Comments on: Ayaz Amir on Bin Ladenism

By: Zack

Zack — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 02:09:00 +0000

Ikram: Ayaz Amir alludes to anti-western feelings a little in the article and implies that the ruling class have neen toadies of the West. That is not on my list of major problems with the rulers (past & present) in Pakistan.

Though he is a very good columnist writing against the military, the religious parties, etc., he does sometimes go overboard with criticism of the “imperialist” tendencies of the west and about the topic of Pakistani cooperation with the US in the war on terror.

I am probably reading more into his article since I read him regularly.

By: Zack

Zack — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 02:06:00 +0000

Jonathan: Though the Lebanese I have met know English well (after all I met them in the US), they speak goof French also. Does that mean that most Lebanese are trilingual?

By: Ikram Saeed

Ikram Saeed — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 23:31:00 +0000

Zack — What didn’t you like about the article. I though it was good through and through.

By: Jonathan Edelstein

Jonathan Edelstein — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 20:39:00 +0000

What’s Lebanon’s excuse, though? Maybe the expatriate community - I believe there are more than a million Lebanese living abroad, and many of them are in English-speaking countries. The growth of English media in Rwanda has a similar origin - the Tutsi refugees of 1959 and 1963 learned English during 30 years in Uganda and Tanzania, and have continued to use it after regaining power in 1994.

By: Zack

Zack — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 20:00:00 +0000

Thanks mainly to British colonialism! But English is definitely the international language now.

By: Jonathan Edelstein

Jonathan Edelstein — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 13:34:00 +0000

It’s interesting that so many countries where English is not the first language have English newspapers - Dawn, the Jerusalem Post, the Jordan Times, the Lebanon Daily Star, probably a number of others. It’s really becoming an international language.