Palestinian pain, Pakistani silence – Middle East Monitor

At a recent gathering of social scientists in Washington, D.C., a Pakistani-American scholar spoke movingly about Palestine. The vocabulary was careful, the grief sincere, the analysis suitably serious. Then a Palestinian academic asked the question that should concern all Pakistani and South Asian intellectuals in the West: why are you so eloquent about Palestine and so silent about Pakistan? Why can you name Zionism but not Imran Khan? Why can we talk about genocide but not General Asim Munir, Trump’s favorite field marshal, who presides over the quasi-dictatorial order of Pakistan? Why does Pakistan – the country you analyze, inherit, visit, romanticize and play with – become unspeakable precisely when it needs words most?

It must be recognized that the Pakistani-American academic has not disappeared into the theoretical fog. She admitted the truth. It is now easier for Pakistani academics to talk about Palestine than Pakistan. Palestine might elicit applause. Pakistan can have consequences: harassment from the intelligence services, family pressure, inconvenience at the airport, poisonous return trips, calls to relatives. These are the true limits of courage. We are silent, she essentially admitted, because we want to travel comfortably.

The Palestinian academic smiled and uttered a sentence that belongs in the museum of moral humiliation: “May your problems always be so small. »

He said this as someone whose extended family had been shattered by the Gaza massacre. It wasn’t cruelty. It was a diagnosis. In one sentence, he denounced an entire class: highly educated, politically fluid, morally theatrical, and terrified of unpleasantness.

This is the scandal of the Pakistani and South Asian intellectual world in the West. It’s not ignorance. They know it. They know Khan is imprisoned. They know that PTI supporters have been hunted down, arrested, intimidated, erased of their legitimacy and treated as civic contamination. They know that Pakistan’s public sphere has been stifled, dissent criminalized, journalism disciplined, Parliament reduced to chattel and the courts bent under the pressure.

They know that Washington has not only tolerated Pakistan’s authoritarian drift, but has found a new use for its uniformed cadres. They know that the United States prefers a reliable general to an unpredictable popular leader.

They know all this.

And yet the silence remains there, thick and well nourished.

Progressive West Asian South Asian organizations have mastered the grammar of anti-fascism. Hindutva? Fluent. Trumpism? Naturally. Zionism? More and more. White supremacy? Of course. But when the Pakistani state persecutes the country’s most popular political leader and turns millions of mobilized citizens into suspect bodies, the language suddenly becomes tricky. We hear about “the establishment,” “polarization,” “civil-military tensions” – phrases coined by people to describe arson without offending the arsonist.

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This is where Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) should be named. DRUM has done serious work on immigrant justice, policing, racial capitalism, deportations, and state violence. It is precisely for this reason that his silence on Pakistan is not a minor omission. It is a political failure. Many of its Pakistani members and supporters are enthusiastic supporters of Khan, angered by US support for dictatorship and repression in Pakistan. They are not confused. They don’t need a reading group to discover that a military-backed order overwhelming civilian political agency is a problem. Yet leaders appear unwilling to mention Khan’s name or confront American complicity.

It’s not a strategy. This is constituency management without courage.

The contrast with CAGE International is instructive. CAGE understood what many Western and South Asian Muslim organizations still miss: the war on terror has never been solely a Western project imposed on Muslim societies. It was also a regime project, eagerly implemented by Muslim states selling out their own people for surveillance, torture, rendition, disappearance, and imperial approval. CAGE names this collaboration when others find safer uses for their microphones. Its policy is important because it rejects the childish fiction that Islamophobia disappears when the executioner speaks Urdu, Arabic, Turkish or Farsi.

Pakistani and South Asian organizations should have learned this only from Aafia Siddiqui. Aafia is not just a story of American injustice. It constitutes a continuing indictment of the security state of Pakistan and its obscene role in the “war on terror”. His name should haunt all respectable generals, ministers, liberal apologists and analysts who claim that Pakistan’s ruling elite protects Muslim dignity.

But even Aafia is often invoked selectively, stripped of the central question: how did she end up in American hands? Who made Pakistan a market where citizens could be converted into the currency of empire?

Now, the same habits are returning around Imran Khan. The Pakistani intellectual class wants every struggle to be universal, except that which involves their passports, their families, their invitations and their summer trips. He talks about Kashmir, Palestine, caste, racism, Hindutva, Islamophobia, empire and coloniality. GOOD. It should. But when Pakistan descends into coercive rule, when Khan is isolated, when his supporters are crushed, when diaspora critics fear transnational repression, the moral climate suddenly changes. The sun of justice disappears behind a cloud called “it’s complicated.”

It’s not complicated. It’s expensive. It’s different.

Defenders of silence ask: why personalize the struggle around Khan? It seems principled only until one remembers Lula, Anwar Ibrahim, Morsi, Mandela. Political prisoners become symbols not because they are perfect, but because power condenses an entire conflict into their bodies. Khan’s cell is not just a cell. It is a message to all Pakistanis who believed that political action could go beyond permission from Rawalpindi and Washington.

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The irony is that Palestinians understand this better than many Pakistanis. South Africans too. This is why voices such as Allan Boesak, Ronnie Kasrils, Susan Abulhawa, Ilan Pappé, John Esposito, Tamara Sonn, Tariq Ali, Medea Benjamin, Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis, Steven Friedman, Roger Waters, Noura Erakat, Katie Halper, Patrick Bond, Vijay Prashad, Omid Safi, Riffat Hassan, Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui, Norman Finkelstein, Fatima Bhutto, Yasir Qadhi, Sami Hamdi, Mushtaq Ahmad Khan, Ammar Ali Jan, Hassaan Bokhari, Taimur Rahman, Hamza Ahmad Khan, Sana Saeed, Maria Kari, Charles Amjad-Ali and Rashid Omar. Courage needs names. Young people need examples, not abstractions.

And what about the United States? Here, the silence becomes even more overwhelming. These organizations live under a government whose foreign policy supports authoritarian arrangements to which they refuse to oppose. If Pakistani-American activists cannot challenge American support for coercive rule in Pakistan, what exactly is their anti-imperialism? A branding exercise? An aesthetic of domestic politics? An Instagram template with borders?

The United States loves Pakistan the most while Pakistan is the least democratic. The generals are stable; civilians are chaotic. Dictators are partners; popular leaders are risks. Trump’s embrace of Munir is not an aberration. It is an unvarnished empire: cruder, louder, more shameless, but structurally familiar.

The Palestinian academic’s sentence should become a test. If the price of speaking is an uncomfortable airport, a nervous parent, a lost invitation or a complicated return trip, perhaps we should hesitate before using Palestine as a moral stage on which Pakistani cowardice disguises itself as courage.

The choice is simple. Continue to speak beautifully about every injustice except the one that threatens access. Or finally, say the names: Imran Khan. Asim Munir. Authoritarianism supported by the United States. Transnational repression. Political prisoners. Pakistan’s stifled democracy.

History does not require poetry. He asks for witnesses.

And if even that is too much, silence should at least have the decency to stop calling itself a strategy.

OPINION: Pakistan at the “Peace Council”: a seat beyond the genocide

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policies of Middle East Monitor.

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