No wonder ISI had no solution left for him except to get him assassinated. The man was Treasonous because he let all the National Secrets of Pakistan out in this article.
From: RIAZ KHAN <khan0427@msn.com>
Sent: Fri, April 20, 2012 3:47:52 AM
Subject: One of the LAST articles written by a Journalist killed by _____________. Please Must Read!
From: RIAZ KHAN <khan0427@msn.com>
Sent: Fri, April 20, 2012 3:47:52 AM
Subject: One of the LAST articles written by a Journalist killed by _____________. Please Must Read!
Murtaza Razvi | 10th February, 2012
'Thanks to Allah', as our cricketers would say, "Just 40.1 per cent of the 5-16 age group [schoolchildren in Pakistan] could do two-digit subtraction sums (with carry) whereas a mere 23.6 per cent were able to do three-digit division sums. Only 41.8 per cent could read a sentence in Urdu or their mother tongue (English is a far cry). Far fewer could read a story," revealed the nuclear physicist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy in his column yesterday, quoting the recently released Annual Status of Education Report.
You bet if the nationwide survey done for the said report had included questions like 'how to drink water according to Islam', 'what to recite in Arabic before you embarked on a journey' or 'which foot be placed before the other whilst entering or leaving a mosque', the students consulted would have come out shining with brilliance.
Primary school textbooks are now replete with such day-to-day knowledge that will win you brownie points in the hereafter. Wasn't it the founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, who whilst on a visit to Karachi in the 1970s was asked how his country could help Pakistan become an economic power, and he had remarked with words to the effect, that how can you even begin to think helping a people who believe that real life starts after death? Obviously, we were yet to shape our blasphemy laws back then, and the dignitary left this country in one piece.
The thing is that we are a unique nation of a unique people living in a unique country with a unique, past, present and future, as the very learned and respectable Mr Javed Jabbar has argued in his recent book to present his case for Pakistan. It is this sheer uniqueness that demands that perhaps our children's abilities too, should be judged by a unique yardstick which is tailor-made to judge Pakistani intellect, and not the run of the mill surveys based on the wisdom of 'one size fits all'. Tune into a quiz show and you'll get your answers.
Here is a hypothetical example: please don't be surprised if many schoolchildren would not know the name of the only Pakistani to have won the Nobel Prize, and at the fact that those few who might know the right answer, would also hasten to add that Dr Mohammad Abdus Salam, despite his name, was not a Muslim. That's why it was important that the state remove the word 'Muslim' from his epitaph in the Rabwah graveyard, which originally proclaimed him as the 'First Muslim scientist' to have won the coveted award.
Ours is also a country where young adults in a Pak-Afghan border area barely know the name of the country they live in; many do not know the name of the President or the Prime Minister, as a televised interview by journalist Saleem Safi revealed the other day. But surely, if asked, the same bunch would have denounced America as a reincarnation of Satan in our times and hailed Bin Laden as their lost Messiah. And they would certainly also tell you what constitutes blasphemy, and why women should be locked up.
The knowledge being disseminated from the pulpit (including TV televangelist shows) and the textbooks is simply frightening. It is frightening in the literal sense of the word, because it is aimed at instilling the fear of God in your hearts and minds via the most ferocious of interpretations of the religious dogma. This leaves one incapable of thinking for oneself.
Here's an example: Tibb-i-Nabawi or treatment through recourse to medicines, herbs and curing techniques used by the Prophet of Islam is today a growing field. An entire brigade of pious, qualified doctors and homoeopathists has jumped on to the bandwagon to make quick money. Many are administering treatment through Hijama, which is Arabic for an old Chinese technique that extracts toxins from the body by superficial incisions made on the skin and drawing blood, using vacuum cups, hence, 'cupping'.
The Prophet must have used it and also recommended it for its curative properties, but to call it a divinely-guided cure for all ailments, from pain in the back to diabetes and hernia, is really stretching it, especially the divine part of it. This is precisely what Hijama practitioners claim as they urge you to recite Ayat-ul-Kursi (a Quranic verse with healing and helpful qualities whilst in distress) as they administer 'cupping'. And thanks to Allah, many are cured.
Who needs arithmetic, reading or writing stories in a worldly language, God forbid, when we have our own unique, divine mechanisms, and Arabic, to guide us through this transitory life on Earth?
You bet if the nationwide survey done for the said report had included questions like 'how to drink water according to Islam', 'what to recite in Arabic before you embarked on a journey' or 'which foot be placed before the other whilst entering or leaving a mosque', the students consulted would have come out shining with brilliance.
Primary school textbooks are now replete with such day-to-day knowledge that will win you brownie points in the hereafter. Wasn't it the founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, who whilst on a visit to Karachi in the 1970s was asked how his country could help Pakistan become an economic power, and he had remarked with words to the effect, that how can you even begin to think helping a people who believe that real life starts after death? Obviously, we were yet to shape our blasphemy laws back then, and the dignitary left this country in one piece.
The thing is that we are a unique nation of a unique people living in a unique country with a unique, past, present and future, as the very learned and respectable Mr Javed Jabbar has argued in his recent book to present his case for Pakistan. It is this sheer uniqueness that demands that perhaps our children's abilities too, should be judged by a unique yardstick which is tailor-made to judge Pakistani intellect, and not the run of the mill surveys based on the wisdom of 'one size fits all'. Tune into a quiz show and you'll get your answers.
Here is a hypothetical example: please don't be surprised if many schoolchildren would not know the name of the only Pakistani to have won the Nobel Prize, and at the fact that those few who might know the right answer, would also hasten to add that Dr Mohammad Abdus Salam, despite his name, was not a Muslim. That's why it was important that the state remove the word 'Muslim' from his epitaph in the Rabwah graveyard, which originally proclaimed him as the 'First Muslim scientist' to have won the coveted award.
Ours is also a country where young adults in a Pak-Afghan border area barely know the name of the country they live in; many do not know the name of the President or the Prime Minister, as a televised interview by journalist Saleem Safi revealed the other day. But surely, if asked, the same bunch would have denounced America as a reincarnation of Satan in our times and hailed Bin Laden as their lost Messiah. And they would certainly also tell you what constitutes blasphemy, and why women should be locked up.
The knowledge being disseminated from the pulpit (including TV televangelist shows) and the textbooks is simply frightening. It is frightening in the literal sense of the word, because it is aimed at instilling the fear of God in your hearts and minds via the most ferocious of interpretations of the religious dogma. This leaves one incapable of thinking for oneself.
Here's an example: Tibb-i-Nabawi or treatment through recourse to medicines, herbs and curing techniques used by the Prophet of Islam is today a growing field. An entire brigade of pious, qualified doctors and homoeopathists has jumped on to the bandwagon to make quick money. Many are administering treatment through Hijama, which is Arabic for an old Chinese technique that extracts toxins from the body by superficial incisions made on the skin and drawing blood, using vacuum cups, hence, 'cupping'.
The Prophet must have used it and also recommended it for its curative properties, but to call it a divinely-guided cure for all ailments, from pain in the back to diabetes and hernia, is really stretching it, especially the divine part of it. This is precisely what Hijama practitioners claim as they urge you to recite Ayat-ul-Kursi (a Quranic verse with healing and helpful qualities whilst in distress) as they administer 'cupping'. And thanks to Allah, many are cured.
Who needs arithmetic, reading or writing stories in a worldly language, God forbid, when we have our own unique, divine mechanisms, and Arabic, to guide us through this transitory life on Earth?
Where to with anti-Americanism?
Murtaza Razvi | 6th April, 2012
Just who is the non-starter Parliamentary Committee for National Security (PCNS) trying to fool, you may well ask. Certainly not the US, whose patience is being put to a test? The people of Pakistan? Perhaps. Comprising elected representatives from the treasury and the opposition, the committee cuts a sorry figure as it struggles to come to a consensus on redefining Pakistan-US relations.
What are the credentials and therefore worth of the members of the committee which does not have a single foreign policy expert on it? Has the PCNS bothered to consult such experts in the academia, the think tanks, career diplomats or anyone having any expertise in the field? The answer is a resounding 'no'.
It's only a boys club fighting over randomly proposed disparate views. They seem to have little understanding that foreign policy is no child's play; it cannot be based on the political wishes or one or the other party, which are being equated with national interest.
Pray tell what is national interest? Words like sovereignty, national honour and integrity ring as hollow as they are because they are not injected with any defined meaning. Let's see what these words and terms have in effect meant to Pakistanis in recent years.
First, take sovereignty. It has variously meant Pakistan's leaders' will, or lack thereof, to let the country suspend itself in free fall; let us kill our Benazirs, Salman Taseers and Shahbaz Bhattis, practise hate and violence in the name of Islam, let the Taliban and the like run amok, turn a blind eye to the bin Ladens and the like who perpetrate atrocities such as those in Mumbai, and cry murder when the world questions us on such issues.
National honour has meant locking up women, denying justice to rape victims, forced conversions of Hindu girls and securing the 'ideological' frontiers. The last mentioned translates into insisting that we have our own value systems and a worldview shaped by these, and of which we are very proud, regardless of whether or not they conform to globally accepted norms of decency and human rights. We started a whole new country to nurture this ideology of isolationism and we are immensely proud of what we have achieved as a result, the nukes being a shining example, which bring us much national honour and pride.
National integrity has meant suppressing the many indigenous, living cultures, denial of ethnic and religious diversity of our people and attempts at imposing a medieval, tribal Bedouin code. This was a code that Arabs themselves had discarded as soon as Islam grew beyond the Arabian peninsula in less than 30 years of the great faith's proclamation, and reached the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of human civilisation.
From there and beyond, Caliphate transformed itself into dynastic, secular rule, embracing modern learning and patronising knowledge, the arts and science. In the heyday of Islamic civilisation, spread over Arab and non-Arab lands, no attempts were made to suppress indigenous cultures, languages or faiths; Arabic progressed just as much as did Persian or Turkish, for instance. This was left to be done in today's Pakistan in the name of national integrity.
Religion was never the defining feature of nationhood. The Ummah under Muslim rule had comprised Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Christians and Jews lived alongside Muslims in harmony without endangering the so-called nation of Islam — from the early state established at Madina to Islam reaching the shores of the Mediterranean, from Palestine to Spain. Today in Pakistan we want the world to leave us to our own devices in the name of national integrity, to be free to suppress the Baloch, for instance.
The question is: do we want such sovereignty, national honour and integrity as we have been practising to define our march forward in a world that is increasingly interdependent? It is in the pursuance of such isolationist internal and external policies that we have wreaked havoc at home and lost many friends, including China, of late. Depending heavily on the US and its regional allies economically, especially the Gulf Sheikhs and international market mechanisms, can Pakistan base its foreign policy on the mere wishes of its politicians to score brownie points with the generals and the electorate in an election year?
We will be deceiving ourselves by focusing on the half truth that the US needs Pakistan; we also need the US and its allies for our own sanity and a chance at survival. The lunatic fringe sympathetic to the Taliban and the like is only a fringe. The politicians and the generals are doing Pakistanis a disservice by mainstreaming their ruinous agenda in foreign policy considerations. Let the think tanks, foreign policy academics and economic managers guide the PCNS in its deliberations.
The debate on what is national interest should be taken up by the media and the responsible experts invited to deliberate on the issue. It is they who must be given the forum to guide the parliamentary committee and parliament.
What are the credentials and therefore worth of the members of the committee which does not have a single foreign policy expert on it? Has the PCNS bothered to consult such experts in the academia, the think tanks, career diplomats or anyone having any expertise in the field? The answer is a resounding 'no'.
It's only a boys club fighting over randomly proposed disparate views. They seem to have little understanding that foreign policy is no child's play; it cannot be based on the political wishes or one or the other party, which are being equated with national interest.
Pray tell what is national interest? Words like sovereignty, national honour and integrity ring as hollow as they are because they are not injected with any defined meaning. Let's see what these words and terms have in effect meant to Pakistanis in recent years.
First, take sovereignty. It has variously meant Pakistan's leaders' will, or lack thereof, to let the country suspend itself in free fall; let us kill our Benazirs, Salman Taseers and Shahbaz Bhattis, practise hate and violence in the name of Islam, let the Taliban and the like run amok, turn a blind eye to the bin Ladens and the like who perpetrate atrocities such as those in Mumbai, and cry murder when the world questions us on such issues.
National honour has meant locking up women, denying justice to rape victims, forced conversions of Hindu girls and securing the 'ideological' frontiers. The last mentioned translates into insisting that we have our own value systems and a worldview shaped by these, and of which we are very proud, regardless of whether or not they conform to globally accepted norms of decency and human rights. We started a whole new country to nurture this ideology of isolationism and we are immensely proud of what we have achieved as a result, the nukes being a shining example, which bring us much national honour and pride.
National integrity has meant suppressing the many indigenous, living cultures, denial of ethnic and religious diversity of our people and attempts at imposing a medieval, tribal Bedouin code. This was a code that Arabs themselves had discarded as soon as Islam grew beyond the Arabian peninsula in less than 30 years of the great faith's proclamation, and reached the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of human civilisation.
From there and beyond, Caliphate transformed itself into dynastic, secular rule, embracing modern learning and patronising knowledge, the arts and science. In the heyday of Islamic civilisation, spread over Arab and non-Arab lands, no attempts were made to suppress indigenous cultures, languages or faiths; Arabic progressed just as much as did Persian or Turkish, for instance. This was left to be done in today's Pakistan in the name of national integrity.
Religion was never the defining feature of nationhood. The Ummah under Muslim rule had comprised Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Christians and Jews lived alongside Muslims in harmony without endangering the so-called nation of Islam — from the early state established at Madina to Islam reaching the shores of the Mediterranean, from Palestine to Spain. Today in Pakistan we want the world to leave us to our own devices in the name of national integrity, to be free to suppress the Baloch, for instance.
The question is: do we want such sovereignty, national honour and integrity as we have been practising to define our march forward in a world that is increasingly interdependent? It is in the pursuance of such isolationist internal and external policies that we have wreaked havoc at home and lost many friends, including China, of late. Depending heavily on the US and its regional allies economically, especially the Gulf Sheikhs and international market mechanisms, can Pakistan base its foreign policy on the mere wishes of its politicians to score brownie points with the generals and the electorate in an election year?
We will be deceiving ourselves by focusing on the half truth that the US needs Pakistan; we also need the US and its allies for our own sanity and a chance at survival. The lunatic fringe sympathetic to the Taliban and the like is only a fringe. The politicians and the generals are doing Pakistanis a disservice by mainstreaming their ruinous agenda in foreign policy considerations. Let the think tanks, foreign policy academics and economic managers guide the PCNS in its deliberations.
The debate on what is national interest should be taken up by the media and the responsible experts invited to deliberate on the issue. It is they who must be given the forum to guide the parliamentary committee and parliament.
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