Swat Flogging, The News International & Ansar Abbasi - 5

On Mon, 4/6/09, bintwaleed wrote:

Here are the details from The News. Anti Islam media is working overtime and running their imagination wild.

Swat girl denies flogging by Taliban By Rahimullah Yusufzai Monday, April 06, 2009

http://thenews.jang.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=21357

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Mr Ansar Abbasi - Correspondent/Editor Investigations - The News International/Jang Group of Newspapers/GEO TV

Where has gone now the so-called Shariah which Ansar Abbasi was trying to defend while defending Sufi Muhammad, Flogging and Taliban while reciting Quranic Verses of Surah-e-Nur[AL-NOOR (THE LIGHT) Chapter 24 from Quran] and what a fun he was reciting Surah Nur Verses to an Unveiled [BAYPARDAH] GEOTV News READER [I wonder where have gone all the verses of Quran regarding Veil]..

Reaction of Ansar Abbasi about Swat girl flogging



Read another article of the same News International after the text below:

During July 2000 General Musharraf [Imran Khan supported that Grunt Musharraf in his Sham Referendum] was the biggest Taliban Supporter before 911 and Musharraf also denied. Reporter below is Pakistani and your favourite Tariq Ali [whom you have quoted in favour of Talibans - I have still got the mail.

The Pakistan Maelstrom By Tariq Ali October 10, 2001

http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq6.html

For the last three weeks Pakistan's military rulers have been trying to convince the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden and avoid the catastrophe being prepared. They failed.

Since Osama is the son-in-law of Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, this was hardly surprising. The more interesting question is whether Pakistan, after withdrawing its own soldiers, officers and pilots from Afghanistan, has managed to split the Taliban and withdraw some of those totally dependent on its patronage. This would be a key aim of the military regime to maintain its influence in a future coalition government in Kabul.

Relations between Pakistan and the Taliban leadership have been tense this year. Last year, in an effort to cement Pak-Afghan friendship, Pakistan dispatched a football team to play a friendly against Afghanistan. As the two teams faced each other in the stadium at Kabul with the referee about to blow the opening whistle, bearded security forces entered and announced that the Pakistani footballers were indecently attired. They were wearing normal football shorts, whereas the Afghans were dressed in surreal long shorts which came down well below the knees. Perhaps it was felt that the rippling thighs of the Pakistanis might cause upheavals in the all-male audience. Who knows? The Pakistani players were arrested, their heads were shaved and they were all flogged in public while the stadium audience was forced to chant verses from the Koran. This was Mullah Omar's friendly warning shot to the Pakistani military to assert the independence of his leadership and his loyalty to Bin Laden.

The bombing of Kabul and Kandahar by the United States and its ever-loyal British ally will not have seriously affected the fighting strength of the Taliban. The combined force - including Bin Laden's special brigade of Arabs - is now reported to consist of 30-40,000 hardened veterans. Nonetheless the Taliban are effectively encircled and isolated. Their defeat is inevitable. Both Pakistan and Iran are ranged against them on two important borders. It is unlikely they will last more than a few weeks. Obviously some of their forces will go to the mountains and wait till the west withdraws before attacking the new regime, likely to be installed in Kabul when the octogenarian King Zahir Shah is moved from his comfortable Roman villa to less salubrious surroundings in the wreckage of Kabul.

The Northern Alliance backed by the west is marginally less religious than the Taliban, but its record on everything else is just as abysmal. Over the last year they have taken over the marketing of heroin on a large scale, making a mockery of Blair's claim that this war is also a war against drugs.

The notion that they would represent an advance on the Taliban is laughable. Their first instinct will be revenge against their opponents. However the Alliance has been weakened in recent days by the defection of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, once the favourite "freedom-fighter" of the west, welcomed in the White House and Downing Street by Reagan and Thatcher.

This man has now decided to back the Taliban against the infidel. Sustaining a new client state in Afghanistan will not be an easy affair given local and regional rivalries. General Musharraf has already told Pakistanis he will not accept a regime dominated by the Northern Alliance. This is hardly surprising since his army has been fighting the Alliance for over a decade.

Till now the Pakistan army (unlike its Arab counterparts) has avoided a coup mounted by captains and colonels. It has always been the generals who have seized power and kept the army united, largely by sharing out the pieces of silver.

It is an open question whether that will be enough on this occasion. A lot will depend on the aftermath of the current war. A major concern for the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis is that the Taliban, cornered and defeated in their own country, will turn on Pakistan and wreak havoc on its cities and social fabric. Peshawar, Quetta, Lahore and Karachi are especially vulnerable. By that time the west, having scored a "victory", will turn a blind eye to the mess left behind.

As for the supposed aim of this operation - the capture of Bin Laden - this is unlikely to be easy. He is well-protected in the remote Pamir mountains and might well disappear. But victory will still be proclaimed. The west will rely on the short memory of its citizens. But let us even suppose that Bin Laden is captured and killed. How will this help the "war against terrorism"? Other individuals will decide to mimic the events of September 11 in different ways.

More importantly, the focus will shift to the Middle East. In Saudi Arabia fierce factional struggle within the royal family is in progress. Saudiologists have long recognised that Crown Prince Abdullah is close to the Wahhabi clerics. But he will still face a bitterly angry population--as will Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. The prospect of eruptions in these two countries is growing and the consequences of the Anglo-American war in Afghanistan are likely to be incendiary. CP

Tariq Ali, a frequent CounterPunch contributor, is the author of The Stone Woman.

No complaints -- Pak soccer body KAMAL SIDDIQI Wednesday, July 19, 2000

http://www.indianexpress.com/ie/daily/20000719/isp19064.html

KARACHI, July 18: The Pakistan Football Federation said on Tuesday that it would not condemn an incident in neighbouring Afghanistan last week in which members of the Taliban militia shaved off heads of Pakistani soccer players for wearing ``un-Islamic dress'' during a friendly football match with Afghans at Kandahar.

The bizarre incident occurred when the Taliban raided the third match between the players from Pakistan and their Afghan competitors in the religious capital of Afghanistan, Kandahar, and accused the Pakistani players of ``spreading obscenity and inciting passions'' by wearing shorts.The Taliban had earlier decreed that men could wear only shalwars (baggy trousers) when playing football. The game, which has a passionate following in Afghanistan, was reluctantly allowed by the Taliban, alongwith male wrestling, after most sport activities were banned for being a waste of time.

Abdul Qayuum, captain of the young Afghan Club, Chaman (Pakistan) told a Pakistani newspaper said the players were released on Sunday last and were deported to Pakistan.The Pakistani players who escaped sought refuge in the local Pakistani consulate. But the Pakistan Football Federation said that it would not condemn the incident since the punishment was ``not that severe'' and that the match was not an official engagement between the two countries.Earlier, Afghanistan hit the sports headlines when it did not allow their boxing team to shave their beards - as it is a crime to shave one's beard in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The boxers were automatically disqualified from their Asian Boxing engagements.

Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.

The enemy within Sameer Khosa Monday, April 06, 2009

http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=170982

There was a news item, not so long ago, about women not being able to work in lingerie shops in Saudi Arabia. According to the logic employed, women were not supposed to work and hence that extended to working in lingerie shops. The ironic consequence of that move was that in a society where men and women are not allowed to even be in physical proximity in public, women ended up having to buy their most intimate undergarments from men only.

On Friday a video aired about the Taliban “administering justice” to a 17-year-old girl accused of having illicit relations with a man. One man held her face down and held her arms, while the other flogged her buttocks with a stick. So, it’s not okay for women to be touched by male doctors, or male companions, but male executioners can hold hands and slap bottoms in front of milling crowds? The Taliban, it seems, have a thing for kink.

Apparently, one of the Taliban spokesmen said the girl had received a “lenient” sentence. Last time I checked, it took two, at least, to have illicit relations. If the girl’s sentence was lenient, one has to wonder what must have happened to the poor boy! Oh, wait – there is no boy in the video. Apparently, only girls must be punished for their libido. Boys, after all, become men when they can “tap that.” Take that for a specimen of modern thinking that gangs from Brooklyn can be proud of. Needless to say, unless one is a glutton for punishment – one should not ask for “leniency” from the Taliban.

There is something sinister at work here. There is an unacceptable cruelty disguised as spirituality that is eating away at the fabric of our country and society. There has been a slow, steady, sustained hijacking of concepts of nobility in our religion to use them as tools of repression, oppression and fear. It is the logic and hypocrisy of the Taliban when they punish only girls and not boys for the same act of “immorality,” under the guise of Islam. It is the logic which says that televisions and videos should be banned, except when their spokesman has to give an interview, or the immoral women have to be given a dose of their version of Islam. It is the logic which prohibits vulgarity and obscenity to protect our morality, but circulates videos of beheadings and shootings to young children to show them the world in its complete and total horror.

The Taliban have fed off the United States’ unpopularity in Pakistan and the globe. They have fed off the hypocrisy in foreign policy that permits and endorses the massacre of Palestinian lives to protect Israeli ones. They have fed off the lies that were told blatantly to the United Nations Security Council as a pretext to invade a country inhabited by Muslims. They have fed off the swagger and arrogance of a president who tortured and drove prisoners to insanity. They have fed off the frustration of a foreign policy that seems weighted in every measure against Muslims, and painted themselves as the vanguard of a Muslim struggle against oppression and as heroes of resistance to an empire.

We need to wake up. The United States of America is not doing this to our girls. The United States of America is not issuing edicts to shut down schools (only for girls!). The United States of America is not expelling organisations that administer polio vaccines to our children. Yet, somehow there is a deep abiding antipathy to the US. For all the United States’ failings — it was our strategic decision under the great, modern, liberal, progressive leadership of our late martyred leader Benazir Bhutto that decided to treat, further and entrench this ideology as a strategic foreign-policy asset, instead of undoing the legacy of her father’s murderer. We may have serious, even legitimate grievances against US foreign policy – but it can never destroy us in a way that this internal dogmatic interpretation of Islam can.

If we do not change things now, soon there will be nothing left to change. It is time to stop using anti-US sentiment as an excuse to do nothing about the Taliban. The Army restrains itself against these militants in no small measure, because it wants the people of Pakistan to own it and like it. We, the lawyers and civil-society activists, the wealthy and the comfortable, the educated and the elite, may not be able to fight on the frontlines. But this fight will not just be won in the valleys of Swat. It has to be won all over Pakistan, in the deserts and the mountains, from the coast of Karachi to the tip of Karakoram, in the hearts and minds of every Pakistani who must disown, despise and hate the unbending Taliban for us to fight successfully against them. There are no more half measures.

It is not a fight for America. It is a fight for the soul of this country. It is a fight for the reclamation of our religion. The Great Satan is not attacking us from outside. The Great Enemy of Islam is within us, among us, ready to explode the next bomb in the name of our God. This is a fight for our God back. Speak up, speak now, speak louder and wider. Silence now is treachery.

The writer is a Lahore-based lawyer. Email: sameer.khosa@gmail.com