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Pakistani right cries ‘blasphemy’ to muzzle progressives

A virulent social media campaign to paint five disappeared Pakistani activists as blasphemers deserving execution has spotlighted how right-wing efforts to muzzle liberal voices using the country’s draconian laws have found a powerful new platform online.

The five men had stood against religious intolerance and at times criticised Pakistan’s military, with several of them running progressive Facebook pages.

They vanished within days of each other earlier this month, sparking fears of a government crackdown. No group has claimed responsibility. Security sources denied being involved.

As publicity surrounding their disappearances grew, with protests in major cities, observers such as Digital Rights Foundation founder Nighat Dad began to notice a worrying trend online.

“There are people trying to label these missing bloggers blasphemers. And the people supporting…(them) are being labelled blasphemers,” Dad told AFP.

The allegation can be fatal in deeply conservative Muslim Pakistan, where at least 17 people remain on death row for blasphemy.

Rights groups have long criticised the colonial-era legislation as a vehicle for personal vendettas. Even unproven allegations can result in mob lynchings.

And now such accusations targeting the disappeared activists are multiplying on Facebook and Twitter.

“The group of atheists committing blasphemy on Facebook… have been defeated,” said a recent post by Pakistan Defence, a powerful pro-military Facebook page run by anonymous right-wing elements which has 7.5 million likes.

The post, liked more than 5,400 times, triggered a flood of threats including one suggesting the activists’ “bullet riddled corpses should be found beside any gutter”.

Other pages such as ISI Pakistan1, with 192,000 Facebook likes, called for such “enemies of Islam” to be “eliminated”.

– Self-censorship –
The attacks are perpetuated by right-wing trolls such as 25-year-old Farhan Virk, who admits he has few real friends but has 54,000 followers on his verified Twitter account.

By re-tweeting the blasphemy charges against the activists, Virk gives them a prominence on social media that can influence the mainstream news agenda.

A number of NGOs and observers believe the campaigns to silence progressive voices are carefully coordinated.

Digital rights activist Dad points to what she says is a periodic surge of new right-wing Twitter accounts with just a handful of followers whose “only purpose is to attack us.”

The end result is often self-censorship, with the online attacks following a well-worn pattern.

Journalist Rabia Mehmood criticised Pakistan online after human rights activist Sabeen Mahmud was assassinated in 2015.

Mehmood received a barrage of death and rape threats on Twitter and Facebook, including many from newly created accounts, accusing her of being anti-state and an enemy of Islam.

“Overnight there were tweets warning me that there were bullets with my name on them for criticising the military and the intelligence agencies,” she said.

“Since then I have started watching what I say.”

The new wave of blasphemy charges that followed the activist disappearances prompted a number of liberal online commentators to close their accounts completely.

– Shrinking space for dissent –
Pakistan used its legal agreements with Facebook and Twitter to temporarily remove a slew of left-wing accounts in 2014, and enacted a cybercrime law last year that critics say will stifle genuine dissent.

Meanwhile, pages such as Pakistan Defence appear to operate freely, despite content that would appear to contravene basic community standards.

A Twitter spokesman said support teams have been retrained on enforcement policies, “including special sessions on cultural and historical contextualisation of hateful conduct”.

Facebook said it routinely worked to “prohibit hateful content and remove credible threats of physical harm”.

Observers say the blasphemy allegations against the missing activists have already put their lives in danger of vigilante attack.

In 2011 a liberal governor who criticised the laws was gunned down in Islamabad, while in 2014 a Christian couple falsely accused of desecrating the Koran were killed by a mob, their bodies burned in a brick kiln, to cite just two examples.

“If they come back I don’t think they have a life in this country,” said Shahzad Ahmed, director of campaign group Bytes For All. “They will have to leave.”

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Four rights activists gone missing this week

At least four human rights activists known on social media for their leftist views have gone missing this week, relatives and NGO workers told AFP on Sunday, as analysts voiced rights concerns.

Two of the men — Waqas Goraya and Asim Saeed — disappeared on January 4, according to a cybersecurity NGO, while Salman Haider vanished on Friday and Ahmed Raza Naseer Saturday, relatives said.

The interior ministry has said it will investigate the disappearance of Haider, who is known for his outspoken views on enforced disappearances in Balochistan, but made no reference to the others. All four were active on social media groups.

Pakistan is routinely ranked among the world’s most dangerous for journalists, and reporting critical of the military is considered a major red flag, with journalists at times detained, beaten and even killed.

“The state has controlled TV and now they’re focusing on digital spaces,” said Raza Rumi, a writer and analyst who left Pakistan in 2014 after he was attacked by gunmen who shot his driver dead.

A security source denied intelligence services were involved in the disappearances.

Naseer, who suffers from polio, was taken from his family’s shop in central Punjab province, his brother Tahir told AFP Sunday.
Hours after Haider was due home Friday evening, his wife received a text message from his phone saying he was leaving his car on the Islamabad expressway, his brother Faizan told AFP.

Police later found the car and registered a missing persons report. Faizan said his brother had not received any specific threats.

Waqas Goraya, who is usually a resident of the Netherlands, was picked up on January 4, as was Aasim Saeed, said Shahzad Ahmed, head of cyber security NGO Bytes for All.

“None of these activists have been brought to any court of law or levelled with any charges. Their status disappearance is very worrying not only for the families, but also for citizens and larger social media users in the country,” Ahmad said.

In 2014, when sectarian killings were rife, Salman Haider had penned a poem titled ‘Kafir’, which quickly went viral on social media. The poem critiqued the intolerance prevailing in the country and quickly garnered critical acclaim.

Haider is a lecturer at Fatima Jinnah Women University (FJWU) in Rawalpindi, an actor, writer and a human rights activist, police said, adding that investigators have started examining his social media accounts and e-mail address, as well as combing his mobile phone records.

A case has been registered under Section 365 of the Pakistan Penal Code, which deals with “kidnapping or abducting with intent secretly and wrongfully to confine a person”, at the Loi Bher police station.

Police were also collecting information regarding his activism, the officer said, adding that “although a kidnapping case has been registered, investigators are still not in any position to pinpoint the motive; whether it is a kidnapping or a forced disappearance”.

“An investigation is ongoing and we are thoroughly examining all aspects of the case.”

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Death threat, warning to media spray-painted on Karachi murals

The walls of Karachi Press Club — which had recently been painted with colourful murals of several progressive civil society activists and journalists — were vandalised last night allegedly by members of politico-religious parties.

The messages left by the vandals were spray-painted over the portraits of nearly all women activists featured on the wall.

Though the vandals remain individually unidentified, the walls have the initials of politico-religious parties Pakistan Sunni Tehreek (PST) and Tehreek-i-Labbaik (TLY) sprayed on them.

A call for executing Asia Bibi, currently on death row as a blasphemy accused, was written in large black letters next to the portrait of Yasmeen Lari, a prominent architect, historian and humanitarian aid worker.

Lari’s portrait had been defaced with crude marks spray-painted on her face. A line in Urdu below the painting read:”Immediately arrest and hang Shaan Taseer or you’ll be responsible for the consequences.”

Shaan Taseer is the son of slain Punjab governor Salman Taseer, who was gunned down by his guard for speaking against Pakistan’s blasphemy law and in favour of minorities’ rights. Shaan recently repeated his father’s stance on the blasphemy law, and has been criticised heavily by the religious right for his views.

The portrait of Zubeida Mustafa, a renowned journalist and the first woman in Pakistani mainstream media, had been defaced with the words “Curse on the Jewish media” sprayed across her face. Her quote: “Women’s lack of empowerment condemns us to social problems,” had been defaced with a profanity.

PST’s initials could be seen spray-painted on a mural honouring Perveen Rehman, who was killed in 2013 allegedly for standing up to Karachi’s powerful land mafia. She had been working on documenting land-use around Karachi, and this may have upset entrenched criminal elements in the city.

Her quote: “Development should mean human development,” has been sprayed over with a religious slogan.

The mural dedicated to Fatima Surraiya Bajiya, a playwright and social worker, had likewise been defaced with profanities directed at the Taseer family and demands to release Khadim Hussain Rizvi, who was among more than 150 individuals arrested by authorities in Lahore yesterday for trying to gather for a pro-blasphemy law rally on the day of Salman Taseer’s death.

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CIVIL SOCIETY STRONGLY CONDEMN TORTURE OF GIRL CHILD IN ISLAMABAD

Islamabad: A large number of civil society activists, organizations and networks have strongly condemned the torture of a minor girl employed by a serving judge and also the so-called “resolution” (sic) of the court case against the judge and his spouse.

This case has yet again highlighted the glaring ills of Pakistani society and its justice administration system. We had not yet forgotten the Kasur children’s video atrocity when we are now confronted with a serving judge breaking several laws of the land – but walking away scot-free, after reaching a so-called “compromise” and “forgiveness” agreement with the girl child’s parents, through legal stamped affidavits.

The compromise and forgiveness loophole in the law, so expeditiously exploited by the judge and his spouse, is a convenient tool, employed mostly against the poor and downtrodden by the rich and powerful in Pakistan, as in this case.

We particularly condemn the following illegal acts of commission and omission by individuals and by State organs in this case:
1. the grinding poverty which stripped the girl child’s parents of their inherent parental love and humanity towards their minor daughter; in addition to their responsibilities as her legal guardians;
2. the dishonourable serving judge, who knowingly employed a minor child for domestic labour, in contravention of the laws against child labour and employment;
3. the nature of the “domestic work” demonstrates that the girl child was “pledged” and left by her parents as “bonded labour” with the judge and his spouse, in contravention of Pakistani laws abolishing bonded labour;
4. the serving judge and his spouse brutally mistreated the girl child over a long period of time, including chronic starvation and frequent beating – finally torturing and burning her almost to death, in clear contravention of the Constitution and several Pakistani laws on child protection, as well as the UN CRC, and other UN Conventions to which Pakistan is a State Party;
5. the delayed response and subsequent inaction by the National Centre for Protection of Children (NCPC), Islamabad is indefensible;
6. the illegal, deliberate, mala fide acts of perjury committed at various stages of this case by: the serving judge and his spouse; the relevant police in Islamabad; and the initial examination report by the PIMS medico-legal staff, which came to the fore when the girl child was questioned in camera by the ICT Assistant Commissioner, who deserves commendation for her sensitive handling of this case;
7. the alleged acts of bribery, threat and pressure exerted on the parents by the serving judge to reach a compromise and retract their case;
8. the inhuman action of the state organs in returning the girl child to the same parents who sold her into forced/bonded domestic servitude in the first place – instead of placing her under State care and protection, and penalizing the parents;
9. the silence and inaction of both the subordinate and superior judiciary in this case is widely being perceived as a tacit act of standing in solidarity with a fellow-judge;
10. the media hype and sensationalization of this case (with a few notable exceptions) could serve as a deterrent to concrete positive action in future.

We stand in empathy and solidarity with the brave survivor girl child, and in support of Advocate Asma Jahangir’s intention to petition the Supreme Court of Pakistan. We reiterate our longstanding demands that the laws on child protection and against domestic child labour be urgently enacted at the federal and provincial levels, and strengthened in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – along with their strict enforcement and implementation; that child protection state institutions be set up all over Pakistan – and strengthened in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; that national and provincial policies be formulated for child protection and development – not to return recovered children back to their parents who pledge and sell them into modern day slavery (aka bonded labour); and that such recovered survivors be provided not just physical shelter and care, but also psychological rehabilitation by the State, to prevent them becoming life-long victims.

Above all, we hold serving judges to a much higher standard than anyone else in the land – they must uphold the Constitution, the law, morality and humanity in both their public and private lives. There must be no “forgiveness” or “compromise” – the State must become the girl child’s guardian (wali) and complainant in this case. The SCP is respectfully requested to urgently take suo moto notice in such cases.

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The Problem With ‘Self-Investigation’ in a Post-Truth Era

No one would argue that Edgar Welch, the 28-year-old North Carolina man who loaded his car with weapons in early December and drove 350 miles to liberate the children he believed were being held in the basement of a Washington pizzeria, was a model citizen or even necessarily sane. But after a tragedy had been averted and he was in police custody, Welch transformed himself into something of an unlikely sage, stumbling on a surprisingly resonant explanation for the misguided quest that sent him ricocheting from internet conspiracy theories to armed vigilantism: He had decided, he said, to “self-investigate.”

At first, it sounds like a useless neologism: Aren’t all investigations self-investigations? But in today’s morass of disinformation — the “post-truth era” — the phrase reveals a radical new relationship between citizen and truth. Millions of people like Welch are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the institutional media, in favor of a D.I.Y. approach to fact-finding. What they are doing is not quite investigating. It is self-investigating.

The phrase twins the American virtues of truth-seeking and individual resolve and suggests, at least superficially, an appealing, bootstrapping approach to information gathering. But an investigator tries to get to the bottom of things. For the self-investigator, there is no bottom, in large part because self-investigation — as I am defining it here — is confined to the internet. Proceeding from the assumption that the so-called experts are not to be trusted, self-investigators are pushed and pulled by the churn of memes and social media, an endless loop of echoes, reflections and intentional lies. With only themselves and their appetites as a guide, they bypass any information that doesn’t suit their predisposition and worldview. The self-investigator’s media diet is like an endless breakfast buffet, only without the guilt: Take what you want, leave what you don’t.

Our most famous self-investigator is, of course, our incoming president, Donald J. Trump; perhaps no one is more committed to embracing and trumpeting unproven claims from the internet. Six years ago, as he flirted with the idea of running for president, he became especially preoccupied with a theory being advanced by a right-wing extremist named Joseph Farah. A self-described ex-Communist, Farah presided over a nonprofit organization, the Western Center for Journalism, which was dedicated to promoting “philosophical diversity” in the news media, and now runs a popular website, WorldNetDaily, which bills itself as “America’s Independent News Network.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that monitors U.S. hate groups, has a different point of view, calling Farah “the internet king of the antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement.”

Somewhere along the way, the democratization of the flow of information became the democratization of the flow of disinformation.

Farah had floated plenty of specious arguments in the past, among them the claim that gay men orchestrated the Holocaust and that Muslims have a 20-point plan for conquering the United States by 2020. But the Farah campaign that captured Trump’s imagination held that America’s first black president, Barack Obama, might have been born outside the United States. Trump talked about this notion almost nonstop; he even said he was considering sending private investigators to Hawaii to prove that the president’s birth certificate was a forgery.

Farah later said he was surprised that a “multibillionaire” would make so much time for a side project like this. But single-minded persistence is the essence of self-investigation. Trump, for instance, also continued to insist on the guilt of the Central Park Five — five teenagers, four black and one Latino, whose convictions in the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger were later overturned — long after they had been exonerated by DNA evidence and the detailed confession of a serial rapist. Indeed, when Trump finally decided to let the birther issue go at an event at his new Washington, D.C., hotel in September, he also accused Hillary Clinton of starting the whole controversy. He was closing one self-investigation but providing fresh fodder for another.

The great promise of the internet was that it would bring democracies together, giving more people more access to more information, all beyond the control of any single authority. Curious citizens could develop a more nuanced understanding of what was going on; voters would be better informed; we would ferret out the truth from the bottom up and greater freedom would be the inevitable result. Way back in 1993, the activist computer programmer John Gilmore argued that the internet “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”; as recently as 2011, activists still held out hope that access to Facebook and other social media could help bring about a peaceful revolution in the Middle East.

But somewhere along the way, the democratization of the flow of information became the democratization of the flow of disinformation. The distinction between fact and fiction was erased, creating a sprawling universe of competing claims. The internet can’t route around censorship when the people who use it remain in their own closed information loops, which is nothing more than self-imposed censorship.

A universe of competing claims is the perfect environment for the rise to power of a politician who has made a career of championing his own truths and manufacturing his own realities. Not that Trump will be our first president who likes to operate from a closed loop. Richard Nixon was broadly dismissive of the State Department and the “Ivy League liberals” at the C.I.A., relying instead on the wisdom of J. Edgar Hoover, the more like-minded head of the F.B.I.

In the age of Trump, data and evidence are just some unwanted roughage down at the end of the buffet.

Preserving the flexibility to pick and choose facts carries obvious strategic benefits. In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush and his senior aides wanted to be sure they received the intelligence they needed to justify their case for going to war in Iraq. They accomplished this by dismantling the information-filtering process that had been in place for decades. In its place, they created so-called “stovepipes” that fed raw intelligence from the field directly into the White House, thus routing around layers of professional analysts. Those bypassed analysts might have noted that much of the intelligence underpinning the administration’s assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction came from completely unreliable sources. Or they might simply never have passed on the intelligence in the first place.

But why accept someone else’s truth when you don’t have to? In 2002, a “senior adviser” inside the Bush administration told the journalist Ron Suskind (for an article later published in this magazine) that the mainstream media were part of “the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” But that’s not the way the world works anymore, the adviser explained. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

The adviser’s airy dismissal of discernible reality was weird and shocking when it was published in 2004, but today it feels a bit naïve. In the age of Trump, you don’t need to act to create your own reality; you can just tweet, whether it’s bogus crime and unemployment statistics or made-up accusations of widespread voter fraud. For that matter, you don’t even need to tweet; you can just retweet. In a world with no universally recognized standards for truth — a world in which journalists engaged in the study of discernible reality are dismissed as “dishonest” and “corrupt” — everything is fair game. Maybe Clinton’s campaign chairman takes part in occult rituals in which bodily fluids are consumed, maybe he doesn’t. Who’s to say, really? “U decide,” as the incoming national-security adviser, Mike Flynn, wrote in a tweet with a link to a post claiming that Clinton’s hacked emails contained enough evidence to put her away for life on charges including “sex crimes with minors.”

In the age of Trump, data and evidence are just some unwanted roughage down at the end of the buffet. Bush may have taken a selective approach to intelligence, but Trump, in his ongoing self-investigations, ignores it altogether, rejecting the daily national-security briefings traditionally provided to presidents-elect by the C.I.A. Even speaking under the cover of anonymity in a completely unguarded moment — is there such a thing as a guarded moment for Trump? — it’s impossible to imagine him drawing a line between “the reality-based” world and the conspiratorial world of self-investigation that he and his fellow travelers inhabit. It’s a distinction that he doesn’t recognize.

Edgar Welch was different. At a certain point, he stopped looking at the internet. All his hours in the Pizzagate feedback loop ultimately drove him not deeper down the rabbit hole, but out into the real world, where he could do some primary research. He was concerned that something very bad was happening in that pizzeria in Washington. When he decided to check it out for himself, and maybe even do something about it, Welch the self-investigator became an actual investigator, albeit a badly deluded, dangerous one. What he discovered — though not before he had fired off a couple of rounds, frightening a lot of people and possibly landing himself in prison for several years — was that he had been gorging on a lot of lies. Or, as he later told a reporter for The New York Times, coining another memorable phrase for our age, “the intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” That, at least, was 100 percent true.

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In Pakistan, five girls were killed for having fun. Then the story took an even darker twist.

ISLAMABAD, Dec 17 — It was just a few seconds, a video clip of several young women laughing and clapping to music, dressed for a party or a wedding in orange headscarves and robes with floral patterns. Then a few more seconds of a young man dancing alone, apparently in the same room.

The cellphone video was made six years ago, in a village deep in Kohistan, a rugged area of northwest Pakistan. It was the last time the young women, known only as Bazeegha, Sareen Jan, Begum Jan, Amina and Shaheen, have ever been definitively seen alive.

What happened to them remains a mystery. Their fates have been shrouded by cultural taboos, official inertia, implacable resistance from elders and religious leaders suspected of ordering their deaths, and elaborate subterfuges by the families who reportedly carried out those orders.

Even in Pakistan, where hundreds of “honor killings” are reported every year, this case was extreme. According to court filings and interviews with people who investigated it, the families confined the girls for weeks, threw boiling water and hot coals on them, then killed them and buried them somewhere in the Kohistan hills.

Later, when investigators appeared, relatives and community leaders insisted that the girls were still alive and produced a second set of similar-looking girls to prove it. They even disfigured one girl’s thumbprints so she couldn’t be checked against the identity of the victim she was supposed to impersonate.

The story illustrates many of the reasons Pakistani officials have failed to curb the problem of honor killings. These include the cruel sway of traditional tribal councils, known as jirgas, over uneducated villagers; the lengths to which such leaders may go to defy state authority; and the casual worthlessness they assign to the rights, lives and even identities of young women.

Today, the truth is finally beginning to emerge, mostly through the efforts of a few individuals including Afzal Kohistani, a young man whose brothers were killed as a result of the incident. He spent years seeking help from local and provincial officials, then petitioned the Supreme Court. In 2012, his case was dismissed, but last month the high court reopened it and ordered a new investigation that has produced a chilling report.

“This has destroyed my family. The girls are dead, my brothers have been killed and nothing has been done to bring justice or protect us,” said Kohistani, 26, who has received death threats. “I know I will probably be killed, too, but it doesn’t matter,” he said in an interview last week. “What happened is wrong, and it has to change.”

Renewed judicial interest in these long-ago events coincided with another encouraging development: the passage of a new law in parliament that strengthened judicial powers in honor-killing cases. Often, even when such crimes manage to reach the courts, there is no punishment because the law allows victims’ families to “forgive” the perpetrators — who are often their own relatives.

The new law, passed in October, gives judges more ammunition to impose life prison sentences for honor killings in extreme circumstances, allowing them to overrule personal deals by making the murder a crime against the state. But supporters fear that cultural and political resistance will continue to prevent justice being done.

“We don’t know yet whether the law will make much difference. Punishment is still not mandatory, and forgiveness can still negate justice,” said Benazir Jatoi, a lawyer who works on women’s rights. “Until there is more political will, I don’t think the lives of ordinary women threatened with honor violence will change.”

The Kohistan case unfolded in a conservative rural region where social mingling between genders was taboo. The the girls’ participation in a coed singing party was risky enough, but someone posted the video on the Internet, where it spread rapidly, bringing shame on their community before the vast virtual world.

The head of the local jirga, a Muslim cleric, allegedly issued a religious decree ordering the five girls to be killed for dishonoring their tribe, along with the boy seen dancing and every member of his family. There was no resistance from the community. After the girls were disposed of, several brothers of the boy were also caught and killed. The rest of the family, including Kohistani, fled the area.

stood for more than a year. No crimes were reported and no one came to investigate. Kohistani, a college graduate from one of the area’s wealthier families, said he repeatedly approached local and provincial officials, reporting the killings and seeking protection, but was chided for opposing the jirga’s verdict.

“No one in my district or my province has ever spoken against honor killing. They tell me I have defamed my culture, my religion, my tribe,” Kohistani said last week. “Everybody knows what happened, but no one is ready to come forward. This an illegal, unconstitutional and un-Islamic tradition, but people don’t even consider it a crime.”

Finally, with assistance from a lawyer in Islamabad, Kohistani appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, a liberal activist, personally took up the case in 2012 and ordered two fact-finding missions sent to the remote area by helicopter.

When the visitors demanded to see the girls, their families at first refused, but eventually presented three girls and said they were the ones in the video. The three delegates had no chance to speak to the girls in private, but they compared their faces to images from the video. Two were convinced of the likenesses; the third, Farzana Bari, said she had doubts.

“I was upset and confused. We had no translators who knew their dialect, and everyone there insisted these were the same girls,” recounted Bari, an academic in Islamabad. “When we got back the second time, I filed a dissenting report, but the judge closed the case. I still feel terrible.”

After that, life apparently returned to normal in the village for several years. One journalist sent photos of both groups of girls to analysts in England, who found only a 14 percent chance they were the same individuals. That evidence was taken to a provincial court, but it declined to take action. Kohistani, in the interview, named each of the original girls and their replacements, who he said were similar-looking sisters, cousins and sisters-in-law.

Finally, last month, Kohistani’s crusade got an unexpected break when the Supreme Court, under a new chief justice, agreed to accept his petition. Once more, a fact-finding mission was sent to the village. This time, it included a district judge and two police officers, armed with government ID records with the heights and thumbprints of the missing girls.

What they encountered was hair-raising.
In his report afterwards, Kohistan Judge Shoaib Khan said the village elders were “unanimous” in insisting that the girls were alive. But two of the girls they produced were much younger than the victims, according to their official birth dates. A third could not be identified because both thumbs had been burned; her parents insisted that it was from a cooking accident. He concluded that at least two girls did not match the ones in the video and that the others were probably also imposters.

“All this leads to the suspicious conclusion that something is wrong at bottom,” Khan wrote. The case, he advised, “needs exhaustive inquiry.”

One day last week, Kohistani, wearing a conservative suit and carrying a copy of the judge’s report, walked up to the Supreme Court. He smiled slightly as he shook hands with his attorney, and they went inside to wait for the next hearing.

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Inaugural planners’ biggest concern: Protesters

WASHINGTON, Dec 15 — Presidential candidate Donald Trump was anything but conventional — now military planners for the 58th presidential inauguration are preparing for a day that might not include traditional pomp and circumstance.

“Generally speaking, the inauguration is taking shape as it has in the past, although subject to change, as you know,” said Brig. Gen. George Degnon, the deputy commanding general for the inauguration.

In a news conference Wednesday, Degnon was asked whether military planners anticipated Trump putting his nontraditional signature on an event full of tradition.

“We’re still negotiating with the Presidential Inaugural Committee, as far as the specifics for the parade,” said Degnon. “But, with the city laid out the way it is, the number of people we’re bringing in to the city, there’s only so many ways you can make this thing happen.”

Maj. Gen. Bradley Becker, commander of the joint task force providing military ceremonial support for the inaugural events, was asked about the biggest threat to a smoothly run operation.

“At this point the biggest concern is the number of potential protesters, and how that impacts the inauguration, especially the parade itself,” Becker said.

Roped areas will be set up along the parade route for protesters, according to Baker, and Col. William Walker, of the D.C. National Guard.

It is unclear whether the new president will walk a portion of the parade route,” Becker said.

“Clearly the Secret Service has talked about it — previous presidents have done it — but at this point we just don’t know what the president-elect plans to do during the parade,” Becker said

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Don’t Waste Learners’ Time, Integrate

How do children learn in real life? Are subject lines drawn in order to make the learning happen? Obviously, the answer is an emphatic no.

We don’t need to philosophize hard to know that children, before entering a school, have a profound understanding of not only their mother tongue but other languages also present in their social environment. It is a common knowledge that children are able to speak three to four languages in a multilingual society. They can think, comprehend and express themselves; they know the right context and their selection of words is perfect. Most importantly, this learning doesn’t take place in isolation in the subject tight compartments. A child is learning simultaneously how four bananas can be divided among four siblings; how many toffees are left if he ate up one of the three toffees she had and also how to make fractions of a roti so that two siblings can share it. Science is everywhere around them and they learn very effectively that fire can burn and they need to be away from it; salt and sugar dissolve in water and we can make a drink; water washes away dirt on the body. They can do and undo things. They ask questions of all kinds; what, how and why of everything. And no body snubs them.

While comprehending and expressing in a language, adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying things, toys, food, animals, plants and their fellow human beings, differentiating between hot and cold, sweet and bitter they are also learning and practicing the social etiquette of eating and drinking, interacting with elders and friends and the concepts of justice and fair play while playing.

But what happens when they are sent to a school? Instead of building on the rich experience and the huge body of knowledge they already have, the very existence of that experience and knowledge is denied and, in fact, is blackened out. They are treated as blank slates and are thrown to an alien and self-alienating environment where such teaching methods and learning styles are forced upon them which are in total negation of their previous learning styles. Likewise, years and years are spent to explain even the very basic concepts and operations of mathematics which they already know and practice. The case of teaching science is no different; in fact, science is seen as one subject that can be grasped only by the “talented” students. To sum it up, the compartmentalized school education is in total contradiction with their existing experience, knowledge and style of learning.

Children resist the tyranny of the new education; they resist; they sob and cry; they do not want to go to school but who listens to them. After all, they are children who don’t know what is good for them!
This approach has not paid much. If education is not able to teach what children need to know in order to prepare for life, memorizing concepts and formulas of mutually exclusive subjects and applying them in unreal conditions don’t do any good to the learners. They may pass exams but their creative and logical understanding is snubbed and blunted and we don’t see thinkers, artists, scientists, mathematicians and inventors emerging. The reality of the matter is that this education blocks thinking, analysis and free play of imagination.

I have worked with children and adults both for over twenty five years. Working with the communities; what a fantastic learning it was. They are not in a habit of cutting one limb off the body and finding a solution for it. Their approach is holistic and they know cutting a limb off the body is destructive for both. I still remember a soil fertility specialist’s meeting with a group of farmers. The farmers disagreed with the specialist’s solution and asked him a range of questions integrating the soil fertility management with the issues of water and cost effectiveness. In the end the specialist had to concede and tell them that many of their questions were outside his area of specialization.

Converting Knowledge into Action
As regards children, I have countless examples to share how quickly they not only learn but also contribute in learning if the teaching is contextualized, integrated and relevant to their life experiences. While working on magnetism I was amazed to learn that the children’s innovative use of magnets was very practical and creative . They were not only creatively using magnets but also reusing and recycling old toys. Their understanding was beyond the bookish knowledge of the teacher.

My approach to education is to learn from life and to learn for life. And my methodology of teaching and learning is inspired of that.

Let’s not waste the learners’ time; it is precious. Let’s not blunt their creativity; it is needed for a vibrant and progressive society. Let’s not snub their curiosity, questioning and reasoning ; it is imperative for an enlightened and a tolerant nation.

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Karachi DHA Fails to Implement SC Verdict against Private Militias

Private armies and ‘militias’ are explicitly prohibited by Article 256 of the Constitution of Pakistan. Ironically, the ruling elite and the police have never believed in this law. There is hardly a street in the posh areas of Karachi where one cannot see private ‘militias’ and armies living in tents, cabins and containers, outside the residences of arrogant, mindless and pampered Pakistanis. These illegal ‘militias’ encroach public spaces, occupy portions of public roads and terrorise neighborhood. The local police and the Housing Authorities conveniently look the other way.

On 24th November 2016, the Supreme Court of Pakistan directed the Defence Housing Authority to take across-the-board action against tents set up by security guards outside the residences of high-profile people residing in DHA. It is now for the DHA to ensure that the orders of the Supreme Court are firmly implemented and all tents and other structures outside the residences of lawless residents are immediately removed.

An equally important aspect of this criminality is the complicity of the Sindh Police to have allowed these private armies to exist, grow and illegally occupy public spaces. The Sindh Police which has the policing responsibility for DHA should have itself rounded up all such private militias. But it did not. It ought to be a matter of concern and shame that the Supreme Court of a country has to deal with matters as small as the removal of thugs and tents.

The DHA and the Sindh Police are requested to ruthlessly implement the orders of the Supreme Court. Those who cannot exist without the presence of private militias and tents outside their homes may be offered accommodation in high security precincts such as the Central Prison at Karachi. Why the ordinary citizens must be subjected to living in war-like zones in company of militants and their private armies.

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US Attempts to Fight Bigotry after Trump’s Election

BALTIMORE, MD – Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh today released the following statement, announcing his office’s launch of a hotline to report hate crimes in Maryland:

“Over the last week, reports of hate incidents directed at racial and ethnic minorities, Muslims, Jews, women, immigrants, and the LGBT community have increased. Sadly, Maryland is not immune to this outbreak, and it is important to remember that our laws prohibit this kind of conduct and provide protection from it.

“Persons engaging in conduct motivated by a victim’s race, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, disability or homeless status, risk civil liability or criminal prosecution under Maryland’s civil rights and hate crimes statutes. Students engaging in bullying, harassment and intimidation in grades K-12 or at institutions of higher education could be subject to disciplinary action under the student code of conduct for the local school system, college or university. Discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as cyber bullying and intimidation online, are also prohibited by state law.

“As Attorney General, I am committed to working with local law enforcement, state and county governments, our local school systems, higher education systems, and communities to enforce these laws. I urge anyone who believes they have been a victim of unlawful harassment or intimidation to first notify local law enforcement, the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights (“MCCR”) or your local human rights agency. My office has also established a hotline to report these incidents and make referrals to local law enforcement for further investigation when appropriate. The number is1-866-481-8361. Complaints of student harassment or bullying should be made directly to the school, college or university.

I believe the current state of affairs presents not only a challenge, but an opportunity. Neighborhood by neighborhood, we can declare that justice, fairness and tolerance are not partisan principles, but keystones of America’s character.”