In most of the Muslim world, Israel is the all-purpose scapegoat for anything bad that happens. Whatever atrocity is committed, and no matter how clear it is who perpetrated it, it was actually an Israeli conspiracy (or perhaps an American one). For example, throughout the Muslim world, the overwhelming majority believe that Osama bin Laden was not connected to 9/11. The popular choices for the real perpetrators are Israel, the US, or some vague “non-Muslim terrorists.”
The latter theory is popular in Pakistan (and probably Bangladesh, which was not surveyed). There, in the Subcontinent, India rather than Israel takes the role of the all-purpose scapegoat. Here’s two stories from a couple of weeks ago. The first regards the terrorist attack in Pakistan on the Sri Lankan cricket team. Among the Pakistani talking heads, it was clear that the culprit was not Pakistani terrorists, but an Indian conspiracy:
FOR many foreigners, events in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, on March 3rd confirmed their view of Pakistan as a hotbed of terrorism. A dozen masked gunmen ambushed a convoy carrying Sri Lanka’s national cricket team, killing six policemen and two others, and wounding seven cricketers and a British coach. But for many Pakistani pundits, quick to appear on television, events fitted another familiar pattern: Pakistan as victim of Indian conspiracy.
In January Punjab’s intelligence service had warned the police that India’s spies were planning to attack the Sri Lankan team. Now the pundits claimed the ambush was intended as retaliation for the attack on Mumbai in November in which more than 170 people were killed, to show that Pakistan was a security risk. As evidence, they pointed to the assailants’ escape: Pakistan’s Islamist terrorists, went the argument, make sure to kill themselves as well as their victims. To bolster their case, they cited India’s crowing over its decision not to send its own cricket team, for which Sri Lanka’s was standing in, and its leaders’ complaints, after the attack, about Pakistan’s intact terrorist “infrastructure”.
This far-fetched analysis, and the refusal to accept the reality of Pakistan’s terrorist problem, owes much to the religious-nationalist leanings of many young but influential television presenters. Their opinions were formed by the distorted education they received under General Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s dictator from 1977-88. So, despite many occasions when al-Qaeda has claimed attacks in Pakistan, many Pakistanis refuse to believe the group exists, let alone that it is dangerous for their country.
The terrorists’ escape, and the fact that India accurately judged Pakistan as unsafe, are both evidence that India was responsible. Awesome.
India, it seems, has a long reach. Because at the same time as it was orchestrating a terrorist attack on Sri Lankan cricketers, it is also accused of instigating a mutiny in Bangladesh:
EVEN as the corpses of 56 army officers—victims of a mutiny on February 25th and 26th by Bangladesh’s paramilitary border force—were being retrieved from a mass grave and sewers in Dhaka, the conspiracy histories were being written.
Rabid nationalists, on the fringe of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), blamed India for the uprising, which occurred at the huge headquarters of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) force, then flared at paramilitary camps around the country.
In Bangladesh, at least, the India theory was only one of many conspiracies used to explain the mutiny.
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