100,000 Pakistanis Protest U.S. Drone Strikes

Posted on Jan 29, 2012

AP / Fareed Khan

Earlier protest: A supporter of Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam attends an anti-drone rally in June 2011.

On Friday, more than 100,000 Pakistanis sympathetic with the country’s largest religious political party, Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam, rallied in Karachi to protest attacks by U.S. drones in the nation’s northwest region. Party leaders also demanded that the country continue its two-month blockade of NATO supplies crossing into Afghanistan. —ARK

Agence France-Presse:

“We are not the enemies of the people of the West and the United States, but we reject the Americans’ attitude by which they always demand of a servile obedience from us,” JUI leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman told the crowd in Pakistan’s financial capital.

… “Movements like Occupy Wall Street are just the beginning of the end of the imperialism of America and its Western allies,” he [Rehman] said.

“We are being forced to become extremists. When you and your religion are humiliated in Guantanamo Bay detention centre and your children are being crushed under tanks, then what the victims will ultimately do? They’ll counter your extremism with extremism.”

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