LAHORE: This is with reference to Saroop Ijaz’s article “Game of Drones” (October 7). While I enjoy baseless allegations as much as the next person, I could not help but notice that Mr Ijaz was particularly flamboyant in labelling Imran Khan ‘cowardly’ and accusing him of not only surrendering before the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, but also “elevating their ideology of murder to the mainstream”.
The esteemed lawyer, however, has based his rather unsavoury characterisation of Imran Khan on two flimsily constructed falsehoods. For one, he claimed that Imran Khan “has sought and successfully received the permission of the Taliban” for his march. This is tantamount to taking most indecent liberties with the truth and there is no story filed by this newspaper that suggests otherwise. Second is the claim that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf received an “offer of protection from the militants”, which is also a blatant lie. This newspaper carried a story “Pakistani Taliban deny offering protection to PTI peace march” (October 5) confirming that this was false.
If the exalted lawyer had spent a little less time looking up words like ‘nihilism’ and a little more time checking facts, the glaring errors might have been avoided. These two utterly incorrect statements allow Mr Ijaz to go on what is a thinly veiled slandering rant against an imagined foe. He creates a whole host of hypothetical scenarios where Imran Khan is colluding with the Taliban in every atrocity imaginable, and adds yet more lies along the way.
For example, at one point in his grand stand against the forces of evil, Mr Ijaz claims that “Mr Khan and other anti-drone activists lump them together with terrorists”, them being the “innocent who died as collateral damage to drone strikes”. Let me belabour the obvious; not only is Mr Ijaz’s assertions astonishingly nonsensical, he is also taking extreme liberties with the truth through such accusations.
The activists who have worked to highlight civilian deaths while Mr Ijaz watched with glee as drones fought ‘these militants’ (yes, he turns drone apologist and labels everyone militant in this very article) do not deserve such vile slander. Neither does a leader who called on the US to reveal identities of drone victims so we know the militant from the innocent. It is no doubt ‘contemptuous and contemptible’ to accuse the very people struggling to separate innocent and guilty of doing the exact opposite.
It must be stressed here that printing an article that consists of accusations of aiding and abetting terrorism, against a public figure on a peace march no less, is a very serious matter. Doing so by relying on assumptions, based in turn on complete lies and invented facts, is graver still. It is, therefore, to be expected that The Express Tribune check the alarming quantity of lies and appalling quality of bias in its columns.
Ali Ahmed
Published in The Express Tribune, October 9th, 2012.
