MALALA and Nabila. Two girls, both of whom have suffered more pain and trauma than any child should have to endure. One is widely berated as a ‘drama’ and an ‘agent’ and abused in the foulest language possible.

The other, though it’s early days yet, has thus far avoided that fate. Oh yes, there have been some insinuations. It is said that she’s being used as a propaganda tool, that her child’s drawing shows two drones, while drones don’t fly in pairs (this last part is true, to my knowledge).

But when I was her age, I drew a picnic scene with my father as a giant, the sky as red and the grass as purple. Pointing out that my father is actually of average height and the technicalities of chlorophyll coloration would not have changed the fact that I did go on that picnic. It does not make me a liar, and the implication that Nabila is lying is as repulsive as implying that Malala is somehow an American agent.

The other day someone on social media commented that Malala was targeted for the ‘hype’ that had been built around her. For “cuddling to the Americans”. It’s interesting how that could be reversed. Would a congressional hearing be considered cuddling? Would flying Nabila 7,000 miles to the US be considered part of some nefarious agenda? Would the translator’s tears be deemed a drama?

The answer depends on which side of the deep ideological divide you stand on. Each has its sets of tenets and beliefs, and deviation from these is punished.

If you sympathise with Malala you’re a ‘fake liberal’, if you question the PR machine that has been built up around her you’re an extremist. If you oppose drones because of civilian casualties you’re a Taliban sympathiser. If you claim drones may have some utility against terrorists you’re a warmonger.

That these binaries are false doesn’t mean they’re not popular, and it’s not just the ignorant and easily misled who are guilty of these rank distortions, but also the well-read, the professionals, the journalists and intellectuals. People you had hoped and prayed knew better.

Here’s the thing: we believe only what we want to believe. We arrive at our conclusions and then choose those facts that neatly support those conclusions. We reverse-engineer reason. It’s not a phenomenon limited to Pakistanis.

A fairly prominent Western academic recently cited the government’s claims of 67 civilian casualties in drone attacks, taking them as gospel truth. Ironically, the same academic refuses to believe anything else that comes out of Pakistan in an official context.

Joining her are many prominent Pakistani thinkers desperate to, just this once, believe the government’s line because this time it jibes with their own thoughts. Cherry-picking is the order of the day. Whether it’s the ‘Tunisian sex jihad’ or the cinema that was struck by lightning for showing a blasphemous film, we hear only what we want to, and shout down anyone who dares differ. It’s much like a child who plugs up his ears and shouts ‘I can’t hear you’. Only far less endearing, and far more dangerous.

It is also deeply hypocritical. Consider this: a newspaper widely attacked by the right-wing for being ‘liberal’, ‘secular’ and working on a ‘foreign agenda’ publishes a scurrilous story implying that a news channel is being funded by forces hostile to Pakistan.

All of a sudden, the same people relentlessly attacking that paper swallow the story verbatim, never even seeing the hook in the tempting piece of bait, and certainly never considering who’d be holding the fishing pole.

Another example is of the Nadeem Farooq Paracha satire piece on Malala last month, which was taken as ‘evidence’ by those who would otherwise condemn him as a traitor.

The internet feeds this phenomenon. This is after all the era of the ‘daily me’. Now we can cater all our news and information to fit and reinforce our existing beliefs and biases. We can virtually surround ourselves with the like-minded, blocking out those annoying dissenting opinions.

In Pakistani discourse, just as in the Game of Thrones, there is no middle ground. But the fact remains that, just because a colour isn’t black that does not mean that it’s white by default. There is a whole spectrum of light out there that can be seen once you take your blinkers off.

Most of us don’t. Most of us don’t even know we’re wearing them, and take the resulting tunnel vision as the way nature intended it. Some others revel in their own myopia, wearing it like a badge of pride. It is anything but.

Yet many of us simply refuse to open our minds, and who can blame them? After all, who knows what dangerous thoughts could enter an open mind? Far safer to bar the gates and raise the drawbridge, and simply hear the echoes of our own voices, bouncing of the barren walls of our mental prisons.

The writer is a member of staff.

zarrar.khuhro@gmail.com

Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro