Originally posted by millerbleach:
Originally posted by Veer2Eternity:
because they'll use them...how do you explain Pakistan?
The state religion is Islam and upwards of 95% of residents are muslims. They've had nukes for almost 20 years now and I haven't heard of a single jihadi bomb flying.
Help me out here.
Who said "Muslims" can't have nukes???????
Iran can't have nukes but not because they are Muslim.
Why Pakistan Is a Bigger Threat to Israel than Iran
Posted:
06/28/2013 5:14 pm EDT
Updated:
08/28/2013 5:12 am EDT
While the United States and Israel incessantly obsess with
the possibility of a future nuclear Iran, they barely ever raise such
concerns about Iran's next door Islamic neighbour Pakistan that
brandishes its nuclear weapons with Islamic zeal and barely concealed
contempt for the "kufaar" -- Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists and
other non-Muslims.
But there are others inside Pakistan who do not
share America and Israel's myopia. The country's leading anti-nuclear
activist, physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy in his book
Confronting the Bomb, has this to say about Pakistan's nukes:
"The
fear of loose [nuclear] weapons comes from the fact that Pakistan's
armed forces harbour a hidden enemy within their ranks. Those wearing
the cloak of religion freely walk in and out of top security nuclear
installations every day ... The fear of the insider is ubiquitous and
well-founded."
Prof. Hoodbhoy is able to see through
the complexity of his country's nuclear arsenal that both the White
House and Jerusalem either choose to overlook or are grossly ignorant
about. Hoodbhoy maintains that there are two Pakistani armies. One led
by General Pervez Ashraf Kayani and the other by Allah.
"It
is difficult to find another example where the defence apparatus of a
modern state has been rendered so vulnerable by the threat posed by
military insiders." Even non-fundamentalist elements are "soft
Islamists," he says. Hoodbhoy describes the Pakistani army as "a heavily
Islamicised rank-and-file brimming with seditious thoughts."
As a
friend of the Jewish people as well as the Arabs, the thought of a
nuclear devise exploding over Israel gives me the jitters. The fact is,
millions of Arabs too will be eviscerated in a nuclear attack on the
Jewish State.
In meeting with leading Jewish intellectuals and
academia in North America and some in Israel itself, I am struck by the
lack of knowledge they have about Pakistan, let alone its nuclear
program. Few write about the internal dynamics of Pakistan that has
emerged as the world's number one source of jihadi suicide bombers and
ground zero for the training of Islamic terrorists.
China's strategic interests at the mouth of the Straits of Hormuz.
All
of this makes the study of Pakistan a daunting task for any outsider.
Even Britain and the USA who helped create the country to install a
buffer state between the advancing USSR and India after the Second World
War, have not been able to read the tea leaves with any degree of
accuracy.
As I write this essay, Pakistan produces more nuclear
bombs than any other nuclear power while developing longer-range
missiles. On paper, these nuclear warheads and missiles are
India-centric and pointed towards the east. However, Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal is not at a static location and the warheads as well as missiles
are constantly on the move, and if there is one country that the
Pakistan's politicians, both on the right as well as the left, hate more
than India, it is Israel.
Are Israelis aware of the
vulnerabilities in Pakistan's nuclear program that make it possible for
non-state jihadi actors to strike at the Jewish State? I doubt it.
Pakistan is a society based on the hatred of the "other." Since its creation, the Hindu and the Jew, ("
Hanood wa Yahood" in the popular street lexicon of the Urdu language) has been cultivated as the enemy of the country and Islam.
In
a culture of violence, three million fellow Muslims were killed in
genocide in 1971 in Bangladesh. With the liquidation of the Hindu
population and the total absence of Jews, the addiction to killing the
"other" is now consuming the Pakistanis from within.
Just in the
three years leading up to the 2011 capture and death of Osama Bin Laden
in Abbotabad, Pakistan, there were 225 suicide bombings in the country
killing over 3,900 people, and all of them in politically motivated
attacks by Sunni Muslim jihadis. All the victims -- from Ahmadi Muslims
to Shia Muslims -- are accused of serving the Zionist cause and thus
eliminated.
Shia vs. Sunni
The irony is
that while Israel considers Shia Iran as its primary enemy and nurtures a
cold peace with Jordan and Egypt, the Shias of Iran are often branded
as a secret Jewish sect by Sunni Muslim clerics in both Egypt and
Jordan. Jews around the world seem to oblivious to this fact as they
read about the slaughter of Shias in Pakistan and the open hostility
towards them from places as far apart as Indonesia to Indiana (home to
America's Islamist organisation
ISNA ).
If
one were to study the sources of Jew-hatred, they are invariably rooted
in Pakistan and the Arab World. If it comes to terrorist attacks
carried out around the globe, almost all of them have either originated
in Pakistan, were carried out by young men of Pakistani ancestry or by
jihadi terrorists who were trained on Pakistani soil. Else, they were
planned and executed by Islamabad's intelligence agency, the ISI and its
sponsored terrorist organizations. Yet, in the eyes of Israel and the
Jewish Diaspora, it is Iran that is the anti-Semitic capital of the
world, hell-bent on destroying the Jewish State.
Let me catalogue
the role Pakistan has played in international terrorism, long before its
territory was used by Osama Bin Laden and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed to
plan and execute the 9/11 attack on the United States.
International Terrorism linked to PakistanSeptember 1986: Armed men attempt to
hijack a Pan Am jet on the tarmac of Karachi airport in which 20 people died. Among the arrested were five Palestinians belonging to the Abu Nidal group and seven Pakistanis.January
1993: The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia is attacked, killing
two CIA employees and wounding three others. The perpetrator is a
Pakistani,
Ajmal Kansi.
Four years later in 1997 he is captured by FBI agents in rendered back
to the United States to stand trial and was executed by lethal injection
in 2002.February 1993: The World Trade Centre is attacked using a truck bomb. The mastermind of the attack,
Ramzi Yousef is later arrested in 1995 in Islamabad, Pakistan.August
1998: American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are bombed, killing 223
people and wounding over 4,000 others. One of the planners of this
terror attack,
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is arrested in 2004 in Gujrat, Pakistan.October
2000: Jihadi terrorists carry out a suicide attack on the United States
Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Cole while it is harboured and being
refuelled in the Yemen port of Aden. Seventeen American sailors are
killed, and 39 injured. The Saudi mastermind behind this attack,
Mufti Muhammad Sabir is arrested 2005 in Karachi, Pakistan.October
2002: Jihadi terrorists attack the Indonesian tourist resort of Bali
killing 202 people and injuring another 240. Nine years later, the
chief suspect in the bombing,
Umar Patek of the militant group Jemaah Islamiah is arrested in 2011 in Abbotabad, Pakistan.July
2005: Jihadi terrorists carry out the now infamous 7/7 suicide bombings
in London, UK, killing 52 people and injuring 700 others. Three of the
four suicide bombers are of Pakistani ancestry. In January 2009, one of
the planners of the London 7/7 bombings,
Saudi national Zabi uk-Taifi is arrested in a village just outside Peshawar, Pakistan. December
2008: Pakistani jihadi terrorists carry out a sea-borne suicide attack
on Mumbai, India, killing 166 people including a rabbi and his pregnant
wife at a Jewish Centre, and injuring 308 others. The mastermind of the
Mumbai attack was the Pakistani-American
Muhammad Tahwwar Rana,
was acquitted in the Mumbai attacks but convicted of working for the
terror group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), long suspected of being supported
by Pakistan's ISI.May 2010: A bombing at New York Times
Square is foiled when street vendors discover smoke coming from a
vehicle and alert an NYPD patrolman. The bomb had ignited, but failed to
explode, and was disarmed before it caused any casualties. Two days
later federal agents arrest a man at John F. Kennedy International
Airport after he tries to board an Emirate Airlines flight to Dubai. He
is
Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American.
In
addition to the above list of international jihadi terror attacks
associated with Pakistan, the country has been home to most of the
Al-Qaeda leadership, including Osama Bin Laden. They include the
following five:
Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
a Yemeni citizen being held by the United States as an enemy combatant
detainee at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He was captured in September 2002,
in Karachi, Pakistan.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
is currently in U.S. military custody in Guantánamo Bay for acts of
terrorism, including mass murder of civilians, as he has been identified
as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks". He was captured in
March 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Abu Faraj al-Libbi
is the nom de guerre of a Libyan who is a senior member of al-Qaeda.
[His real name is thought to be Mustafa al-'Uzayti.] Al-Labibi was
arrested in May 2005 in Mardan, Pakistan.
Mustafa Nasar,
also known as Abu Musab al-Suri is a Syrian-born leader of al-Qaeda who
holds Spanish citizenship. He is wanted in Spain for the 1985 El
Descanso bombing that killed 18 people, and in connection with the 2004
Madrid train bombings. Nasar too ended up in Pakistan where he was
captured in October 2005 in the Pakistani city of Quetta.
Not
to mention the fact that the only time Britons have been involved in a
suicide bombing attack inside Israel, it has involved men of Pakistan
ancestry.
In May 2003 a suicide bomber and his accomplice murdered three people and wounded scores at a Tel Aviv bar.
The 21-year-old bomber, Asif Mohammed Hanif died in the attack while
his accomplice as Omar Khan Sharif failed to detonate his bomb. Both
were born to Pakistani parents in the U.K.
Hanif was not the
first Pakistani-Briton to commit terror against Jews. In 2002, Omar
Saeed Sheikh of London masterminded the kidnap and murder of Wall Street
Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.
Compared to the acts
of international terror that have a Pakistani link, terrorism that
originates in Iran is few and far between.
The first international atrocity that can be traced back to Iran was committed in 1994 when the
Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish Centre in Buenos Aires, Argentine
was bombed, killing 85 people and wounding 300 more. There is little
doubt that senior Iranian officials were behind the attack and that
their Lebanese-based Hezbollah allies carried out the attack.
The only other major act of Iranian international terror was in
February 2012 when a bomb explosion targeted an Israeli diplomat in New Delhi, India.
Why Iran? Why not Pakistan?
Why
then is Israel so obsessed with Iran, but not Pakistan? One of the
reasons may be the presence in Israel of an influential Persian Jewish
community with roots in Iran, and who have a particularly nasty
experience with the regime of the Ayatollahs compared to the era when a
close relationship between Israel and Iran existed during the reign of
The Shah until 1979.
Iranian Jews in Israel are estimated to be
200,000 to 250,000 strong and have a far greater role in the country's
public policy making then their numbers suggest. From Dan Halutz , the
former chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to the now
disgraced former president of the country Moshe Katsav, Iranian Jews in
Israel pull more than their weight in the affairs of the country.
Today
the former Israeli Minister of Transport Shaul Mofaz, leads the Kadima
Party while Michael Ben-Ari and Mordechai Zar have served as are members
of the Knesset.
Compared to Iranian Jews in Israel, Pakistani
Jews do not exceed 2,000 in number, and their claim to fame is
restricted to the introduction of cricket inside Israel. They mostly
live in the city of Ramla and do not have any prominent figure in the
Israeli political discourse. Few of these Pakistanis have any links or
even memories of Pakistan and unlike their Iranian counterparts, lack
any insight into the current political nature of their former homeland.
While
Israel Radio runs a daily Farsi language service since the 1950s, it
has no such broadcast in Punjabi, Urdu, Balochi, Puhstu, or Sindhi, the
languages of Pakistan. It is no wonder that in Israel there is such a
dearth of scholarship on Pakistan and that country's involvement in
international jihadi terrorism.
While the 180-million population
of Pakistan and its diaspora is almost universally anti-Semitic and
hostile to Israel, the ordinary Iranian is neither obsessed with Jew
hatred nor seeped in convoluted theories of Jewish conspiracies that are
ubiquitous among its next door Pakistani neighbours.
Israelis are
justifiably worried with the rabid rhetoric that emanates from the
Iranian ayatollahs. However, they need to recognise that it is Pakistan
that has 100 nuclear warheads and missiles that can reach Israel, not
Iran.
Obsessing with Iran while shrugging off the threats posed by
Pakistan and its jihadi sponsor Saudi Arabia, may be a mistake that
Jerusalem can still correct while it has a chance.
Already there are reports that Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief
Prince Turki al-Faisal is in support of cooperating secretly with Pakistan in developing a Saudi-based nuclear program. This initiative has the backing of the current director of Saudi intelligence agency, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan.
Israel
needs to realize that Iran and Syria may be the dogs that bark, but it
is Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who are the ones most likely to bite.
