Pakistan, Turkey wage 'hypocritical' war against France

According to an article published in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Macron needs "mental treatment" while Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said that the French President Emmanuel Macron has "chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims" as both of them favoured rhetorical strategy to insist on a disturbing equivalence between Holocaust denial and blasphemy.

Tel Aviv:Following French President Emmanuel Macron's criticism of radical Islam after a school teacher was beheaded in France for showing his pupils cartoons of the Prophet as part of his class on free speech, two so-called champions of selective outrage against Islamophobia-Turkey and Pakistan have taken centre stage according to an article in an Israeli newspaper.

Both Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's favoured rhetorical strategy is to insist on a disturbing equivalence between Holocaust denial and blasphemy, according to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz titled "Erdogan and Imran Khan's Hypocritical War on 'anti-Muslim' France".

The Haaretz article authored by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid reported that while urging the boycott of French goods, Erdogan invoked the Holocaust and equated France's policies with Nazi Germany, saying that Muslims in Europe are now being subjected to a "lynch campaign similar to that against Jews before World War II."

Meanwhile, the Pakistan PM had in a bizarre letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought a ban on Islamophobic content similar to the prohibition put for the Holocaust on the social networking site.

Read:|I understand the sentiments of Muslims: Macron

In the letter that he shared on Twitter, Khan said that "growing Islamophobia" is encouraging extremism and violence "across the world" - especially through social media platforms such as Facebook.

If there is anything more preposterous than Khan's frequent and conveniently myopic lectures on Islamophobia, it is often their timing, he said.

The author said that the day the Pakistani premier was expressing outrage against Charlie Hebdo's cartoons at the United Nations General Assembly, a man of Pakistani origin launched a terror attack targeting the French publication's former offices.

Further, the attack on Macron by Khan came a day after an attack on a Hindu temple in Pakistan's Nagarparkar region, and "only 46 years after the Ahmadi Muslim community was defined as heretical in Pakistan's constitution - an act of collective discrimination that Khan has addressed with full-scale appeasement".

While Khan continues to be oblivious of the Islamist abuses in his country, he has over the years continued to draw "parallels between blasphemy against Islam and the genocide of Jews".

In a letter to the Muslim states, the Pakistan PM said that though the European countries have banned "questioning of the Holocaust" but not "mockery" of Mohammed.

Highlighting the fact that the Western countries, including France, which "allows" blasphemy against Islam, Shahid said that these countries also ermits the same against other religions.

He further said that much of the targeting of Muslims that Khan's Facebook letter highlights are far more prevalent in Pakistan.

"Amidst all the talk of Islamophobia, Pakistan remains the only country in the world that criminalizes the recitation of Quran, and the Islamic call to prayer, when they deny the Ahmadiyya sect the right to self-identify as Muslims," Shahid said. Also, the Khan-led administration has and will never condemn the atrocities being committed on Uyghurs by the Chinese Communist Party. For him, the issue of concentration camps in Xinjiang is "non-issue".

Recently, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad had said in a series of tweets that Muslims have a right to be angry and "kill millions of French people" for the "massacres of the past".

Read:|Pressure grows on French Muslims stigmatised by attacks

"Those conjuring these absurd comparisons seem to ignore how opposition to Holocaust denial has never triggered violence. Nowhere is it suggested that the provocation of Holocaust denial justifies violence, knife attacks or murder. Nowhere is violence or the death sentence codified for denying the genocide of Jews," said Shahid.

He highlighted that the ban on Holocaust denial is "actually part of legislation banning the denial of Nazi crimes in a bid to help ensure they're never repeated where they were instigated".

The author notes that if Pakistan had accepted the commitment of its genocide of the Bengalis in Bangladesh in 1971 or Turkey had acknowledged its genocide in Armenia then these leaders would not have called out "Islamophobia" amid the Islamist abuses in their land.

However, the author has also noted that the Holocaust denial should be decriminalised as it might "prevent self-appointed global Muslim leaders from expediently equating the denial of the Holocaust with "global anti-Muslim persecution".

ANI