Pakistan Wondering How Much Longer It Can Keep Citizen Anger Focused On Faraway Israel

“An emerging challenge for the leadership in deflecting attention from its cronyism, nepotism, incompetence, corruption, support for terrorists, warped domestic priorities, and other issues best left shrouded in distraction.”

Credit: Bassem Tellawi via Wikimedia Commons

Islamabad, October 3 – A proven political strategy to divert popular resentment from the corrupt, repressive government and toward an outside foe might not remain effective forever, a new report by this Islamic country’s ministry of the interior warns.

Israel remains a potent rhetorical magnet for focusing Pakistanis’ anger despite its physical distance and negligible measurable impact on Pakistani lives, acknowledged the report, but the authors caution that overplaying the Israel card may carry unwanted consequences during a time of increased access to alternative sources of information that can both attenuate the desired anti-Israel and anti-Jewish effect of the rhetoric and reflect some of the anger back at Pakistan’s own leadership. The risk of this development has reached a likelihood unknown thirty years ago, according to the report, and appears to increase with each passing year, such that by the middle of this century, it estimates, Pakistan may be forced to forgo anti-Zionism as a primary domestic pacification strategy.

“Whereas during the latter half of the previous century the very mention of Israel, Zionists, or Palestine served as a reliable lightning rod for popular anger, it no longer riles the populace as it once did,” the report warned. “An outright majority of Pakistanis still view an assertive Jewish presence on historically Muslim-ruled land as a source of existential shame, but indications have emerged that they no longer rank that shame at the top of their troubles, a development that points to an emerging challenge for the leadership in deflecting attention from its cronyism, nepotism, incompetence, corruption, support for terrorists, warped domestic priorities, and other issues best left shrouded in distraction.”

Some analysts disagree with the report’s conclusions, arguing that antisemitism has seldom failed as a political strategy to enlist a population to get behind, or at least accept, the government’s numerous and deep flaws, and that nothing has emerged to indicate any erosion of that phenomenon. “The fact is it’s only the specific guise of anti-Zionism that makes the report’s authors reach their erroneous conclusion,” contends commentator Itchinmai Karachi. “It’s not all that difficult to dress up classic antisemitism in some new garb and paint it as something else: anti-colonialism; anti-capitalism; anti-Bolshevism; holy opposition to heresy. Whatever. The only thing the government of Pakistan has to do is find a new vehicle for thinly-veiled Jew-hate and use it to unite groups who otherwise would tear the country apart with ethnic violence. That’s one export that never becomes obsolete.”

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