Liverpool opinions
Danse macabre
By
John Williams
The hate filled voices of the so called left are creating a myth that is not only untrue but dangerous to us all. I am referring to the notion that Israel is an 'illegitimate state'. Those who support this lie implictly advocate the elimination of Israel as a nation state; in short, they desire a genocide.
I want to make my self perfectly clear on one thing; people can call themselves anti-Zionists but they are Jew haters plain and simple, using the rag of caring for Palestinians as a cover for the hatred of Jews in general and Israelis in particular. I can say this with confidence because their bleeding hearts couldn't spare a drop for the Palestinians who were executed like dogs, by Hamas, in the streets of Gaza .
The once allegedly impartial BBC refer to Hamas as 'radicals', which puts these savage medievalist murderers in the same exalted company as Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell or William Wilberforce.
The principles of the Hamas are stated in their Covenant or Charter
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."
Their 'radicalism' is no more that old Islamic hatreds togged out in the rhetoric of 'freedom' fighters,
Leaving aside the sick fantasies of those 'leftists' whose political lineage, before they succumbed to the succubus of racism, included many Jews, let us examine the notion of Israel's legitimacy or otherwise.
The denial of Israel's legitimacy, whose status as a nation state was conferred by a majority vote the UN for the partition of Palestine, is tenuously woven around ideas of artificiality, armed conflict and the displacement of refugees.
Essentially what they are insinuating is that Israel has no right to exist because it was created in 1948 on land that allegedly belonged to others.
The measure of their duplicity and Jew hatred can be demonstrated by the fact that they totally avoid applying the same accusations to Pakistan which was created a year earlier and which unleashed a catastrophe. The simple fact is that the wars of the middle East have resulted in regrettable but relatively few deaths compared to the endless blood letting that has characterised Islamic Pakistan's existence.
These are the words of Ishtiaq Ahmed Associate Professor, Dept. of Political Science, Stockholm University
"The Partition of British India in 1947, which created the two independent states of India and Pakistan, was followed by one of the cruellest and bloodiest migrations and ethnic cleansings in history. The religious fury and violence that it unleashed caused the deaths of some 2 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. An estimated 12 to 15 million people were forcibly transferred between the two countries. At least 75,000 women were raped.[1] The trauma incurred in the process has been profound. Consequently relations between the two states, between them and some of their people, and between some of their groups have not normalised even after more than half a century; on the contrary they have consistently worsened with each passing year.".
Contrast this with the recent statement of an Israeli commentator, Ben Dror Yemeni;
"...about 60,000 Arabs have died in the Arab-Israel conflict since 1948 (including the War of 1948 itself), most killed in wars started by the Arabs themselves, and only a few thousand of those killed have been Palestinians! Now, it goes without saying that every one of those killed is a tragedy, but the numbers killed in this conflict are dwarfed to insignificance by the terrible, horrendous atrocities that have been committed elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world at the very same time. All this time, millions of Muslims and Arabs have been dying at the hands of Muslim and Arabs."
Ben Dror Yemeni calls it a cover up and says that the great deception of the libel against Israel is the great tragedy of the Arabs and the Muslims - for it allows this horrific carnage to continue undisturbed".
Here are some undeniable facts about the deaths that have been caused by the creation of Pakistan.
On February 22, 1971 the generals in West Pakistan took a decision to crush the Awami League and its supporters. It was recognized from the first that a campaign of genocide would be necessary to eradicate the threat: "Kill three million of them," said President Yahya Khan at the February conference, "and the rest will eat out of our hands." (Robert Payne, Massacre [1972], p. 50.) On March 25 the genocide was launched. The university in Dacca was attacked and students exterminated in their hundreds. Death squads roamed the streets of Dacca, killing some 7,000 people in a single night. It was only the beginning. "Within a week, half the population of Dacca had fled, and at least 30,000 people had been killed. Chittagong, too, had lost half its population. All over East Pakistan people were taking flight, and it was estimated that in April some thirty million people [!] were wandering helplessly across East Pakistan to escape the grasp of the military." (Payne, Massacre, p. 48.) Ten million refugees fled to India, overwhelming that country's resources and spurring the eventual Indian military intervention. (The population of Bangladesh/East Pakistan at the outbreak of the genocide was about 75 million.)
So, the state of conflict that we call Pakistan has been responsible for the death of millions of its own and other people's citizens; and its fostering of Islamic fanatics coupled with the real prospect of those fanatics obtaining the means to make nuclear war leave us all in mortal danger; but not a word of criticism from the wilfully deluded left and their allies about the legitimacy of Pakistan. They not only refuse to criticise the Islamic state, many of them actually applaud the murder of westerners, soldiers or civilians.
If that is not a dangerous psychiatric condition I don't know what is.
Since 1947 many new countries have been created and their creation led to countless deaths.
French indo China was divided to create Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. I don't have to remind you of the slaughter that took place in these countries in the name of independence. The Republic of the Congo was born in blood and is still haemorrhaging at a dreadful rate. Nigeria's leaders slaughtered its Ibo population....
The carnage that ensued in these and many others places still continues is not perceived by the lunatics on the left as in any way a stain on the legitimacy of these states.
In matters not concerning Israel they are rather pragmatic and accept that, like the birth of human beings, the births of nations are often bloody.
This determination on their part to walk eyeless everywhere, except in Gaza, is proof of their Jew hating mentality
How anybody can question or even deny the legitimacy of Israel while studiously ignoring the disaster that is Pakistan and still lay claim to intellectual integrity is a mystery to me.
2008
Update May tenth 2011
Pakistan has been the home of Osama bin laden for years. Nuff said. The writer below is the son of the Pakistani minister who was assassinated for questioning the blasphemy laws
Pakistan’s rogue army runs a shattered state
By Aatish Taseer
Published: May 5 2011
The veil has been lifted. The truth revealed is so awful that one is tempted to look away, but we must not. For the first time since the war on terror began, we now have the clearest view of our enemy’s other face. And it is not that of a bearded jihadi but of a serving officer in the Pakistani army. Let us be clear about what happened last week: Osama bin Laden was not just found living in Abbottabad, there out of some inverse logic of his own. He was found in this garrison town because he was the guest of the army. And now the charges against this army and its agencies are manifold. They range from duplicity in Afghanistan, both aiding the Americans and their adversaries, to a rich trade in nuclear technology with the world’s worst countries, to – as senior members of the Indian establishment have claimed – helping to plan and execute the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Pakistan’s neighbours – India and Afghanistan – are hoarse in the throat from repeating that it is the Pakistani army that is the source of jihad in south Asia. Yet for all these charges against it, this army has thrived in the ever-smaller gap between perception and reality. This is why bin Laden’s death in Abbottabad is significant: it represents the moment when perception and reality become one. And what a frightening reality it is: a vast and nuclear-armed military exposed for not just being the enemy of peace in south Asia but probably the ultimate sponsor and protector of terrorism against the west. The ramifications are grim. The response in India and Afghanistan has been open outrage, and a feeling of vindication leagued with some considerable anxiety at how Pakistan will respond to the looming US withdrawal of troops. In America too, which because of its close military ties to Pakistan needs to move cautiously, a diplomatic frost of a sort is setting in. Yet in Pakistan, the army is menacingly silent, and the civilian government (which I sense was in the dark about bin Laden) is squirming. The danger is of an army shamed and distrusted abroad while increasingly more destructive at home. Already it has done more harm to its people than to any outside force. The country was founded as an impractical utopia for India’s Muslims in 1947. When this proved to be essentially nihilistic, making it a place that defined itself by not being India, the expectations on which Pakistan was founded fell away, and the army moved in. It led the country into a series of ruinous wars with India, undermined civilian government and entrenched itself in economic life – becoming bread-maker and property dealer, and consuming a fourth of the national budget each year. Even as the country steadily collapsed, Pakistan’s army flourished. It became like a kind of Praetorian Guard for whose parasitical growth the Islamic republic’s aspirations were ransomed. Then in the 1980s, to keep alive an enmity for India, a hateful Islamic ideology was spread among the people of Pakistan. Pakistan’s army has left the country today more adrift than any other in the Muslim world. Terrorism is just one part of the problem; there is on the ground an unimaginable level of fear and anarchy. The place is full of gangs, kidnappings, parricides, rapes and murders. It is as if the whole fabric of society has come apart. There has also been, since Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, a campaign to silence dissent in Pakistan. Earlier this year, my father, the governor of Punjab, was killed by his own guard. The act was put down to the actions of a single man. But later that week there were vast demonstrations of support for my father’s killer – rallies of 40,000 and more – and leading them was Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group created and nurtured by the Pakistani army, which is loath to put it out of business because of its special hatred of India. Its leader, Hafez Saeed, was also the man conducting prayers for bin Laden this week. There is such a climate of fear and violence in Pakistan at the moment that only a fraction of what happens gets reported. Moments before I sat down to write this article, a Pakistani friend called. Over the course of our conversation, she asked me if I had considered why a mutual acquaintance, someone normally brave and outspoken, had been silent of late. I said I did not know; perhaps they were frightened. In fact, a relative had been kidnapped, and the kidnappers warned that without their future silence, the boy was as good as dead. This then is the background of bin Laden’s death: a shattered country, traumatised and steeped in blood, with a rogue army falling piecemeal into the hands of jihad. After my father’s assassination, I had begun to feel that the birth of this new terrorist state would not be defined by anything so distinct as a takeover or a revolution but by an infiltration so deep that it would soon be impossible to know where Pakistan began and where terrorism ended. This latest news of the army’s guest in Abbottabad suggests the new state is already at hand. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ed7622b4-773e-11e0-aed6-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1LaADekvR