This is apropos a letter to the Editor from this writer carried by the newspaper yesterday. The confrontation that revealed Ambassador Iftikhar’s strength of character unfolded when the Israeli ambassador attempted to draw an analogy between Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the US operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which killed Osama bin Laden.
It was a deliberate distortion, intended to cloak genocide in the language of counterterrorism, and it invoked Pakistan’s history in a way that was both misleading and offensive.
Ambassador Iftikhar rose with words that pierced the façade. He reminded the world that Pakistan had been a frontline state in the global fight against terrorism, losing more than seventy thousand men, women, and children, dismantling terror networks, and rendering sacrifices unmatched by any other nation.
“Pakistan’s record,” he declared, “is bright, recognized worldwide, and written in the blood of its martyrs.” He then turned the analogy on its head, pointing out with clarity that invoking Pakistan’s sacrifices to justify the mass killing of innocents in Gaza was “outrageous, incoherent, and morally indefensible,” for what Israel was doing was not counterterrorism but genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the conversion of Gaza into a slaughterhouse.
The chamber fell silent. Rarely does rhetoric give way to truth so powerfully, and rarely is propaganda so effectively exposed. The weight of his words left Israel’s representative cornered, and in a rare act of contrition, Danny Danon publicly apologized to Pakistan, admitting that invoking its name had been inappropriate.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
The writer is a former Press Secretary to the President, An ex-Press Minister at Embassy of Pakistan to France, a former MD, SRBC Macomb, Detroit, Michigan