August 05 2005
On Quintin Fernando’s Reference to Rohan Gunaratna
Hameed Abdul Karim
Your columnist Quintin Fernando has gone to some lengths to commend Rohan Gunaratna in his column ‘From Down Under’ (DM 20 July 2005) describing him as a ‘terrorist expert’ and quite well versed with the machinations of Al-Qaida. He had written a book titled ‘Inside Al-Qaida’. The title suggests that he had risked his life by somehow creeping into the movement and finding out for himself the threat this outfit poses to the so-called ‘civilised world’. Quintin Fernando’s’ comments were symptomatic of the infamous Bushism that ‘those not with us are with them’ and therefore somehow uncivilized. But the fact of the matter is that Rohan Gunaratna had never been inside Al-Qaida. He had written his book ‘Inside Al-Qaida’ from outside!
Rohan Gunaratna shot to fame, or notoriety depending on which side of the fence one stands, the civilised or the uncivilised (ask Bush for the definition), with 9/11 and his book on Al-Qaida. Ever since then he has made himself available to promote Western interests with his vituperative invectives against what the western media and he call ‘Islamic terrorism’, never even pausing to catch their breaths to find out why there is such a thing as ‘Islamic terrorism’.
The irony is that it is his very book ‘Inside Al-Qaida’ that lays bare Gunaratna’s pseudo-intellectualism. For example he had cited an incident on how terrorists (Islamic, of course) planned to hijack a BA aircraft and crash it into the British parliament. The source of his information was an Indian by the name of Mohammed Afroz whom the Indian intelligence had arrested after 9/11 on suspicion of being an ‘Islamic terrorist’ (what else). But an Indian court released Afroz because it transpired, during the investigations carried out by Delhi police that the Mumbai police had forced the statement from Afroz and then sensationalised the story to gain some cheap international publicity in the glare of 9/11.
Gunaratne had claimed that one Hannibal,the head of Jemah Islamiah intelligence outfit, along with others of the group had made many reconnaissance visits to Australia before the Bali bombing. But the truth is that they did no such thing according to Daryl Williams, Australia’s attorney general. Rohan Gunaratna stood exposed and could do nothing to defend himself!
In his book he claims he had been invited to address the United Nations, the US Congress and the Australian parliament in the wake of 9/11. He goes on to add that he is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland. Before all that we are informed that he was ‘principal investigator’ at the UN’s Terrorism Prevention Branch. And what’s more we are told, for good measure, that he served as a consultant on terrorism to several governments and institutions.
Unfortunately for him Australia’s The Sunday Age did a check on him and discovered that the UN had no such position as ‘Principal Investigator’ at its Terrorism Prevention Branch. He had done no such thing as addressing the UN, the US Congress or the Australian parliament. What he had done, in fact, was that he had addressed a group of people at a seminar organised by the Australian Parliamentary Library and given evidence to a congressional hearing on terrorism. His ‘address to the United Nations’ was in reality only a research paper he presented at a conference on terrorism organised by the UN’s Department for Disarmament.
‘Experts’ like Rohan Gunaratna serve the Western Axis’ agenda with the likes of Samuel Huntington’s and the Francis Fukayama’s who, whenever the imperialists want to create what is called ‘democratic consent’ for their designs for world domination, quickly jump on to the bandwagon and carry out their masters’ orders. Case in point is the myth of the WMD’s in Iraq that ‘media friendly experts’ on ‘Islamic terrorism’ mooted on the orders of their bosses in the White House and Downing Street. When these ‘experts’ do their masters’ bidding by creating a hoopla and hype about the imminent destruction of the civilised world by ‘Islamic terrorists’, they don’t realise that they leave behind a trail of death and destruction wantonly created by the Western Axis to steal the resources of the non-White world.
By and large the Indian media goes about its profession in an objective manner. There is no doubt about that. But strangely when it comes to Pakistan, certain sections tend to go off at a tangent.