http://criticalppp.com/archives/36002
So, when I heard about the Kashmir uprising in mid-August, the first place for me to go to was the British Council. I had a bicycle at that time and after college, I rushed to the library about five miles away to scour the British press as well as the Times of India. The Times of India came daily to Pakistan and was only stopped after September 6, when Indian invaded Pakistan. The British and Indian press were clear; the skirmishes in Kashmir were not an uprising, but were infiltration by regular Pakistani troops dressed up as Kashmiris.
Next day I discovered that the College library also got the Times of India and carried reports of the Pakistan ‘invasion’ and how the Pakistani troops were being met with hostility by the Kashmiri Muslims. This was the first time in my life I realized that Pakistanis were being lied to, but loved to be lied to. It was a sort of an addiction. Soon the senior students of the college demanded the library not carry any Indian papers. They did not have to wait. On September 6, 1965, Indian attacked Lahore and the last time I read an Indian newspaper in Pakistan was August 29, 1965. I remember it had the maps of the Pakistan infiltration route and how a Pakistani tank column was advancing towards Chamb.
The following 17-day war with India shaped my life permanently. I saw through the deception of the Pakistan Establishment very early in life. I was a mere 15, but had already recognised that we mainstream Pakistanis, the Urdu-speaking elites and my own Punjabi nationality, were a flock of sheep, seeped in bigotry and a false sense of a fake identity. This was a falsely constructed identity that was masquerading as some sort of B-grade Persians of Arab ancestry, but certainly did not want anything to do with the rich 5,000 year old Indian identity of the Indus valley where we all lived.
Today, the Left is generally suffering the same sickness it confronted in 1967. In the late 1960s, Left activists were being lynched, beaten and murdered by the Islamist thugs; today significant sections of the Left have latched on to these very same Jamaat-e-Islami and Muslim Brotherhood thugs as a way to express their irrational hatred of the West. Today when Fatima Bhutto in particular and to a lesser extent, Mubashar Hassan echo Imran Khan and the Taliban, I refer to them as Sharia-Bolsheviks who have unwittingly become the hand maidens of the Islamofascists of the world.
In the ten years that I spent researching the subject and the 45 years I have spent fighting the forces of medieval darkness that wish to drag the world’s Muslims into the past as a path to the future, it dawned on me that even those who knew the truth about the fraudulent nature of the Islamic State, were not prepared to say so, guilt-ridden in their minds, thinking this would be an act of betrayal of the Muslim community. Such a state of affairs was possible because while liberal or secular Muslims were busy caught up in the challenges of their day-to-day lives, their Islamist counterparts were having a field day, unchallenged and unopposed, where even the communists would use the phrase, “Comrade, Bismillah karo” to start their meetings.
In brief, whereas Islam is a religion based on the five pillars of our faith, Islamism (al-Islamiyah as the Ikhwan claims) is the use of the religion of Islam as a political tool and doctrine, whose logical end is Islamofascism (or Islamoanarchism in the words of Tariq Ali).
The difference between a Muslim and an Islamist is along the same lines. Whereas a Muslim follows Islam, an Islamist sticks to the political doctrine of Islamism. This makes it possible for even non-Muslims and atheists to be Islamists. For example, George Galloway is an Islamist as is Ken Livingstone (former mayor of London) and even Noam Chomsky who I am told addressed a large gathering of the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba in Punjab University.
I shall only state here that if even today Pakistan’s elite cannot see through the con men who divided India’s Muslims into three parts as a bizarre way to unite them, then we are all collectively blind.