Daily Times

Gandhi, when asked what he felt about western civilisation, quipped, “It is a very good idea.” His one-time comrade and later political opponent, Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, had a far less cynical view of western civilisation. Jinnah was the product of western civilization, not just in the way he lived but as a London-trained lawyer his political ideas had been shaped by John Morley and Edmund Burke. His speeches in the legislature would be peppered with quotes from English political philosophers and his ideas of liberty and personal freedom were also inspired by them. Yet I wonder whether Jinnah would not have agreed with Gandhi had he read what David Frum, the editor of The Atlantic, had to say on his death anniversary, i.e. September 11, which coincidentally is also the anniversary of the attacks in New York.

David Frum tweeted, “Muhammed Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, died 9/11, 1948. That seems ominously appropriate, doesn’t it?” When asked to explain himself, he responded: “The Pakistani state brought the Taliban to power, supported al Qaeda and gave sanctuary to bin Laden. Jinnah founded the Pakistani state.” One could ask David what it means for Christmas, since Jinnah’s birthday falls on Christmas Day. One could point out — as many did on Twitter — that Jinnah, the anglicised Shia Muslim lawyer who was the votary of the separation of church and state and who devoted his life to constitutional means, was the last person who could be associated with the puritanical Salafi Islamic creed. Nor was there a single Pakistani amongst the 9/11 hijackers. One could argue that this tweet is akin to saying that the death and devastation brought about in the world by US foreign policy, dictated entirely by a desire to dominate the world and its resources, the many coups against popular governments around the world and the continuing menace of terror should be laid at the door of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and Adams. But these would be pointless as we deal with a mindset that is closed and damned despicable that it is incapable of any course correction.

In this newspaper, sometime ago, I wrote a piece on so-called Pakistani historian Safdar Mahmood’s obsession with certain dates occurring on the same day. I for one believed then that such a superstitious bent of mind could only exist in the east. Now clearly David Frum is not from the east. The feather in Frum’s cap, his only real claim to fame, is that he was — get this — the speech writer for none other than George W Bush, the man whose family is closely linked to the bin Laden family and, of course, he was the US president who invaded and occupied Iraq after lying about weapons of mass destruction. The speeches Bush gave, which David Frum takes credit for, must rank amongst the most disjointed ramblings by any head of state anywhere. Remember the “axis of evil”? Yes, the one with secular Syria, Shia Iran and Maoist North Korea, none of whom had anything to do with al Qaeda, conspiring to take over the world? Frum coined the term. Clearly unthinking superstition and rhetoric is not the exclusive preserve of the east.

Now, given the kind of low IQ hogwash Frum is guilty of churning out on a regular basis, it is perhaps too much to expect him to see the most obvious correlation between the two 9/11s he refers to: one was a tragedy for Pakistan and the other was a tragedy for the US, one derailed Pakistan and the other gave a halfwit president (and his halfwit speech writers) a blank cheque to bomb the world and plunge it into a perpetual crisis. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is the direct result of George W Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq.

However, if we are going to talk about ominously appropriate 9/11 occurrences, let us talk of 9/11, 1973 shall we? This was the day President Salvador Guillermo Allende of Chile was overthrown and killed in a coup, a coup backed by the US. That 9/11 unleashed a chain of horrors under General Augusto Pinochet, Kissinger’s puppet dictator. How would Frum feel if I wondered out loud whether this was ominously appropriate? But I will not. I was in college in the US when 9/11, 2001 happened. I saw first hand the pain that was inflicted on ordinary hardworking US citizens, who cannot be held accountable for the crimes committed by Kissinger or Frum’s boss, Bush.

People like David Frum are more a representation of the gradual un-civilisation of the western world than western civilisation. The un-civilisation of the west coincides with the rise of the US as the paramount world power replacing the UK. Where the UK was sophisticated in its imperialist policy, the US is downright uncouth. A future historian will no doubt trace the dumbing down of humanity to this. It began with the god awful “business casual” that the US invented because they could not dress well. There was also the misspelling of English words and then the use of an “of” after “comprises”. A US president invented the word “normalcy” because he could not spell normality. Thanks to the US, we also have Fox News carrying on as a serious news channel when it cannot pass even as a parody. Thanks to the US, we now call football “soccer” and football means US football because the ignorant US citizen does not know better. Then, of course, you have people like Ann Coulter saying that it is “soccer” that is not competitive while US “football”, i.e. gridiron, is. The wonders never cease. The whole world consequently has gone to the dogs and this is the reason the term “ugly American” exists. The ugly American now is that intellectual in that terrible tweed jacket, sitting in a coffee shop with a Macbook in front of him.

Well the time has come for the rest of the world to tell the ugly American to lump it.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com