Salman Rushdie’s attack was “unjustifiable,” according to Former PM Imran Khan

Anger among Muslims toward the Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie was understandable, but Imran Khan, a former prime minister, said that it did not justify the attack, according to a Friday report in the Guardian. Rushdie was stabbed in the neck.

Imran responded to the violent attack that put Rushdie on a ventilator by telling the newspaper, “I think it is terrible, sad.”

“Rushdie recognized it because his family was Muslim. He is aware of our love for and reverence for the prophet that resides in our hearts. That was something he was conscious of. Therefore, I understood the anger, but you cannot excuse what occurred “The chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was quoted in the newspaper as saying.

Rushdie, who was raised in India by a Muslim Kashmiri family, has lived under the threat of death and spent nine years hiding out with the help of the British police.

According to the author’s agent, the attack left him with serious wounds, including nerve damage in his arm, liver injuries, and the potential loss of an eye. However, since the weekend, his condition has improved, and he was taken off the ventilator.

Victimization by politics

Imran also discussed the PTI’s political persecution, focusing in particular on the alleged mistreatment of Shahbaz Gill, a fellow party leader who was allegedly beaten and “psychologically broken” after being arrested earlier this month on sedition-related charges.

The British newspaper claimed that Gill was targeted because he had advised army officers not to follow illegal orders.

The former prime minister claimed that they were pressuring him to claim that I had instructed him to say that.

He said, “What they’re doing to Gill is sending a message to everybody. And our employees are afraid of them. We now have very active social media and social media activists. They are making an effort to intimidate the populace.

“At the time I lived, we never tried to control the media. The only issue was that occasionally the… security agencies picked someone up; three or four times we discovered this and immediately had them released, according to the Guardian.

Speaking of the situation in Afghanistan, which the Afghan Taliban have been in control of since August of last year, the PTI chief predicted that “Afghan women and the Afghan people will eventually assert their rights. They are resilient people.

However, the Taliban will simply erect defenses if you push them from the outside because you are aware of their mentality. They merely despise outside interference, he continued.

The attack on Salman Rushdie is very sad and condemnable, it cannot be justified in any way. Imran Khan’s interview to the American magazine The Guardian.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOBdN3cN_4Q]

Khan cited the security forces’ counterinsurgency strategies as the cause of the excesses and disappearances.

They were in charge of picking up people, but they also allegedly took part in the insurgency that was raging in Balochistan and the tribal region bordering Afghanistan. Because there wouldn’t be any witnesses, you couldn’t convict terrorists in court, so they would blame that, with some justification, Khan said.

“At the time I lived, we never tried to control the media. The only issue was that sometimes the… security agencies picked someone up, which we discovered three or four times. As soon as we learned, we had them released, he said.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a group that promotes a free press, described the list of violations committed by the Khan administration as “endless.” However, it was also mentioned that there was a fresh effort to terrorize journalists who were being critical.

Since Khan was replaced as prime minister by Sharif, the harassment of journalists has not abated, according to a statement from RSF.

Khan is also facing a case brought by the nation’s election commission for unauthorized foreign campaign contributions against the PTI. Although he didn’t refute the accusations, he dismissed them as politically motivated and noted that rival organizations, like Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), had not been subject to the same level of scrutiny.

In November 2014, Akbar Babar, a PTI founding member, filed a lawsuit against the group, alleging irregularities in the handling of about $3 million in foreign funding. The PTI received illegal funding, according to a decision made by the Pakistani Election Commission last month. The commission summoned Khan on Tuesday and gave the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) additional investigation authority. According to experts, if charges are proven, Khan may be barred from politics or his party may be banned.

Khan claimed that Washington was responsible for orchestrating the vote of no confidence that toppled his government and claimed that the US had assisted in persuading members of his party to leave.

He also laid the blame on Pakistan’s military, which has long played a deciding role in the nation’s political affairs. In his interview with the Guardian, he was more cautious in accusing the security forces, but he still stated: “If they weren’t behind the conspiracy, they could have stopped it because the intelligence agencies, the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] and MI [Military Intelligence], are of the highest calibre available on a global scale, and they certainly would have known what was going on.”