20 December 2017

Haaretz: Pakistan's New anti-Soros Campaign Boosts Its anti-Semitic, Conspiracy Theory-Infested Political Culture

This is because while analysts see the rise of the anti-Soros phenomenon in the West as a reincarnation of old anti-Semitic tropes about nefarious Jewish financial and social engineering designs, this kind of conspiracist thinking about Jews have never left the Pakistani ethos  - so it's more a question of continual peaking rather than resurfacing. In other words, anti-Semitism is a feature, not a bug, of Pakistani politics. [...]

Last Friday, for instance, in expectation of the Supreme Court verdict on Imran Khan, the chairman of the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), the main opposition party in the country, the Federal Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb accused Khan of being "funded by Jews and Hindus." [...]

While the prevailing anti-Hindu bigotry is rooted in the legacy of the violent Indo-Pakistani Partition, and Pakistan’s need to justify its creation, the ubiquitous anti-Semitism in the country has Islamist roots. A literalist reading of the Islamic scriptures serves as a justification for espousing violent anti-Jewish sentiments, a characteristic of jihadism. [...]

This has meant that Pakistan, with a registered Jewish population of precisely one person, where both the left and right wings perpetuate anti-Semitism through quasi 'anti-colonialism' and Islamism respectively, remains ripe for political point-scoring through perpetuating anti-Jewish bigotry. 

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