Media watch: Merkel's statements

Media discusses Chancellor Merkel comments about Pakistan and terrorism, suggests possible reasons for such remarks.

Media watch is a daily round-up of key articles featured on news websites, hand-picked by The Express Tribune web staff.

Merkel’s hard line

The implication, unstated but there in the subtext, is that we are for whatever reason a state that sponsors or supports terrorism, and there can be no other interpretation of Merkel’s statement. There can be few more serious openly made accusations at a time when global sensitivities to terrorism allegedly originating in the Islamic world, are at an all-time high. Rightly then, the Foreign Office has summoned envoys of both the countries to explain and to lodge some kind of a protest.

Merkel’s cheek

They all feel pained at what happened in Mumbai, though they are neither bothered about the leads that show Hindu terrorist hand behind the incident, nor the atrocities that the Indians are perpetrating on the beleaguered Kashmiris who have lost over 80,000 of their kith and kin in the struggle for their legitimate rights. The role of the mastermind that they along with the US had played in bringing into being the terrorist menace stands whitewashed by the blitzkrieg of propaganda.

In introspection

A section of the establishment and media maintain that with India offering the industrialised West the largest market in the region, this leads the US and Europe to close ranks with New Delhi over the issue. There are others who condemn Foreign Office for its supposed failure to project the country’s policies more effectively. Why can’t these countries be made to realize that Pakistan has made more sacrifices that any one of them in the fight terrorism, they ask?