The falsehoods and hypocrisy from a country’s defense minister defies belief

Pakistan’s Defense Minister, Khawaja Asif, stated recently that “Israel is a threat to the entire Muslim world,” and that “Israel is a product of the Balfour Declaration, which was established in the 1940s as an illegitimate state, and it could pose a direct threat to any of the countries in the region.”

I would like to ask Minister Asif how he can say what he has said, living in a country created a year earlier than Israel under an a similar British mandate to Israel?

Pakistan, the country that gave sanctuary to the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, for nine and a half years? Bin Laden, who directed and inspired numerous terrorist attacks causing 3,200 direct deaths, most notably the 2,977 victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Thousands more people died later from 9/11-related illnesses and subsequent global conflicts based on Bin Laden’s murderous ideology, one that continues to this day to “cause a threat worldwide”.

It is worth revisiting that the death toll from the 1947 Partition of British India (which created India and Pakistan) is generally estimated at around 1+ million people. Pakistan was created as “a State for South Asian Muslims” (on Indian soil), the dream of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in an identical British-mandated manner to which Israel was created (on biblically-acknowledged Jewish “lands”). Can Asif really be that unaware of this historical fact and how the establishment of his own country came about?

The big difference is, Israel is located on historically biblical Jewish land stretching back thousands of years. Pakistan is not located on land with any biblical connection to Islam.

The violence surrounding the 1947–49 partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel is commonly estimated at around 15,000–25,000 deaths total (including Palestinians, Jews/Israelis, and Arab armies).

That means the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan was some 50 times deadlier in terms of people killed, with some 18-20 times the number of people (circa 14 million) displaced than the partition of Palestine creating Israel and Jordan (circa 750,000).

Not all 750,000 Palestinians crossed an international border when Israel was founded. Many were displaced from one part of Mandatory Palestine to another, for example, to Gaza (ending up under Egyptian control) or the West Bank (ending up under Jordanian control), where, for some nearly 20 years prior to the 7-Day War, the Arabs started and lost in 1967. There were no cries of “Free Palestine” before that time.

There is also an important distinction. It would be very misleading to compare the circa 750,000 Palestinian refugees with the entire Indian population movement while completely ignoring the subsequent displacement of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. Approximately 850,000 Jews eventually left Arab countries in the decades following 1948. The timing and causes (many forced, some voluntary while fearing for their lives) varied considerably by country.

This is gross hypocrisy and ignorance at an unbelievable level from a senior Government Minister, and Khawaja Asif should be called out world-wide for making such skewed and false accusations.