Mr. Sadanand Dhume is a columnist for Wall Street Journal. Earlier this week, he wrote a column on the failed New York City terror attempt. He gave this provocative title to his column, 'Why Pakistan Produces Jihadists'.
His sub-heading was even more interesting. It read:
Carved out of the Muslim-majority areas of British India in 1947, it was the world's first modern nation based solely on Islam.
My gut reaction was: What's that got to do with anything?
How typical. An event offers itself to malign Pakistan and Indians pop up everywhere to offer distortions on history and policy that - in an innocent coincident of course – overlap with long held Indian policy objectives. Most WSJ readers won't know this because most outsiders are not privy to the full history of Indian antagonism toward Pakistan since this small nation's rise in 1947 after an epic and peaceful struggle.
One of the official Indian objectives has always been to question directly and indirectly the rise of Pakistan as an independent nation. That's exactly what Mr. Dhume does here, innocently of course. In lamenting the rise of a Muslim-majority nation, he conveniently forgets that it was Hindu extremism in his country that pushed the ruling Muslim elites of the region - who were a distinct race and culture by all standards - to seek the right to shape their own destiny.
Pakistan is Muslim in the same way that Israel is the world's first and only nation created in the name of Judaism and in the same way that Ireland is Catholic and India is Hindu, even if it presents itself as secular.
Instead of obsessing over Pakistan and seizing opportunities to malign it, Mr. Dhume would do well to explain to us and the world how a secular democracy in India produced 21st century's first genocide against Christians [almost 600 killed in the summer of 2009] and Muslims [2,000 burned alive in 2002].
Pakistan, despite failures of governance and politics and a history of foreign meddling in its affairs by outside powers, remains immune to this rapid and violent deterioration in tolerance that has affected the world's largest democracy.
Why do US newspapers solicit insights on Pakistan from biased, agenda-driven Indians?
Even the US government does it. Recently, Washington sent an Indian to head the USAID office in Islamabad.
This is a sign of prevalent anti-Pakistanism in some corners of US media and government.
Of course, WSJ doesn't hide its bias against Pakistan. It is not interested in offering a balanced perspective. Like most of the mainstream US news organizations, this publication has been at the forefront of demonizing Pakistan and spreading unsubstantiated rumors about Pakistan's nukes and the country's imminent breakup. To be fair to WSJ, most mainstream US news outlets have been peddling these theories as news for the past three years.
Now the US Embassy in Islamabad is recruiting Pakistanis from the media and academia [as consultants to USAID, to DoD, to CIA-linked think tanks, etc.] to beautify Washington's real face in the eyes of ordinary Pakistanis.
But Pakistanis are not stupid. They know how Washington has been treating Pakistan as a de facto enemy state and deceiving Pakistan for the past eight years.
This op-ed by Mr. Dhume is also a sobering reminder for Pakistanis that India remains the number one threat to Pakistan's long term security and stability. The Indians won't miss a chance to harm Pakistan, like they did in 1971 when they unilaterally invaded Pakistan when Pakistanis were busy in a post-election domestic squabble.
The Nation newspaper of Pakistan reported that its editor in chief Mr. Majeed Nizami, who also heads the Foundation for Pakistan's Ideology, accused India in a story published recently that it "is bent upon destroying Pakistan."
Mr. Nizami then went on to make a dire warning cloaked in satire. "If India," he said, "did not refrain from committing aggression against us, then Pakistan is destined to defeat India because our horses in the form of atomic bombs and missiles are far better than Indian ‘donkeys’."
Mr. Nizami was apparently making a refernce in jest to several incidents recently where Indian missile tests flopped, nuclear security was breached, and a story where foreign experts charged that the famed Indian nuclear tests of 1998 were not as successful as portrayed by New Delhi.
This statement riled some Indians so much that it unleashed a flurry of emails from Indians to Pakistani newspapers and news Web sites accusing Mr. Nizami of promoting hatred against India.
The Indians were so angry they apparently picked up every Pakistani newspaper columnist and sent them emails. I received one of them in my capacity as a columnist for The News.
I had not read the original statement by Mr. Nizamy but judging by Indian reactions I thought Mr. Nizami might have really gone hard this time on the Indians.
But I was disappointed. My first reaction after reading him was that his statement is peanuts compared to the anti-Pakistan drivel that virtually fills the Indian airwaves and newsprint. There isn't anyone in Pakistan who can match the Indian hatemongering against Pakistan.
Mr. Nizami's statement was reasonable and conditional on Indian actions. I can list over 20 references quoting Indian public figures, political leaders, and religious leaders who've made statements that encourage extreme hatred toward Pakistan and Pakistanis. I can't recall a single incident in Pakistan where a Pakistani Hindu was attacked or killed because of his or her religion. In India, 2100 Indians were killed because they were Muslims. And this happened in the 21st century, not in the 1920s.
Serving Indian military officers joined Hindu terrorists to burn 50 Pakistanis alive in 2006. India not only has the world's biggest concentration of poverty and health issues, it also has the biggest concentration of religious nutcases, disgusting religious practices, and outright hatemongering against followers of other religions, especially Christians and Muslims.
For every case of an old Saudi man marrying a 15-year-old girl, there are at least a hundred similar cases in India, not to mention the unique tradition of burying newborn girls alive as a custom across many Indian villages and towns. And this happens today, not a century ago.
All of this doesn't come to the surface very often because the American and British media is biased in favor of India for political and strategic reasons. Otherwise, India's ugly face is worse than anything we've seen anywhere else.
I relish the moment an Indian comes to this blog and complains about the 'height of intolerance' when his or her official Indian propaganda is deleted.
Intolerance? No, just reciprocity really.
Almost all the major Indian news websites, the same ones that claim secular democracy, regularly block the accounts of any Pakistani visitor who registers and writes something that punctuates the official Indian propaganda on Kashmir or bilateral relations.
The only Pakistani comments that are accepted by Indian news websites are those that either praise India or at least criticize Pakistan. Anything else, even if it was a measured comment peppered with praise for India, is deleted and its author is blocked.
And I am not talking about unknown Indian blogs. I am talking about mainstream Indian newspapers and television stations. All of them follow the same policy of blocking any Pakistani comment maker. They also never publish op-eds by any Pakistani commentator unless the author is either praising India or clearly opposing Pakistan's policies.
Moreover, all Indian media outlets follow a quiet policy of sticking to the Indian official position on Kashmir and on rape cases by Indian soldiers not to mention the mass graves found recently. I, of course, dare not say 'mass gaves' and 'Saddam's Iraq' in one sentence on any Indian news website.
In contrast, the Pakistani media not only publishes Indian authors who openly criticize Pakistan, but discussion on Kashmir in Pakistani media always gives space to the Indian viewpoint as well.
Indian claims about openness are just that. Claims. But of course the Am-Brit media won't see that, especially when Wall Street Journal, for an example in yellow journalism, never hesitated in publishing lies planted by US government in the runup to the invasion.
So I tell all the young administrators and Web editors editing the various forums run under PakNationalists to keep our Indian visitors on a short leash and make frequent use of the delete buttion. Because we're not here to foster debate with them. We're here to tell our story. Period.
A small group of Pakistani journalists are protesting because one Pakistani newspaper has accused Mathew Rosenberg, an India-based American correspondent for the Wall Street Journal of being a spy. The editor of Wall Street Journal is 'disgusted'. Under new directions from Mrs. Clinton, US diplomats are aggressively engaged in a media battle in Pakistan. Part of the game is raising a new class of US apologists – commentators, editors, journalists. Mr. Rosenberg may not be a spy but here is a Pakistani lesson for the US media.
Click here to read the full story.
