A MAELSTROM OF GOBBLEDEGOOK

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/04/24/a-maelstrom-of-gobbledegook/

A circus of religious terminology and manipulation

Sadiq (the truthful) and Ameen (the trustworthy) were the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)’s attributes, because he was eminently truthful and trustworthy. They became some of the names he was known by, in a society in which people were customarily called ‘Father of so-and-so’, or ‘Keeper of this or that’.

In Pakistan, although originally the constitution called for no such thing, amendments to Articles 62 and 63 in 1973 made being ‘Sadiq’ and ‘Ameen’ requirements for holding legislative office, which effectively disqualifies almost everyone.

Sadiq and Ameen referred to the man who was the Messenger of God. If anyone were to inherit the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)’s job as Messenger of God, a requirement to live up to the same titles would make sense. But inheriting that job is out of the question. So although one might aspire to the Prophet (PBUH)’s values, it makes little sense to make his attributes a legal condition, now, for other public office, for other people. In any case, what is the litmus test, and who is to administer it? Therefore let’s give the circus a rest. This bandying of religion and so called religious terminology is sickening and nothing but deliberate manipulation of public sentiment since we have a public that is happy to accept that manipulation and is all too often unable to detect it. Although in fact, most publics everywhere are not too different.

This government has been attempting to purge those amendments from Articles 62 and 63, since once these requirements are removed those Articles can no longer be used as a tool to prosecute legislators for not coming up to scratch, in the sense of Sadiq and Ameen. A committee headed by Zahid Hamid has been deliberating the matter. It is another matter that the sudden desire for such a purge is like Richard Nixon trying to change the rules concerning obstruction of justice after Watergate became public. You wonder if that committee headed by Mr. Hamid will carry on its deliberations now that we have been informed that the PM is neither Sadiq nor Ameen.

Raise your hands, all those who ever thought he was.

No one?

Aww, that’s just too bad.

Politicians are good at manipulating public sentiment using words the public is comfortable with, which explains Donald Trump’s limited vocabulary, his willingness to honour the ‘dumb’ Australian deal, and his pronouncement that “It’s a very, very terrible thing that is going on in the world today.” Such language is one of the factors that led to his election, but not for the reasons that most people think.

Sarah Sloat mentions an article by Philip Roth in The New Yorker, where Roth equated Donald Trump’s limited vocabulary with ignorance, since vocabulary has traditionally been an indicator of intellectual acumen, or its absence. “But”, Sloat says, “It has become increasingly apparent to researchers that a non-expansive vocabulary isn’t necessarily the sign of a failing mind; rather, it might be the hallmark of a person sly enough to hook his listeners and persuade them using only a few words.” She says “An analysis by The New York Times found that Trump frequently repeats the same divisive words — like “stupid,” “horrible”, and “weak.” By means of this repetition she says, the “speaker guarantees that his audience walks away with his most important points in mind.” She also says that by using few words liberally sprinkled with cuss words, Trump wants the audience “to feel like he’s one of them. And that level of manipulation is anything but dumb.”

Well we’ve known this for years. Here, words or phrases that smack of Arabic will have the greatest impact. They need make little or no sense. We’ve had the ‘Tauheen e Risalat’ laws which no one dares touch because people kill to protect them, no matter how much our beloved Rasool (PBUH) condemned killing. There are the precious Sharia laws, although no word is more loosely defined than ‘Sharia’: what that is, whose Sharia it refers to, and how that applies to present times is yet nebulously understood.

Since it seems to be sufficient to give something an Arabic name to make it inviolate it can’t be long before all – rather than just the optional few – car number plates will be required to carry the words ‘Al-Bakistan’ along with the registration number, and it will be against the law to scrap old plates because it would be Tauheen e Risalat, and the constitution will be amended to say so. Unless of course the Ruet e Hilal committee says it’s okay, and then we can go ahead and chuck them, but only before the first session of the Majlis e Uzma, and after the Adalat e Aalia has been convened.

WHEN TALK IS CHEAP AND ACTION NON-EXISTENT

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/04/15/when-talk-is-cheap-and-action-non-existent/

When talk is cheap and action non-existent

Because what can you say in the face of Mardan?

Sometimes things are bleak beyond tears. The brutal, horrific murder of young Mashal, a student at Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan, is one such. What do you say when young people upon whom your hopes were pinned as – perhaps – the bearers of change for the better, turn out to be more bestial and bigoted than their elders? If any of the many young men who beat Mashal their fellow student to death, read this, I hope they will think of what they and their mobster friends have done, just think. They not only turned upon their own, rejected the teachings of peace, compassion and tolerance contained within the creed they claim to subscribe to, but they inflicted immeasurable agony upon another human being and his loved ones, surely the thing condemned above all in Islam. They also presumed to tread upon the territory of God…whom they pretend to worship…by pronouncing judgement in a sphere that belongs to God alone. Did you see, they actually forced Mashal to recite the Quran before torturing and killing him? Did they see, do we see, that almost every verse of the Holy Quran begins with the words ‘In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful’? Does anyone understand what that means? My God, this has to stop, this spouting of the ‘b’ word. My heart goes out to Mashal who is now beyond fear and pain, and to his family who has a lifetime to live through it. And to this country whose men made up that vicious, murdering mob of…surely it is too kind to call them men.

Where is this country headed when such things can happen? What is behind this?

Young people need something to do. They need to keep not just their hands but their minds busy. It is in the natural order of things. And when they do not find these things they drag a project out from under a stone to involve themselves in, whatever that project may be. And this is what allows them to play right into the hands of people who need ‘martyrs’, or a mob to carry out their distorted mission whatever that is. It is this instinct that is used to gain support both for wonderful projects and for utterly devastating ones, such as this event in Mardan.

Imran Khan tweeted: “Am in touch with KP IG since last night on condemnable lynching of student in Mardan. Firm action necessary. Law of the jungle can’t prevail.”

No it shouldn’t prevail, but it does. Nor should this mindset prevail, but it does. Nor should young persons be so readily available to do the dirty work for murderers. Please condemn the mindset as well as the breaking of the law, the law of man and of God. Humanity has also been killed here.

We need an organised effort to harness this energy among the young and direct it towards something constructive, failing which they will expend it in acts of vandalism and violence, in anything that makes them feel part of a group, participating in what they are taught is the grander, larger scheme of things. We really need remedial action.

Clubs. I know that sounds gratingly out of context in the current context, as would be the mention of Jacuzzis following a death by drowning, but it is not. The word gets a rise out of people because they associate it with something frivolous and bad. Well, like everything else clubs can be relaxing, or they can run on a scale from pointless to outright debauched. But others can be constructive and productive, and useful and one should possess the understanding to perceive the difference. Clubs can and do exist for young people as places where they can read, meet each other and gain information, take part in activities and sports, and achieve something. They are in short a way of bringing young people together and harnessing the younger generation’s boundless energy and new ideas, which can seldom be harnessed at home, except where the family is unusually active and enlightened.

Education is crucial, but it is as important to provide avenues for using it, along with better attitudes and values, otherwise education is like painting your front door and leaving the rest of the house knee deep in muck.

There are clubs that help young people participate in social work. They aim to motivate young people to educating society and fostering literacy. Communities need and can use young people, to construct buildings, paint walls, teach school, dig drains, run radio stations, television shows, to cook and distribute food for the needy and run fund raising drives. Instead of allowing them to do little beyond pose for selfies and dress up. Not using this huge source of power is like a senseless reliance on nothing but WAPDA in the presence of boundless solar energy, like using solar energy for nothing but bombs.

Mr. Khan I appreciate your twitterings. But if you can expend as much energy into keeping young minds constructively occupied as you did with your hospital then you will have succeeded as a politician and a visionary, something that is not happening at present.

THE NON-EXISTENT QUEUE

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/02/13/the-non-existent-queue/

One step forward, two steps back

A visit to a hospital is never a pleasure, but the reason for that absence of pleasure ought to be the illness that brings a person to the hospital, not the hospital itself. Unfortunately, that isn’t how it is. A simple visit to Jinnah hospital in Lahore to get polio vaccinations before travelling was a nightmare, although illness was not the reason for the visit.

You enter the hospital via the exit gate, which, in spite of the sign appears to be the way in.

Parking at Jinnah Hospital is – I don’t believe there is a word that would adequately describe the experience. ‘Nightmare’ seems gloriously inadequate. But let me tell you, I regret not tipping the parking attendant, an amazingly good-humoured, patient man, skilled at his job. The mess that was the parking lot was not his fault. There was simply no space for the cars present. He was getting people to double-park, asking them not to leave the hand-break on, or the car in gear, so that he could push the car up or down as required. I did as he asked. There was simply no other way. I was assured there was no parking either in or out of the hospital. Mind you, I was charged for that parking. All of thirty rupees.

You wonder what could be achieved if the armed forces of Pakistan would divert some of their budget into trivial things, such as health care for the masses, instead of into expensive killing machines.

In out-patients, at the Reception desk, there was the usual herd of Pakistanis falling over each other trying to get at the Receptionist. Not a sign of a queue anywhere in sight.

In today’s world, when man has got to the moon, when communications have reached the point they have, and medical science is what it is, queues in Pakistan remain what they always were, nonexistent. It is amazing that the people of a country fail to understand that to queue is to save time. Not the other way around.

This is also how it was at a recent trip into the Punjab countryside, where a ‘tralla’, a Chingchi rickshaw and a score of cars all decided to cross a bridge, but no one was willing to leave a lane free for the traffic coming from the other side. The resultant snarl took a good twenty minutes to clear. All because this nation does not believe in queues.

There’s an interesting bit in Khalid Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner’ in which Amir’s Baba says that, “There is no act more wretched than stealing – be it a life or a loaf of naan.” It is a simple truth. Even to kill someone is to steal from them, in the case of killing it is to steal their life, and to rob his/her family of a family member and his employer of a worker, and so on.

To refuse to queue is also to rob a person or several persons of their rightful turn, at a service, a product, whatever it is that is being presented at that point.

Providing health services is not easy. And it is expensive. Should it not be a priority to search for at least those aspects of a health service that can be improved without a great outlay of money?

As it so happens, teaching the public to form queues is one of those inexpensive things, and it can be implemented immediately. The other thing is to enforce a strict policy of cleanliness and against littering. It can be done. It has been done in other countries. In a hospital it is crucial. It only needs the will, and not much money.

Both these things are important. I’m not going to harp on cleanliness because everyone knows about that, particularly in the case of hospitals. Where hospital are concerned both queues and cleanliness save lives. Cleanliness for obvious reasons, and queues since it’s only when you wait your turn that everyone can be seen, without the need to push, shout, or negotiate a scrum.

The first thing is to convince hospital workers of this fact.

The second thing would be to enforce a queue at the point where it must be formed. Barriers? Personnel?

There was a time when Shahbaz Sharif as Chief Minister was obsessed with drivers not stopping their cars over the line at a red light. Traffic police had instructions to give tickets to anyone who so much as put a toe across the line. And drivers had got used to it. They didn’t put a toe across the line.

There was, and still is a rule (thank God) that marriage halls and hotel venues must end functions at 10.30 pm in Lahore. It is enforced, it is adhered to. People complained in the beginning but they’re used to it now, and they like it.

So it’s a question of enforcing this. Strictly, diligently, without exception. It won’t cost anything. And at least in a world where huge advances have been made, the people have Pakistan will have made one simple advance: they’d have learnt to form a line, and wait their turn. Because while I agree that CPEC is important, Trump is a worry, India is a pain, the Grammy’s are riveting and remittances have slipped, unless Pakistan concentrates on teaching its people this one little crucial thing, the country cannot progress. It’s like trying to write a computer software without bits and bytes.

When I came back to my car it was still unscratched. I wish I’d tipped that attendant.

'LET US WALK THE ROAD OF PEACE' - BULLEH SHAH

What is achieved by arresting random persons and maltreating them?

Gangs of sex criminals have sexually abused both children and adults in Kasur for at least as far back as 2009.  The acts of abuse are recorded, and families of the victims blackmailed and forced to pay money to stop those tapes from being sold in this country and overseas. Many tapes are sold regardless. To add insult to injury it appears that these groups operate not in spite of law enforcement agencies but with their blessings, with patrons in political circles. Hundreds of children have suffered from this abuse for several years by now.

It is sacrilegious that such things should happen – and particularly in Kasur, the home and burial place of the Sufi saint Bulleh Shah – but they do. Kasur is also the twentieth most populous city in Pakistan.

In 2015 a police official was arrested. In this case his victim was not a child but a married woman who was drugged and raped. She was then blackmailed with the threat of making recordings of the rape public. When the woman informed the police the rapist fired shots at her house to force her to withdraw her complaint.

Also in 2015, two pedophiles were arrested and sentenced to life in prison.

While it is good that an example was made of these men, all this is obviously just the tip of the iceberg.

Some weeks ago the body of a five year old child was found in an under construction house in Kasur. She had been missing for four days, taken away from the street in front of their house. A post mortem revealed the little girl had been raped before being murdered.

When the fact that there are gangs abusing children and blackmailing their families was exposed some years ago, there was a public outcry. There was also a public outcry at the revelation that the police and public officials were supporting this abuse. As a result, when the body of that five year old child was discovered in the under construction house there appears to have been a swift reaction. Families residing in Kasur have spoken of men being taken into custody at random.  Hundreds of men appear to have been detained, some for weeks. They were beaten, and released, and others taken into custody, in what is obviously the response of officials keen to be ‘seen doing something’ about the problem.

This is what happens when there is no prescribed procedure for dealing with problems, or when a prescribed procedure is put aside. In an attempt to appease the public, officials indulge in such mindless ‘visible’ acts that make it seem as though ‘something is being done.’ You see it on the roads when there is a terror threat, when barriers are suddenly put up resulting in traffic jams hundreds of yards long. It is unclear what these barriers achieve since all that is done is that motorbikes containing men or boys are stopped and their documents scrutinised. What this tells anyone is unclear. What does, for example, a security man at the CSD find when he stops someone and glances at her identity card? Can he tell if that is a ‘wanted’ number? Can he tell if it’s a fake card?  Why would a terrorist be so insane as to use a wanted number or an obviously fake card? In the case of road blocks, women are generally peered at and waved through. Are women incapable of carrying out terrorist attacks? Why would terrorists employ only young, lower middle class males (excuse the stereotyping) on motorbikes to carry out their schemes? They’re terrorists, not fools.

So, going back to Kasur, what is arresting random persons and beating the bejesus out of them before letting them go likely to achieve? Would it not be a better idea to trace incriminating videos from sale point to source, meticulously, and discretely? Or to follow leads and reports,  because people have reported rape, blackmail and other such crimes, to follow those leads diligently and doggedly to some conclusion? This, if anyone remembers, is what the police is supposed to do, when it is genuinely keen to do something.

And most of all, would it not be an idea to make an example of criminals by sentencing them when they are located, so that others fear to tread where these people have gone? This is what justice is supposed to achieve.

Gangs and individual criminals proliferate like rats, in places that are considered to be congenial. This is not entirely the fault of the public but equally the fault of law enforcement, political and administrative officials. In any case there is a procedure by means of which a person may be apprehended and questioned. If this is not followed, and an Al-Ghraib like atmosphere is being created in a city in response to crimes which are providing some kind of perceived reason for such response – there is something seriously wrong with the laws and procedures of the country in which such things take place.

THE WALL, THE BAN AND THE WORLD

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/01/30/the-wall-the-ban-and-the-world/

When no place is homogeneously composed of its original people, is exclusivity possible?

  

There’s a message doing the rounds on social media for the past few days. It says:

‘Standing on an Ikea (Swedish) podium, behind bullet proof Saint Gobain Glass (French), smiling at a 4K Sony (Japanese) video camera, speaking into a Dolby Sennheiser (German) microphone, with vigorous hand gestures giving a glimpse of a Rolex (Swiss) watch under the cuff, he patriotically said: “Buy American, Hire American, Stop Immigrants” – standing beside a Slovenian wife’.

And that begs the question. Is it possible, in today’s world, to stuff the genie back in the bottle, if the genie equals all things foreign?

Not all of anything is made in just the one country today. And why should it be, when there is such a wealth of talent all over the world? Every country has something to contribute to the whole and with modern communications facilitating that, what is to stop individual countries from making the most of what others have to offer, in terms of goods and services? Nothing, and if something tries to, it recoils upon the person(s) who does so.

If foreign doctors left the UK, for instance, the NHS – the National Health Service of Britain – would fold. A study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) quoted in The Independent indicates that a whopping 36 percent of doctors working for the NHS were born overseas. What’s more, more than 27 percent of nurses in the NHS were also born overseas. Working the other way around, the UK is second only to Germany in exporting doctors to other countries. 12,000 British medics, it seems, work abroad.

America imports in total more than 12 percent of global imports – and that includes electronics, machines, cars, oil, medications, medical equipment, furniture, gems, chemical, and plastics. If the world ceased its supplies to the US, it seems the US would fold. All the achievements made by the US – its medical advances, space travel, etc. – everything depends on these things, and, like a ripple-effect, many things around the world depend on American achievements.

If a country imports many things that does not mean that country is a failure. It is what the country does with those imports that matters. Are those items that are imported used to make some larger product? With developed countries that is generally the case. Such dependence is therefore not a ‘bad’ thing, and in the course of the natural progression of today’s world where nothing is static, and as a result no one is static, no place is homogenously composed of ‘orang asli’, the original people of a land.

Russia is probably one of the world’s most self-sufficient countries with much of its own oil, coal, gas, metals, and grain. Yet it imports many things – including medicines which are crucial to its population. Norway would rank next because it, too, has natural resources in abundance – which in turn seem to indicate that self-sufficiency is measured by natural resources. Not every country possesses abundant natural resources, and accessing natural resources requires technology, equipment, man-power – and here’s where the inter-dependence comes in again.

As time goes on civilisations become increasingly dependent on each other. It has always been the case. Better rail networks opened up entire countries, and areas that were uninhabited before became settled: the central parts of Australia, the more remote parts of North America, Africa, Russia and China. Better communications in wireless technology achieved the same. And now, when we have space travel within our grasp, and communication abilities like nothing seen before, how can anyone expect human movement to be restricted? When many countries contribute to the progress of one, when one nation potentially impacts on so many, how and why is it possible to keep the human element out of the equation? To expect it to be so is to restrict progress, not the other way around. It is also one way of reducing security.

To impose restrictions on travel has never led to amicable relationships, and non-amicable relationships are hardly the way to seek peace. There is something odd about those with malevolent intentions: isolation rather than proximity fans their ill-will, because they need to see and dwell upon what those they love to hate are doing. Like in every case, education is the way out of this violent mess. Nothing else will work.

SHORT TERM POLICIES CAUSE LONG TERM SUFFERING

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/01/24/short-term-policies-cause-long-term-suffering/

And attitudes filter down from the top

Barack Obama is a lucky man, a highly educated, intelligent, dignified and eloquent man, with an equally intelligent and elegant wife. He had several achievements as President, and health care reform was one of them. Another was that he put an end to certain interrogation techniques that had been initiated by the previous government. There were others.

What makes Obama luckier is that he has been succeeded by a person who makes him look even better.

Trump loses out big time by comparison. Had he not been so ham-handed there would be more questions about the Obama government’s role in Syria and the concurrent tragedy in Aleppo. As it is, all that might be examined later. For now the focus is on radicalism and terrorism, which Trumps policies are very likely to exacerbate.

In his inaugural address, President Donald Trump vowed to fight radical Islamic terrorism and “eradicate it from the face of the earth,” promising that “We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones and unite the civilised world against radical Islamic terrorism.”

You wish he’d share his plans for doing that, since most of the world would love to eradicate terrorism, Islamic or otherwise. We in Pakistan suffer from it as much as any other country. Just recently there was a blast in a bazaar in Parachinar which was said to be caused by an IED, for which the Lashkar e Jhangvi and the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan are said to be responsible.

Of course terrorism stems from no single quarter, and the definition can be broadened to include any situation that creates terror and destruction. The American attack on Iraq following 9/11 can be called terrorism. So can the war in Afghanistan, and way back before either of these – the nuclear bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima when millions died.  Most civilisations have committed terrorism at some stage or another. The intention is not to justify the act, but to identify a fact. Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledged the role of Japanese soldiers in damage and suffering in World War II, and earlier under Emperor Hirohito when millions of people were massacred and experimented upon.

There were German war crimes, they were also terrorism. When the Wehrmacht had control of Poland, hundreds of towns and villages were burned and the Wehrmacht carried out more than seven hundred mass executions. Altogether, it is estimated that more than sixteen thousand Poles fell victim to these atrocities.

During the Second Boer War, the British rounded up around a sixth of the Boer population – mainly women and children – and detained them in overcrowded camps. Of the more than hundred thousand people interned in the camps, more than twenty thousand Boers died, along with an unknown number of black Africans.

When peaceful protesters defied a government order and demonstrated against British colonial rule in Amritsar, India, on 13 April 1919, they were trapped inside the walled Jallianwala Gardens and fired upon by soldiers. The soldiers, under the orders of Brigadier Reginald Dyer, fired until they ran out of ammunition, killing hundreds of protesters and injuring more than a thousand within 10 minutes. Brigadier Dyer was later held up as a hero by the British public, which raised thousands of pounds as reward for him.

Pakistan is no land of the pure. Its war crimes in Bengal come under the title ‘genocide,’ when in 1971 the Pakistan army and its supporting radical militia killed and raped between 300,000–500,000 Bengali men, women and children. Some sources say this figure is too low.

What else were all these acts, but terrorism?

So, yes, the world does face a problem with terrorism. And yes it currently also faces the problem of so called ‘Islamic’ radical terrorism in a big way. But will a Trump style wall and exclusionist policies achieve any improvement?

Attitudes tend to filter down from the top. Acts that people are afraid or ashamed of, become kosher when they are supported or indulged in by the powers that be themselves. Which makes it rather a dubious start to a jihad against terrorism to have Donald Trump as President, a man whose sordid language and attitude towards women is not unlike that of the Taliban as evinced in Afghanistan. You can strip them, or whip them, where’s the difference?

Ever since Donald Trump won the election, racism and misogyny have been on the rise on American streets and campuses.

Radicalism and terrorism are fostered by resentment, although those are not the only causes. Donald Trump has promised to overturn Obama Care. In one of his first steps as president, Mr. Trump has signed an executive order targeting the health care reforms of his predecessor. If that does not create resentment, it would be very surprising, just as the ‘interrogation techniques’ Obama put an end to must have contributed to resentment.

It really is time that the American Government ceased indulging in short term policies, just like governments in Pakistan. It was American short term policies in Afghanistan that helped create the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the ISIS, a creation Pakistan had an equal hand in. Governments, if they really wish to eradicate terrorism, should stop contributing towards it.

It is time the military and arms houses took the back seat and acted upon saner advice. Perhaps from think tanks. But all this will be difficult while the present government is in the White House.

America is truly a great country, and one wishes it well. But this time you wonder what they have brought upon themselves, and upon the rest of the world.

A POWERFUL PLATFORM

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/01/17/a-powerful-platform/

Is social media threatening?

It used to be the province of the people’s representatives to disseminate the point of view of governments, political regimes – and of the people of the countries to whom these governments and regimes belonged. Somehow though the voice of the people seemed rather muted and at times outright absent, even though many of these countries were democracies or at least they called themselves so.

Instead, for the last two decades or so the electronic media has taken over the role of disseminating the people’s voice, and has been responsible for driving world events. That platform from which the people have been speaking for the past two decades is not a parliament, an assembly or polling booth, it is social media, across divides and countries. It is a platform that allows people to have their say in a way that those other platforms never did. It can be called one of the main forces on the world stage. Democracy has taken an interesting turn.

Certain spin-offs of a powerful cyber platform have had their down side. The ‘Arab Spring’ an uprising of the Arab people born of a dissatisfaction of the way things were, led to the civil war in Syria now taking place, which has led to so much loss of life and such a huge displacement of people. The uprising took place on the shoulders of the electronic media, by its new and extensive use by the Arab public. At the height of the Arab uprisings (or Arab Spring as it has been dubbed) Facebook had well over 27 million users in the Arab world. In mid-2011, In Egypt and Tunisia, almost all of those polled claimed that social media, Facebook and Twitter, played a large role in their activism. In countries such as Yemen and Libya where social media does not have as large a presence, its people used YouTube, email and cell phones. It seems that the voice of the people, like murder, will out.

Interestingly, in Egypt in addition to social media another powerful platform has been the mosque from where the call for change was issued and widely heard and acted upon.

Good or not good is not where this column leads, it only indicates several points worth noting. It points firstly to social media as a new and powerful platform, of the people, for the people and by the people… a platform that by virtue of being the voice of the people demands respect.

It indicates secondly that perhaps governments and political regimes do not after all speak for the people as much as they would like us to believe. That those traditional platforms, parliaments, assemblies and booths where available have proved ineffective or insufficient, or that in some way for some reason have failed to perform. If people would like these to remain the major platforms then there needs to be some major changes to the way they function.

The third point is that social media and the internet, given that it is the force it is should be given appropriate facilities and opportunities to carry on providing a voice to the people. In countries where social media is suppressed the act can be viewed as synonymous with the suppression of democracy and freedom of speech, making the suppression an undemocratic act. Like the genie, cyber platforms cannot now be stuffed back into the bottle. They are here to stay.

The fourth aspect is that mosques, although not electronic media – unless you take the electronic microphone used by mosques into account appear to have been as loud and powerful as any social media, judging by Egypt’s experience. This is not said facetiously to refer to the indiscriminate use of the microphones by mosques, although the temptation is great. Instead what is referred to is the inherent power of the mosque to provide a platform for Muslims wherever they visit mosques, and for the masses in Muslim countries. Any regulation of social media should include regulation of mosques.

President Obama, as he leaves the Presidency, is said to be worried about the spread of fake news on social media. It is a legitimate concern. According to The Guardian, it seems that ‘fake news – whether claiming that the Pope had endorsed Trump, or that Clinton sold weapons to Isis – actually outperformed real news on the platform, with more shares, reactions and comments.’ But that still does not provide reason for suppressing social media, only reason to regulate it rationally. Which calls into play the question of how much is rational making regulation a tricky business.

The dilemma presented by social media is very similar to that presented by the transition of power from Obama’s more level headed hands – responsible as they are for much of Syria’s trouble today, to Trump’s, the hands of a man who does not have the vote of the majority of American people, only the vote of a majority in the Electoral College. It does not legitimise placing restrictions on democracy as it is practiced in the US but raises the potential of change and/or amendment. As sure enough, following the election results in the US this year there has been debate concerning the electoral system of the USA and whether election by an electoral college is as good an idea as it was meant to be.  If it legitimises placing restrictions on democracy, it is time to question democracy itself, to the extent to which it should and does provide a platform and power to the people.

The restrictions imposed on freedom of information and expression by Pakistan’s new cybercrime laws should be viewed in this light, although perhaps the cyber world has already been viewed as being too powerful for the regime in power, and restrictions placed on it for that very reason. That makes the new laws not for the people but against them. One must ask oneself the question in this country whether this is the direction we would like our governance to take.