Musharraf asks why there is no “Jew bomb”
In his Davos appearance today with Henry Kissinger, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf complained about media coverage of his country's nuclear weapons: We are a nuclear state, and it is just unfortunate that we are seen to be unstable; that our nuclear assets can fall into wrong hands, into the hands of the terrorists… this is ...
In his Davos appearance today with Henry Kissinger, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf complained about media coverage of his country's nuclear weapons:
In his Davos appearance today with Henry Kissinger, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf complained about media coverage of his country's nuclear weapons:
We are a nuclear state, and it is just unfortunate that we are seen to be unstable; that our nuclear assets can fall into wrong hands, into the hands of the terrorists… this is an Islamic bomb that Pakistan has. I really don't understand why the world calls it an Islamic bomb, and why there is no Hindu bomb, or a Jew bomb, or a Christian bomb, or a Buddhist bomb. Why is this bomb an Islamic bomb? I don't understand. And the man on the street in Pakistan does not understand this.
UPDATE: I asked Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, coauthors of The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets… And How We Could Have Stopped Him, to weigh in on the historical context for Musharraf's complaint. Their verdict? He's full of it:
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan ignores history when he complains that he doesn't understand why his country's nuclear weapons are referred to as "the Islamic bomb."
When the late Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto initiated the bomb project in 1972, he took a tour of Muslim countries with hat in hand to get money. Libya's Moammar Gadhafi sent couriers carrying suitcases of cash and the royals in Saudi Arabia provided free oil. To show his gratitude, Bhutto named a cricket stadium after Gadhafi and a town after King Faisal.
In fact, it was Bhutto himself, sitting his jail cell in 1978 awaiting execution, who defending his nuclear ambitions by writing, "The Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilizations have this power. The communist powers also possess it. Only the Islamic civilization is without it, but that position (is) about to change."
Finally, the father of the Islamic bomb, the rogue Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, often cited his anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments in defending his nation's nuclear arsenal and one of his motivations in selling nuclear technology to Iran and Libya was to spread the weapon to other Muslim countries and divert attention from Pakistan.
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