I wonder what does the Establishment has in mind when it decides to impose censor and acts to curb expression. Without any plausible reasoning being given out, the good protectors of the ‘national interest’ have once again decided that Blogger is hazardous for Pakistani health; once the disease was diagnosed as such, medication followed in the shape of a block on expression by way of blocking of the Blogspot domain. So sick of them; really really sick!!
They say that in today’s world, information is everything. They say that information gives privileges and information leads to control. It may well be true, but given the consequences, is such a twisted role of information desirable? I doubt.
The role of information is indeed immense but as the world is turning out nowadays, information is being used and manipulated to twist reality and affect and mould perceptions. Effectively, information is being used to take away the freedom of thought from the citizens of the world. The sickening ideal is that if you control the way people see and feel reality, you infact control reality. Never has this been truer than it is in today’s world. There are a number of instances where interest groups have sought to influence public opinion to their favour. And leading from the front are governments that find it in their interest to make the masses to believe in a certain manner.
A belief that has developed recently is that as nations advance and as interests become more and more varied the corresponding advancements in technology has led governments to seek new ways to exert control. Thus, we see that battlefields have changed quite a bit. Now, apart from territorial wars, wars are also being fought for ideas, beliefs and ideologies. Thus, the mind has emerged as a vast battlefield. The result has been that information is presented in such a fashion that, at times, it states a totally different form of reality. It’s as if people are made to believe that the artificial reality is the ‘real reality’ (remember the movie The Matrix?). It’s like when you keep bombarding people with a set of accounts regarding the artificial reality and somehow keep their attention too, they may at last surrender to the information onslaught and start believing in what you tell them without any questions. In my view, in such cases, our collective intelligence comes to questions. I wonder how easy it is for an interest group to mock our senses and perceptions. These guys are initially always in a minority but they ultimately become able to win over the minds of people and their ideas become the ideas of the majority.
There is truth in this world and there is lie. If one somehow remains sane enough to hold onto the truth, that person should counter the prevalent propaganda and show the people the real reality. It may sound utopian, but freedom of thought amounts to be one of the basic rights of man. Truth should be defended and kept separate from a lie. People have the right to distinguish between white and black. They have to know that white is light and black is dark, because that is the truth.
The birth pangs in the Middle East are now over but the newborn is definitely not to America’s liking. Tough luck. What has it resulted in? The exposure of incapability and incapacity of the “forces of good” to overcome the “forces of evil”, as the America and Company would observe. Thus, it has remained a hard birth both for the Israelis and Americans as well as the Lebanese.
The adoption of Resolution 1701 by the Security Council has led to relative calm and has presumably kindled hopes for a long – lasting solution. However, such hopes are misconcieved and misplaced. The Resolution is infact merely a tool of the Israelis and the Americans to appease the International community which was getting increasingly unnerved by the miseries being caused by the war to the large number of civilian victims. One can view Resolution 1701 as being a mildly watered down version of the earlier draft proposed by the French and the Americans and which was duly rejected by Hizbullah. Resolution 1701 ultimately remains weak and ambiguous and one that does not take into account the ground realities. The Resolution, by virtue of its draft, remains vulnerable to manipulations and is certainly biased in favour of Israel. Therefore, it also goes agianst the principle of natural justice and equity as well as the mandate of the UN.
For this outcome, the brokers (United States) have cunningly moulded the text in a manner that would clearly provide Israel with ample room for action in contravention of international law.
Resolution 1701 certainly does not stop the war, but as with the earlier rejected draft, only persuades Israel to cease all “offensive military action” while tells Hizbullah to stop all attacks. The ramifications are clear. This leaves Israel with ample space for manipulation and strike anywhere, even civilians, in the future in the name of self – defence.
The blame for the recent round of hostilities has squarely been put on the shoulders of Hizbullah. Resolution 1701 further fails to doubt the legality of Israeli action by not condemning the disproportionate response that was displayed by the Israeli forces not against Hizbullah, but against innocent Labenese civilians. The response was no doubt made so to pressurize the Lebanese government and to cause the public sentiment to rise against Hizbullah. What happened was a frustration to the Israeli – American plans. Nevertheless, in failing to taking Israeli actions to account, the UN has set a dangerous precedent as this amounts to endorsing the act of targeting innocent civilians in the name of self – defence.
One of the major bones of contention that was there in the earlier draft too is that the Resolution does not tell Israel to pull back its forces from Lebanon immediately, and still leaves no timeframe when these forces will eventually return to Israel. Ths act has been solely left upon the option of Israel that as and when a beefed up United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) is deployed in south Lebanon, Israel will withdraw its forces gradually. Again, a basic Hizbullah demand has been ignored for an immediate and complete withdrawal of Israeli forces. Still, Hizbullah has braced to be bound by the rules but has made it clear that it reserves the right to resist and that it will target Israeli forces inside Lebanon, Israel being the occupying force, till they withdraw completely. Now this is a major loophole in the Resolution is it can very well lead to a conflict that involves, apart from Israel and Hizbullah, the Lebanese army and the UNIFIL forces. Looking from the other side of the mirror, Resolution 1701 legitimizes the temporary occupation of Lebanon by Israel till the complete deployment of the proposed international force.
The main thrust of Resolution 1701 for a long – lasting settelement is the complete disarmament of Hizbullah. This is a rather uphill task given the history of Israeli belligerence in the region and the continuation of Israeli action to corner the Palestinians. The Resolution further proposes an arms embargo as well as a forbiddance of any training or any other help that is not authorized by the Lebanese government. This is indeed a plan to neutralize Hizbullah and sever its links with Syria and Iran. However, there’s no restriction placed on the Israelis. The disarmament of Hizbullah would be done simultaneously with the formation of a buffer zone that is free of anything military except for assets and personnel belonging to the government. The UNIFIL is being mandated to aid the Lebanese government to effectively implement the proposed buffer zone and in securing entry points to prevent arms or related material from entering Lebanon. Here, the UNIFIL is being authorized to act in all manners possible to take all necessary action to prevent the area under its control to be used for any “hostile activities”. This point certainly creates a chance for UNIFIL for being faced with a catch – 22 situation by creating a possibility of its confrontation with Hizbullah.
The authors of Resolution 1701 may well have led the world to believe that the Resolution will lead to alleviation of miseries of innocent civilians. But the way the Resolution has been drafted and it’s ignorance of a number of critical issues and its not being partial may only lead to an opposite scenario.
The United Nations should realise that post 9/11, it has been turned into a sort of a wholly owned subsidiary of the US administration. The United States gets away with the UN with whatever it wants; Afghanistan, Iraq and now Lebanon are prime examples of this state of affairs. It has continued to fail the citizens of this world in all these instances. The result has been that as an organization that has the mandate to ensure international security and protection of human rights, common people have now started having a hard time in placing their trust in it. This leads to the erosion of legitimacy of actions carried out by the United Nations.
This time, it was the steadfastness of the Hizbullah forces on the ground and support for the resistance amongst the masses that led Lebanon not to really bow down completely in front of the powers and that enabled Lebanon to stand up in front of Israeli threats to its sovreignty. There is significant doubt whether the United Nations has been useful for the Lebanese. Rather, as is clear from Resolution 1701, the UN has sided with Israel – a clear evidence of American hegemony at the international body. However, now that the Resolution has been adopted by all parties, let’s hope for the best for the victims. But there will always remain fears that another round of fighting might break out and which may well be worse than what the world saw during the last month.
Today, on this very auspicious day, I want to wish my dear country and all the fellow country men and women a very happy Independence Day.
Happy birthday, Pakistan, my love…..many many happy returns of the day. May you always remain happy and prosperous….we all love you, dear. It’s only because of you that we get our identity as a proud Pakistani nation…..may you always and always prosper and continue to show us our way on the path of the principles laid down for us by your founding fathers; may you continue to always light up our hearts with hope; and may we become able to realise our strengths and fulfill our individual duties towards you, dear Pakistan. Once again, a very happy birthday to you!!
Pakistanis celebrate the country’s 59th independence day today. So many years ago, our forefathers, the nation’s heroes, worked so hard and tirelessly to relieve this nation of the yoke of the British Raj and to provide the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent with a separate piece of land where they could live their life the way they wanted and where they could become masters of their own destinies. Till that extent, the nation’s forefathers did a marvellous job and the nation still salutes them for this feat, and will continue to do so forever and ever.
There certailnly is reason for rejoice on this day today. Pakistan has come a long way from a newborn state facing a host of difficulties during the initial times, that continued to threaten it’s existence till long. But it was always the resilience of the great and spirited Pakistani nation that always kept alive the desire to succeed and to show the world that even the most hostile of circumstances don’t stand a chance infront of human perseverance and steadfastness. The belief in purpose and faith in self were the goalposts that guided the nation’s early journeys through hard times. The stories and historical experiences of that era remind us today that the Pakistan which we never hesitate to take for granted has some ideals as its foundations; and these ideals are worth dying for, as demonstrated by our forefathers who never waited a second to lay their lives to attain the embodiment of their ideals.
This makes us responsible to carry the spirit of those ideals forward and act in ways that work to preserve the sanctity of the dreams that the founding fathers of this great country had and the vision that they harboured in their lively hearts for the future of this nation.
Today is the day for us to look back and see whether we have been successfull in carrying the mission of our national heroes forward and whether have we done justice with their ideals of nationhood as foreseen by them for this country. At this point of time, I would not want to delve deep into what have we, as a nation, done with the dream of Iqbal and the ideals and principles of Jinnah. The Pakistani nation is a very intelligent one. The day today coaxes us to have an analysis of our behaviour retrospectively and to find out flaws so that we take lessons and mend our ways to become able to again find the true light and the true spirit behind the guiding principles set forth for the nation by this country’s founding fathers. This can be the only way whereby we may even come close to fulfill our duties towards this great and beautiful country. Happy birthday, Pakistan!
Long Live Pakistan!!
Oh forget it….I would never, even in my wildest dreams, wish this guy on his birthday. I don’t know why and how my fellow countrymen bear with him!!
The current commenting system with wordpress hosted the way it is with my current host has really started to suck. There are so many good plugins available, but I don’t have access to the storage area, so can’t install and configure these plugins. The plugins currently installed in my space are, no doubt, working but there’s a lot more that’s needed as a lot of spam manages to get through. This thing has made me to seriously start giving thought to changing the host either to some service that provides FTP access to the storage area or to wordpress.com. And for this purpose, I have started to maintain a parallel area of postings on wordpress.com, apart from my current place. Let’s see how it goes. But the time this problem takes over my nerves, that will be the time I’ll definitely change the host.
However, I don’t plan to change my blogging platform – Wordpress. Wordpress is vanilla; it’s chocolate and it’s beautiful. And I completely understand that the problem I’m facing is not due to the platform, but lack of tuning it to my needs because of the lack of proper tools provided in this installation by the host.
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