Moborate

Continuing moronic statements by trolls on this blog and some no doubt military establishment-goaded television anchorpersons have forced me to address - hopefully for the last time - certain basic issues to do with the whole ' Raymond Davis ' saga. Unfortunately, such is the deterioration of our national discourse and perhaps of our educational system that not only are people often unable to grasp simple arguments but are willing, immediately and without understanding the nuances of the points being made, to ascribe ulterior motives to anyone presenting facts that go against popular opinion. So for the sake of clarity, I will attempt to make my points as questions and answers in bullet form (no pun intended). Roughly the same questions have come up repeatedly in earlier comments. The man known as Raymond Davis in custody 1. Do I 'support' 'Raymond Davis'? No. I hold no brief for him or others like him. Nor do I wish to see 'security contractors' / yahoo...

Since we Pakistanis often suffer simultaneously from the twin demons of megalomania and paranoia - verily we are better than everyone else and that is why everyone is out to get us - we often also look at history through a rather selective and distorted lens. Unfortunately, none typify this mindset more than the doyens and doyennes of the Pakistani electronic media, in whom a curious mix of hyper-patriotism, half-baked information, sincere ignorance and arrogant bluster seems generally to hold sway. Take the issue of the day on Pakistani media: whether the American known by his apparent pseudonym " Raymond Davis" - who shot dead two men in Lahore - can be tried by Pakistani courts or whether the US government has any right to claim diplomatic immunity for him. I am not going to offer my own opinion on this because, for better or worse, this is an issue for the US and Pakistani states to sort out. (I should, however, point out that, personally speaking, I do not think armed A...

Can we just express how refreshing it was to watch  Najam Sethi 's first appearance on  Geo  tonight? In the middle of the hyperventilating cacophony surrounding the  shooting to death of two men in Lahore by a contractor of the US embassy  (and the death of a third in a hit and run accident apparently at the hands of an American consulate vehicle), Sethi began his new programme  Aapas Ki Baat  with the warning that he wanted to put emotionalism aside and analyse the incident only in terms of the facts. That in itself is an all too rare approach on our television screens these days. But what followed was close to a masterclass for other television anchors on how to impart clear, precise information with a logical, rather than emotional, analysis. Not only did Sethi cite the actual clauses of the  Vienna Convention  on diplomatic immunity (which Pakistan has ratified) that have been furiously talked about but never actually specifically refere...