What media is saying in Pakistan

Daily times, September 14, 2005
EDITORIAL: Our media is scaring the world and hurting our national interest

Many discussions on Pakistani TV channels or comments in the Urdu press are downright scary. For example, a retired chief justice of the Sindh High Court recently denied on TV that the boys who did the 7/7 bombing in London were really involved or had anything to do with Pakistan. Similarly, several editorials written in Urdu on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 cast doubt on Muslims ever being involved in the act. Now consider the latest threat delivered to the cities of Melbourne and Los Angeles through an Al Qaeda tape received by a TV channel in New York. The boy pictured in it was identified by his parents in California, who told the TV channel that he had converted to Islam at an Orange County mosque and “come under the influence of militants who took him to Pakistan”.

As the retired chief justice of the Sindh High Court railed against the West in a September 10 telecast, the news that he had not read was that the leader of 7/7 bombers, Siddiq Khan, had appeared in an Al Qaeda video, made somewhere in Pakistan prior to the attack, and declared his terrorist intent in the name of Islam. The honourable judge on the other hand was trying to prove “on the strength of my vast judicial experience” that the 7/7 deaths were stage-managed by “the West” to punish Pakistan and the Muslim world. He ignored the fact that Shehzad Tanvir, one of the London-bombers, had visited a madrassa in Lahore run by the banned terrorist organisation, Sipah-e-Sahaba. (The madrassa is still functional.) Of course, we have the right to hold free discussions in which facts can be quoted to prove our point but mere fulminations spoil the atmosphere in Pakistan by creating hatred and scare the outside world.

How the world is scared was demonstrated on Monday when an airliner carrying British tourists from Cyprus back to Manchester, UK, had to be delayed because the passengers refused to take off with two Pakistanis on board “who looked like terrorists”. Alarm was raised when one of the Pakistanis entered the plane toilet and did not come out even after 10 minutes. The airline had to suffer thousands of dollars of loss as 230 passengers had to be rescheduled after a lay-off in a local hotel and the two Pakistanis had to be sent on a different airliner. The two poor Pakistanis suffered because their dress was shalwar-qamees and their faces were covered with beards. The bad reputation of Pakistan is linked to facts that most of us insist on denying, but also to the kind of opinion we express whenever we get a chance to do so.

Now Australia is reported as getting ready to secure itself against possible Al Qaeda attacks. But if any new legislation is passed the expatriate Pakistani community in Australia will be the one to suffer. The 9/11 attack which was carried out by Arabs with no Pakistani involved was planned in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the attackers of the “Hamburg Cell” had all visited Pakistan. If Australia is attacked, which country are the terrorists likely to have visited before the attack? If the Australians say Pakistan, they can’t be blamed, because of what has happened in the past and what our press has been saying and reporting about Australia. This year, a leader of Ahle Sunnat Muslims in Australia, Sheikh Muhammad Imran, said that Osama bin Laden was not responsible for the 9/11 bombings, nor had the Muslims done the 7/7 bombings. Osama, he said, was a great (azeem) Muslim and there was no proof that he had carried out acts of terrorism.

It may be recalled that newspapers had reported the former interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, on August 17, 2004 as saying that in 2003 an Australian member of Al Qaeda named Terry was arrested from the house of former national hockey player, Shahid Ali Khan, in Karachi, whose wife was a member of Jamaat-e-Islami. Similarly, an Urdu weekly reported as recently as August 1, 2005 that Hizb al Tahrir was recruiting Muslims for Al Qaeda from the Green Acres area of Sydney. It stated that Muhammad Atta, the 9/11 pilot, had contacted the Hizb in Germany and that the 7/7 London bomber, Shehzad Tanvir, also had contacts with Hizb Al Tahrir. The organisation was found distributing pamphlets among the Muslims of Australia. Meanwhile, the head of the Islamic Teaching Institute in Australia, Sheikh Khalid Yaseen, has asked the Muslims not to make friends with non-Muslim Australians. And although banned, Hizb al Tahrir is very active in Pakistan with full public and, alas, judicial sympathies.

Apart from “defending” Islam, our duty is to protect our economy and also protect a very important factor of our economy, namely, the expatriate Pakistani community. We can prevent the radicalisation of the expatriate Muslims by toning down our rhetoric and controlling our madrassas. We can surely stop adding to the international alarm by tempering the inflammatory discussions that affect our economy and our travel abroad. We cannot miss the point behind even the Gulf states’ deporting hundreds of Pakistanis suspected of Al Qaeda sympathies and extreme views. We should not forget that foreign investment is still shy and an Arab buyer of our privatised electricity corporation (KESC) only recently abandoned the deal with the forfeiture of his preliminary deposit after looking at what was happening in Karachi on the terrorism front.

The terrorists who blow up our public facilities and kill our citizens are roaming around in Pakistan and the daily news confirms their presence, but why should the rest of us join verbally in their enterprise? Everything written and spoken on TV in Pakistan eventually gets reported abroad. Our “free” media must raise the standard of dialogue and discussion in the national interest. The world is already scared; we don’t have to play on this scare any further.