Tuesday, July 26, 2011

On Saudi role in Pakistan and its coverage

Comrade Junaid responds to Jawad:  "If Jawad can demonstrate where in my posts I defended the “polygamous head-chopping zombies of the Saudi regime,” then I will give him the Angry Arab’s favourite prize, a blender. Otherwise, he should not lie.  
Otherwise, Jawad’s comment is illustrative of how strongly some of the pseudo-left react when you challenge their new sacred cow, the fashionable and cool blame-a-Wahhabi for anything and everything that happens to the country narrative. The country’s population could be (and is) facing hell (malnourishment, disease, natural disasters, etc.), but the neoliberal elite will just find a Wahhabi under every bed, tree, rock, whatever, to blame. 
But Jawad put "neoliberal" in quotation marks, so maybe he doesn't think such an elite exists in Pakistan. I guess Pakistan was spared neoliberalism. Again, just reactionary Wahhabis running around. 
Like I said, and I take note that Jawad does not necessarily do this, but this narrative dare not blame the country that, as the other comrade from Pakistan aptly demonstrated, is principally responsible since the 1950s for strengthening the biggest impediment to progressive social change in Pakistan, its military national security establishment. Readers can read Tariq Ali’s “The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power” to understand that that other country isn’t Saudi."