So far, the highest recent accomplishment of our high command has been to have successfully overthrown Imran Khan. To keep him overthrown, they fabricated 200 cases against him. The fear that all of these cases would come apart at the seams, drove them to deploy the Pakistan army against their own people; to undermine the rule of law to the extent to have made abduction and torture by government agencies the norm, garnished by robbing of their dignity, the women folk of those opposed to them; brazenly rigging the Feb 8 elections so that the stock of shamelessness has seldom been raised higher except when they used the illicit fruit of this shamelessness, the parliament, to shred the constitution. And then, on Nov 15, when there arose the suspicion that the Supreme Court may finally do justice and restore some of the seats to the PTI of which it had helped rob them, through Qazi Isa’s many kindnesses to Pakistan, they torpedoed the bench hearing the case!
The high command seems utterly determined to keep the people of Pakistan subjugated. Their fear is that should the people get back what is theirs, the high command stands to lose their heads. So, the solution to the problem they have arrived at is that this subjugation be made permanent. And this is best done by ensuring that their man at the top becomes the permanent bane of Pakistan!
Three thousand miles to the west of us another subjugation is being sought to be made permanent i.e that of the Palestinians by the Israelis, ably assisted by the US, UK, Germany [the inventor of modern-day genocide] and most of the “West”, with the honourable exceptions of Ireland and Spain.
This attempt at subjugation has now gone on for over a hundred years, when the first street thugs among the Zionists were formed into the Haganah paramilitary units in 1920 to scare the Palestinians into selling off their land to Jewish immigrants.
In 1948, when Israel became ‘independent’, it drove half the Palestinian population [750,000] out of their homes to seek refuge in different neighbouring countries, and not only did they destroy 500 Palestinian villages, but ploughed them under, and planted trees of European origin over the land where these villages had stood, so that not even a memory of these villages should survive. Then, in 1967, they expelled another 350,000 Palestinians.
Since the 1920s, successive generations of Jews have been brainwashed into believing that the Palestinians were human animals. For the Israelis not to have been made to believe this, would have made impossible the permanent subjugation of the Palestinians, their ethnic cleansing, or their extermination, all of which were alternate Zionist goals.
Concurrently with brainwashing their own children, the Israelis resorted to breaking the spirit of Palestinian children so that even the very thought of freedom would flee their hearts and minds.
By Oct 6, 2023, the Israelis were fairly certain that they had sufficiently pulverised the spines of the Palestinians so that every last dream of freedom among them had been ground to dust.
But then dawned Oct 7, and breaking through their prison of the last fifty-six years, the Palestinians destroyed the functional capacity of the famed Israeli “Gaza Division” in the next six hours, and unleashed their war of independence which has no example in history in terms of inequality of the forces doing battle, unparalleled heroism of the underdogs, nor of the sacrifices being rendered by the Palestinians, which is evidenced by thousands of witnesses and captured on miles of video footage.
This has truly been a war between the F-35 Stealth Fighters on one side, and the RPG-7 Rocket Launchers on the other. According to Israeli estimates, this war should have ended with the complete annihilation of Hamas in a month, but it is now the 14th month going, and yet the Palestinians are still fighting on.
More than 50000 thousand of them, mostly women, children, and old men have been counted dead on the ground, and it is estimated that more than 200,000 of them have been crushed and asphyxiated under the rubble or died of disease and starvation. All their hospitals and schools have been destroyed; targeted killings have accounted for most of the Palestinian journalists and teachers, and hospital and aid workers. Many among them, including hundreds of kids, have had their limbs amputated without anaesthesia, and now the final phase has arrived for those who have been cut off in North Gaza. They are being starved to death, while being continuously bombed, sniped at, and strafed from the skies above. Countless times they have been herded into ‘safe zones’ on Israeli advice, and once there, they have been murdered by IDF bombing. The US has ensured that though the Palestinians have no food to eat, Israel does not fall short of bombs to kill those of them who might escape the ravages of hunger, thirst, and disease. But yet they fight on.
With all the blood being shed in Gaza and the heart-rending tragedy being played out there, along with the epic heroism being enacted, a divine mercy has also descended upon the Muslims. For the first time in centuries, the Shia and Sunni Muslims have come together and unified, and the Shia Muslims are mixing their blood with that being shed by their Sunni brothers and sisters. A great and blessed change seems to be in the offing.
This is what the thirst for freedom does to those who want it badly enough. The high command and their pimps and thugs, whom they have empowered, should assiduously pray that this thirst for freedom does not come to infect the people whose necks bear the weight of their accursed jackboots.
Email: saeedakhtarmalik85@gmail.com