Misplaced Rage

The comments made by renowned Islamic scholar Mufti Taqi Usmani, a former judge of the Federal Shariat Court, deserve amplification at the highest levels of government. His state­ment, delivered on Thursday, urging restraint and rejecting violence and vandalism as an appropriate response to the ongoing conflict in Palestine, is a timely and necessary intervention. As protests inten­sify and a second fast-food outlet has now been attacked, his words must serve as a reminder that Islam is a religion of balance—not one that condones destruction in the name of emotional outrage.

The broader point made by the Mufti—and one the government must elevate—is that global resistance against Israel’s actions in Gaza must be rooted in strategy, not chaos. While global opposition to genocide and its backers must remain firm, it must also remain focused. The recent attack on a KFC branch in Pakistan is a mis­placed gesture: the chain is not listed among the targets of the Boy­cott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, the global campaign that identifies and applies pressure on businesses and institutions complicit in Israeli apartheid.



A Call for Reform If Pakistani groups genuinely wish to contribute to the Pales­tinian cause, they must align their actions with established glob­al efforts like the BDS movement. That means advocating targeted boycotts, raising public awareness, and encouraging shifts in con­sumer behaviour away from companies that are clearly and di­rectly complicit. Effective activism requires coordination, educa­tion, and discipline.

There is, of course, also room for more confrontational forms of protest—so long as they are directed at institutions or companies that are actively supporting Israel’s war machine. For instance, in the UK, activists have physically disrupted factories of Elbit Sys­tems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer. Such acts, while bold, are aimed at direct enablers of violence—not at isolated fast-food franchises in cities far from the conflict.

Vandalising a local KFC outlet in Pakistan achieves nothing. It neither disrupts the structures enabling genocide nor brings comfort to the vic­tims in Gaza. Instead, it only normalises vigilante violence and under­mines the very moral authority that protest movements seek to wield.

Diplomatic Nuance Tags: misplaced rage.