COMMENT : YouTube ban — Yasser Latif Hamdani

From the Daily Times:

No state, modern or ancient, secular or religious, has successfully managed to exercise thought control on its citizens

The big news this week in
the business world is the decision by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the Google antitrust investigations. Holding that Google was not harming consumers in anyway, the FTC did not press ahead with a complaint against Google. This is a significant victory for Google but there is a loud chorus of voices against this decision, including by Microsoft’s general counsel who says that the FTC missed a golden opportunity to set things straight in terms of Google’s control over the market.

The logical result of Blasphemy Law

By Yasser Latif Hamdani

(Published in Daily Times Sept 10, 2012)

The events of the last week may have surprised you. Seeing mullahs falling over one another to declare that Rimsha Masih, the 14-year-old Pakistani Christian girl, was innocent of the charge of blasphemy was quite a spectacle in a country no stranger to spectacles. It is not out of a sudden love for justice or humanity that the mullahs have adopted this stance. Khalid Jadoon Chishti’s attempt to drive out the Christians from their locality is just one case where the real motivations have been exposed entirely due to one conscientious muezzin who had the courage and humanity to speak out against this outrage.

A year and a half after the tragic assassination of Salmaan Taseer, it has become obvious to good Muslims of this country that in its present form clause 295-C militates not just against fundamental human rights but also against Islam. They now realise that the worst kind of blasphemy is misusing the name of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) to persecute a minority community when all Muslims agree that he (PBUH) spoke of religious freedom long before it came to be universally accepted as a key principle of liberty.

A bigoted and prejudiced bad law

By Yasser Latif Hamdani

Pakistan’s Ordinance XX of 1984 has to rank in human history alongside the worst laws enacted in human history – worse than Jim Crow Laws of the southern states of the United States of America and equal in its bias to the Nuremburg Laws enacted by Nazi Germany against the Jews.  In its viciousness,  the said law is one of a kind in the modern world.  Not only does it crush the freedom of expression and speech but restricts religious freedom in a manner unprecedented in legal history.

Did Jinnah want a secular state?

By Yasser Latif Hamdani


 Taimoor Ashraf made a number of patently inaccurate claims, based on a flawed and utterly misdirected rendering of facts about Jinnah, partition and the making of Pakistan. The gist of his convoluted piece was this: Jinnah might have been secular, but did he want a secular Pakistan? 

Mr Ashraf claims that Jinnah was not secular because the August 11, 1947 speech was made as a consequence of terrible sadness on his part because of the communal bloodletting. By August 11, 1947, there were communal disturbances, but the communal bloodbath, largely, happened in late August and September. Then he claims that Jinnah was not secular because he was a pluralist. So in other words being ‘secular’ and ‘pluralist’ are mutually exclusive? There are no qualms with the fact that Jinnah’s secularism was more of the British variety than the strict French laicism of Kemal Ataturk. Does that mean Jinnah would have approved of ‘priests with a divine mission’? That incidentally is one of the more famous Jinnah quotes: “Pakistan shall not be a theocracy to be run by priests with a divine mission.”