America exposed!

Good for all that Zahid Hamid has finally thrown in the towel as law minister and gone home. Hopefully forever! The brothers Hamid — Shahid and Zahid perfected the art of ingratiation with their various political masters in Pakistan’s jungle of the corrupt and crooked. And what to talk of clueless Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, who allowed the religious crisis to fester for three weeks before agreeing to their demands. What does it say of the writ of the state? More later. First Trump, who is on a destruction path in America as his first year in the White House winds down. His infamous Access Hollywood tape boasting of grabbing women by their private parts and kissing them has caused a domino effect. Each waking hour, new allegations against sexual molestation by powerful men surface. The victims are not holding back on the lewd details of their predators. From the hallowed halls of the US Congress to the entertainment industry Hollywood; from legends in TV and print media to captains of industry, morality in America all appears smooshed to the lowest denominator.

But guess what? Now Trump calls the Access Hollywood tape fake and his 16 accusers who have come forward to nail Trump as liars. He’s supporting another sexual deviant, Roy Moore, 70, to be innocent. Moore is accused of paedophilia having sexually molested under-aged girls when he was Alabama’s district attorney. Roy is expected to win and enter the august halls of the US Senate come December 12.

Roy Moore belongs to the religious right’s scary, judgmental old men league that has gained power since Donald Trump’s victory. These hardnosed White Christians preach hate against Islam and their leader is Trump. Notice how the men in power sexually molest women and get away with it by convincing their foolish voters that the women are liars. Trump and Roy know how to destroy their women victims by letting their lawyers attack them like Rottweiler dogs.

Pakistan too faces a threat from the religious right. According to a veteran political watcher, cleric Rizvi and his backers have dealt a “devastating blow to secular parties like the PML-N, the PPP, the PTI, proving that in Pakistan, there exist only two forces — the soldier and the street Islamist, the rest is all fill in the blank.” He says that at the peak of agitation, even “Nawaz and Imran seemed like irrelevant jokers and the army chief was irresolute.”

Pakistani rulers, past and present, allowed Iran and Saudi Arabia to carry out their proxy wars on our soil. The two warring countries flooded petro-dollars in return for hatching demonic nurseries that gradually turned out killing machines infiltrating our civil and military cadres. “Eventually our beloved country will end up as a full-fledged theocracy in less than a decade,” emails another friend living in Europe. “There has been a gradual takeover of the state by religion-driven zealots since the inception of Pakistan. Unfortunately, we will keep on enacting and upholding archaic edicts and laws while the world moves on at an amazing speed.” The most archaic interpretations of Islam have been embraced by a majority of Muslim countries the world over. “Therefore, we can never have an objective debate on Islam in Pakistan or in any other Muslim country for fear of fundamentalist backlash.”

Here’s the good news! No debate on democracy either! Thank You Donald Trump! Pakistani civilian-military leadership will be spared tedious lectures from the US on democracy because their president has single-handedly done more to undermine the “basic tenets of American democracy than any foreign agent or foreign propaganda campaign could,” says The New York Times. “Trump is a political weapon of mass self-destruction for American democracy — for its norms, for its morality, for sheer human decency.” So, chill out Islamabad’s power elites and Rawalpindi’s GHQ. And laugh out loud at Trump’s 1,600 lies and counting.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 3^rd, 2017.

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