Friday, June 03, 2005
Imran Con
Jaideep had made a post earlier about Imran Khan's role in the Newsweek Koran abuse story. James Forsyth and Jai Singh, writing in the Weekly Standard, make the exact same point that Jed made earlier: the real villain in the piece is Imran Khan with his mind-boggling hypocrisy.
On Friday, May 6 Khan catapulted the 300-word Newsweek story about a Koran being flushed down the toilet into headline news across the Muslim world by brandishing the article at a press conference and demanding that Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf secure an apology from George W. Bush for the incident. It is unlikely Khan chanced upon the item. Just days before, Khan had tried to spark a similar firestorm over a Washington Times cartoon depicting the Pakistani government as America's lapdog. Clearly in search of grist for the anti-American mill, Khan's demagoguery speaks to his own two-facedness and to a downside of military rule in Pakistan.
Khan embodies the hypocrisy of Muslim elites who inveigh against the West by day and enjoy its pleasures by night. His fame in Pakistan comes from cricket not politics: Khan is the best cricketer Pakistan has ever produced. But in London many remember him as an even greater playboy. Throughout the 1980s Khan was linked to a string of beautiful women. In 1988 he told Australia's Sunday Mail, "Pakistan society encourages marriage. There, I lead a very steady, comfortable life. Here, it is more exciting. The pace is faster. Because of the nightclubs and parties, it is a very good place to be single."
After his playing career ended in 1992, Khan entered politics under the tutelage of Lt.-Gen. Hamid Gul, the former Pakistani intelligence chief famous for fueling the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan. Khan, a man who once captained the Oxford University cricket team and was a feature at London's trendiest places, now turned against the culture he had previously enjoyed. In 1995 he denounced the West with its "fat women in miniskirts" (presumably the skinny ones in miniskirts Khan had dated were okay) and proclaimed that the "West is falling because of their addiction to sex and obscenity."
Even his political allies find Khan's duplicity hard to take. In 2002 one of his party leaders remarked: "Even we are finding it difficult to figure out the real Imran. He dons the shalwar-kameez and preaches desi and religious values while in Pakistan, but transforms himself completely while rubbing shoulders with the elite in Britain and elsewhere in the West." Khan claims that his marriage proved he wasn't a politician but his divorce and his recent demagoguery show that he now is one, albeit one of the worst sort.
In many ways, this is reminiscent of the role played by Khushwant Singh in the Satanic Verses imbroglio. Satanic Verses may have remained yet another book by Salman Rushdie that Ayatollah Khomeini had not read, if Khushwant Singh had not created such a flap about it. He called on Rajiv Gandhi to ban the book, thereby alerting the Iranian mullahs to the existence of the book.
On Friday, May 6 Khan catapulted the 300-word Newsweek story about a Koran being flushed down the toilet into headline news across the Muslim world by brandishing the article at a press conference and demanding that Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf secure an apology from George W. Bush for the incident. It is unlikely Khan chanced upon the item. Just days before, Khan had tried to spark a similar firestorm over a Washington Times cartoon depicting the Pakistani government as America's lapdog. Clearly in search of grist for the anti-American mill, Khan's demagoguery speaks to his own two-facedness and to a downside of military rule in Pakistan.
Khan embodies the hypocrisy of Muslim elites who inveigh against the West by day and enjoy its pleasures by night. His fame in Pakistan comes from cricket not politics: Khan is the best cricketer Pakistan has ever produced. But in London many remember him as an even greater playboy. Throughout the 1980s Khan was linked to a string of beautiful women. In 1988 he told Australia's Sunday Mail, "Pakistan society encourages marriage. There, I lead a very steady, comfortable life. Here, it is more exciting. The pace is faster. Because of the nightclubs and parties, it is a very good place to be single."
After his playing career ended in 1992, Khan entered politics under the tutelage of Lt.-Gen. Hamid Gul, the former Pakistani intelligence chief famous for fueling the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan. Khan, a man who once captained the Oxford University cricket team and was a feature at London's trendiest places, now turned against the culture he had previously enjoyed. In 1995 he denounced the West with its "fat women in miniskirts" (presumably the skinny ones in miniskirts Khan had dated were okay) and proclaimed that the "West is falling because of their addiction to sex and obscenity."
Even his political allies find Khan's duplicity hard to take. In 2002 one of his party leaders remarked: "Even we are finding it difficult to figure out the real Imran. He dons the shalwar-kameez and preaches desi and religious values while in Pakistan, but transforms himself completely while rubbing shoulders with the elite in Britain and elsewhere in the West." Khan claims that his marriage proved he wasn't a politician but his divorce and his recent demagoguery show that he now is one, albeit one of the worst sort.
In many ways, this is reminiscent of the role played by Khushwant Singh in the Satanic Verses imbroglio. Satanic Verses may have remained yet another book by Salman Rushdie that Ayatollah Khomeini had not read, if Khushwant Singh had not created such a flap about it. He called on Rajiv Gandhi to ban the book, thereby alerting the Iranian mullahs to the existence of the book.
