Global Muslim public opinion is as useless as tits on a bull. Israel has been kicking ass and taking names for the past 70 years.
Bangladeshis need nationalism to counter these assholes, something which gave the independence and something I often found lacking in average Bangladeshi.
Global Muslim public opinion is as useless as tits on a bull. Israel has been kicking ass and taking names for the past 70 years.
1. Relations with Muslim countries can't totally be ignored, I mean even India has good relations with all Muslim countries besides Pakistan and better relations with many of them than Pakistan e.g. Iran, Afghanistan, current Bangladesh, central Asian states etc.
Bangladesh is reliant on the huge amount of remittances from expatriates working in the gulf so had to be careful about that. Other Muslim countries are not very relevant and have little power to effect us e.g. Turkey, Iran etc.
However all states benefit from having good bonds, co-operation with countries they have some commonality with e.g. the European states, the ASEAN states, the white Anglo-Saxon countries of the 5 eyes (US,UK, Canada, Australia, NZ) and for us being treated badly by certain Muslim states would have had disadvantages e.g. we had to downgrade defence relations with Erdogan's Turkey (well they downgraded it and refused to sell us certain products).
The Jamaatis however overestimate this desire to have good relations with all Muslim countries and regularly boast of what they perceive as the powerful Pak-Jamaat lobby in the gulf who can impose economic sanctions on us (banning of our workers, no further recruitment of new ones) and say "Bangladesh has bad relations with the Muslim World" (which only really means Pakistan and the GCC).
Bangladeshis need nationalism to counter these assholes, something which gave the independence and something I often found lacking in average Bangladeshi.
2. Muslims are generally quite racist and there is an unofficial ethnic/racial hierarchy in the Muslim world with Bengalis being at the lower levels of the ladder.
Jamaati-minded Bangladeshis won't say it overtly but they believe Pakistanis are racially superior.
However the good thing is in the real world what counts in international politics is your economic importance, military and hard realities. In the cold hard give-and-take benefit minded bazaar of international politics Bangladesh is doing well economically, an economic progress not due to the Muslim world (if anything despite it) and based on internal growth and help from east Asian states i.e. China, Japan and south Korea.
There isn't much Pakistan can do to Bangladesh now as the GCC states have their own problems and cannot go around bullying Bangladesh (not that they are that particularly close to us and not that the Pakistani badmouthing hasn't had some impact on Saudi and the UAE) any more than they already have. Despite their antics we are clocking over 7% economic growth a year now i.e. something around $15 billion a year.
Our armed forces are heading towards becoming pretty impressive and by 2030 we should have an airforce which might even be the 4th or 5th biggest if we were in the EU (if we were in the EU we'd have the 10th biggest airforce, despite the fact that our airforce is embarrassingly small in the appropriate context of our population, level of Myanmar's airforce etc).
So I think 2012 was a danger year and that danger has been overcome.
The Pakistanis seem to realise this and are not making much of a hoo haa about this recent incident in comparison to previous occassions.
Bangladeshi (Muslim Bengali) nationalism may not be as strong as it could be, but it is strong enough that we kicked out the Pakistanis in 1971 and then executed their agents in the past few years and have devastated these same agents and their party (Jamaat) despite the likes of Turkey, Qatar, Iran etc all supporting them.
We ignored Erdogan, at one point got him to pull his ambassador out from our country .
