Was Pakistan’s Imran Khan Shot Because He Was Too ‘pro-Israel’?

Opinion | Was Pakistan’s Imran Khan Shot Because He Was Too ‘pro-Israel’?

Former premier Imran Khan accuses Pakistan’s current prime minister and military of planning his assassination. His assailant accuses Khan of cosying up to Israel. The Islamist conspiracy theories, anti-Israel hysteria and violence stoked by Khan have turned on their mentor

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid Nov 6, 2022 1:00 pm IST https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2022-11-06/ty-article-opinion/was-pakistans-imran-khan-shot-because-he -was-too-pro-israel/00000184-4c20-d61c-a5bf-cea7bef50000 Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, was targeted by an assassination bid at a political rally organized by Khan’s party in Punjab’s Wazirabad town last week.

The attack, which Khan claims was carried out by two separate shooters, killed one rally attendee, wounded two senior party leaders, and left the former premier with leg injuries. A suspected attacker, who has admitted to shooting at Khan, has been arrested by the Punjab police.

In separate confessional videos leaked on social media, the suspect underlines why he shot at Khan. “He was leading the people astray, and I couldn’t stand it… While the azaan [Islamic call to prayer] was going on, they were creating noise [with music] on [DJ] decks. My conscience did not accept that,” he says in the first video.

In another, he cites acceptance for Israel as the rationale for attacking Khan: “They [Khan’s government] accepted Israel. Accepting Israel is not something a Muslim should do. Our prophet (peace be upon him) said only a kafir (infidel) can be friends with another kafir, and [any Muslim attempting the same] will also become kafir alongside them.”

Khan, who has been at loggerheads with the army since his own government was ousted from power in April, has accused the top political elite and the military establishment of plotting his killing, specifically naming Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah and senior intelligence officer Major General Faisal Naseer.

Pakistan’s most popular leaders have a long history of being unexpectedly eliminated from running in elections. When they aren’t being ousted by the military, via coups or political skullduggery, they have been killed – from the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan (assassinated) to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (executed) to Benazir Bhutto (assassinated). Even the deaths of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his sister Fatima Jinnah remain shrouded in mystery. The attack on Khan comes at a time when his popular, albeit largely conspiratorial, narrative has seen unprecedented anti-army sentiment simmering in Pakistan.

The police have found the cellphone of Khan’s self-confessed attacker stacked with sermons by Saad Rizvi and his late father Khadim Rizvi, the founder of the radical Islamist Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP). The group, which has called for a nuclear bomb to be dropped on France over Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad caricatures and rallied for the mass murder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim minority in Pakistan, was actually created by the military establishment to continue its decades-old practice of using Islamist outfits to target and outflank popular political parties.

The TLP, whose chant ‘labbaik ya rasool Allah’ [O Allah’s prophet, here I am at your call] is the latest to weaponize Pakistan’s bloodthirsty Islamic blasphemy law, which facilitates vigilantes in their quest to perpetrate violence over any construed sacrilege against Islam.

Also weaponized in Pakistan, as Khan’s attacker has reaffirmed, is the anti-Israel hyperbole which remains etched in the country’s religious and political narratives. While anti-Israel conspiracy theories in the country are as old as the state itself, largely owing to the deep-rooted antisemitism among the populace, they have exploded in recent years as Pakistan inches closer to its inevitable formalization of ties with the Jewish state.

And while Saudi Arabia, hand in hand with Pakistan’s military leadership, are the ones pushing Pakistan closer to formal diplomatic relations with Israel, much of the progress on that front happened on Imran Khan’s watch – while he was in government.

In October 2018, two months into the Khan-led government taking over, the local media was brimming with claims that Israel’s then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had visited Pakistan. Next year, a meeting with George Soros over potential developmental reforms in Pakistan, rekindled the antisemitic conspiracy theories against Khan, rooted in his first marriage to Jemima Goldsmith.

Around this time, the erstwhile military touts in the media were already peddling a rationale for supporting recognition of Israel, as the prospect of official ties between the two countries moved in synchrony with the efforts towards the Abraham Accords in 2020.

By 2021, Khan’s closest aides were issuing clarifications over their own reported visits to Israel, while Saudi Arabia was pushing for normalization of relations between Pakistan and Israel before making its own ties with the Jewish state official.

Imran Khan, who for three-and-a-half years was the civilian frontman of the military’s moves, and whose fallout with the army today is largely due to his replacement by a new puppet regime, spent much of his tenure reiterating that any progress on Israel would only be possible over a ‘just solution’ for Palestinians, even as Khan conceded that he was under (Saudi) pressure to recognize the Jewish state. And following his ouster, Khan took little time to redirect accusations of appeasing Israel and the Jews, erstwhile aimed at him, towards the new Sharif regime.

Indeed, Khan has been an active peddler of much of what his attacker alleges motivated his attempted assassination, as well as the instrumentalization of violence itself for political gain. This ranges from undermining parliamentary supremacy, to justifying attacks on civilian leaders, to spreading Islamic blasphemy codes. As he fell out with the military, Khan quickly pieced together a desperate confection of conspiracy theories used to target him over the years as the “real” reason for his own exit.

When a Pakistani group visited Israel in May, Khan regurgitated the same antisemitic allegations that had been used against him, referencing the new government’s movement towards recognizing the Jewish state.

Even so, Khan is hardly the first Pakistani leader to endorse venomous narratives for political gains. The Sharif and Bhutto families, who have long been the target of suppression by the military, have now replaced Khan in doing the military’s bidding, including the same gaslighting about how they won't give in on the Israeli front.

Interior Minister Sanaullah, who insisted on Friday that religious extremism is to blame for the attack on the former premier, has helped forge the ties of his party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, with anti-Shia radical Islamist groups in Punjab to help the Sharifs consolidate their power in the country’s most populous province. And amid these political musical chairs, it is the military’s jingles in the backdrop that remain the only constant.

Whether Khan’s attacker is a lone wolf actually inspired by Islamist Judeophobic rhetoric, or a hitman parroting a bloodthirsty antisemitic, Islamist purist cover story, it is evident that these narratives give fodder to fundamentalist violence. These homicidal ideologies don’t limit themselves to victimizing those that they claim to target, and have a knack of devouring even their staunchest proponents. This in turn sustains the volatility that allows totalitarian powers like Pakistan’s military establishment to suppress democracy through absolutist rhetoric and its paramilitary executioners.

Today, the ‘democratic supremacy’ that Imran Khan still insists he is fighting for, and his opponents claim they have already achieved, is merely a contest to front this autocratic superstructure. No progress in Pakistan, parliamentary or otherwise, is possible without uprooting the Islamist peril that awaits anyone who aspires to disrupt the status quo.

And unfortunately, even Imran Khan, having been whiskers away from death, is unlikely to challenge the weaponization of conspiratorial Islamist hysteria of which he’s both proponent and victim.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a Pakistan-based journalist and a correspondent at The Diplomat. His work has been published in The Guardian, The Independent, Foreign Policy, Courrier International, New Statesman, The Telegraph, MIT Review, and Arab News among other publications. Twitter: @khuldune