The article, by reporters Salman Masood and Carlotta Gall, discusses how it is that there can be two very different perceptions of Aafia in the US – where she is seen as a militant threat – and at home – where she is largely seen as a victim of oppression. As is well known, Aafia has become something of a martyr in local discussions, with the ruling political party (PPP) providing millions of dollars in legal assistance and the government raising the issue of her release with American officials and diplomats.

The broad outpouring has forced the government, led by the Pakistan Peoples Party, to publicly assure Ms. Siddiqui’s supporters that it will continue its legal assistance, which has amounted to $2 million already.

Pakistan’s government has also raised her case with American officials, most recently in February during a visit by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy to the region.

“The prime minister has suggested to visiting American delegations that releasing Aafia Siddiqui unconditionally would greatly improve the image of the Americans in the public’s eyes,” a close aide to Mr. Gilani said.

But the Americans obviously have a very different perspective. After all, Aafia was recently convicted by a New York court of trying to kill American military officers in Afghanistan. How can there be so big a difference in opinion? Well, some say that the way media has treated the case in Pakistan has done more to create an icon than to report facts.

All of this has taken place with little national soul-searching about the contradictory and frequently damning circumstances surrounding Ms. Siddiqui, who is suspected of having had links to Al Qaeda and the banned jihadi group Jaish-e-Muhammad.

Instead, the Pakistani news media have broadly portrayed her trial as a “farce” and an example of the injustices meted out to Muslims by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. She was convicted on Feb. 3 on seven counts, including attempted murder of American officials.

“People here have very little knowledge of who she is and what she did other than she is a Pakistani woman, so the reaction is much more knee-jerk Pakistani nationalism,” said Samina Ahmed, a director in Pakistan with the International Crisis Group, a policy advocacy organization.

This ‘iconization’ of Aafia is not lost on all Pakistanis, however. Raafia Zakaria, a columnist for Dawn, explains why it has been so easy for this representation of Aafia as oppressed victim of American conspiracy to take hold in the media.

There is no doubt that the case of an ultraconservative, educated middle-class Pakistani woman who shunned the ways of the West and defied America has resonated with the Pakistani public.

“The iconization of Aafia Siddiqui as an emblem of Pakistani womanhood represents the kind of female rebel acceptable in a rapidly Islamizing Pakistani society,” said Rafia Zakaria, a columnist for Dawn, the leading English daily newspaper.

“Leaving a husband for a second marriage, traveling alone, even putting your children in harm’s way, all acts that would be otherwise reviled, became acceptable when they are done with the ultimate aim of defying the United States,” she said.

It is not for this blog to pass judgment on the guilt of Aafia Siddiqui. Even if I was inclined to do so, I do not have access to all of the facts, and my own opinions are heavily influenced by the way that the information that I do have has been packaged and presented to me by the TV shows I watch and the newspapers and blogs that I read.

The case of Aafia Siddiqui is complicated without any help from media opinion makers. Even government officials who have access to more facts than reporters and the public have disagreements.

Last month, the Pakistani minister of state for foreign affairs, Nawabzada Malik Amad Khan, said the evidence against Ms. Siddiqui was insubstantial, local news reports said. But senior Pakistani officials acknowledged that it was almost impossible to defend her in a court of law.

Some of this confusion in a case as complex as that of Aafia Siddiqui is unavoidable. But we, as journalists, must do our best not to add to the confusion, but to cut through the speculation and innuendo to report only the facts. I worry that too often, Pakistani journalist are avoiding reporting anything unpleasant. But our job is to give people the facts only so that they can make up their own minds and hopefully come to the right decision – not necessarily the decision that is easiest or most convenient.

The building of icons and journalism are two different things. Media owes Pakistan the truth.

Xenophobia is the fear or hatred of foreigners. This is becoming increasingly a problem, and Mr. Baber rightly points to media types for promoting this attitude:

The shocking intolerance, sectarian, secular, xenophobic and otherwise, increasingly displayed in ‘current’ societal structures here is fast getting dangerously out of control, the fires stalked by people who should know better such as Imran Khan and those who apparently don’t, Zaid Hamid of the red topi being a prime example of the latter, with the resulting conflagration, when it erupts, set to completely desecrate any remote semblance of sanity that tries to prevail in the country-shattering inferno that will, undoubtedly follow if left unchecked.

But Mr. Baber leaves out one other media organization that promotes fear and hatred of foreigners: The Nation.

Examples of The Nation’s xenophobic tendencies are not hard to come by. From Kaswar Klasra’s infamous article in which he accuses American reporter Matthew Rosenberg of being a spy, to statements that any actions by India must be seen as “a deliberate pattern towards some nefarious goal,” to the recent column about Aafia in which Sikander Shaheen accuses the US, India, and Israel of being “in an unholy alliance to tighten the noose around a Muslim lady” – The Nation makes a habit of promoting xenophobia in its pages. In November, the newspaper even ran an article by Azam Tanoli that was all but a transcript of a speech by Zaid Hamid – the same who is so soundly criticized by Baber today – praising him as “a prominent” scholar” and echoing Hamid’s claims about the threat of foreigners to Pakistan’s existence.

I was glad to see The Nation step outside its usual ideological boundaries and publish Baber’s article. Let us hope, dear readers, that the editors of The Nation will take the time to read their own newspaper and consider the suggestion to avoid cheap xenophobia in the future.

Aafia Siddiqui in Court

Today’s editorial in The Nation about Aafia Siddiqui presents a confused concept of justice that is at once both self-contradictory and misinformed. The editorial referred to, “The verdict,” attempts to argue that the conviction of Aafia Siddiqui in an American court demonstrates that the justice system that tried her case is defective. It is not for this blog to say if Aafia is innocent or guilty. But The Nation’s editorial is so riddled with misinformation that it is hard not to consider it as propaganda.

The Nation’s editorial writers begin by condemning the American justice system as broken because it relies on a judge and a trial by jury.

The American justice system is supposed to be one of the things for which the War on Terror is being fought, but the trial itself shows it as defective, as allowing the fate of a human being to be placed in the hands of a jury of his or her peers, a jury which may well be influenced by reasons of state. The jury, composed of laymen, depends a lot on the summing up by the judge, who is supposed to be a legal professional, and thus likely to be influenced by the kind of reasons of state at work in Dr Afia’s case.

The Nation gets its facts all wrong. Actually, a trial by jury protects the accused from the influence of the state on a judge because the jurors are chosen randomly and are not subject to state control like a judge may be. Also, the judge is only present to oversee proceedings to ensure they meet the standards of openness and fairness.

But let us for a moment consider more closely what The Nation is saying. First, they say that a jury trial is defective because supposedly it can be influenced by reasons of state. Second, judges cannot be trusted because supposedly they can be influenced by reasons of state. So, The Nation wants to have a justice system with no judge and no jury. What kind of justice system is this?

Jury trials, please remember, are not an American invention. The concept of a trial by jury was actually borrowed from the Lafif in the Maliki school of classical Islamic law:

The precursor to the English jury trial was the Lafif trial in classical Maliki jurisprudence, which was developed between the 8th and 11th centuries in North Africa and Islamic Sicily, and shares a number of similarities with the later jury trials in English common law. Like the English jury, the Islamic Lafif was a body of twelve members drawn from the neighbourhood and sworn to tell the truth, who were bound to give a unanimous verdict, about matters that “…they had personally seen or heard, binding on the judge, to settle the truth concerning facts in a case, between ordinary people, and obtained as of right by the plaintiff.” The only characteristic of the English jury that the Islamic Lafif lacked was the “judicial writ directing the jury to be summoned and directing the bailiff to hear its recognition.” According to Professor John Makdisi, “no other institution in any legal institution studied to date shares all of these characteristics with the English jury.” It is thus likely that the concept of the Lafif may have been introduced to England by the Normans and then evolved into the modern English jury. However, the hearing of trials before a body of citizens may have existed in courts before the Norman conquest.

Does this mean that The Nation also rejects Islamic law as “defective”?

The Nation next compares the case of Aafia Siddiqui to that of Alfred Dreyfus’ treason conviction by a military court in France in 1894. But The Nation fails to realize that, despite being initially convicted improperly, Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army in 1906, eventually ending his service as a Lieutenant-Colonel. Furthermore, The Nation adds that the Dreyfus affair proves that military courts are defective justice.

For the record, The Nation suggests the following are defective systems of justice:

1. Jury trials (and, by extension, Islamic law)
2. Judge trials
3. Military trials

Again, dear readers, I must ask what is justice system is left?

While it is unfortunate that some people are incorrectly convicted in any type of trial, a proper legal system includes a set of processes by which these individuals can show their innocence and be exonerated, even after a conviction. This was the case with Alfred Dreyfus in France, and this is the opportunity for Aafia Siddiqui in America. In fact, the government has already vowed to provide a good defense for Aafia in the next stages of her trial. So what is The Nation complaining about?

Of course, The Nation does not offer some alternative legal system that is better. The editorial writers only accuse the system of being broken because it allows them to add fuel to the growing hysteria over this case.

The Nation’s editorial writers even try to use Aafia’s being a woman and mother as proof that she should not be convicted, even though this has nothing to do with the accusations, the trial, or her conviction.  The Nation even suggests that there is some unique brutality on the part of the legal system that convicted Aafia because she is a woman and a mother.

She symbolises the might of the USA, and its relentlessness in punishing all its enemies, even if they are in the form of frail mothers of three. And it shows that it will not only punish women but also children it has decided to make an example of.

But do we not convict women and mothers here at home? In fact, under the Hudood Ordinances, women have been most unjustly tried and convicted in our own country. Particularly, we may remember the embarrassing case of Zafran Bibi – another women and mother – who was sentenced to death by stoning in 2002 for the crime of adultery. Actually, 80 percent of the women in our prisons are convicted under laws that penalize rape victims. Certainly this is not the so-called justice that The Nation would like to see. So what is this other justice system that they are advocating?

Of course, The Nation does not say what system of justice would be more fair. The editorial writers at The Nation only make accusations and weave wild conspiracies. This is because at The Nation, justice is only a convenient word for political posing.

The Nation’s editorial ends with a strange conclusion:

“Dr. Afia is being tortured, and her kids have disappeared, so that Americans may escape the effects of terror.”

Honestly, I am not sure how to respond to this concluding sentence as it makes absolutely no sense. How would it protect Americans to torture and kidnap anyone? Actually, this would make Americans less safe as it would add fuel to the fire of jihadi propaganda. Or, perhaps that’s what The Nation intended in the first place.