo-liberals and worst as liberal fascists, doing America’s bidding in the AFPAK region, thereby, diminishing the possibility of long-term success of the endeavor. However, a deeper question for Pakistanis to ponder is where are the true liberals of Pakistan? Where is Pakistan’s Arunduthi Roy?

Does Zionism Justify Killing Innocents Non-Jews?

Does Zionism justify the killing of innocent non-jews...The answer is yes, the manner in which Israelis in the last 60 years have conducted warfare, read terrorism, from the bombing of the King David Hotel to the latest atrocity commited in Qana, and more importantly how it has gone comemorating each of these events as glorious chapters in modern Israeli/jewish/zionist history not only hightlights their complete disregard for the loss of innocent non-jewish lives but also reinforces the very notion...Bibi Netnayahu recently attended an event in the US, where the King David hotel bombing, in which 92 people died, many of whom were nurses, was celebrated. Dr. Baruch Goldstein who Massacred 29 worshippers in the Ibrahimi mosque in cold blood has earned himself a shrine which attracts scores of visitors each year. The biggest war criminal in Israeli history, who according to Israel’s own investigation was indirectly responsible for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila has been elevated to the status of a legend in Israeli folklore. The armed to teeth settlers, who invariably kill innocent Arab men, women and children usually get off with a slap of wrists, i.e. six month in jail. Even in the aftermath of the Qana massacre, the Israelis and their Christain-Zionist supporters are lamenting the diplomatic ground and PR war Israel is ostensibly losing, not the moral reprehensibility and egregiousness of deliberate and targeted killing of the civilians.
All of these factors compound to evince the true and sinister psyche of core Jewish and Christian-Zionist beliefs, i.e. Non-Jewish lives, be they gentile, or the pesky sub-human arab cockroaches are not worth the same as Jewish-lives, hence justified to kill…

The Massacre at Qana


By OMAR BARGHOUTI

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora condemned Israel's massacre in Qana today as a "heinous crime" and called Israeli leaders "war criminals." Reacting to an earlier atrocity, he wondered: "Is the value of human life in Lebanon less than that of the citizens of other countries?"[1] The answer, at least as far as Israel is concerned, is an unambiguous "yes!" Israel's latest bloodbath, which claimed the lives of dozens of children and women hiding from the relentless bombing in what they hoped was a secure basement in Qana, betrays not only Israel's criminal disregard for the value of Arab human life, a typical colonial attitude towards natives, but also its increasingly fundamentalist perception of Gentiles in general as lesser humans.
Israeli apologists who will try to spin this new massacre as yet another "mistake" must expect their audience to have an awfully short memory or a very low IQ. Israel has explicitly indicated in the past few days that it may resort to such atrocious measures, especially since its armed forces have failed to achieve any tangible military gains after 19 days of rolling massacres and wanton destruction across Lebanon. Israeli minister of justice, Haim Ramon, issued a stern warning [2] only days ago that a large area in south Lebanon was regarded by his government effectively as a free-fire zone, advocating indiscriminate bombing of villages inside it to ease the so-far unsuccessful advance of the Israeli army. "These places are not villages. They are military bases in which Hizbollah are hiding and from which they are operating," he said, adding that, since Israel had ordered Lebanese civilians to leave the area, "All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hizbollah, Israel's biggest-selling paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, advocated [3] raising the threshold of Israel's response to Katyusha rockets: "In other words: a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire." It is worth noting that all available evidence points to the fact that no Katyusha was fired by the Lebanese resistance from Qana before the bombing.
Among Israel's staunch Zionist supporters in the West, the same "talking points" were parroted. Harvard academic Alan Dershowitz recently argued [4] that, "Hezbollah and Hamas militants [] are difficult to distinguish from those 'civilians' who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks." He concluded saying, "The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit."
Thus the massacre in Qana.
Qana's name is associated with an earlier Israeli massacre. In 1996, during its military offensive codenamed "Grapes of Wrath," Israel's air force bombed a UN shelter in the village, slaying more than 100 civilians, mostly children, and inviting almost universal verbal condemnation but no real threats of sanctions or any other form of effective punitive measures from the international community. In the current Israeli war on Lebanon this is only the most recent episode in a series of smaller atrocities deliberately committed by the Israeli army against Lebanese civilians in an attempt to collectively "punish" them for the humiliating defeat its elite military units have so far experienced at the hands of the formidable Lebanese resistance, most noticeably in the legendary town of Bint Jbeil.

This intentional and coldly calculated Israeli policy of targeting innocent Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure stems from a time-honoured, but hardly ever successful, Israeli doctrine of applying intense "pressure" against a civilian population in order to compel them, in-turn, to pressure the resistance into submitting to Israeli dictates, thereby doing Israel's bidding by proxy. It has been consistently used against the Palestinians ever since the Nakba of 1948, and is still applied now in the ongoing barbaric offensive and hermetic siege against Gaza. Israel may have plagiarized this doctrine from the legacies of previous oppressors, but it has refined it to a degree that it no longer raises any moral qualms in most of Israeli society, where it is widely accepted by the public as a right, even a duty in the fight for Israel's "security."
Such blatant racism, which may have been frowned upon in the past by many Jewish-Israelis as a pathological anomaly, is now quite popular in the Israeli mainstream, including among lawmakers, academics, journalists and, of course, military leaders. While it has become normal to read scathing -- occasionally valid -- critiques of the hateful and chauvinistic discourse "inherent" in Islamic and even Christian brands of fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, which is among the key factors informing current Israeli apartheid policies and laws, remains a taboo subject that is rarely discussed or debated in the West. It is rooted in a long tradition of fanatic, yet popular, fundamentalist interpretations of Halakhah, or Jewish law, propagated by influential rabbis and internalized by a widely acquiescent Israeli society, secular and religious sectors alike. Even before the creation of Israel, the core concept in this fundamentalist worldview was publicly espoused by Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, who said, "The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews...is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle."[5]

The late Israeli academic and human rights advocate, Israel Shahak, traced the roots of Israeli public justification for killing Palestinians, for instance, to similar readings of the tenets of Halakhah. While the murder of a Jew is considered a capital offence in Jewish law, the murder of a Gentile is treated quite differently. "A Jew who murders a Gentile," Shahak reveals, "is guilty only of a sin against the laws of heaven, not punishable by court." Indirectly, but intentionally, causing the death of a Gentile is "no sin at all." [6] A booklet published in 1973 by the Central Region Command of the Israeli army subscribes to this same doctrine. In it, the Command's Chief Chaplain writes

"When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that those civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then according to the Halakhah they may and even should be killed Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilized In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good. [7]
In 1996, the same year the first Qana massacre was committed, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, a leader of the powerful Lubavitch Hassidic sect, echoed the same principle, rhetorically asking, "If a Jew needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save [the Jew]?," answering, "The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something more holy and unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life." [8] Moreover, Ginsburgh coauthored a book defending the 1994 massacre of Muslim worshippers in Al-Ibrahimi mosque (Patriarchs' Cave) in Hebron, in which he argued that when a Jew kills a non-Jew the act does not constitute murder according to the Halakhah, adding that the killing of innocent Palestinians as an act of revenge is a Jewish virtue.

During the first months of the current Palestinian initfada, it was common for Israeli army spokespeople to justify killing Palestinian children throwing stones by saying that they "threatened human life." (B'Tselem Report) Not soldiers' lives, not Israeli lives, but human life. One cannot escape the implication that the alleged sources of the threat are not exactly eligible to be called human in the army's common diction.

In this context, it is entirely justified to see Israel's second massacre in Qana as the rule, not the exception.

This often ignored menace of Jewish fundamentalism needs to be addressed as seriously as other forms of fanatic religious thought which sows racial hatred, animosity and war mongering. While adhering to moral principles alone will certainly not bring any of Qana's murdered children back to life or compensate any bereaved parent or loved one anywhere, perhaps insisting on the equal worth of all human lives, regardless of ethnicity or religion, and rejecting racism from any source, including from sanctimonious former victims, can help diminish the chances of such ruthless crimes recurring in the future. Irrespective of the Holocaust, or precisely because of it, Israel should not be allowed to get away with its racist, at-will flaunting of international law and its state terrorism against defenseless civilians. It is time to go beyond mere condemnation to properly channel irrepressible grief and simmering anger into morally sound acts of intervention. Just as it worked against apartheid South Africa, a comprehensive regime of boycott against Israel is urgently called for. People of conscience everywhere share the responsibility of stopping this unrestrained behemoth before it scorches everything in its blind quest for hegemony and colonial control.

Omar Barghouti is an independent political analyst.

References:
[1] Jonathan Steele and Rory McCarthy. "Strike on bunker failed, says Hizbullah. The Guardian, July 20, 2006.
[2] Patrick Bishop. Diplomats argue as all of south Lebanon is targeted. Telegraph, July 28, 2006.
[3] Harry de Quetteville. You're all targets, Israel tells Lebanese in South. Telegraph, July 28, 2006.
[4] Alan Dershowitz. 'Civilian Casualty'? It Depends. Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2006.
[5] Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press, London, 1999. P. ix.
[6] Israel Shahak. Jewish History, Jewish Religion-The Weight of Three Thousand Years. Pluto Press. London, 2002. P. 75-76.
[7] Ibid. P. 76.
[8] Ibid. P. 43.]