Protestors overturn container blockadeISLAMABAD, Sept 20: The Army was called in on Thursday to prevent close to 3,000 angry protesters from entering the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad during a protest against the anti-Islam film.
The US Embassy is one kilometre away from the entrance of the diplomatic enclave and there are no barriers inside. According to Express News correspondent Qamarul Munawar, if the protesters, who are present at the gate of the enclave, manage to break through, then it will result in chaos.
He added that the Army was called in as the police shelling remained ineffective in controlling the protesters.
Express News correspondent Haider Naseem reported that the protesters coming from Rawalpindi to Islamabad headed back after the police hurled tear gas at them.
Around 50 protesters and 38 police officials were injured during the riots who were shifted to the Polyclinic hospital.
An ulema delegation met with the IG Police and chief commissioner and agreed on a deal. Maulana Zahoor Alvi confirmed that the arrested protesters were also released.
SSP Traffic Police Islamabad Dr Moeen Masood told Radio Pakistan that the red zone of Islamabad will remain closed on Friday for traffic.
He said that the normal traffic would ply between the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi as well as within Islamabad.
Dr Masood added that 274 Islamabad police personnel were deployed for controlling traffic and they would remain alert on Friday as well.
Mobile services will also remain suspended in Islamabad tomorrow (Friday) from 9am-11pm to avoid any untoward incident.
Islamabad’s heavily-guarded diplomatic enclave is home to most Western embassies, including the US, British and French missions.
Earlier during the protest, police fired live rounds and tear gas to break up a crowd of students, many armed with wooden clubs.
The crudely made Innocence of Muslims has triggered protests in at least 20 countries since excerpts were posted online, and more than 30 people have been killed in violence linked to the film.
There have been dozens of protests around Pakistan over the past week and at least two people have been killed, but Thursday is the first time protests in the capital have turned violent.
Police fired tear gas and live rounds as the protesters, chanting “We are ready to die to safeguard the Prophet’s (pbuh) honour,” tried to break through a barrier of truck containers set up to block access to the diplomatic enclave.
“I was ordered by my boss to disperse the crowd and that is why I had to open live fire but the aim was nearby trees and not the demonstrators,” Zaman Khan, a police officer deployed at the picket said.
The firing forced the protesters to scatter, but they returned later to pelt the police picket with stones.
Student Asif Mehmood demanded police let the protesters through to the US embassy and urged harsh treatment for American pastor Terry Jones, notorious for past Quran-burning episodes and who is reportedly connected to the film.
“Terry Jones and the filmmaker should be sternly punished for playing with the feelings of Muslims. We will not tolerate this blasphemy,” Mehmood said.
Fellow protester Rehan Ahmad said: “Islam is often ridiculed by America and the West and blasphemy is committed against our Prophet (pbuh) in the name of freedom of expression.”
Charlie Hebdo Firebombed last year (Credit: guardian.co.uk)
PARIS, Sept 19 — A French satirical magazine on Wednesday published a series of cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, setting off a new wave of outrage among Muslims and condemnation from French leaders amid widening unrest over an amateur video that has provoked violence throughout the Islamic world. The illustrations were met with a swift rebuke from the government of François Hollande, which had earlier urged the magazine, Charlie Hebdo, not to publish the cartoons, particularly in the current tense environment.
“In France, there is a principle of freedom of expression, which should not be undermined,” Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, said in a French radio interview. “In the present context, given this absurd video that has been aired, strong emotions have been awakened in many Muslim countries. Is it really sensible or intelligent to pour oil on the fire?”
In the interview on France Info radio, Mr. Fabius announced that, as a precaution, France planned to close its embassies in 20 countries on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, which has become an occasion for many to express their anger although “no threats have been made against any institutions.” A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the closings would affect French consulates, cultural centers and schools as well.
In Egypt, representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood denounced the cartoons as blasphemous and hurtful, and called upon the French judiciary to condemn the magazine.
Mahmoud Ghozlan, a spokesman for the group, noted that French law prohibits Holocaust denial and suggested that similar provisions might be made for comments deemed blasphemous under Islam.
“If anyone doubts the Holocaust happened, they are imprisoned,” Mr. Ghozlan told Reuters. “It is not fair or logical” that the same not be the case for insults to Islam, he said.
Religious and political leaders in other majority Muslim nations also denounced the cartoons but called for calm. Tunisia’s governing Islamist party, Ennahda, warned believers against falling into a trap set by “suspicious parties to derail the Arab Spring and turn it into a conflict with the West,” Reuters reported.
Charlie Hebdo’s Web site was not functioning on Wednesday, the result of a computer attack, according to the editorial director, Stéphane Charbonnier. A Pakistani technology news outlet, ProPakistani, reported that a Pakistani hacker group claimed it had blocked the site because of its “blasphemous contents” about Muhammad. The violence provoked by the video disparaging the prophet began on Sept. 11 when a mob attacked the American Embassy in Cairo. The unrest quickly spread to Libya, where an attack on an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi claimed the lives of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three staff members.
On Wednesday, police officers were dispatched to guard the offices of Charlie Hebdo in eastern Paris.
The magazine’s headquarters, not far from its present offices, were gutted by a firebomb in November after it published a spoof issue “guest edited” by Muhammad to salute the victory of an Islamist party in Tunisian elections. Mr. Charbonnier, the editorial director, has been under police protection since.
Neither he nor the publication had received threats as a result of the most recent issue of the magazine, he said.
Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the government would prohibit a series of protests that had been planned in several French cities for Saturday — one week after a group of around 250 people staged a largely nonviolent protest of the American-made amateur film, “Innocence of Muslims,” outside the American Embassy here.
“There is no reason for us to let a conflict that doesn’t concern France come into our country,” Mr. Ayrault told RTL radio. “We are a republic that has no intention of being intimidated by anyone.”
Mr. Charbonnier contested that decision, which he called “shocking.”
“The government needs to be consistent,” he said. “Why should they prohibit these people from expressing themselves? We have the right to express ourselves, they have they right to express themselves, too.”
In a statement, the main body representing Muslims in France, the French Muslim Council, expressed its “deep concern” over the cartoons and warned that their publication risked “exacerbating tensions and provoking reactions.” The council urged French Muslims to express their grievances “via legal means.”
Mr. Charbonnier said the weekly published the cartoons in defense of freedom of the press, adding that the images “would shock only those who wanted to be shocked.”
Gérard Biard, the magazine’s editor in chief, said: “We’re a newspaper that respects French law. Now, if there’s a law that is different in Kabul or Riyadh, we’re not going to bother ourselves with respecting it.”
This week as every other week, Mr. Biard insisted, “We’ve simply commented on the news.” The caricatures are meant to satirize the video that has stirred violence across the Muslim world, he said, and to denounce that violence as absurd.
“What are we supposed to do when there’s news like this?” Mr. Biard asked. “Are we supposed to not do that news?”
Known for its sharply ironic and often vulgar tone, Charlie Hebdo has a reputation for being an equal-opportunity provocateur. In addition to episode in November, the magazine was criticized for a decision in 2006 to republish cartoons of Muhammad that first appeared in a Danish newspaper.
In an editorial on Wednesday, Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, defended the magazine’s right to publish what it pleases, within the limits of French law. But it called the most recent caricatures “in poor taste, or even appalling” and questioned the “sense of responsibility of their authors and editors.”
Mr. Charbonnier held firm.
“I’m sorry for the people who are shocked when they read Charlie Hedbo,” Mr. Charbonnier said. “But let them save 2.50 euros and not read it. That’s the only thing I have to say.
“They can’t hold us responsible for the closure of the embassies, they can’t hold us responsible for the violence and the deaths,” he said. “We’re not provoking anything.” Religious radicals can use “any pretext to start the fire,” he said.
Rushdie's Road to Notriety (Credit guardian.co.uk)
Valentine’s Day 1989 had nothing to do with love for Salman Rushdie. He “hadn’t been getting on with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins,” but that was nothing compared with the news from Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini made an announcement that plunged Rushdie into more than a decade of fear, sequestration and flight. “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world,” Khomeini said, “that the author of the ‘Satanic Verses’ book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.”
Not long after the proclamation of this fatwa, the British police who had been protecting Rushdie told him that he needed an alias, not only for receiving payments and writing checks without being identified but “for the benefit of his protectors,” who “needed to get used to it, to call him by it at all times, when they were with him and when they weren’t, so they didn’t accidentally let his real name slip . . . and blow his cover.” After some thought Rushdie “wrote down, side by side, the first names of Conrad and Chekhov, and there it was, his name for the next eleven years”: Joseph Anton. These “were his godfathers now,” and “it was Conrad who gave him the motto to which he clung as if to a lifeline . . . ‘I must live until I die, mustn’t I?’ ”
Thus the title of this, Rushdie’s memoir of his entire life, but mainly of those more than 11 years of torment, years often made bearable by the friendship and love of others, yet years unceasingly under the threat of the dire unknown, while Rushdie was squirreled away in secret London hideaways and remote farmhouses. For anyone it would have been terrifying, but for this proud and passionately sociable man it was degrading as well:
“To hide in this way was to be stripped of all self-respect. To be told to hide was a humiliation. Maybe, he thought, to live like this would be worse than death. In his novel ‘Shame’ he had written about the workings of Muslim ‘honor culture,’ at the poles of whose moral axis were honor and shame, very different from the Christian narrative of guilt and redemption. He came from that culture even though he was not religious, and had been raised to care deeply about questions of pride. To skulk and hide was to lead a dishonorable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. Both shamed and ashamed.”
As that passage indicates, Rushdie has chosen to tell his story in the third person: to write not about Salman Rushdie but about Joseph Anton, the person who for more than a decade was himself yet not quite himself. It takes a few pages for the reader to get used to this, but it works: It eliminates the temptations of self-pitying bathos (temptations that surely must have been severe) and allows Rushdie to maintain a certain clinical distance from himself. He further intensifies this effect by abandoning, for the most part, the elaborate, fanciful, quasi-poetic style that characterizes most of his previous work (including “The Satanic Verses”) and to write, instead, in a plain prose that by its severity makes his ordeal all the more palpable.
Relatives mourn Karachi factory fire (Credit stuff.co.nz)
KARACHI, Sept 13 — The towering metal door at the back of the burned-out garment factory could have been an escape for many of the low-paid textile workers caught in the fire here on Tuesday. Instead, it stands as a testament to greed and corruption at a factory where 289 trapped employees died. .
As hundreds of workers scrambled to escape the flaming factory after a boiler explosion, they found the main sliding door — 30 feet high, big enough for a truckload of cotton — firmly locked. Instead of letting the workers escape, several survivors said Thursday, plant managers forced them to stay in order to save the company’s stock: piles of stonewashed jeans, destined for Europe.
“They prevented people from leaving, so they could save the clothes,” said Shahzad, a stone-faced man in sweat-drenched clothes, standing in the blacked corridors of the factory.
His voice trembling, Shahzad, who goes by just one name, said he had already recovered the body of a 15-year-old cousin; now he was looking for his 23-year-old brother, Ayaz. He figured he was buried under the mounds of ash and twisted metal.
“He’s gone,” he said quietly.
Karachi buried its dead on Thursday amid grief and recrimination over the deadliest industrial accident in Pakistan’s 65-year history.
Sounds of mourning filled working-class neighborhoods as emotionally charged funeral processions wound through the narrow streets. Amid such a high death toll, the stories of misfortune competed for pathos — one street lost eight residents; a mother said she lost three daughters to the inferno, then a son who tried to rescue them.
At the factory, known as Ali Enterprises, rescue workers quenched the last flames 48 hours after they started. Volunteers cast bundles of smoldering jeans from a first-floor window.
Meanwhile, the police spent a second day hunting for the factory’s three owners, who now face possible charges of conspiracy to commit murder.
Mirza Ikhtiar Baig, the prime minister’s adviser on textiles, noted in a statement that after the first fire engine reached the scene on Tuesday, firefighters found that the manager had ordered the gates to be closed, “not allowing anyone to leave the premises without checking.”
Instead, up to 600 factory workers were left with just one open exit, or forced to take their chances plunging from windows considered too high to require bars.
Inside the factory, warmth still glowed from the pitch-black basement where many workers perished from smoke inhalation.
Muhammad Raheel, a rescuer, said he helped recover 30 bodies before fainting and having to be carried out on a stretcher. “I still have visions in my head,” he said. “It is impossible to forget.”
The disaster was a blow to an already struggling city: Karachi, a bustling megalopolis of an estimated 18 million people that has come to represent both the immense promise of Pakistan and its tragic failings.
For decades, Karachi and its growing factory sector have been a magnet for migrants, both from outside Pakistan’s borders and within them.
Afghans and Iranians arrived in huge numbers in the 1980s, fleeing war in their homelands. Recent years have seen a strong flow of ethnic Pashtuns from the Taliban-affected areas of northwestern Pakistan, as well as refugees from surrounding areas of Sindh Province displaced by the floods of 2010 and 2011.
The Ali Enterprise factory was a microcosm of Karachi. “We had Biharis, Gujratis, Baloch, Sindhi, Pashtuns, Urdu-speakers, Punjabis,” one survivor said. “Everyone worked here in peace.”
But that harmony has often been missing from the city’s streets, plagued by increasing violence in recent years: sectarian blood baths, criminal score-settling, militant atrocities and the bloody rivalry among the city’s ethnically divided political parties.
Activists from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the city’s most powerful and muscular political party, led cleanup efforts at the stricken factory on Thursday.
Karachi’s ambitions have also been thwarted by the faltering authority of the local or federal governments, which have failed to enforce the most basic workplace standards.
In theory, Pakistan’s laws offer strong protections to workers, but application is notoriously weak. In textiles, which account for 53 percent of exports, employers routinely sidestep health and safety regulations through bribery and corruption.
“The state inspectors can make a lot of extra money,” said Sharafat Ali, an activist with the Pakistan Institute of Labor Education and Research, which has documented abuses in the textile industry. “They have lifestyles that go beyond their wages.”
The lack of regulation was apparent inside the factory, which contained space for fire extinguishers that had failed and directions to emergency exits that were locked.
“There was no safety in there, no fire equipment,” said Khwaja Sohail Mansoor, a local lawmaker, who stood near a fire truck outside the factory.
Survivors of the blaze said rule-breaking was the norm at the plant, where many worked 12-hour shifts and were paid as little as $58 per month — one-third less than the statutory minimum.
German-language labels on bundles of denim that survived the blaze carried a brand named “Okay Men.” And workers at the factory said they had been forced to lie about their working conditions to auditors representing foreign buyers.
Hafeeza Bano, a 35-year-old with burn wounds on her leg and arm, said she had to misrepresent her working hours and pay or face the threat of dismissal. “The owners were very cruel, and very greedy,” she said.
Those men — identified as Abdul Aziz, Mohammad Arshad and Shahid Bhaila, and sought for arrest — have yet to be found.
A thread of outrage ran through news coverage. “Hundreds saw hell on Earth” read the banner headline in Dawn, the leading English-language paper.
On Thursday, the Sindh Province labor minister resigned. Hours later, the government announced that a retired judge would lead an investigation tasked with delivering initial findings next week. But few here believed it would amount to much.
“We need to do more than change the faces — we need to change the policies,” said Farida Bibi, who lost her 26-year-old son. “Then we need to hang the men who owned this factory.”
Alarmed at the wave of public anger, other textile manufacturers sought to distance themselves from their actions.
“We are shellshocked by what happened, and these people need to be held accountable,” said Shehzad Saleem, chairman of the Pakistan Garment Exporters and Manufacturers Association. “But everyone needs to calm down and let the investigation take place.”
The Muttahida Qaumi Movement called for three days of mourning, but the city is expected to be back on its feet soon. Karachi’s resilience is a point of pride, and normal life, of a sort, has tended to quickly resume after floods and bombings.
But Parween Rahman, the head of a major aid project in Orangi, the city’s largest slum, said that resilience may be a product of circumstance as much as a triumph of the human spirit. “Where do they go? They have to live their lives. They have to survive,” she said. “They have little other option.”
This website completes one year on September 11, 2012. That coincides with the 11th anniversary of the biggest terrorist attacks on US soil – and which have also turned into America’s longest serving war.
The 9/11 attacks fetched me an offer by a US based publishing giant to write a book on Pakistan. For me, the motivation to write a book was always present. However, to write a book through the prism of how the West sees Pakistan or to pander to stereotypes of how emancipated I felt as a woman emerging from a Muslim society… would have defeated my original motivation.
And so, ‘Aboard the Democracy Train,’ is a nuanced book that seeks to both educate and inform global audiences about Pakistan’s inside story. Doubtless, the Western reader today is far more informed about the Pak-Afghan region than before it went to war in Afghanistan. However, even while Pakistan’s geography has been critical to its destiny, the country is so much more than an epicenter for the 9/11 attacks or a conduit for bringing the Taliban to power in neighboring Afghanistan
This website has brought Pakistanis and Americans (and readers from some 60 countries around the world) to catch up on the region’s current affairs. That is a testimony to openness among individuals, ready to go beyond the mainstream media to non traditional internet resources. As someone invested on both sides of the Atlantic, I see the website as a means of promoting greater understanding between people around the globe.
Eleven years to date, the US is now focused on bringing the troops back home and rebuilding its stressed economy. A badly battered Pakistan seeks to foster trade ties with its neighbors. With the world community involved in the US’s longest war, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the longer the war, the greater its toll. In particular, the three nations most involved, the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan have the greatest to lose. If greater numbers of US soldiers returning from war are committing suicide or suffer post traumatic stress disorder, the war has shattered the lives of millions of Pak-Afghan people for generations to come.
But as nations turn inward to pursue their policies of self interest, its absolutely critical that people don’t scapegoat peoples of other ethnicities, nationalities or faith, in tribal vendetta or failed policies of their governments. This is where education safeguards against agent provocateurs who use religion to drive a wedge between people. Submitting to such provocateurs, as is happening in the Middle East, only breeds terrorism, wars and a state of perpetual conflict. Despite its advanced state of evolution, if humanity continuously engages in this type of behavior, it will only drive its own kind of species toward extinction.
This is where the internet and constructive websites bring people across the globe to understand the “other.”
US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens (Credit: telegraph.co.uk)
The U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed when suspected Libyan religious extremists stormed the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi late Tuesday night, according to Libyan Deputy Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagour. Margaret Coker has the latest on The News Hub.
The killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, in one of the most brazen attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound in a generation, sparked a security crisis in the North African country, elevated tensions across the Middle East and raised concerns about how well the U.S. can protect its diplomats abroad.
The U.S. responded to the assault by dispatching two Navy destroyers, dozens of Marines, federal investigators and intelligence assets to Libya to protect Americans and hunt the suspected religious extremists who carried out the attack late Tuesday. U.S. officials described the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens as complex and possibly premeditated.
The assault, along with a protest at the American embassy in Cairo, created a crisis atmosphere in Washington just as the presidential campaign is hitting its stretch run and fueled a harsh exchange between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.
Mr. Obama said the U.S. will work with the Libyan government to bring attackers to justice, but he and other officials didn’t rule out a unilateral U.S. strike. “Make no mistake, justice will be done,” the president said.
What’s the likely fallout from the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya as well as the storming of U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt? Eurasia Group Middle East and North Africa Analyst Hani Sabra discusses on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters.
The attack took place on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, a day when security officials are typically on heightened alert. American officials, who debriefed survivors, described a horrifying scene in the consulate where, amid thick smoke and gunfire, Mr. Stevens became separated from his security officer.
As the flames grew and attacks increased, personnel were forced to abandon the building without the ambassador. American officials retrieved his body when it was brought to the airport the next day by Libyans.
An Obama administration official declined to comment on the ambassador’s security measures but said a review conducted ahead of the anniversary found “no information and there were no threat streams to indicate that we were insufficiently postured.”
U.S. officials were still piecing together the day’s events, which followed protests at the U.S. embassy in Cairo over an anti-Islamic video. In contrast to the Cairo protest, which appeared to be spontaneous, U.S. officials said the attack in Benghazi late Tuesday night might have been planned by militants who used the protests as cover.
American intelligence agencies were poring over information that could help indicate what groups may have taken part. Officials said intelligence agencies are looking specifically at the pro-al Qaeda group Ansar al Shariah but cautioned they didn’t have solid evidence.
Nearly 24 hours after the start of the shooting, officials struggled to piece together details about what transpired through hours of chaos and terror inside the darkened consulate and a nearby annex. They warned that their preliminary version of events could change as more information became available.
Nearby, Benghazi residents described a harrowing scene of destructive mob violence. A Libyan doctor said he and several neighbors attempted to get the gang of about 200 armed men to leave as they marched toward the U.S. compound. “We told them to leave our homes alone and one [of the militants] replied, ‘The Americans are infidels and we are going to finish them,’ the doctor said. “Many of us then fled because the shooting started.”
Ali Ben Saud, the Libyan owner of the villa leased to the U.S. for the consulate, said the men arrived in the neighborhood around 8 p.m. local time, carrying weapons including rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles.
The handful of local security forces were overwhelmed. “We couldn’t stop them. They were multiplying, minute by minute. There were hundreds of them,” said Saleheddine al-Arghoubi, a neighborhood resident. “They didn’t come to talk. They came to fight.” The first shots were fired at around 10 p.m. local time, or 4 p.m. Eastern time, according to a preliminary U.S. account.
The attackers gained access to the compound and began firing into the main building, setting it afire. A senior administration official said three people were inside the compound at the time: Mr. Stevens; Sean Smith, a foreign service information-management officer; and a U.S. regional security officer.
As the three tried to leave the burning building, they became separated from each other in heavy smoke. The regional security officer, whose name hadn’t been disclosed by late Wednesday, made it outside, and then he and other security personnel rushed back into the burning building to try to rescue Mr. Stevens and Mr. Smith. They found Mr. Smith, already dead.
They were unable to find the ambassador before being forced to flee the building because of the heavy flames and continuing small-arms fire.
Around 10:45 p.m. local time, U.S. security personnel assigned to a nearby annex tried to regain control of the main building but came under heavy fire and returned to the annex. At around midnight, the mission annex came under fire. Two U.S. diplomats were killed during that attack and two others were wounded.
At around 2:30 a.m. local time, Libyan security forces regained control of the situation, according to the preliminary U.S. account. Mr. Obama was told Tuesday night that Mr. Stevens was unaccounted for.
According to Mr. Ben Saud, the landowner, Libyan security guards jumped into the compound and pulled Mr. Stevens from the burning building at around 1 a.m. local time. Libyans then drove him to Benghazi Central Hospital, where the staff there tried unsuccessfully to revive him. One Libyan doctor said the diplomat died of asphyxiation and that he tried for 90 minutes to revive him, according to the Associated Press
Obama administration officials said they didn’t know what condition the ambassador was in when he left the compound. “His body was later returned to U.S. personnel at the Benghazi airport,” an administration official said. A chartered aircraft evacuated U.S. personnel back to Tripoli, including the remains of those killed.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the attack should “shock the conscience” of people of all faiths, but wouldn’t alter U.S. policy in Libya. The “mission in Libya is noble and necessary…and will continue,” she said from Washington. The U.S. also announced increased security measures for all U.S. diplomatic facilities.
Libyan officials, many of whom led the rebel government based in Benghazi and worked with Mr. Stevens during that time, condemned the killings. The head of the new congress, Mohammed Magarief, apologized to the American public for the tragedy. By late Wednesday, no one had been arrested. Officials in Tripoli were scrambling to implement a response to what they admitted was a monumental security breach.
Egyptian protesters climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and replaced the flag with a black standard bearing an Islamic inscription, in protest of a film deemed offensive to the Prophet Muhammad. Matt Bradley has details on The News Hub.
The U.S. responded by sending two destroyers, the U.S.S. Laboon and the U.S.S. McFaul, to the Libyan coast to aid in any evacuations or humanitarian missions, said a U.S. official.
In addition, a U.S. Marine team was sent to supplement security at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, arriving there Wednesday. The unit is known as a Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team, or FAST team, and typically numbers 50 Marines.
Mr. Stevens is the first ambassador killed by hostile forces since 1979, when the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan was murdered in Kabul. Officials said intelligence agencies were now trying to determine if any threads of information may have been missed.
American intelligence agencies are poring over threat information that could help indicate what groups may have taken part in the attack.
Members of the Ansar al Shariah militant group gave an interview to the local television station from the hospital early Wednesday morning, praising the men who attacked the consulate, calling them “the top layer of Libyan society.” However, the members told Benghazi TV that their organization, a group of religious fighters who battled to help oust Moammar Gadhafi from power, didn’t plan the attack against the Americans.
Mr. Stevens, 52, who is usually based in the capital Tripoli, apparently was visiting Benghazi ahead of the planned opening of a U.S. cultural center there, said a Libyan official.
The attack on the U.S. consulate was the second this year. In June, suspected Islamic militants detonated an improvised explosive device at the same compound. A Libyan guard was injured, but no Americans were harmed. In the spring, the International Committee for the Red Cross offices in Benghazi were also targeted.
Washington has long been leery of the radical Islamic fringe in Libya. The largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq waging battles against U.S. soldiers were from two towns in eastern Libya, and U.S. drones have monitored those locations since the Libyan uprising last year.
—Siobhan Gorman, Devlin Barrett and Carol E. Lee contributed to this article.
KARACHI, Sept 12— Fire ravaged a textile factory complex in the commercial hub of Karachi early Wednesday, killing almost 300 workers trapped behind locked doors and raising questions about the woeful lack of regulation in a vital sector of Pakistan’s faltering economy.
It was Pakistan’s worst industrial accident, officials said, and it came just hours after another fire, at a shoe factory in the eastern city of Lahore, had killed at least 25.
Flames and smoke swept the cramped textile factory in Baldia Town, a northwestern industrial suburb, creating panic among the hundreds of poorly paid workers who had been making undergarments and plastic tools.
They had few options of escape — every exit but one had been locked, officials said, and the windows were mostly barred. In desperation, some flung themselves from the top floors of the four-story building, sustaining serious injuries or worse, witnesses said. But many others failed to make it that far, trapped by an inferno that advanced mercilessly through a building that officials later described as a death trap.
Rescue workers said most of the victims died of smoke inhalation, and many of the survivors sustained third-degree burns. As firefighters advanced into the wreckage during the day, battling back flames, they found dozens of bodies clumped together on the lower floors.
One survivor, Muhammad Aslam, said he heard two loud blasts before the factory filled first with smoke, then with the desperate screams of his fellow workers. “Only one entrance was open. All the others were closed,” he said at a hospital, describing scenes of panic and chaos.
Mr. Aslam, who was being treated for a broken leg, said he saved himself by leaping from a third-floor window.
Hundreds of anguished relatives gathered at the site, many of them sobbing as they sought news. Some impeded the rescue operation, and baton-wielding police officers tried to disperse the crowd but failed.
“If my son does not return, I will commit suicide in front of the factory,” one woman shouted before news cameras as relatives tried to console her.
The death toll rose quickly. By evening, the Karachi commissioner, Roshan Ali Sheikh, said that 289 people had died, most of them men. The provincial health minister, Sagheer Ahmed, put the toll at 248, which he said was the number of bodies accounted for at major hospitals. The number was expected to rise further.
In the shoe factory fire in Lahore, 25 people were reported killed and dozens wounded. Officials said that blaze had been set off by a generator that caught fire and ignited chemicals stored nearby in the factory, illegally located in a residential neighborhood. Most of the victims were men under 25.
The fires immediately revived long-running questions about the regulation of Pakistan’s manufacturing sector, centered in Karachi, and of the vital textiles industry in particular.
Textiles are a major source of foreign currency for Pakistan, accounting for 7.4 percent of its gross domestic product in 2011 and employing 38 percent of the manufacturing work force. Pakistani cotton products are highly sought in neighboring India and form the backbone of a burgeoning fashion industry that caters to the elite. President Asif Ali Zardari’s government has often called on the United States to drop tariff barriers to Pakistani textile imports, which it says would be preferable to traditional aid.
But the industry suffers from weak regulation, characterized by lax oversight and corruption. Business owners often put profits over safety, workers’ rights advocates say.
On Wednesday evening the police raided the home of the owner of the Karachi factory, Abdul Aziz, who appeared to have gone into hiding. According to an online business information service, his company, Ali Enterprises, manufactured denim, knitted garments and hosiery and had capital of between $10 million and $50 million.
His nephew, Shahid Bhaila, the chief executive officer of the company, was also being sought for questioning. The police said both men had been placed on the exit control list, barring them from leaving the country.
The Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the most powerful political party in Karachi, announced three days of mourning. The city electricity company said it would cancel all outstanding bills for the families of those affected as a good will gesture.
The cause of the fire remained unclear. Geo News, the largest news channel, speculated that it had been started by extortionists, reporting that Mr. Aziz had previously faced a demand for a shakedown payment of more than $100,000, which he refused.
But others said an electrical fire was more likely. Wali Muhammad, a former electrical inspector, said that most accidental fires are caused by short circuits in equipment. But since 2003, he said, inspectors had been forbidden by law from visiting factories in Karachi and Punjab; it was not immediately clear why.
“This is criminal negligence,” he told Geo News, referring to the ban.
Another mystery surrounded the locked factory doors. Some survivors said the exits had been shuttered to prevent workers from slipping out early; others said it was the consequence of a recent break-in.
A majority of the garment workers came from Orangi Town, a poor working-class neighborhood in Karachi. Seventeen of the victims came from the same street, local news media reported.
The factory building suffered severe structural damage in the blaze, and officials feared it would collapse on rescue workers during the day.
While many distraught family members set up camp near the factory, others moved between city hospitals, seeking news of loved ones. One man said he was looking for his cousin, who earned $70 a month as a cashier. “He’s still missing. I’m afraid he may have been working in the basement,” the man said.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan called on the government to mount an immediate investigation. “The head of the firefighting operations in Karachi has noted that the factory was dangerous, flimsily built and had no emergency exits,” said Zohra Yusuf, chairwoman of the rights group. “Why did all of that escape official attention earlier?”
Workplace safety is guaranteed under Pakistan’s Constitution, but labor leaders say that government oversight has crumbled rapidly in recent years, along with a general decline in governance.
Sharafat Ali of the Pakistan Institute of Labor Education and Research, a labor rights group, said that 151 workers died in accidents in 2011. The state was partly responsible for the deaths, he said, because its civil servants “silently and criminally allow violation of laws and regulations established to ensure health and safety provisions at work.”
Waqar Gillani contributed reporting from Lahore, Pakistan.
THE audience erupted as Aamir Liaquat Hussain, Pakistan’s premier televangelist, darted around the television studio, firing off questions about Islam. “How many gates are there to heaven?” he challenged.
Children leapt from their seats, their mothers yelled answers, fathers strained forward, all hoping to catch the eye of Mr. Hussain, who worked the crowd like a circus ringmaster — cajoling, teasing, rewarding.
“Show me the tongue of a snake!” he commanded a bearded man, as part of a question about symbolic serpents. The man obediently stuck out his tongue, prompting hoots of laughter.
To the victors, Mr. Hussain tossed prizes: mobile phones, tubs of cooking oil, chits for plots of land, shirts from his own clothing line. Then he vanished, briefly, only to return on a purring motorbike — also up for grabs.
When a shy-looking man answered Mr. Hussain’s theological teaser correctly, the preacher grabbed the man’s hand and thrust it high, in the manner of a prizefighter. The audience applauded.
“It’s the Islamic version of the ‘The Price is Right,’ ” said the studio manager, standing behind a camera.
Mr. Hussain, 41, is a broadcasting sensation in Pakistan. His marathon transmissions during the recent holy month of Ramadan — 11 hours a day, for 30 days straight — offered viewers a kaleidoscopic mix of prayer, preaching, game shows and cookery, and won record ratings for his channel, Geo Entertainment.
“This is not just a religious show; we want to entertain people through Islam,” Mr. Hussain said during a backstage interview, serving up a chicken dish he had prepared on the show. “And the people love it.”
Yet Mr. Hussain is also a deeply contentious figure, accused of using his television pulpit to promote hate speech and crackpot conspiracy theories. He once derided a video showing Taliban fighters flogging a young woman as an “international conspiracy.” He supported calls to kill the author Salman Rushdie.
Most controversially, in 2008 he hosted a show in which Muslim clerics declared that members of the Ahmadi community, a vulnerable religious minority, were “deserving of death.” Forty-eight hours later, two Ahmadi leaders, one of them an American citizen, had been shot dead in Punjab and Sindh Provinces.
Many media critics held Mr. Hussain partly responsible, and the show so appalled American diplomats that they urged the State Department to sever a lucrative contract with Geo, which they accused of “specifically targeting” Ahmadis, according to a November 2008 cable published by WikiLeaks.
Now, Mr. Hussain casts himself as a repentant sinner. In his first Ramadan broadcast, he declared that Ahmadis had an “equal right to freedom” and issued a broad apology for “anything I had said or done.” In interviews, prompted by his own management, he portrays himself as a torchbearer for progressive values.
“Islam is a religion of harmony, love and peace,” he said, as he waited to have his makeup refreshed. “But tolerance is the main thing.”
IN some ways, Mr. Hussain is emblematic of the cable television revolution that has shaped public discourse in Pakistan over the past decade. He was the face of Geo when the upstart, Urdu-language station began broadcasting from a five-star hotel in Karachi in 2002. Then he went political, winning a parliamentary seat in elections late that year. The station gave him a religious chat show, Aalim Online, which brought together Sunni and Shiite clerics. The show received a broad welcome in a society troubled by sectarian tensions; it also brought Mr. Hussain to the attention of the military leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was reportedly touched by its content. In 2005, General Musharraf appointed him junior minister for religious affairs, a post he held for two years.
Mr. Hussain’s success, with his manic energy and quick-fire smile, is rooted in his folksy broadcasting style, described as charming by fans and oily by critics. By his own admission, he has little formal religious training, apart from a mail-order doctorate in Islamic studies he obtained from an online Spanish university in order to qualify for election in 2002.
“I have the experience of thousands of clerics; in my mind there are thousands of answers,” he said.
That pious image was dented in 2011 when embarrassing outtakes from his show, leaked on YouTube, showed him swearing like a sailor during the breaks and making crude jokes with chuckling clerics. “It was my lighter side,” Mr. Hussain said. (Previously, he had claimed the tapes were doctored.)
But that episode did little to hurt his appeal to the middle-class Pakistanis who form his core audience. “Aamir Liaquat is a warm, honest and soft-natured person,” said Shahida Rao, a veiled Karachi resident, as she entered a recent broadcast, accompanied by her 6-year-old grandson. “We like him a lot.”
Senior colleagues at Geo are less enthusiastic. After an accumulation of controversies, including the Ahmadi show and on-air criticism of sex education material in school textbooks, he left the station in 2010. But Geo struggled to find a replacement and last June brought him back, causing consternation among senior anchors and managers, several of whom threatened to resign, senior executives said.
“It created a lot of noise,” said one, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Many of us wanted to know what he was coming back as.”
The answers were provided by the network’s chief executive, Mir Ibrahim Rahman, a 34-year-old Harvard graduate who argues that Pakistan needs people like Mr. Hussain, who hold water with Islamic conservatives, to incrementally change society.
“We are still recovering from the Zia years; we can’t move too fast,” Mr. Rahman said, referring to the excesses of the Islamist dictator Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s. “We need people like him to ease us down the mountain.”
To placate internal critics, Geo has just published a code of conduct for its journalists. “We’ve taken stock of the excesses that have been committed,” said the channel’s president, Imran Aslam, referring to a variety of controversies involving the station. “It’s an important start.”
But commercial imperatives also loom large, and in that arena, Mr. Hussain’s value is unquestioned.
COMPETITION for ratings at Ramadan is fierce among Pakistan’s television stations, and this year the race had a feverish feel. One station hired Veena Malik, a racy actress better known for posing seminude for an Indian magazine, to present its religious programs. One of her shows featured a live exorcism of a supernatural spirit that, conveniently enough, had called the station by telephone. Another station broadcast the conversion of a Hindu boy to Islam, drawing wide criticism.
By contrast, Mr. Hussain’s show seemed a model of restraint, though the set’s extravagance may have suggested otherwise.
The centerpiece was a giant boat that represented Noah’s Ark, but closely resembled a craft from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie franchise. Live animals wandered the set, including flamingos, peacocks and deer. Studio guests included Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program, and Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-conservative politician. Ratings peaked on Aug. 12 when the studio moved to a cavernous exhibition hall that held 30,000 people — the largest studio audience in Pakistan’s history, executives said.
Mr. Hussain, unsurprisingly, has become rich.
Although his salary is a closely guarded secret, Geo sources said top names can earn $30,000 a month — income that, in Mr. Hussain’s case, is increased by lucrative product sponsorship deals, his clothing line and by leading religious pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia.
He keeps tight security, including bodyguards and an armored vehicle, since his acrimonious departure from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a political party at the center of Karachi’s often violent power struggles, in 2008. A senior party official said Mr. Hussain had “nothing to fear” from the party.
Mr. Hussain hopes to shrug controversy off in his latest incarnation. “Even the liberals will love me,” he said, a touch optimistically. He has even developed a soft spot for the United States, the bête noir of Pakistani conservatives. After a family vacation in New York last year, he returned with a honey sauce that he uses during his cooking broadcasts.
At any of the countless secular universities she might have chosen, religion — at least in theory — would be beside the point. But she picked one that would seem to underline her status as a member of a religious minority. She enrolled at the University of Dayton, a Roman Catholic school, and she says it suits her well.
“Here, people are more religious, even if they’re not Muslim, and I am comfortable with that,” said Ms. Alhamad, an undergraduate in civil engineering, as several other Muslim women gathered in the student center nodded in agreement. “I’m more comfortable talking to a Christian than an atheist.”
A decade ago, the University of Dayton, with 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students, had just 12 from predominantly Muslim countries, all of them men, said Amy Anderson, the director of the school’s Center for International Programs. Last year, she said, there were 78, and about one-third of them were women.
The flow of students from the Muslim world into American colleges and universities has grown sharply in recent years, and women, though still far outnumbered by men, account for a rising share.
No definitive figures are available, but interviews with students and administrators at several Catholic institutions indicate an even faster rate of growth there, with the Muslim student population generally doubling over the past decade, and the number of Muslim women tripling or more.
At those schools, Muslim students, from the United States or abroad, say they prefer a place where talk of religious beliefs and adherence to a religious code are accepted and even encouraged, socially and academically. Correctly or not, many of them say they believe that they are more accepted than they would be at secular schools.
“I like the fact that there’s faith, even if it’s not my faith, and I feel my faith is respected,” said Maha Haroon, a pre-med undergraduate at Creighton University in Omaha, who was born in Pakistan and grew up in the United States. “I don’t have to leave my faith at home when I come to school.”
She and her twin sister, Zoha, said they chose Creighton based in part on features rooted in its religious identity, like community service requirements and theology classes that shed light on how different faiths approach ethical issues.
Many Muslim students, particularly women, say they based their college choices partly on the idea that Catholic schools would be less permissive than others in the United States, though the behavior they say they witness later can call that into question.
They like the prevalence of single-sex floors in dorms, and even single-sex dorms at some schools. “I thought it would be a better fit for me, more traditional, a little more conservative,” said Shameela Idrees, a Pakistani undergraduate in business at Marymount University in Arlington, Va., who at first lived in an all-women dorm.
Some of the women land at Catholic schools more or less accidentally — some are married and simply enroll where their husbands are going, while others are steered toward particular schools by their home countries’ governments.
But for others it is a conscious choice, based on recommendations from friends or relatives, or impressions gained from growing up in places, like Lebanon, with strong traditions of church schools.
Most of the schools say they do not specifically recruit Muslim students.
“There’s no conscious effort,” said the Rev. Kail Ellis, a priest and vice president for academic affairs at Villanova University, near Philadelphia. “It’s basically something that happened through word of mouth and reputation.”
Muslim students here cite the accommodations Dayton has made, like setting aside spaces for them to pray — a small room for daily use, and two larger ones for Fridays — and installing an ablution room for the traditional preprayer washing of hands and feet.
The university also helps students arrange celebrations of major religious holidays, and it contracts with a halal meat supplier for special events.
Manal Alsharekh, a Saudi Arabian graduate student in engineering at Dayton, said, “I was in another university before that did not respect us so much.”
Even so, the adjustment to an American school can be jarring, especially for women. They are a minority even within the minority of Muslim students. Many of them follow restrictions on interaction with nonrelatives, and the head coverings most of them wear make it impossible to blend in.
The degree of culture shock students experience varies as widely as the traditions they grew up in. Some eat the nonhalal meat served daily in school cafeterias, some eat it only after saying a blessing over it and others do not eat it at all.
In a gathering of foreign-born Muslim women here, traditional attire varied widely, from Ayse Cayli, a graduate student from Turkey who does not cover her head and wore shorts and a T-shirt, to Mrs. Alsharekh, who while in public wears a floor-length cloak over her clothes and a veil across most of her face. Most wear a hijab, or head covering, and stylish but fairly conservative Western clothes extending to the ankles and wrists, even in warm weather.
The prospect of walking into an identifiably Christian institution, often for the first time in their lives, can be intimidating.
“I was afraid they will not like me because I am Muslim, or they will want me to go to church,” said Falah Nasser Garoot, a male Saudi graduate student in business at Xavier University in Cincinnati. “At first, when I saw the crosses on the classroom walls, it was very strange for me.”
Fatema Albalooshi, a graduate student from Bahrain who is studying engineering at Dayton, said that when she first looked into the school, “I thought it was going to be compulsory to take Catholic courses.”
And for the women, especially, identifiable by their head scarves, there are always questions. “People stop and ask me questions, total strangers, about my head covering, they’re curious about how I dress,” said Hadil Issa, an undergraduate here who grew up in the Palestinian territories and the United States. The more covering they wear, the more women are asked if they get hot in the summer. Muslims are consulted on etiquette by students planning to visit the Middle East. And often, they are asked why they attend a Catholic school.
“I tell people the atmosphere is very warm and supportive,” Ms. Issa said. “I feel accepted here, and that’s what matters.”
Lahore, Aug 31: Hate content in textbooks used in the Punjab has increased from ‘45 lines in 2009 to 122 in 2012’, a content analysis report published by the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) said on Thursday. The report titled Education or Promotion of Hatred was distributed at a conference, Biases in Textbooks and Education Policy, organised by the NCJP on Thursday.
The study examined 22 textbooks for the academic year 2012-13 in the Punjab and Sindh from classes 1 to 10.
The report says that one of the 30 chapters in the general knowledge textbooks for class 1 has content advocating intolerance. It says there has been a ‘marked increase’ in hate content in the curricula of classes 7 to 10.
In 2009-2011, it says, 12 chapters in various textbooks at these levels contained hate material. The number of such chapters has increased to 33.
As many as seven lessons with hate content are part of the 8th class Urdu curriculum for 2012-2013, compared to none in 2009, it says. It also says said that the number of such lessons in the Pakistan studies textbooks for classes 9 and 10 had increased to three in 2012 from none in 2009. It says that hate lessons that were part of the class 6 social studies and class 7 Islamiat books in 2009 had been excluded from the 2012 curricula.
Speaking at the launch Dr Mehdi Hasan, the School of Media and Communication dean at the Beaconhouse National University, said Muslims posed a greater danger to their fellow Muslims then to non Muslims in Pakistan.
He said, seminaries, where less than 4 per cent of the Pakistani children studied in Pakistan, did not pose a greater threat than schools, where hate material was being taught to students as young as to be in class 1.
He said, “Teaching students that a certain religion teaches ‘bad things’ is not just a violation of human rights but also a severe ethical violation.”
Dr Hasan said that a religious state was not a democratic state. He said that Pakistan had been established through a democratic process.
Wajahat Masood, an assistant professor at BNU, said future generations will likely judge the present as ‘sub-human and insensitive’.
He said hate content and distortion of history was evident in curricula as well as in Pakistani literature. Masood said that sectarian and religious discrimination should be recognised as ‘vulgar’ and discouraged.
Irfan Mufti, deputy director at the South Asia Partnership Pakistan, said that hate content in school syllabi spoke volume of an intolerant society.
“Hate content will turn our children into intolerant individuals,” he warned.
Dr Baela Raza Jamil, director of programmes at the Idara-i-Taleem-O-Aagahi highlighted the Compulsory Education Act that was passed recently by the Senate for Islamabad. She said the Act had failed to mention religion as a reason for which no discrimination would be allowed in provision of education.
‘She said after the devolution of powers to the provinces, each province was responsible for regulating its curricula.
Dr AH Nayyar, visiting professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, regretted that many such reports had been issued previously, but the matters had become worse instead of improving.
NCJP Executive Director Peter Jacob regretted that textbooks were being used to promote hatred in the country.
“Religious discrimination cannot be eliminated unless people working for it are demotivated,” he said.
