Author: ReallyVirtual

Pakistan Problems Propaganda and Prejudice

ReallyVirtual6 Comments

Two months ago, this Urdu + English “sponsored link” ad for a website worstnation.com started showing up in my Gmail every day. I will not link to it for obvious reasons, but here’s what is says:

دنیا کی سب سے بدترین قوم

www.WorstNation.com

پاکستان سے زندہ بھاگ آپ یقیناً اتفاق کریں گے۔

The Urdu text translates roughly to “World’s Worst Nation“, “You will surely agree” and “Get out of Pakistan Alive” – the later is a wordplay on “Pakistan Zindabad“, which means “Long Live Pakistan“, and has been in use to ridicule Pakistan for atleast a decade. On the site, there is an almost exhaustive list of the many things wrong with Pakistan, in Urdu.

The first time I saw the ad, I checked the whois information out of curiosity and found out that the domain was registered to some guy in Faisalabad. I assumed that the owner was just another Pakistani frustrated at being born with brown skin, and that he was just utilizing the free adword credit that some hosts offer. The ad and the website were mildly irritating, but so is 90% 99% of the world, so I moved on.

Two months have passed since I first saw this ad – many bombs have exploded and hundreds of people have been killed in all four of our provinces – by terrorists, by our army, by the Americans and recently – by our ordinary(?) citizens – in the name of nationalism, peace, honor, ethnic cleansing, and various variants of God as well. The killings are still going on in Karachi as I write this.

The worstnation.com website, meanwhile, is still advertising relentlessly – I see its targeted message more than a dozen times a day, with its cryptic “About us” page that says “our identities really don’t matter, just listen to our message or go do something else”, and the owners of the website are still spending money to make their voices heard. A Google search tells me that atleast one other person noticed this last month and rightly recognized the demoralizing effect of such propaganda material, but blamed it on “international efforts to demoralize our nation”. He also mentioned seeing an indian flag favicon on the domain, a domain that is registered under a false name – after all, Indians are the real enemy, right?

After two months, the owners of worstnation have learnt from their mistakes, there is no indian flag and the whois information has disappeared from the database behind a privacy protection service though the clocktowercity website is still alive and clicking.

If you check the server for worstnation.com on http://www.myipneighbors.com/ , you will notice half a dozen websites that can have a relationship with Pakistan and are hosted on the same server – a few of them are:

http://oururdu.com/forums/index.php

http://irfan-ul-quran.com/quran/index.php?tid=12

http://www.minhajforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29

The irfan-ul-quran website has this favicon that was mistaken for an Indian flag. The forums page on the last link lists 40 websites that they run, and mentions with a smile that they have (created and are running)

..and a lot more that cannot be listed here smile.gif

So, My dear brethren in Islam (who are stuck-in-the-worst-nation-of-the-world through no fault of your own), I respect your opinions regarding the state of our nation and even agree with many of the points on your website, but hiding behind private websites and talking about revolutions is no way to start a revolution!

When you say we are the worst nation, please speak for yourself, not me – and please publish your identities on your website, don’t just hit and hide… who knows, you might get lucky and start a revolution by mistake – or you might get lucky and get the death penalty (read ‘heaven’) for disrupting national harmony in cyberspace – at least that is what the new cybercrime law asks for. Either way, it is a win-win situation for you, you lucky guys! So please don’t be shy and reveal yourselves to the public. You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

I love your bitterness and sarcasm, but after identifying all the problems of this nation in a couple of months, I was expecting to hear the solution to those problems from your own anonymous-yet-expert beaks. If getting out of Pakistan alive (Hijrat to Canada perhaps?) is your thing, then let me know if I can help you in any way. But whatever you do, for Allah’s sake, please stop the frigging advertising on GMail – it is irritating!

PS. and change your flag – it does resemble the indian flag.

Bajour, Bajor, What’s the Difference?

ReallyVirtual2 Comments

As a trekkie-in-denial who watched the whole Deep Space Nine this year and who is also a citizen of Pakistan, I can’t help being reminded the Bajor of DS9 each time somebody is killed in the Bajour of Pakistan. Those of you who have seen the series (and know about the Bajourian incidents) will know what I’m talking about. The rest of you, if you are in Lahore and want to see DS9, you know who to talk to 🙂
DS9
The DS9 producer denies that the planet was modelled after an actual location, and says that “unfortunately, the homeless and terrorism are problems in every age.” which makes the similarities between the two places all the more interesting. I’ll attempt to list a few of the similarities that I can remember below from memory and without any verifications. Purist trekkies, please forgive me.

Bajor [Bajour] is a stategically located planet [area] at the border of a worm-hole [Pakistan]. The quadrant [country] on the other side is supposed to hold a lot of resources and trading opportunities. The people of Bajor [Bajour] were occupied by an alien race, when most of the Bajorans joined the Resistance, sabbotaging and attacking the invaders whenever they could, and finally fought them off. Bajorans [Bajourans] are a religious race, consulting their gods and prophets before making important decisions. Their religious leaders have a very strong influence over their politics, and sometimes take over and rule the planet [area]. Now, the Federation [US + allies], an alliance of multiple races that is technologically much more advanced than the Bajorans [Bajourans] has arrived and wants to help them rebuild, and ultimately join the Federation. Many religiously inclined Bajorans [Bajourans] are resistant to the idea…

Uh oh, blogging time is up. Qapplah!

Arthur C. Clarke, Pakistan, Terror and Science Fiction

ReallyVirtual

I started reading Arthur C. Clarke's novel Time's Eye the day before he died. The novel is set in the NWFP, and it is a world where Lahore has been blown up by a nuclear bomb (ouch!). Here's a page from the novel's beginning that reminded me of the recent US missile strikes inside Pakistan:

He had been just four when he had first encountered the helicopters of the west. They had come at night, a pack of them. They flew very low over your head, black on black, like angry black crows. Their noise hammered at your ears while their wind plucked at you and tore at your clothing. Market stalls were blown over, cattle and goats were terrified, and tin roofs were torn right off the houses. Moallim heard, though he did not see it for himself, that one woman’s infant was torn right out of her arms and sent whirling up into the air, never to come down again.

And then the shooting had started.

Later, more choppers had come, dropping leaflets that explained the “purpose” of the raid: there had been an increase in arms smuggling in the area, there was some suspicion of uranium shipments passing through the village, and so on. The “necessary” strike had been “surgical,” applying “minimum force.” The leaflets had been torn up and used to wipe asses. Everybody hated the helicopters, for their remoteness and arrogance. At four, Moallim did not have a word to describe how he felt.

And still the choppers came. The latest UN helicopters were supposed to be here to enforce peace, but everybody knew that this was somebody else’s peace, and these “surveillance” ships carried plenty of weaponry.

These problems had a single solution, so Moallim had been taught.

The elders had trained Moallim to handle the rocket-propelled grenade launcher. It was always hard to hit a moving target. So the detonators had been replaced with timing devices, so that they would explode in midair. As long as you fired close enough, you didn’t even need a hit to bring down an aircraft-especially a chopper, and especially if you aimed for the tail rotor, which was its most vulnerable element.

Time's Eye – Clarke & Baxter

Science fiction is not always fiction.

Make More Movies like Fitna

ReallyVirtual2 Comments

As we all know by now, the movie 'Fitna' was taken down from LiveLeak after some threats to their staff today, and is now available on Google Video (watch out Brin and Page).

I was truly disappointed after watching the movie (yes, I watched it, out of curiosity) – it had the same old arguments, partial ayaat, cherry-picked and quoted out of context, mixed with music and select imagery mixed with the beheading videos that have already been milked for all their worth – in an attempt to associate 'terrorist' with 'Islamist'. I was expecting something phenomenal but all I got was 15 minutes of boredom… guess I'm just jaded. I was also looking forward to the debates that the movie was supposed to have elicited, but I guess that isn't going to happen either.

What I don't understand is, why can't the defenders of Islam (extremists or whatchamacallum) realize that nothing better can happen to further their cause than movies like Fitna?!

We keep complaining about how the Western culture is slowly taking over and changing our muslim values… but when a western producer actually stands up and tells the world "honestly" about what he and his supporters think of the jew-hating, brainwashed killing machines that we Muslims are, and that too in a video that is somehow getting world-wide media coverage and can potentially serve to alienate and estrange the muslim population from the rest of the world (something which is a top priority of our 'Islamist' brothers) … our religious superheros miss this golden opportunity by threatening and removing the videos from the internet. That just does not make any business sense, at least to me! I wouldn't be surprised if the threats were a stunt by Gert Wilder himself, just to prove his point.

Like every other muslim, I don't want anyone to draw the prophet's image – either with love or in ridicule, but every time some such incident happens, I can mark the person/entity/group of people as 'bad', 'wrong' or 'evil', depending on my level of faith. This makes hate movies like Fitna excellent tools – wedges that the 'Islamists' can use very effectively to widen the chasm between 'us' and 'them'. Any muslim who watches the video (and is frustrated by the distorted and skewed picture that Wilders paints) and cares enough to research the quotes from the video is bound to become a little less "tolerant" and a little more "extremist" – which is exactly what AlQaida wants. Our terrorist brothers should appreciate Gert Wilders for this honest and public broadcast of his true feelings instead of doing it the KKK way.

To borrow a concept from Richard Dawkin's "The God Illusion", if we are really right and they are really wrong, they are going to hell anyway, and if hell really is all that it is purported to be, isn't that enough of a punishment for them already?

Actually, if I were an AlQaida media representative of some sort, I would have gone one step further and would have sent ALL the Taliban propaganda movies that I could buy from Hall Road, Lahore (they must be in dozens, if not hundreds) to Mr. Wilder as a gift. He surely won't be able to find better raw material for his next "documentary" – or better – a whole TV series. Your infidel enemies bearing the cost of your PR campaigns, and earning some more sins in the process – it can't get any better than this, AlQaida!

If you have come this far in reading this, do also check out the comments here about the pictures of our prophet. I like the way these average 'ferangis' make fun of my religion/ideology, it helps me 'stay awake'. So Al Qaida, please let Wilders make more movies like Fitna, and Mr. Wilders , the next time you make a documentary, please tear a page from the Quran and not some telephone book – we know you want to.

Marlboro Man is Here

ReallyVirtual

ImageSo the Marlboro Man is finally taking over the Pakistani tobacco market.

Too bad they are a few years too late. Had they come to us a couple of decades earlier, they would have found a perfect fit in the form of the ready-to-go localized model for the Marlboro Man role – one that is healthier, and is already associated with death and horses (shown in the picture (stolen from Pakistaniat.com) here).