The wheel of time
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Imran Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan, addresses the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, on Sept. 27, 2019.Lucas Jackson / Reuters
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly began with safe comments on the environment. After that it descended into medieval parochialism. It contained little that would win over any enlightened listener, and it failed to win support from the 16-member human rights council to investigate Indian human rights abuses in Kashmir.
Yet among Pakistanis, Khan’s primary audience, the speech won accolades. Most applauded it for its comments on religion and the Kashmir crisis. The PM ostensibly represents the educated elite, but he showed appalling lack of insight into the worldwide consequences of certain Muslim sensibilities. No wonder the first secretary of the Indian ministry of external affairs Vidisha Maitra described the speech as “crude” and suggested it mainstreamed terror.
By insisting that the West should refrain from insulting the prophet Mohammed because he lives in the hearts of Muslims, Khan tried to validate the myth of universal Muslim victimhood. He appeared to justify the violent responses many Muslims have to any perceived insults to Islam.
According to Khan, it is a natural outcome if Muslims are to feel “hurt”. Yet how hurt do self-defined victims need to feel before they form a rabble and beat to death a member of a religious minority, or shoot a politician opposed to blasphemy laws? These things are common enough in Pakistan that they barely make international news.
Freedom of expression is everyone’s right. The PM has so completely lost all sense of proportion over “insults” to the prophet that he equates Muslim offence with the holocaust. He even compared the wearing of the hijab with “taking clothes off” in the West. Rather than condemning the murderous insanity that takes place among the Pakistani masses, Khan offered a lengthy rationalization.
His worst was provoking India over Kashmir by once again justifying the radicalization of Kashmiri Muslims. On previous occasions Khan has labelled terrorists “freedom fighters”, failing to acknowledge that when freedom fighters kill innocent people indiscriminately, by definition they become terrorists.
Khan’s implication that there is only one Islam allows the rest of the world to class all Muslims together with the extremists as backward and barbaric. He also suggested that radicalization is somehow a natural and inevitable outcome of marginalization. This overlooks the fact that Osama bin Laden and most of the 9/11 bombers, for example, came from the middle classes. Khan calls himself moderate, but no educated leader with such blinkered views deserves such a moniker.
Khan’s speech was an utter embarrassment and Pakistanis, instead of hailing it as courageous and candid, should have condemned it en masse. Their prime minister, in whom they placed so much trust, has let them down on every single issue that he touched upon in the speech.
Instead of meeting the world even halfway on extremist-related issues or the question of Islamophobia, Khan blatantly pitted the world of Islam against the Western world by drawing flawed dichotomies throughout the speech. His lack of sophistication in the matter has in fact strengthened India’s image while weakening Pakistan’s. Worse, it has put Pakistan on track for even further diplomatic isolation.
Khan claims to be concerned about the plight of his disadvantaged people, but views like his can only produce further suspicion of his compatriots.
Poor indians can't even do a small thing in their own country without literally get their faces in the mud worldwide...
