“May Your Problems Always Be So Small”: Palestinian Pain, Pakistani Silence |
At a recent gathering of social scientists in Washington, DC, a Pakistani-American academic spoke movingly about Palestine. The vocabulary was polished, the grief sincere, the analysis appropriately grave. Then a Palestinian academic asked the question that should stalk every Pakistani and South Asian intellectual in the West: why are you so eloquent about Palestine and so silent about Pakistan? Why can you name Zionism but not Imran Khan? Why can you speak of genocide but not General Asim Munir, Trump’s favorite field marshal, presiding over Pakistan’s quasi-dictatorial order? Why does Pakistan — the country you analyze, inherit, visit, romanticize, and perform — become unspeakable precisely when it most needs speech?
To her credit, the Pakistani-American academic did not disappear into theoretical fog. She confessed the truth. It is easier now for Pakistani academics to speak about Palestine than Pakistan. Palestine may bring applause. Pakistan may bring consequences: intelligence harassment, family pressure, airport unpleasantness, poisoned trips home, calls to relatives. These are the real borders of courage. We keep quiet, she admitted in substance, because we want to travel comfortably.
The Palestinian academic smiled and offered a sentence that belongs in the museum of moral humiliation: “May your problems always be so small.”
He said this as someone whose extended family had been shattered by Gaza’s slaughter. It was not cruelty. It was diagnosis. In one sentence, he exposed an entire class: highly educated, politically fluent, morally theatrical, and terrified of inconvenience.
This is the scandal of the Pakistani and South Asian intellectual world in the West. It is not ignorance. They know. They know Khan is imprisoned. They know PTI supporters have been hounded, arrested, intimidated, erased from legitimacy, and treated as civic contamination. They know Pakistan’s public sphere has been suffocated, dissent criminalized, journalism disciplined, parliament reduced to furniture, and courts bent under pressure.
They know Washington has not merely tolerated Pakistan’s authoritarian drift but found renewed use for its uniformed managers. They know the United States prefers a reliable general to an unpredictable popular leader.
They know Washington........