Ridicule is Nothing to be Scared of

I wrote most of this a week ago. As my post gathered pace, I didn’t notice that I gradually lost access YouTube, most of the BBC News website, the New Scientist, Wikipedia, twitter and hundreds of other sites. It was only when WordPress was blocked here in Pakistan that I realised what was happening. Anyway, I finished it off today

Yesterday it seemed a bit of an inconvenience. A silly, pointless inconvenience but at worst it meant I wouldn’t know who had found a lonely black sheep which had wandered into their mafia wars, or something. Today, Pakistan’s facebook ban has meant Mobilink, my mobile phone service, has switched off its BlackBerry connections – leaving my BlackBerry as nothing more than a large, overpriced, not very good telephone.

So what’s going on?

The origins of the row seem subversive, satirical and frankly quite amusing. A Seattle-based cartoonist, Molly Norris has a pop at censorship (of the now notorious South Park episode featuring The Prophet Mohammed in a bear costume) with an image of half a dozen household objects each claiming to be Mohammed. The cartoon is titled Everybody Draw Mohammed Day – a spoof contest.

In there is a reasonable question. Why are many Muslims so unwilling to question – or be questioned on – elements of their faith? For people brought up in the post-Enlightenment West, scepticism and cynicism are tools applied to faith, politics, philosophy and pretty much anything else. Many liberal, moderate Muslims are of course open to exactly these discussions. But many others are closed to debate.

But here is where things break down. As usual, the issue has been hijacked by an anti-Muslim element, intent on conflating freedom of speech with the freedom to gratuitously offend a population. You don’t need me to tell you that having the right to do something is not the same thing as going out and doing it. Just like the newspapers who reprinted the offending cartoons in 2006, it seems that to do so would be to put our right of freedom of expression above other people’s right to not be offended, or harmed or outraged, or upset.

Those are the trade-offs and balances that have to be made every time we exercise a right: in short we have to consider what other rights it might infringe. A pathetic cartoon contest to prove a point does not seem to be one of those occasions where freedom of speech comes first. We still have the right, of course, but just choose not to use it.

The saddest part of all of this, though, has been the reaction of a small number of people in Pakistan and the subsequent decision of the court (a system incapable of tracking down the thousands of “disappeared”) to shut down facebook. Once again a small number of nutters have fallen right into the trap set for them by another set of nutters. The only winners are the extremists who have found fresh ammunition to lump at the other side. Suggesting that censorship is somehow justified in preventing outrage rather misses the point. Censorship never helps anything. For as Brendan O’Neill at spikedonline points out…

Indeed, these two camps – the Muhammad-knockers and the Muslim offence-takers – are locked in a deadly embrace. Islamic extremists need Western depictions of Muhammad as evidence that there is a new crusade against Islam, while the Muhammad-knockers need the flag-burning, street-stomping antics of the extremists as evidence that their defence of the Enlightenment is a risky, important business. And as this mutually masturbatory performance of a new culture clash continues, the true threat to freedom and Enlightenment goes unanalysed and unexplained.

Going Local

Going local

The plan was quite simple. We were making a trip to a village in rural Punjab. The sort of place where it was not inconceivable that we could be close to supporters of Jihadi groups. The driver, fixer and I agreed we would dress in traditional shalwar kameez to avoid drawing attention to ourselves (even though I would pass as a local only from a distance of say a mile). So imagine my disappointment when I walked out of my hotel in billowing clothes to find that aforementioned driver and fixer had dressed in jeans and short-sleeved shirts. Theirs were in the wash apparently Spent rest of day feeling like a plonker.

Picture above shows me, Rizwan and PK- along with a local stringer who knows how to dress properly.

Putting the Error in Terrorism

I’m waiting in eager anticipation for The Express Tribune to be launched in Islamabad. So far this newest of Pakistan’s papers is available in Karachi, and a day or so later here in the capital. It has a clean, fresh design and a lively turn in human interest stories. Best of all though is Sami Shah‘s column every Thursday.

Last week he turned his neat brand of sarcasm on Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber. The newspapers here have used a lot of ink poring over Shahzad’s life. No-one else though has used it as a chance to examine Pakistan’s booming reputation for exporting world-class terror.

That is, until Faisal bloody Shahzad. You have to be a truly terrible terrorist when the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan refuses to acknowledge you. This is an organisation that is on the verge of claiming responsibility for the Hindenberg disaster and the Apollo 13 problems. They have, of course, since backtracked and claimed to have trained Faisal but even they don’t sound like they believe themselves. It’s more a case of trying to buy some brand presence on a new celebrity. Faisal, for his part, could not have done more damage to the terrorism industry if he visited Mullah Omar, Hakeemullah Mehsud and Osama bin Laden while wearing a tracking device that was pinging his GPRS coordinates to a drone flying directly overhead. His claims of having attended bomb-making classes in South Waziristan are blatantly a case of lying on one’s resume. It’s safe to say, the first lesson taught on the first day of classes in North Waziristan, the Harvard of bomb-making, is “Don’t lock the keys to your getaway car inside the car that’s supposed to blow up.”

Too many people blew themselves up in too many creative ways for this buffoon to so callously ruin it all. We can’t afford to be known as the country that put the ‘error’ in ‘terrorism.’

Not everyone enjoyed Sami’s take. A couple of comments suggested Sami had picked the wrong topic for his humour. But they amounted to a tiny minority among the supportive messages, some demanding “putting the error in terrorism” T-shirts. When I called Sami up in Karachi he said he wasn’t surprised that so many people got the joke.

“A lot of people don’t realise there’s a very dark sense of humour here,” he said. “It’s one of the ways people deal with it. Pakistan is in a constant state of post-traumatic stress disorder. You can scream and cry or you can crack jokes about it.”

Sami certainly falls into the latter camp. But is there a message in his satire? Is there a point beyond the jokes? Well yes, there’s a much more serious issue beneath the froth – and a question that has been ignored by a lot of the media coverage here. Most reporters have been keen to highlight Shahzad’s life in the US. And investigators have played down links with militants, repeatedly saying he had spent little time in Pakistan. All of which is to avoid the big question: Why is it always Pakistan?

Islamabad

So here I am in Islamabad. A new city, new country, new employer. A lot of changes. South of West has been quiet since I arrived. For a start I wanted to keep writing about Sudan and Africa for a bit. But then I realised I had become just another blogger writing about a place from a distance, rehashing what other people were saying and not having any new ideas. So I let things go quiet.

Now it’s time to start writing about Pakistan, its sights and its sounds. I’ve already been blown away by her food, hospitality and history but sort of feel a bit adrift. For the time being, everything is a mystery. I’ve yet to find a handful of guiding principles that will help make sense of it all. But that’s no excuse for not blogging. In fact that probably makes it the best time. So here we go…