The Governor of Pakistan's Punjab province is convinced the recent Lahore bombings were the work of the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba (LeT) terrorist group believed responsible for the Bombay attacks last November. At the time of writing, no-one has claimed responsibility for the attack that killed six Pakistani policemen and two passers-by.
Eight Pakistanis dead. And one Pakistani umpire in a critical condition in hospital. But that didn't stop Andrew Bolt and his fellow moderators from allowing this comment to be posted on his Herald Sun blog:
Peter of Mt ElizaPeter of Mt Eliza has posted a comment literally calling for the complete annihilation of Pakistan as a nation state; that the best way to deal with 200 million Pakistanis is to do to them what the Romans did to the people of Carthage in 146BC. He calls upon readers to brush up on their history. I've just brushed up on mine. The results are frightening.
replied to George P
Tue 03 Mar 09 (08:30pm)
Time for a Carthaginian solution. If you don't understand, brush up on your history. It works. Brutal - yes. Effective – Yes.
The Romans sacked Carthage, massacred hundreds of thousands, enslaved tens of thousands and destroyed the city completely. Out of some 2-400,000 Carthaginians, around 150,000 perished. It's the kind of stuff you learn in high school history lessons. According to Yale genocide historian Professor Ben Kiernan, the Roman strategy in Carthage
... fits the modern legal definition of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention: the intentional destruction 'in whole or in part, [of] a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such'.And so the Herald Sun's blog moderators have out-done themselves. They have allowed a comment to be moderated on the blog of their star columnist which calls for a modern nation-state to be wiped off the map.
Eat your heart out, Ahmedinejad! Then again, maybe not ...
An edited version of this article was first published in Crikey on 4 March 2009.
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