Dr Aafia’s appeal – By Rafia Zakaria
The explosive mix of appearing to be the obedient Muslim woman clad in burka and a would-be assassin defying the US make Dr Aafia Siddiqui irresistible as a heroine and an icon. But should such defiance be the only mark of heroism in our society? – File photo
THE aftermath of Dr Aafia Siddiqui’s conviction nearly two weeks ago in a New York courtroom has seen several protests. On Feb 13, students from universities all over Islamabad congregated at Aapbara Chowk and demanded her release, while pointing out the silence of human rights groups.
A day earlier, Lahore’s Liberty Chowk saw students and faculty members of several educational institutions come together to protest against Dr Aafia’s continued detention. Many other protests have been witnessed since the verdict was announced.
While the facts of Dr Aafia’s case remain shrouded in secrecy, the transformation of her case from one of suspected terrorism to Pakistan’s cause célèbre is undeniable. No other female figure facing serious criminal charges has ever garnered so much public outpouring of support in Pakistan’s recent history.
More notable is the wide spectrum of groups supporting her cause. The recent protests have illustrated the breadth of her allure, driving groups as diverse as the Tanzeem-i-Jihad and students from elite schools to the streets of major urban areas. From women in burka on the streets of Karachi chanting “down with the US” to jeans-clad members of student action committees at Liberty Chowk, Aafia Siddiqui seems to have captured the collective heart of the Pakistani nation.
This ability to unite such a diverse group of Pakistanis behind her makes her appeal worthy of analysis. It is rare indeed for those frequenting elite private universities to have a platform in common with the burka-clad members of organisations such as the Tanzeem-i-Jihad.
While the human rights violations in her case are the obvious explanation for such unity among the Pakistani public it is not the only factor. Human rights violations are rampant in Pakistan but are routinely ignored and do not provoke much public outcry. Indeed, the alleged torturer of 12-year-old Shazia Masih who is believed to have died of violence inflicted on her was released on bail without generating much of an outcry. Thousands continue to languish in the country’s jails without being afforded hearings.
How then does Aafia Siddiqui’s case appeal to the public? If anything, she has flouted conventions dear to Pakistani culture. She is divorced from her first husband with whom she has children. She then went on to remarry. Ordinarily, this alone would be considered enough to render a woman morally suspect in the eyes of Islamist groups whose teachings and literature uphold dutiful wives and mothers.
Indeed, groups like the Jamaat-i-Islami and Tanzeem-i-Jihad would normally have problems with the idea of a young woman like Dr Aafia Siddiqui travelling all over the world, as she did, without being accompanied by a male relation or mahram. Also problematic would have been the fact that she attended a Jewish-funded educational institution and did not live with her family while completing her education.
As the emblem of Pakistani womanhood, one that is being venerated and defended around the country, Aafia Siddiqui’s unfettered popularity represents perhaps the emergence of a new kind of female rebel. While she may have lived the life of a liberated western woman, attending American universities, working routinely with men, the visible image she presents is quite useful in allowing her to evade criticism.
Wearing the niqab she refuses to remove, shouting anti-imperialist slogans and taunting the institutional justice of her American captors, Aafia Siddiqui is able to channel the voice of every downtrodden person who has been misjudged and mistreated by the US. In accepting the visible garb of an obedient Muslim woman she seems to have won the hearts and minds of those very men who may have been her most avid critics.
Ironically the most magnetic aspect of Dr Aafia’s appeal lies in the most harmful allegations levelled against her. Simply put, while it is entirely likely that the stories alleging that Dr Aafia grabbed an unattended assault rifle and shot at her American interrogator are untrue, the possibility of their being correct titillates every Pakistani wanting to defy the US.
Pakistan’s beleaguered sense of sovereignty — assaulted by repeated drone attacks and an unending series of conspiracy theories regarding the presence or absence of US troops on Pakistani soil — is instantly assuaged at the idea of a frail, helpless woman attacking a trained American law-enforcement official. Cumulatively, the explosive mix of appearing to be the obedient Muslim woman clad in niqab and a would-be assassin defying the US make Dr Aafia Siddiqui irresistible as a heroine and an icon.
Undoubtedly, Aafia Siddiqui is a rebel. Born to a middle-class family she chose a male-dominated career and earned a PhD degree in a field where women are severely unrepresented. She abandoned a conventional life as a mother taking her children to and from school and looking after her husband and home to marry someone who was known to be an Al Qaeda member. She was arrested, disappeared in extremely suspicious circumstances and resurfaced in Afghanistan, leading to several questions. Even more questions remain about her guilt or innocence but her elevation to the status of an icon bears deeper consideration by all diverse groups supporting her cause.
The most pressing of these questions is whether similar attention and unquestioning sympathy would have been afforded to a Pakistani woman who had similarly thwarted convention but was persecuted by Pakistani authorities rather than the American ones. There is much valour even in the dream of defying the US but should such defiance be the only mark of heroism in our society? Concern for human rights, due process and justice are venerated principles that apply universally and indeed unequivocally to Aafia Siddiqui’s case but they also do so to all other cases of justice denied which may not vindicate a country’s suffering pride but whose victims are equally tortured and helpless.
The writer is a US-based attorney and teaches constitutional law and political philosophy.
Source: Dawn, 17 Feb, 2010
Nazir Naji’s article:
http://www.jang.com.pk/jang/feb2010-daily/18-02-2010/col8.htm
Received by email by Mr Zahir Ebrahim
Editorial: Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and Justice in the Service of Empire
Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Yvonne Ridley’s anguished opinion ‘Truth about US justice’ has appeared worldwide including in the Pakistani press. Ms. Ridley bemoans the travesty of justice in the US court’s pronouncement of its guilty verdict on the frail, tortured daughter of Pakistan, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. The veteran journalist is perhaps unaware of the import of the following revealing words of a US Supreme Court justice which were uttered in 1951:
“To those who would paralyze our Government in the face of impending threat by encasing it in a semantic strait-jacket, we must reply that all concepts are relative.”
This lesser known utterance by the highest lawman of the United States came right on the heals of the victorious Allies administering the absolute victor’s justice at Nuremberg to the defeated Nazis with these famous words of its chief prosecuting counsel for the United States, Robert H. Jackson:
“… we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Indeed, if there is one monumental statement made at Nuremberg, it was possibly this:
“… the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.
In other words, Justice Robert H. Jackson averred that all the destruction of civilian cities from Dresden, Hamburg, … to Tokyo in Allied fire-bombings which deliberately killed millions of innocent civilians, was not culpable crimes against humanity because its sin and criminality was absorbed by the Supreme International Crime of the first aggression!
Culpability for “all the evil that follows” is always solely apportioned by victors to the account of the first aggressor (the one who is defeated).
Even the aggressor’s pretext for its first invasion of Poland as its own preemptive self-defense against terrorism (the Gleiwitz terrorist incident aka Operation Canned Goods), was outright rejected at Nuremberg as merely the self-inflicted inside-job to synthesize a Machiavellian pretext for extending German Lebensraum. As Hitler had put it to his Generals in Bavaria:
“[I will] give a propagandist reason for starting the war [and don’t] mind whether it was plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not the right that matters, but victory.”
Justice Robert Jackson unequivocally affirmed that the Nazi quest for full spectrum dominance of Europe was illegal by international law, under any pretext:
“The intellectual bankruptcy and moral perversion of the Nazi regime might have been no concern of international law had it not been utilized to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers. It is not their thoughts, it is their overt acts which we charge to be crimes.”
And in order to ensure that these legal words of immense import were never re-semanticized for “imperial mobilizations” by future ‘ubermensch’ Reichs, but rather, that these concepts remained inviolably “encas[ed] in a semantic strait-jacket”, the very definition for the word ‘aggressor’ was ab initio proposed by Justice Robert Jackson as a state which first initiates:
“invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State. … If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
That is quite an objective measure in international law for ascertaining who is the most guilty aggressor party, and who to fry first for crimes against peace, for monumental crimes against humanity.
So, even if Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is actually guilty as charged; is indeed the heinous mastermind of Al-Qaeeda (a Hegelian Dialectic which is examined elsewhere); or even if she was merely a dupe recruited by the Talibans/Al-Qaeeda as their waterboy (just as the CIA recruited Muslims from around the world to fight as the lauded Mujahideen against the USSR with proclamations of “god is on your side”); by the same yardstick as was used to hang the Nazis while awarding medals of bravery to the Allies who killed millions of innocent civilians in the defense of Europe against the aggressor, all the evil which has followed from the terrorist acts of an individual in aiding and abetting the militant-response against the invasion forces in Afghanistan is similarly legally subsumed by the monumental acts of state terrorism! The superpower’s utilization of the 911 terrorist incident to “goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers” is little different from the Nazis’.
Therefore, in any fair justice system interested in bringing real criminals closer to their day of accounting, before Dr. Aafia can be charged for her criminal conduct of responding to the invading forces in Afghanistan by her frail physical might, the leaders of the ‘free world’ and their financial supermasters seeking their own “Lebensraum” must be put on trial for their “supreme international crime … [of] goosestep[ing] the Herrenvolk across international frontiers.”!
To anyone with even half a brain, but one which is not entirely uncongenial to reflection, it must have been rather obvious from day-one that in the light of public revelations of the egregious circumstances of Dr. Aafia’s bizarre capture and the subsequent orchestration of her show trial (instead of simply assassinating the accused if she was such a diabolical threat to mankind), any “justice” administered to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui would only be comparable to the proclamation of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: “off with her head”.
It must also have been apparent to those inclined to perusing statecraft rather than watching television or reading newspapers for their knowledge of current affairs, that the show trial of Aafia Siddiqui was designed primarily to serve an agenda of the state. Namely, one of calculatingly exercising the “high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification” deemed necessary for a “sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power.” A careful reading of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard makes the political science and the various mantras behind “imperial mobilization” abundantly clear.
Therefore, at least for these abnormal people who actually try to comprehend the forces which drive terrorism, both the pirate’s as well as the emperor’s, there is nothing surprising in the guilty verdict, nor in the conduct of the servile Pakistani rulers leading up to the verdict, and nor in the utterances of the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Ann Patterson. To have expected anything else after all the careful preparations that went into enacting this puppetshow, the show trial and its attendant media demonization of Dr. Aafia, only betrays immense naiveté of the inner-workings of empire.
In my view, the prima facie ‘Truth about US justice’ is that “justice” is in the service of empire, as it always has been! The madam Ambassador of the United States to Pakistan has only executed the core purpose of her diplomatic post rather faithfully in the service of her empire.
Justice in these times, like everything else, including science, politics, history, literature, cinema, news (which is often indistinguishable from cinema), and of course political-science, is continually put in the diabolical service of empire. The only veritable truths are the imperial proclamations of the white man – from who did 911 to Global War on Terror to Global Warming to Global Epidemics to Global Financial Collapse to Global Governance. These history-constructions by incremental faits accomplis are the sine qua non for one-world government and cannot be constrained in any moral or legal “semantic strait-jacket”.
It’s not like the beleaguered Pakistanis don’t know it – we even have the East India Company’s achievements to guide us – but apparently, we, the ‘untermensch’, never quite seem to learn its lessons. And that’s really the only pernicious secret of the enduring hidden strength of the golem behind all its guns and butter offerings to its victims before slaughtering them. The veritable strength of its ‘Samson locks’: our own price!
The former Director of the ISI, Brig. Tirmazi, narrated the following about us Pakistanis in his 1996 book Profiles of Intelligence:
‘… It would be fair to ask what we [the ISI] did to counter the US machinations? Well we did not, and could not do any thing beyond reporting to the highest authority in the country. There are reasons for our inaction:
One, neither the ISI nor the IB is designed or equipped to counter the machinations of a Super Power.
Two, an important factor is our own price. A lot has been said and written by some of our American friends about the price of a Pakistani. Dr. Andrew V. Corry, US Counsel General at Lahore, once said, “Price of a Pakistani oscillates between a free trip to the US and a bottle of whisky.” He may not be too far wrong. We did observe some highly placed Pakistanis selling their conscience, prestige, dignity and self-respect for a small price.’ (page 45, emphasis added)
The point of this unsubtle resignation request by the courageous Ms. Ridley to show some moral backbone among the errand boys and girls of empire, even as it is merely being rhetorical, is entirely meaningless even in its rhetoric for two reasons: 1) it is a moral request in a global governance system which is beyond good and evil, one which brazenly asserts “hegemony is as old as mankind”, and which puts morality itself directly in the service of empire; and 2) given that the highest-order-bit of the systemic disease among the ‘untermensch’ has apparently already been apportioned as our national destiny!
Crises are defining moments for nations, and for a people. Some rise to it. Others fall before it. Pakistan as a nation has evidently decided the latter course of action – and this is palpably apparent from the statements of Pakistan’s own Ambassador to Washington:
‘“Foreign relations are not discussed in poetry, … Saddam Husain’s last speech was also full of poetry but it could not save him or his nation”’, and that ‘relationships between nations are based on ground realities’.
Read its full deconstruction here: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/11/bringing-back-thelost-zen-to-pakistan.html
While it is true that most in Pakistan are very upset by what has befallen Dr. Aafia Siddiqui as yet another victim of “imperial mobilization” – only one among the millions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan’s Tribal-Belt, all along the ‘arc of crisis’ in the “global zone of percolating violence”, etc. – the handful who did publicly protest this latest visitation of empire’s justice upon a frail tortured woman in a nation of almost 200 million, did so only symbolically. And this show of moral bravado despite the fact that Dr. Aafia has become the inextricable symbol of the summation of all the abhorrent injustices purveyed upon women in wars – from rape to rape – and no mere words can ever capture her indescribable agony! Yet, most Pakistanis have only expressed our moral outrage and displayed our fine moral tenor from the comforts of our living room. Just as we did when Iraqi women were being raped, tortured, and disappeared in the service of empire not too long ago. Then we returned back to our daily grind.
Symbols of morality, like talismans, are no match for hard orchestrated events of “imperial mobilization”. And especially when arsonists are running all the fire brigades in a nation where its masses are more closely tied to their daily bread than to matters of state or national survival. The apathetic public well understands that many more arsonists eagerly await in the wings to take the place of their predecessors. The masses are well aware that the Pakistani elite, the ever patriotic praetorian guards, and their coterie of miserable sycophants have already learnt that while one’s abject service to empire can sometimes be hazardous to one’s existential wellness, it also routinely calls for new faces in many a chief’s seat and presents the fabulous opportunity to loot and plunder anew in the name of patriotism.
Therefore, Ms. Yvonne Ridley’s impassioned moral hint to the distinguished American Ambassador to Pakistan:
‘She should then pick up the phone to the US president and tell him to release Aafia and return Pakistan’s most loved, respected and famous daughter and reunite her with the two children who are still missing. Then she should re-read her letter of August 16, 2008 and write another … one of resignation.’,
will only deprive madam Ambassador of a well-earned livelihood and comfortable retirement for no fault of her own. She merely faithfully discharged her service contract to her own empire. And it will do nothing for Pakistan either, for we, as a nation, are serving exactly the same interests. When these aren’t even our own!
I humbly recommend instead that madam American Ambassador be the next in line to be awarded the glorious Freedom Medal by the White House. President Obama has already received his Nobel Peace Prize.
Thank you.
Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Author of: The Pakistan Decapitation Papers
http://humanbeingsfirst.wordpress.com/files/2009/11/pakistan-decapitation-papers-2nd-edition-nov042009.pdf
Source URL: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/02/draafia-justice-inthe-service-of-empire.html
Source PDF: http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/draafia-justice-inthe-service-of-empire-feb132010a.pdf
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