Trump: Pakistan is fantastic!!!

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#1 [Permalink] Posted on 1st December 2016 17:25

Pakistan says Trump declared its PM 'terrific' in call

Pakistan said Donald Trump praised its prime minister as a "terrific guy" and offered support for a "fantastic" country, in an effusive phone call that baffled many after sharp criticisms in the past.

The Pakistani government released the candid account, complete with Trump's trademark language, after Sharif phoned the billionaire real estate mogul to congratulate him on his election victory.

Widely circulated on social media, the statement released late Wednesday caused surprise given the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Trump campaign and the president-elect's past description of the country as "not our friend".

It said Trump told the embattled Pakistani leader, currently embroiled in a corruption court case, that he has a "very good reputation".

"You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Prime Minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long," it quoted Trump as saying.

"Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people," Trump said according to the statement, while also offering to help solve the nation's many challenges which include a violent insurgency.

"I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it."

Trump has long been disdainful of Pakistan on social media.

On January 17, 2012, he tweeted: "Get it straight: Pakistan is not our friend. We've given them billions and billions of dollars, and what did we get? Betrayal and disrespect — and much worse. "

Pakistanis have also been suspicious of his relationship with arch-rival India.

Trump courted Indian-American voters in the run-up to election day. He spoke with Indian leader Narendra Modi last month and has met with Indian business leaders since winning the election.

Pakistan heavily relies on US aid and is likely to get around $1 billion in economic and security assistance in the 2017 financial year.

Trump's election has met with concern over what it could mean for aid commitments and bumpy diplomatic relations.

However, the government statement said Trump urged Sharif to call him "any time even before 20th January" when he takes power.

Trump also responded to an invitation to visit Pakistan by saying he would "love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people", it said.

Some social media users welcomed the phone call revelations as a pleasant surprise.

"Fantastic diplomacy" wrote Pakistani journalist Waseem Abbasi, based in Washington, on Facebook.

Some were more sceptical.

"But Mr Trump do you know most Pakistanis are Muslim - how can they be 'brilliant and exceptional' as well? Won't you stop them entering?" wrote journalist Omar Quraishi on Twitter.

Trump's transition team confirmed the call but gave a more toned-down account, saying the pair had a "productive conversation about how the United States and Pakistan will have a strong working relationship in the future."

"President-elect Trump also noted that he is looking forward to a lasting and strong personal relationship with Prime Minister Sharif," it said in a statement.

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#2 [Permalink] Posted on 1st December 2016 18:19

Maybe mr 30% has agreed to sell pakistans assets to trump in return for his protection.

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#3 [Permalink] Posted on 3rd December 2016 11:42

Apparently the conversation has been sugar coated by the Pakistanis. More to come later InshaAllah.

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#4 [Permalink] Posted on 4th December 2016 13:52

Donald Trump Team Releases Different Version of Sharif-Trump Call Readout

ValueWalk
December 1, 2016, 11:14 pm

The Pakistan government is believed to have made up a phone conversation between Donald Trump and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Pakistanis may have sugarcoated the tone of the conversation. On Thursday, Pakistani media outlets joyfully proclaimed Trump their country's friend after the U.S. President-elect allegedly showered the Pakistani PM with compliments during the phone call on Wednesday.

According to details on the call officially released by The Prime Minister's office in Pakistan, Trump praised Sharif as a “terrific guy” and called Pakistanis “one of the most intelligent people.” Trump's sugary sweet remarks about Pakistan raised eyebrows all around the world, as the U.S. President-elect previously accused Pakistan of “betrayal and disrespect.”

ValueWalk's Chief of Operations, Sheeraz Raza, confirmed with Philip Crowther, White House correspondent for France 24 and RFI, that Wednesday's phone conversation between Trump and Sharif actually had a different tone.

In the version sent to the media by Trump's transition team, it can be seen that the phone call between the two leaders had “a productive conversation about how the United States and Pakistan will have a strong working relationship in the future.”

Here's the description of the call presented by Trump's transition team:

Contradictions in the U.S. and Pakistan versions
The readout presented by Trump's team didn't mention anything about the U.S. President-elect praising the Pakistani PM as a “terrific guy” with “a very good reputation.” While Trump has never been enthusiastic about partnering with Pakistan and has even accused the nation of “betrayal and disrespect,” it's rather doubtful that the U.S. President-elect would suddenly praise Sharif for his “very good reputation.”

The Pakistani PM and his family are said to be linked to a corruption scandal after the revelations of the Panama Papers. Sharif's reputation within the country has also taken a hit lately, as he's facing uncertainty among the public about his position.

In addition to that, this isn't the first time Sharif has served as PM of Pakistan, as he was in power in the 1990s before he was ousted in a military coup. Trump, according to the Pakistani government's version of the call, also offered the Pakistan PM to “play any role that you want me to play.” The phone conversation comes at a time of ever-increasing tensions between nuclear-powered Pakistan and India.

Trump has always been full of surprises, but showering the Pakistani PM with compliments while taking India's side in their territorial disputes over the Kashmir region would be too surprising and confusing, to say the least.

“I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems,” Trump allegedly told Sharif, according to the Pakistani government. “It will be an honor, and I will personally do it.”

Here's the full summary of the call presented by the Pakistani government:

Terminology used by Trump perfectly suits his style
While Pakistanis claim Trump has promised to help Pakistan solve its problems abroad and praised Sharif for his “very good work which is visible in every way,” the summary from Trump's transition team only said that the U.S. President-elect “is looking forward to a lasting and strong personal relationship with Prime Minister Sharif.” Expressing interest in having “a strong working relationship in the future” (Trump's team) is a far cry from promising to “play any role that you want me to play” (Pakistan's version).

Republicans have been rather unfriendly in their remarks about Pakistan, and the U.S. has been favoring India in its dispute with Pakistan, so such a sudden shift of opinion understandably raised eyebrows in India. As tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors have risen to a dangerous level, the U.S. has been more friendly towards India while accusing Pakistan of sheltering ISIS militants.

According to the Pakistani government's version, Trump also said, “as I am talking to you, prime minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long.” Sharif then asked the U.S. President-elect to visit Pakistan, and Trump responded that he “would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people.” Trump also called Sharif's country an “amazing” country with “tremendous opportunities,” according to the Pakistanis.

The terminology allegedly used by Trump (according to Pakistan's version of the call) actually fits with Trump's style; he's a fan of such words as “tremendous,” “fantastic,” “terrific” and “exceptional.” But even Pakistanis changed their tone by the end of the day. Pakistani media outlets reporting on the phone conversation became more circumspect, and people were skeptical that Trump could turn U.S. foreign policy in South Asia upside down within just one phone call.

Trump, who has close business relations with Pakistan's traditional enemy India may have little experience in politics, but he knows a thing or two about U.S. foreign policy, like that it cannot be changed like that during a phone call.

Is Pakistan sugarcoating the Sharif-Trump call?

Although the U.S. and Pakistan had been allies in South Asia for decades, their relations took a serious turn for the worse when the U.S. claimed Pakistan is responsible for the surge of ISIS militants in the region. Pakistan has strongly denied the accusations, but the U.S. remains more favorable towards India, which has long accused Pakistan of being a terrorist state and urged the world to turn Islamabad into a pariah state.

Trump's allegedly saying that Pakistanis are “one of the most intelligent people” and calling them “fantastic people” also doesn't fit with his infamous anti-Muslim comments. During his presidential campaign, Trump said he would ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Trump, who enjoys deeps business relations with India, is expected to keep shifting further towards New Delhi during his presidency.

America's shift towards India resulted in a significant improvement of their relations. The only problem is that India still has deep economic and military ties with Russia, which remains New Delhi's key weapons supplier. The U.S. and Russia have locked horns ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. But Trump seems to be interested in amending ties with Moscow, as he has previously said that he respects Putin's leadership values and said he could deal with Russia.

To make things even more confusing, Russia has enjoyed warming relations with Pakistan lately even though the two nations were Cold War-era rivals. Last month, Russia carried out joint military exercises with Islamabad and supplied the nuclear-powered nation with new weaponry.

So which is it? Is the Pakistani government's version of the call actually true? Or have the Pakistanis sugarcoated the tone of the conversation? If yes, why would they do something like that?

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#5 [Permalink] Posted on 5th December 2016 18:06

foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/01/inshallah-in-the-age-of-trum...

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#6 [Permalink] Posted on 5th December 2016 21:38

mkdon101 wrote:

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Can you post the contents of that link please, I'm unable to read/open the page properly.

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#7 [Permalink] Posted on 6th December 2016 10:23

‘Inshallah’ in the Age of Trump
Can the hipster invocation of God’s will survive the coming wave of American Islamophobia?

English speakers all know: To sound smart (or insufferable), use French. That movie has a certain je ne sais quoi; my grandmother exhibited a true joie de vivre. French has been fancy since 1066 when the conquering Normans ate boef while the lowly English peasants cared for the cū.

Or to sound open-minded (or stoned), use Sanskrit. No one will be surprised to learn that the first recorded use of the word “karma” in a popular U.S. publication was in 1969 — in the California-based Surfer magazine.

These days, another word is making inroads into the American English lexicon. It’s “inshallah” — an Arabic Islamic expression that means “God willing.” Inshallah first made its English debut in the 19th century, but it’s only since 9/11 that the word has become fashionable among non-Muslim, non-Arabic-speaking Americans. You’ve probably heard it already in passing, which is my point. The Atlantic’s James Fallows has tweeted it. Even actor Lindsay Lohan has made a faltering attempt. I’ve heard it in meetings, on the metro, and at a casual Sunday brunch in Brooklyn.

For all these inshallah-invokers, the phrase seems to combine the prestige of French and the multiculturalism of Sanskrit — with an added thrill of risk.

President-elect Donald Trump is stacking his administration with supporters who believe that Islam is inherently violent, dangerous, and threatening. Some who evince this view believe that anything associated with Islam has a diabolical power, an insidious evil that has to be guarded against at every turn as the Puritans guarded against witchcraft.

Michael Flynn, a retired intelligence officer whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped for national security advisor, has called Islam a “malignant cancer” and believes that sharia, or Islamic law, is creeping into U.S. laws and institutions. Conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney, who advised Trump during the campaign and is “good friends” with Steve Bannon, the president-elect’s senior strategist, has previously written that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency logo contains a hidden star and crescent, the symbol of Islam, and that it thus suggests “official U.S. submission to Islam.” It’s an argument that comes out of the world of Christian fundamentalism, which has long sought out occult symbols in the most innocuous of sources.

This fear extends to the Arabic language. In 2013, Gaffney criticized John Brennan as President Barack Obama’s pick to head the CIA, deeming him the “single most important enabler of the Islamic supremacists’ agenda in government today.” One piece of evidence Gaffney gave for this assertion? Brennan speaks fluent Arabic. After listing the names of several terrorist organizations at a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in May 2015, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham reportedly quipped that “everything that starts with ‘al’ in the Middle East is bad news.” Al, of course, is simply Arabic’s definite article, equivalent to “the” in English.

It should come as no surprise, then, that inshallah has found itself in the crosshairs of these rising Islamophobes. In June, when BBC presenter Nicky Campbell ended his usual segment with crossed fingers and a poorly inflected “inshallah” — “We’re in Uxbridge next Sunday for a special, asking, ‘Are we facing the end of the world?’ So we’ll see you then, inshallah” — it set off a right-wing media firestorm.

Breitbart wrote that the “incident comes just days after the BBC’s Head of Religion admitted that Islamic State is rooted in Islam.” Jihad Watch, a popular anti-Islam website, commented: “A conquered, colonized people adopts the language and practices of its conquerors.” In April, a University of California, Berkeley, student of Iraqi origin was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight after another passenger heard him speaking Arabic on his cell phone; he had ended his conversation with “inshallah.”

The latent Islamophobia the word can conjure seems to be part of the its growing appeal among progressive urbanites in the United States. As the Islamophobia industrial complex has expanded, so has a cultural push against it. Garnishing your conversation with an inshallah or two is a small act of resistance, a direct jab at the belief that Islam — and by association, Arabic — is sinister.Garnishing your conversation with an inshallah or two is a small act of resistance, a direct jab at the belief that Islam — and by association, Arabic — is sinister. It’s the linguistic equivalent of donning a headscarf in solidarity for World Hijab Day. Or the spoken version of the anti-Trump ad near Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a large population of Arab-Americans, which was written in Arabic and read: “Donald Trump can’t read this, but he is scared of it.” It’s a subtle political statement, a critique of Republicans who believe certain sounds, like incantations, must cross the lips in order to defeat evil (“radical Islamic terrorism”) whereas other sounds (“inshallah,” “Allahu akbar”) must remain taboo.

But why inshallah and not some other Arabic word? There are dozens of other common Islamic expressions, including bismillah (in the name of God), barakallah (blessings of God), and alhamdulillah (praise be to God), that haven’t crossed into English (though bismillah makes a cameo in Queen’s 1975 classic “Bohemian Rhapsody”).

The reason is that inshallah is a charming, maddening, and undeniably useful expression. On paper, the word is very similar to “God willing,” its Christian, English equivalent. It’s an acknowledgment of the human inability to foresee or control the future while harking to the belief that a Greater Being holds humanity’s fragile plans in its omnipotent hands.

But unlike the English “God willing,” inshallah also serves as a convenient preordained excuse for what may go wrong. If your toilet is broken and your plumber says he’ll come “tomorrow, inshallah,” you may be in for quite a wait. In countries such as Egypt, inshallah has expanded into a society-wide verbal tic invoked by Muslims, Christians, and even the nonreligious for occasions as mundane as ordering a hamburger or riding an elevator — a phenomenon that a 2008 article in the New York Times dubbed “inshallah creep.”

That’s what has made it so easy for visitors to pick up. Inshallah conveys an uncertainty that “hopefully” lacks. “The project will be done by 9 p.m., hopefully” implies that a sense of control still resides in your hands and thus a lingering amount of responsibility if the deadline isn’t met. “The project will be done by 9 p.m., inshallah,” by contrast, indicates that some outside force — an indolent contract worker, slow trains, spotty internet, even fate itself — is now in the driver’s seat and that if things go wrong, it’s not your fault.

It’s also exotic in a way that the down home “God willing” can never be. That phrase conjures images of church pews and pro-life protests outside Planned Parenthood — nothing that progressive Americans typically want to associate with. Throwing inshallah into a sentence here or there — “Tom will be filing that report tonight, inshallah!” — signals membership in a well-educated, well-traveled, and tolerant urban elite.

Arabic-speaking Americans don’t seem to mind this bit of friendly borrowing. Marya Hannun, a Palestinian-American doctoral student based in Washington, D.C., called the trend “charming,” explaining that when speaking Arabic, non-Muslims as well as Muslims use inshallah. She described its use among Americans as “solidarity and finding meaning in a language other than your own.”

“I say it every now and then,” said Thorstan Fries, a New York-based consultant who told me that he picked it up from a college friend studying Arabic. “I started saying it much more frequently after a trip to Morocco a couple years ago. They say it all the time, and I think it’s cool.”

Of course, to view a Middle Eastern import as exotic is also to risk condescension. The very first recorded use of inshallah in the English language was not just atrociously Orientalist — it was also incorrect. In his 1857 work The Kingdom and People of Siam, John Bowring, a British politician and the fourth governor of Hong Kong, wrote, “Inshallah! Such promptitude was, I believe, never before exhibited in an Asiatic Court.” But inshallah is used exclusively for events that have not yet occurred. What Bowring likely meant was mashallah, an Islamic phrase expressing amazement at an existing set of circumstances.

The first to use it in natural speech, not in a grandiose reference to foreign peoples, was T. E. Lawrence, otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence viewed Arabs with respect, lived among them, and adopted some of their customs — including, apparently, the habit of checking plans against the divine’s schedule. “I have been photographing this last week—and will more next. Developing too inshallah,” he wrote in a letter dated 1911.

Britain’s entanglements in the Middle East, North Africa, and India put it in intimate contact with Muslim peoples decades before the United States became similarly involved. Inshallah followed on the heels of colonialism. For the British upper classes, Arabic was a sign of distinction; the Arabists dominated Britain’s Foreign Office for decades, and Prime Minister Anthony Eden — who sent Britain’s reputation in the Middle East plummeting with the Suez crisis — prided himself on his fluency.

At the time, American English was far more preoccupied with the apparatchiks and cosmonauts of the Cold War. It wasn’t until the expansion of U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, particularly after 9/11, that the region became a national preoccupation. (Though the growing number of Muslim and Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States has also helped popularize the word. One person I spoke to learned it from Arabic-speaking students she encountered at her university; another googled it after he saw Muslim friends posting the word on Facebook.) The study of Arabic has blossomed across the United States, and a legion of American military officials, diplomats, journalists, government contractors, NGO workers, academics, and students flowed in. Upon their return home, many brought with them the ubiquitous, malleable, and easily pronounceable inshallah.

It’s now common currency among the younger generations at the State Department, journalists who’ve spent time in the region, and soldiers who deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan — and, increasingly, among the people who travel in the same elite circles as these folk. As one colleague, who uses the word but has no background in the Middle East, told me, “I learned it because everyone at every damn development NGO uses it.” Others I know say they picked it up from artifacts of contemporary popular culture, like Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner, which was adapted into a movie in 2007, and Rabia Chaudry’s book, Adnan’s Story, published this year.

There’s now a good chance inshallah may find a permanent home in English. But those afraid of creeping inshallah should take heart. This wouldn’t be the first time that the word has imbedded itself in a Western language. Ojalá is a common Spanish word often translated as “hopefully.” In fact, ojalá is merely the Hispanicized pronunciation of inshallah, which made its way into the language during the centuries of Muslim rule in Spain that ended in 1492. Yet as far as I can tell, despite this obvious case of linguistic jihad, neither Spain nor the 20 other countries where Spanish is the official national language has yet fallen to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Nor has asking a waitress for more pancake syrup — from the Arabic sharab, a versatile word that the West acquired during a previous episode of war-induced cultural cross-pollination, the Crusades — ever proved to spontaneously convert anyone to Islam. Nor has spending hours studying algebra — another one of those menacing “al” words — ever made anyone more inclined to funnel one’s life savings to al Qaeda.

It turns out short vowels, sibilants, and fricatives might not be as magical as some have been urging us to believe. Donald Trump and his national security team would be wise to take note. God willing.

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Trump: Pakistan is fantastic!!!

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