But despite fiery rhetoric, the rallies held after Friday prayers were poorly attended, and newspaper commentators gave the landmark meeting between Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and his Pakistani counterpart Khursheed Kasuri a cautious welcome.Thursday's meeting in Turkey was the first high-level contact between the two countries — a direct response to Israel's recent removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. However, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Naeem Khan said there are no plans for President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting later this month — a possibility that Shalom said he had discussed with Kasuri.
News of the meeting in Turkey surprised many here, and hard-line Islamic clerics from an influential, anti-U.S. opposition bloc in Pakistan's Parliament responded quickly with a call for protests in major cities across the country. The rallies fizzled. At the largest, about 300 supporters of an opposition coalition of six Islamic parties, Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, gathered in the northwestern city of Peshawar. Smaller protests were staged by the coalition in Quetta and Karachi. At a rally in Rawalpindi, near the capital, only about a dozen people showed up.
| Don'tcha hate it when that happens? Qazi must be taking the gas pipe about now... |