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Nobel Laureate Wiped From Pakistan's Textbooks As Heretic
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Alexander Abad-Santos writes that in any other country, the late Dr. Abdus Salam would be a national hero: he's the Nobel laureate in physics who laid the groundwork for the biggest physics discovery in the past 30 years--the Higgs boson. But that isn't the case in Pakistan, where Salam has been wiped from textbooks and history for not being fundamentalist enough. 'He belonged to the Ahmadi sect, which has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants who view its members as heretics,' says Sebastian Abbot. 'His grand unification theory of strong, weak and electromagnetic fields opened the gateway for the discovery of bosons and laid down the basis for this quantum electrodynamics project,' writes Anam Khalid Alvi for Pakistan's Express Tribune. But Pakistan can't celebrate his achievements, since Ahmadis like Salam are and were prevented from 'posing as Muslims,' and can be punished with prison and even death. By contrast, fellow Pakistani physicist A.Q. Khan, who played a key role in developing the country's nuclear bomb and later confessed to spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is considered a national hero. Khan is a Muslim."
Comparing the Extremism the Fundamentalist Islamists get away with around the world to whatever drama the Fundamentalist Christians try to perpetrate is -- really -- just ridiculous.
Not really - Just a matter of degree, limited solely by how much power each group has over their respective countries... AIDS sucks more than the flu, but you don't really want to catch either of them.
But hey, I hear ya - It makes perfect sense to devote the full resources of the US government to hashing out whether or not whores... er... "young women"... should have the right to autonomy over their own bodies when it comes to reproductive health. Certainly, no fine upstanding Fundies would suggest beating people to death just because their god whispers sweet, sweet nothings to them in the dark...
Religion is a disease, which any sane person would seek to cure ASAP.
People can handle accidental, isolated deaths. Yes, someone dies, but there is no malicious force that caused it. ...
People cannot accept someone else who is out to kill them intentionally because of hatred or a belief system.
I find sporadic intentional, malicious deaths to be far more acceptable than widespread preventable accidental deaths. Any decent human being would feel the same. The important thing is to minimize the loss of human life. Whether there's intentionality behind the deaths is irrelevant.
The problem is, most people aren't decent human beings and care more about being slighted by foreigners than about actually saving lives.
The reason there ever was a "war on terror" isn't to "funnel money to corporate buddies" â" it's because, to be blunt, we don't put up with that shit
What's sad is that you probably actually believe that. If that were actually true, we'd have actual reasons for going to war, instead of flimsy pretexts.
e.g. Afghanistan, we're there to get Bin Laden, but once we get there we stop looking for him and waste years spending money for nothing. Who does that benefit besides military contractors?
e.g. Iraq. What reason is there to invent a non-existant link between Saddam Hussein and OBL, and hype up non-existent WMDs based on evidence that was known to be false?
Why did we go intervene in Lybia and haven't done much yet in Syria? One's an oil producing nation, the other isn't.
You've made a bold assertion in that "we don't put up with that shit". What sort of mechanisms are in place to prevent that shit from happening? If a well connected vice president actually decided to go to war in order to benefit his cronies, how does the system prevent that? What reason is there to believe that ANY US politician makes ANY decision without considering how it would profit their friends and campaign contributors?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
" But make no mistake: when US policy makers of any political stripe make the decision to go to war, the thinking isn't, "Hey, this can line the pockets of my corporate buddies!! Lulz!"
Well actually there was LBJ, he was a pretty successful war profiteer on Bell helicopter, General Dynamics fighters and his buddy ran Brown and Root. Brown and Root did very profitable general contracting for the military in Vietnam.
Brown and Root became Kellog Brown and Root and ended up owned by Halliburton which Dick Cheney used to war profiteer in Iraq 30 years later. The second Iraq war turned in to one massive exercise in war profiteering for people well connected with the Republican party. The U.S. would fly in plane loads of 100 dollar bills and they would be made to disappear. How else do you explain the Bush administrations overwhelming urge to invade Iraq. There was no actual rational reason for it that wasn't a lie.
War profiteering is as old as war, Dave. Are you actually that naive or do you not even believe the stuff you're writing anymore.
Profiteering may not be the prime reason for a war but it sure is a huge fringe benefit for the well connected.
@de_machina
People cannot accept someone else who is out to kill them intentionally because of hatred or a belief system. Yes, foreign policy, resources, economics, geopolitics, and myriad other nuances are involved here, but it really is that simple at its core.
While there is some irrational hatred at play, the fact remains that the US and its allies have been overthrowing governments, propping up dictators, and generally fucking with many countries in the Middle East for over 50 years now. I'd say it adds up to a bit more than nuance.
The reason there ever was a "war on terror" isn't to "funnel money to corporate buddies" — it's because, to be blunt, we don't put up with that shit, even if our response is imperfect — not to mention that Europe and the West has enjoyed US defense-by-proxy for over a half-century. The fact that war is an economic driver is incidental (even if it can be argued to be important in its own way). But make no mistake: when US policy makers of any political stripe make the decision to go to war, the thinking isn't, "Hey, this can line the pockets of my corporate buddies!! Lulz!"
The reasons for the War on Terror are myriad. Many players are interested in it for their own reasons. For the defense contractors and the banks, the purpose of the War on Terror is very much to make money. That $500 billion the Pentagon spends every year has to go into someones' pocket. And the debt to finance the war has to come from somewhere. Not much gets done in America that doesn't have a profit motive.
But I know that you and many other readers here are cynical (and ignorant) enough to actually twist a story about Pakistan and Islam into, yet again in true topsy-turvy bizarro-world style, how the US is evil. (Same thing happened with the recent Syria Wikileaks story.) It might be amusing if it weren't so predictable, pathetic, and shameful.
On the world stage it's never about good and evil. It's about power and control; who has it and who wants it. It's as simple as that.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Might have been helpful to read the rest of the conversation about how most of the other religions (Christianity especially) have learned from their mistakes.
Furthermore, nobody asserted Islam was the "silliest" of the bunch -- just the most lethal to non-believers.
being in a shit-hole place with shit education where everyone has been miserably poor for centuries has much more to do with you being a violent scumbag than the particular batshit superstitions you subscribe to.
actually, terrorists tend on average to be relatively wealthy and well-educated, from relatively well-to-do countries
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?