Joel Schalit

His Halo is Gone

If you happen to have read any of Obama’s policy statements on central Asia during the election campaign, the post-inauguration US missile strikes on Pakistan’s tribal areas ought to come as no surprise.

It was equally inevitable that such actions would be accompanied by a metaphorical loss of innocence, especially considering the immense hopes that progressives have held for Obama in Europe.

To that end, today, in Comment is Free, Richard Seymour does as good a job as anyone could in expressing exactly how disappointed progressives will be with the new US president’s foreign policy.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Obama can develop a consistent approach to greater west Asia. Perhaps Pakistan and Afghanistan will become of equal concern to the peace community as Palestine.

Photo: Clapham garage, January 20th.

Daniel Pearl as Metaphor

The killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 was of particular importance in reinforcing this understanding of Pakistan. A Jewish-American reporter engaged in a multiethnic marriage, Pearl’s murder by Islamic militants was promoted as an iconographic instance of the clash of civilizations thesis, transposed to America’s relationship with Pakistan. The ideological tensions inherent in emphasizing Pearl as though he were the US – multicultural, liberal, interfaith – to Pakistan as uncivilized, violent, politically corrupt and religiously intolerant – ought to be clear.

Pearl represented America, and its actualization of the ideals it was promoting on the War on Terror, which Pakistan, with its tribes, its madrassas, and its fundamentalists was in conflict with. This made Pearl a martyr-equivalent to domestic neoconservatives. If Americans wanted more nuance in news coverage of the country than Pearl’s remembrance allowed, they had to seek it out from foreign news sources such as the BBC and The Guardian.

- From a report I recently wrote about south Asian news coverage in the US