Goebbels denies #ShiaGenocide in Pakistan – by Khalid Niazi
To present Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as a symmetrical tit-for-tat fight between the Nazis and the Polish Resistance would be pretty insensitive. To arrive at this description on the basis of information provided by Goebbels, Goering and Himmler would be intellectually dishonest.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the manner in which Matthew Green (otherwise a fine journalist) bases his most recent report for Reuters. Some of the facts are questionable and the report has serious omissions of context. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/24/us-pakistan-sectarian-idUSBRE91N00G20130224#sthash.UcDs6lgC.dpuf
While Matthew alludes to the inter-Sunni conflict in passing, he conveniently omits some crucial facts. That aside from conducting Shia Genocide, the Al Qaeda affiliated ASWJ-LeJ militants are part of a the larger Takfiri Deobandi militant network that also includes the Taliban and Jaish-e-Mohammad and other similar Deobandi (and some Wahhabi) groups with shared ideology and overlapping membership. There is no mention in Matthew’s report of the links between LeJ-ASWJ and the powerful military establishment that dictates the direction of Pakistan.
Another crucial area of omission by Matthew are the non-Shia massacres by Takfiri Deobandi militants. Aside from general terrorist attack (Sri Lankan Cricket Team, CID building Karachi etc), LeJ-ASWJ has also conducted large scale massacres of Barelvi (Sufi) Sunnis with its large attacks on shrines all over Pakistan. In the last few years, the LeJ-ASWJ-TTP Deobandi network has killed thousands of Sunni Barelvis including 60 top Sunni clerics at a peaceful gathering in Karachi to commemorate the Holy Prophet’s birthday in 2006.
Aside from Sunnis, LeJ has been instrumental in pogroms and massacres Pakistan’s Christain and Ahmadi minorities. These omissions are critical as they highlight that:
a) That LeJ-ASWJ is not an organic entity and owes the basis of its existence to the military establishment and Saudi funding.
b) LeJ-ASWJ is a violent fascist entity that has spared no one
Selective misrepresentations like Matthew Green’s have unfortunately become the norm. And the fault is not entirely his. While his research and presentation are deplorable, what needs to be taken into account is the role of Pakistan’s (fake) liberal “intelligentsia” that has positioned itself as the primary source of research but who in reality provide much of the obfuscations and misrepresentations on this issue as well as on others. For example, in their recent articles, Najam Sethi and Nadeem Paracha misrepresent Shia Genocide as an Iran-Saudi proxy war.
Here are some areas that Matthew needs to look into for a much needed revision of his original report:
- Casualties: Refer to LUBP’s database for total and 2012 casualties of Shia Genocide. http://criticalppp.com/archives/132675
- Do a proper tally of LeJ murders of Sunni Muslims which include casualties at the various shrine attacks by LeJ-ASWJ-TTP. These numbers also include those prominent Sunnis like senior police officer Ashraf Marth who was killed for his investigations of LeJ http://criticalppp.com/archives/244393. LeJ typically launches indiscriminate attacks that leaves scores of dead bystanders and associates. Even a cursory view at various atrocities committed by LeJ would lead one to the logical conclusions that LeJ has killed the largest number of Sunnis in Pakistan. Aside from LeJ’s attack on the Sunni leadership in 2006 Karachi, over 20 Sunni policemen, journalists and medics were killed in the January 2013 bomb blasts in Quetta.
In 2001, LeJ-ASWJ (then known as Sipah-e-Sahaba) killed prominent Sunni leader Saleem Qadri. After Saleem Qadri’s guard returned fire injuring one the hitmen, the rest killed him too before making their escape Sipah-e-Sahaba has killed many Sunni Barelvis.
In addition to all this, LeJ has even killed those Sunnis who it views as having “Shia sounding names” like Ali, Hussain and Fatima. Furthermore, Forensic examination reveals that Sipah Sahaba behind murder of both Sunni and Shia in Karachi.
In 1997, the State crushed the handful of Shia vigilantes whose reactionary tactics were discriminate and focussed on LeJ leaders and militias. The State did the same thing in 2010 when it attacked the combined Shia-Sunni Pashtuns who took on the Taliban in Parachinar http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011%5C07%5C07%5Cstory_7-7-2011_pg3_2 and http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010%2F11%2F04%2Fstory_4-11-2010_pg3_2.
This important context is completely missing from Matthew Green’s report to Reuters. While quoting LeJ-ASWJ’s Aurangzeb Farooqi’s willingness for a “dialogue”, did Matthew Green even bother to research the anti-Shia hate literature published by LeJ-ASWJ and their parent body, the Ulma Deoband, the largest hate site against Shias, Sunni Barelvis, Ahmadis and Christians? Refer to http://criticalppp.com/archives/241085. This is the same kind of bigotry that is published by the Saudi financiers of the LeJ-ASWJ against Christians and Jews http://www.nbcnews.com/id/13804825/
Apostatizing someone in a society overflowing with State-backed armed extremists is passing a death sentence. Like other important context, this too has been left out in the Reuters’ report. When even the UN has taken note of Shia Genocide, Reuter’s continues to misrepresent this as a tit for tat conflict. Shame.
#ShiaGenocide: Dear Matthew Green, Is it really tit for tat Sunni-Shia violence?
http://freespeechpakistan.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/shiagenocide-dear-matthew-green-is-it-really-tit-for-tat-sunni-shia-violence/
A comment on Matthew Green’s (Reuters) report on “Sunni-Shia sectarian violence” in Karachi – by AZ http://criticalppp.com/archives/246537
Goebbels denies #ShiaGenocide in Pakistan – by Khalid Niazi – See more at: http://criticalppp.com/archives/246937
“There is no battle. This is not a war. This is a massacre.”
By Fayes T Kantawala
Fayes T Kantawala joined the mourners outside Governor’s House in Lahore last week
Cry, the beloved country
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Last week in Lahore, a doctor was driving his twelve-year-old boy to school in the morning. Two men on motorcycles intercepted their car and opened fire, killing father and son with multiple gun shot wounds. The victims were Shias. That’s the reason – and the only reason, according to the last update – that they were killed. They were not the first and they will not be the last.
The killing earned the sympathy and outrage of people all over the country, as many “target killings” have before, and I have no doubt that our better emotions will be stirred by such acts in the future. The Shia genocide in this country is widespread, pervasive, unrelenting and very much a work in progress. Even as a schoolchild was being pumped with bullets on a cool Monday morning in Lahore, dozens of Hazara families were staging a protest in the sub-zero temperatures of Quetta with more than 80 corpses to illustrate the point. All over Pakistan Shias have been murdered in groups, by themselves, in cars and on foot, on the streets and in their homes, at majlises and on the way to work. Entire busloads of people have been sprayed with bullets and peaceful processions blown up.
Lahore imagines itself as somewhat immune to the national carnage
All of Pakistan’s big cities have been witness to horrific sectarian crimes, and even though Lahore has been the site of mass murders and bombings before, it’s a city that continues to imagine itself as somewhat immune to the national carnage. This is a lie and a dangerous delusion. The fear made fact by this heinous act is that everyone is a target. You can be a beleaguered community in a sparsely populated and “troubled” area, or you can be the Head of Ophthalmology at a major metropolitan hospital: there are people here you will kill you and your little son. What you believe, what you think, what you espouse is, eventually, immaterial, even if you have led yourself to believe that you aren’t ruffling any feathers: people will still kill you. It doesn’t matter where you live, which school your children attend, how uncontroversial your job is, what your father is or your grandfather was; people will still kill you. And they will kill you when you least expect it. As you exit a restaurant. As you walk to the gate of your house in the morning to pick up the newspaper. As you are driving your 11-year old son with his new haircut to his school on the fragrant, tree-lined roads of your beloved Lahore.
This is the country we all live in: rich, poor, Shia, Ahmedi, men, women, children.
The protest had the air of a majlis, of the Shia dirge and elegy
The morning after the murders, I woke up to a text message asking me to attend a peaceful protest outside the Governor’s House in Lahore. (This text was immediately followed by one inviting me to a GT in celebration of the Lahore Literary Festival, but that’s a whole other column.) I’ve been asked to come to protests before (some with after-parties) and I do not usually attend on principle (see “after-parties”) but I went to the Governor’s House that day because, well, I don’t know why. The police had closed down the main street, so we lied at the checkpost and said we were going to a wedding at the posh hotel nearby. Walking towards the Governor’s House, we were directed by young Shia men, obviously community volunteers who had taken on the responsibility of arranging security for the protest. They didn’t wear any protective gear and were kind, courteous and helpful. They checked us for explosives and sent us on to the next makeshift checkpoint, assembled out of discarded bits of barbed wire and a billboard for the Lahore Literary Festival. There were no policemen doing this. No state presence, no elite guards, no bomb dogs. Only volunteers. Each and every person we encountered on the way thanked us for our support with a simplicity and sincerity that was heartbreaking.
The actual protest couldn’t have had more than 3,000 people. Men and women sat in segregated rows and looked onto a stage. Most of the attendees were Shias (all those heart-rending cries of “Ya Hussain!”), but there were also people from other sections of charming, crumbling Lahore.
This is not a war. This is a massacre
The friends who accompanied me to the protest expressed their surprise at how well-organized it was. But that’s hardly unexpected. The Shia communities do bigger events every year during Muharram, and are exceedingly well-organized when it comes to crowd control. When I got to the Governor’s House, people were listening to speeches by well-known activists and responding with slogans to their calls to action. The protest had the air of a majlis about it, of the Shia dirge and elegy. It occurred to me that a full-on procession of people doing maatam in front of Governor’s House was as good an expression as any of collective outrage and grief.
I stayed there until they started laying out mats for the approaching prayers. I am glad I went but I came away disturbed. “The battle lines have been drawn,” one person said to me, suggesting there was going to be a battle at all.
Bull.
There is no battle. This is not a war. This is a massacre. We know exactly which ideology is responsible for it, we know who funds it, and we’ve seen the same thing happen repeatedly in other parts of the world. Yet we pretend otherwise. What makes us images it will end differently here?
Deep down, we all know how this will end. We are just too scared to say it. We’ve seen it happen to other countries. Hell, we’ve seen it happen to this country. We detect it every day in the uniforms of our elite guards and we read it between the lines of English op-eds and Urdu columns. I’ve been writing this column for two years now, nestling in events of the day with humor, with my weight issues and my ironic reserves utilized for good measure. But I have not articulated what has become so sadly clear to me of late: there is no “battleground”, there are no “discourses”, there is no “debate”. There is no real opposition to the terror we know is coming and to the place we are becoming.
We, as a people, have failed. And there is no end in sight.
Write to Fayes at thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter
- See more at: http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20130301&page=13#sthash.eWZRvoEH.iZL1Vtxf.dpuf
When I and some other writers started to write and call it “the genocide of the Shia community”, there was a reaction from the liberal and lefts intellectuals who did not agree with us. They were not ready to call it genocide and were not part of the protest and resistance against it.
Aamir Hussaini
http://www.thespokesman.pk/index.php/component/k2/item/1366-ingredients-of-sectarianism
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