Washington’s support to the Muslim Brotherhood has been one of the important factors for the growth of terrorism in the Middle East . It has always been very close to the Wahhabi regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates which have been the main sources of militant Islamist terrorism . Washington has been so close to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that recently American President Barack Obama cut short his India visit and air-dashed to Riyadh in order to pay his condolences on the death of its King Abdullah. Besides, Washington has of late been cultivating the Khomenist regime in Tehran even though the latter has been behind the Hezbollah variety of terrorism and vows to wipe Israel—the region’s only pluralist, liberal democracy — off the world map.
I wish the citizens of Pakistan—its genuinely liberal and progressives forces, including in its media, academics and legal fraternity— would assert and show the door to their rulers. The successive dispensations in Islamabad have hardly represented the original values of their land. The radical Islamists have little social base in the land . Pakistan has the Ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat represented by the Barelvi creed with the largest following. The masses in Pakistan have had a strong syncretistic tradition derived from the curious amalgamation of Islam and the region’s indigenous religions. The progressives could invoke the land’s original values and use its massive social base in strengthening such elements in politics as would be genuinely committed to combat terrorism .
I think the citizens in the advanced West could take a lead in reining their governments. Given their linkages with some of the notorious anti-rights states in the world today, these governments could hardly be said to be democratic . It must not but concern the Western citizens that their governments support such states and groups as are dead opposed to the rights so cherished by the enlightened humanity in the world today.