Will the world wake up after Peshawar?

Proximity to tragic events tends to magnify the cruelty inflicted on innocent people. So it is that we are horrified by the ghastly slaughter (there can be no other word for what the barbarians did) of 141 people, among them 132 children, at Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Tuesday, December 16. Most of the students felled by the bloodthirsty jihadis were aged 10 to 13.

The heart-rending wail of a father captures the sorrow of the parents who lost their children, “My son went to school in his uniform, he has returned home in a coffin. He was my dream, my dream has died.” Hundreds of dreams died and transmogrified into nightmares on Tuesday.

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or one of its factions, has issued a statement owning up responsibility for the crime. The statement came even while the carnage was on, with a spokesman declaring that the seven jihadis, among them two suicide bombers, who had attacked the school had been instructed to kill “older students”. The chilling disclosure has only served to underscore that terrorism is the antithesis of all that is human, that terrorists are no better than rabid dogs.

Yes we grieve, like all decent, democratic and humane societies should, over the tragedy that has visited Peshawar. But our grief also tells a story that cannot but discomfit those who repudiate everything that terrorism and terrorists stand for. It tells us that proximity alerts us to Islamist barbarism that distance tends to dull.

When 200 teenaged girls were abducted by Boko Haram and pressed into sex slavery in Nigeria, we barely took note of that crime. When the Islamic State militia massacred Yezidis, forcing survivors to take shelter in the barren Sinjar mountains where children died like flies, we merely took note of it. Earlier, when terrorists attacked a school in Beslan, Russia, in September 2004, leaving 385 dead, among them 186 children, we wondered what it was all about.

Just as the story of global trans-border terrorism does not begin with the devastatingly spectacular attacks of 9/11, the story of innocents being massacred in the name of jihad does not begin with the ghastly attack on the school in Peshawar. These are stories with prologues and preceding chapters; each day, each week, each month a new chapter is added to these stories.

Let us not forget that on November 26, 2008, parents, wives, husbands, friends and families were grieving in Mumbai as Pakistani terrorists went on the rampage. By the time the bloodletting was over, 164 people were dead; many more scarred for the rest of their lives.

This is not an occasion, at least not an apt occasion, to remind those who claim to govern Pakistan, the rickety civilian Government and the all-powerful Army, that the mess in which that country finds itself today is of their own creation. As Farahnaz Ispahani, a highly respected former Member of Pakistani Parliament and public policy analyst, tweeted, “We are eating ourselves up from the inside. Stop blaming neighbours / West. These monsters are our creation. Our children are dead.”

Denial in the face of overwhelming evidence; pandering to Islamist extremism for ‘strategic’ gains; breeding and feeding monsters to use them against others, notably India and Afghanistan; sheltering wanted terrorists like Osama bin Laden; and using terrorism as an instrument of state policy.

The list is long, the details are known to the world. That Hafiz Saeed, wanted for masterminding the Mumbai attacks, walks freely around and routinely calls for jihad, protected by the Pakistani state, is not exactly a secret. That Pakistan has repeatedly rejected incriminating evidence related to 26/11 is not unknown to its patrons and friends.

That none of the leaders of Pakistan, men who thump their chests and threaten fire and brimstone, had the courage to name the Tehreek-e-Taliban while shedding crocodile tears over the innocent victims of Peshawar bears testimony to their cowardice. Worse, it reinforces the widely documented belief that they are complicit and in cahoots with the Tehreek-e-Taliban.

The Pakistani Army, which has been dragooned into raiding Taliban hideouts in North Waziristan by the US which has made funds conditional to anti-terrorist operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has used the Taliban, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as a ‘strategic asset’. Recall the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008. Recall too the attack on the Indian Consulate in Herat days after Narendra Modi took charge as Prime Minister.

The ISI, a unique institution that is answerable to none other than the Generals of Rawalpindi, has long been engaged in inflicting a million wounds on India. From Punjab to Kashmir to Kanyakumari, rare is the Indian State that has not been scorched by the evil of terrorism aided, sponsored and plotted by the ISI. We have grieved and raged over our dead, we have mourned the death of our soldiers, we have repeatedly sought to draw the world’s attention to the incubator, the epicentre, of terrorism to our west.

But the world has slept all these years and decades. It has slept through India’s sorrow, it has slept through the atrocities on Shias and Ahmediyas and Christians and Hindus in Pakistan. It has slept through the taunting display of jihadi terror by the Pakistani Establishment. It has slept through the eruption of multiple faultlines across the arc of Islamic countries.

It is only now, as jihadis strike with ferocity in places as distant as Canada and Australia, as the Middle East slides into devastating chaos and destruction, as the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Boko Haram and numerous offshoots of violent Islamism compete with each other to emerge as the most ruthless, and now as children are massacred in so horrific a manner inside a school, that the world is stirring awake. It is yet to act.

In that lethargy can be found the real tragedy of our times.

Source : ABP Live