Author: Gina Khan

  • Benazir, Daughter of destiny

    Thirty years ago I watched my mum cry when Zulfiqar Bhutto was executed, today I cried for the daughter of Pakistan’s destiny.

    Benazir Bhutto was a more than a beacon of light for mobilising Pakistanis against Islamism and instilling Pakistan’s democracy. She had the same fire, passion, commitment that her father had for his country, and for the tenets of democracy. In 1986 after years in jails and then exile, she left the safety of England to return to Pakistan and took on dictatorship, she bravely ignored death threats and achieved her ambitions to become Pakistan’s first woman Prime Minister.

    In her autobiography Daughter of Destiny in 1988, she was the first to identify the ‘Islamization’ of Pakistan and the reversed
    rights and freedoms of Pakistani women under President Zia who engaged with Islamists in the 80s. She was a threat to Islamists and Jihadists who deploy an anti-democracy propaganda with violent terror, and yet she returned from exile again, knowing she faced death threats, only to be assassinated in a barbaric Jihadist’s attack. She was a threat to Islamists and Pakistan’s only glimmer of hope of restoring full democracy.
    She gave her life for Pakistan and was self determined in her quest to establish democracy again, as she once did on the first of December 1988.

    I hope she now becomes the inspiration that British Pakistani women aspire to, so that we too can fight the extremism
    in Britain that Jihadists have embedded into our communities; I hope that British Pakistani women stand up for the tenets of democracy that we live in. I hope that British Pakistani women take off the black headscarves and veils to adapt the true Pakistani style and dress that represents Pakistani culture as she did and oppose the cult Jihadism represents. I hope we can collectively oppose the ‘ideology’ that she alone as a woman opposed without fear. I hope we break our silence now to honour her memory and aspirations.

    Benazir is an inspiration and Icon for Pakistani men and women. Jihadism opposes democracies, opposes women
    leaders, reverses the equality and the freedom of muslim women. I hope British Pakistani women stand up with the same passion and bravery that Benazir demonstrated, against an extreme global ideology. Islam hasn’t just been hijacked, it has been blacklisted by Jihadists and Islamists…who aim to destroy democracies and people who want to live in a civilised world. I hope British Pakistani women in Britain take the first lead against the suicide human bombs created by Jihadists and their mentors.

    I hope for a lot, but more than anything I hope Benazir becomes our symbol of inspiration, never to be forgotten.

    Pakistan has lost a daughter, a sister, a mother, but she will remain forever in our hearts…as there won’t be a Pakistani woman
    of her calibre and class to inspire British Pakistani women or people again.

    27th December 2007 will be remembered as the saddest day in the history of Pakistan for generations to come.

    She will always be our hero.

    Gina Khan, Birmingham

  • Human Rights Are Geographically Relative

    ‘What one western culture deems a gross violation is not so in another culture.’

  • Rights Here, Rights Now

    It’s no good waiting until after the revolution.

  • McGinn Reviews Honderich; Sparks Fly

    ‘This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad.’

  • ‘Repressed Memory’ as Cultural Phenomenon

    Romanticism created fertile soil for the idea that the mind could expunge a trauma from consciousness.

  • Malaysia: Only Muslims Can Say ‘Allah’

    Christians not allowed to use the word.

  • Reactions to Bhutto Assassination

    People are upset.

  • Pakistanis React

    ‘She was a liberal force, a hope for a Pakistan overrun by militancy. Now there is a great vacuum.’

  • Location

    Merry Xmas. (No war on Christmas here.)

    As may be obvious, I’m away for a few days. I’m on the Monterey peninsula doing my day job, and Jeremy and Cheryl are here for a visit. We went to Point Lobos yesterday, on a brilliant beautiful windy day, with pelicans flying back and forth in front of us. Jeremy took a few thousand photographs (he’s a professional you know) and he says he will post some here when he gets back. Normal broadcasting will resume on Friday.

  • Moses Tells Jesus and Mo About Otherness

    ‘We in the west have no privileged place from which to judge other cultures and traditions.’

  • Andrew Anthony on Wishful Thinking and Evasion

    Far-right hate speech bad, hate speech in a mosque – er – um –

  • Ali Eteraz on One-eyed Ideology

    Neocons seized the human rights narrative, but that doesn’t mean the left should abandon it.

  • AC Grayling on Nick Clegg and Not-God

    Keep religion out of politics and out of the mouths of politicians.

  • Niger – Where Girlhood Ends on the Marriage Bed

    In many countries what happened to Hadjo would be called paedophilia and the male attacker would be imprisoned.

  • Student Sues Teacher for ‘Anti-Christian’ Remarks

    Student and parents filed a lawsuit alleging history teacher violated student’s constitutional rights.

  • Review of Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West

    Postcolonial studies placed a dime-store psychology of empire at the center of every discussion of ‘East meets West.’

  • Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the News

    Public Opinion demonstrated how much people see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear.

  • Review of Michael Walzer’s Thinking Politically

    Walzer’s goal in these essays is to argue that liberal values can and should be preserved in leftist politics.

  • Mitchell Cohen on a Left That Doesn’t Learn

    People who pivot until they can ‘understand’ almost anything in order to keep their own presuppositions intact.

  • Smuggling

    ‘If the essays in “Thinking Politically” share a single theme, or better, a common tension,’ says Adam Kirsch, ‘it is Mr. Walzer’s effort to reconcile his liberal instincts with his leftist commitments to socialism and cultural relativism.’

    The problem for Mr. Walzer, as a left liberal, is that the left has never really shared the morality of liberalism, or even credited it…To the left, the liberal love of freedom is a self-deception, designed to obscure the fact that the material conditions of life leave most [people] unable to enjoy their freedom. The danger of this conviction is that, once the love of freedom is discredited, freedom itself usually follows, as the history of the last century shows again and again. And when freedom is lost, equality — which was supposed to take its place, in the Marxist vision — also disappears, since without the liberal respect for the individual, there is no basis on which to erect equality.

    Unless you just swap group equality, ‘community’ equality, cultural equality. Which is exactly what a lot of people seem to have done, often without fully realizing it, or the implications of it.

    It is only because he is deeply wedded to liberalism that Mr. Walzer assumes that all cultures can converge on the liberal belief that the self-legislating individual is the ultimate ground of value. Ironically, Mr. Walzer seems to be guilty of the very same error that he chastises in his polemics against John Rawls and the Rawlsians: His ostensibly neutral moral deliberation rests on principles that he smuggles in because he cannot openly declare them.

    Ah yes – the ever-present danger. I was reading a long article or declaration from the Vatican a couple of hours ago, and noticing exactly that. It makes certain things crystal clear and leaves obscure the implications of those things – because it cannot openly declare them. It smuggles in the principles that make one set of things more important – more clarity-worthy – than others. Always something to watch for (in self as well as others, of course).

    “If each of us walks with his own god, then all of us will sit in peace under our vines and fig trees,” Mr. Walzer writes sanguinely. But the assumption that our god wants us to sit in peace, rather than to convert the heathen, is already a thoroughly liberal assumption, which would find no purchase in, say, fundamentalist Islam.

    Another assumption is that we will all even be able to sit in peace under our vines and fig trees. What will actually happen is that prosperous men will be able to sit in peace under their vines and fig trees while women do all the domestic work and unprosperous men cultivate the vines and fig trees.

    The alternative to this illusory neutrality would be openly to confess that liberalism is a positive creed, which holds some human types and some forms of society to be better than others. Such an admission would considerably ease Mr. Walzer’s difficulties in articulating a criticism of the enslavement of women — a practice he clearly loathes but finds it hard, given his axioms, to directly condemn.

    Yes. JS and I are busy doing that for this book that articulates a criticism of the enslavement of women (that’s why I was reading a Vatican declaration a couple of hours ago). We openly confess that we hold some forms of society to be better than others. That item is much too big to smuggle.