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Showing posts with label Pakistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pakistan. Show all posts

Saturday 25 April 2020

Pakistan Christians with No Food for Not Converting to Islam in Coronavirus Crisis

Coronavirus Pakistan Christians Left Starving

In these times of great concern and panic over the Coronavirus pandemic we cannot think about the plight of Christians persecuted in great numbers in the world.

Ah, wait a minute: even in times without any hint of Coronavirus, our supposedly, or at least historically, Christian societies never give persecuted Christians a thought.

It can't be because of Covid-19, then.

Oh well, ehm.

Anyway, in the egalitarian country of Pakistan they know how to deal with SARS-CoV-2, which is how they deal with everything else: there are two tracks, one for the Muslim majority and one for the Christian minority. And don't you ever forget that.

Like in other countries, so in Pakistan, with 11,940 total cases and 253 deaths, people must remain in lockdown at home until at least April 30th.

Due to the abrupt interruption of many jobs, a high number of communities found themselves with no food and means of subsistence. Both the government and private Muslim NGOs are helping the poorest, since one in two Pakistani lives below the poverty line.

But aid is not given to needy Christians. The US-based charity Emergency Committee to Save the Persecuted and Enslaved (ECSPE) reports: "Islamic foundations, which receive a lot of public funds, force Christians to convert to Islam. Otherwise, they don't distribute the food to them".

The Saylani Welfare International Trust, a Muslim NGO that hands out aid and meals to homeless people and seasonal workers, denies food to both Christians and Hindus.

This is perfectly in line with Islam's concept of charity. Farooq Masih, a 54-year-old Christian in Korangi, said that volunteers who distributed food rations in the neighbourhood purposely skipped Christian homes. As Asia News explains, "The reason for this is that Zakat, Islamic alms giving (one of Islam’s five pillars), is reserved for Muslims."

Robert Spencer on Jihad Watch comments:
Islamic apologists in the West routinely deny that this is the case, but here it is in action.

Anyway, if the reverse were true, this story would receive massive international media coverage. But no one will take any particular notice of this.
In fact, Zakat is not just for Muslims, generically. Zakat is partly for violent jihad .

While unfortunately Christian and Hindu minorities are used to discrimination in Pakistan, at school and at work, nevertheless they hoped that at least during a national emergency like the Coronavirus pandemic it could be different, but no, they still suffer extreme discrimination.

Another incident, reported by UcaNews, occurred in the Sher-Shah neighbourhood of Lahore, where the distribution of government food rations was announced by the speakers of the local mosque. However, when the Christians, identified through the identity card, showed up in line they were sent away.

Christians complained on Facebook of similar discrimination in a small village near Lahore.

In yet a further instance over 100 Christian families from the Sandha Kalan village, in the Kasur district of the province of Punjab, were excluded from the distribution of aid by the local mosque.

Wednesday 25 December 2013

Queen Christmas Message Does Not Mention the Plight of Christians

Baghdad Church burnt by Muslims



Happy Christmas everyone!

I watched the Queen's 2013 Christmas message on the BBC.

It would have been nice, if she hadn't told two lies, one by action and one by omission.

The former was: "For Christians, as for all people of faith, reflection, meditation and prayer help us to renew ourselves in God's love, as we strive daily to become better people."

It's quite obvious that not in all faiths believers strive to become better people, unless we consider as self-improvement perfectioning suicide-bombing and beheading skills in order to impose one's faith - to be specific, Islam - to the whole infidel world with whatever available means.

And this takes us directly to the lie by omission. Her traditional Christmas message could have been a good opportunity for the Queen to remind her subjects not just in Britain but also in the rest of the Commonwealth that not all Christians are free to celebrate Christmas.

For years now, Christmas has been a time when Christians in many parts of the world - thanks to some faithful of the "religion" mentioned above, in their striving for self-amelioration - are routinely massacred and have to fear for their lives more than ever.

At least 38 Christians have just been killed and 70 wounded in Baghdad by two car bombs, one on Wednesday targeting a Christian market and the other on Christmas Day outside a church, targeting the faithful after a service.

On December 21 in Syria, some of those heroic freedom fighters that Obama and Cameron are so eager to help, anti-Assad "rebels" - otherwise known as bloody, murderous, kill-the-infidels-wherever-you-find-them jihadists - fired multiple mortar shells on a church, killing 12 Christians and injuring many others.

The Christians, clearly having a different concept from Muslims of what self-betterment is, were distributing charity help to the local population.

And, to get closer to the Queen's own home turf, the Commonwealth includes superb examples of countries whose Muslim majority takes a special pride in becoming better and better people at discriminating against and ferociously persecuting the Christian minority.

One of them is Nigeria, which has been rightfully called the most deadly country to be a Christian. Another is Pakistan where, after many years of continuous attacks on the Christian community, 2013 has been one of the worst of them. In September, 96 people were killed and 130 wounded in twin suicide attacks on a church in Peshawar, the most deadly attacks of this kind since independence.

Why hasn't the Queen, who always talks about the Commonwealth in her Christmas messages and this year expanded on the Commonwealth Games, found in herself the courage to speak up for the millions of her fellow Christians who are subjected to psychological and physical torture just for their belief in the same Jesus Christ whose birth we are today celebrating (in case someone, among the trees, cards, shopping and central London's "winter" lights, had forgotten)?

Thursday 7 March 2013

Sign the Petition to the UN for the Recognition of a World Day against Christianophobia



Christians are today by far the most persecuted religious group. The number of Christians killed each year for their faith is so high that it calculates to one Christian martyr's life being taken every five minutes.

This must be stopped. The UN would let down its mission if it did not do what is in its power to stop this abominable form of discrimination and this genocide.

The 2nd of March 2011 is the day when Muslim extremists in Pakistan assassinated Shahbaz Bhatti, the Roman Catholic man who was Pakistan's first Minister for Minorities Affairs.

They killed him for his work to abolish the country's blasphemy law which has been used to persecute Christians and other faith minorities.

March 2nd has now been proposed as the Annual World Day against Christianophobia, with a petition to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for the recognition of a World Day against “Christianophobia”.

At this moment 2272 have already signed it, including me.

You can sign it here:

Let’s promote March 2nd as the Annual World Day against Christianophobia!

This is the petition:
Dear Secretary General!

Present-day persecution of Christians attracted world attention after the cold-blooded killing of 58 worshippers by radical Islamist gunmen inside Our Lady of Salvation Syriac Catholic Cathedral in Baghdad (Iraq), in October 2010, and the bombing during a New Year’s Eve service of the coptic al-Qiddissin Church, in Alexandria (Egypt), leaving 23 people dead and another 97 injured.

Perhaps even more worrying was the March 2nd murder of Mr. Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Federal Minister of Minorities in broad daylight in Islamabad, since he was martyred precisely for his opposition to the «blasphemy laws» which are used as a legal instrument to persecute non-Muslims.

Direct killing, however, is not the only form of “christianophobia.” Current persecution of Christians also includes vandalism against churches and discrimination and harassment of individuals, particularly in the West, under the form of unjust representation in the media, unfair treatment by employers, disrespect for the right to conscientious objection, disregard for the right of parents to be the primary educators of their children, etc…

This reality makes the recognition of a World Day Against Christianophobia urgent – to draw the attention of public opinion, social movements, policy makers and the media to this crucial issue and to provide a unique annual opportunity for Christians to defend their rights in society.

A World Day against Christianophobia is the natural next step after recent positive attitudes adopted by the European Parliament, such as its resolutions expressing deep concern over the attacks against Christian communities in Iraq (Nov 25th, 2010), and its condemnation of attacks against Christians in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Iran and Iraq, as well as the forcible interruption by the Turkish authorities of the Christmas Mass in northern Cyprus (Jan 20th, 2011).

However, words – even if they are pronounced from the floor of a Parliament – are not enough ! No concrete results will come from them if the persecution against Christians is not recognised as the first worldwide emergency with regard to religious discrimination and violence.
Sign the petition here!


London Protest: Christians Persecuted in Pakistan Demand Equality



Saturday 2nd March I attended in London the protest against discrimination and persecution of Pakistani Christians.

Organized by the British Pakistani Christian Association, it included the presentation of a petition both to London's Pakistani Embassy and to the British Prime Minister's residence in 10 Downing Street. Several religious figures and human rights campaigners were speakers at the demonstration.

A Peace Rally and Memorial Concert in Trafalgar Square followed, in memory of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Roman Catholic man who was Pakistan's first Minister for Minorities Affairs from 2008 until Muslim extremists assassinated him in 2011 for his work to abolish the country's blasphemy law which has been used to persecute faith minorities. He was the only Christian in the government.

Minister Bhatti had received repeated death threats for his consistent defence of the rights of Pakistan's religious minorities and for his fight for the abolition of Pakistan’s shameful blasphemy laws, which mandate the death sentence for anyone thought to have spoken ill of Muhammad or to have in any way offended Muslim sensitivities: the standard of accepted evidence is very low, and intent or lack of it is not a consideration in passing the sentence.

Two months before the assassination of Bhatti, another man campaigning for the same cause, Provincial Governor Salman Taseer, had been killed by his own bodyguard, who for his crime was welcomed as a hero by many Pakistani Muslims.

Saturday's event, like a similar one in 2012, commemorated the anniversary of Shahbaz Bhatti's assassination on 2 March 2011 outside his home in Islamabad.

Constantly Pakistani Christians are killed for their faith, or other atrocities are committed against them, like the rape of a Christian 2-year-old girl because her father refused to convert to Islam.

The situation of Christians in Pakistan is dire. Recently a Christian 19-year-old boy, Mard-e-Khuda, living in the Bahawalpur district, was barbarically killed on the false accusation of having an affair with a Muslim girl.

"20 million Christians in Pakistan are treated as second class citizens and denied justice in Pakistan by Islamic governments which never feel ashamed to release Muslim criminals and terrorists" said Dr. Nazir S Bhatti, who has been been campaigning for equal rights for Christian people in Pakistan since 1985 and is President of the Pakistan Christian Congress (PCC). He had to flee Pakistan for his safety and now lives in the USA.

While in his country Nazir Bhatti was arrested many times. The government of Pakistan registered 21 false cases of treason and blasphemy against him on February 13 1998, for leading a protest against the burning of the Christian village Shanti Nagar in Punjab by radical Muslims.

The reality of Christian victimization and persecution in this Muslim-majority country is so horrific that I suggested that the international community, particularly the British Commonwealth of which it is part, should give Pakistan the South African treatment and treat it like a pariah until it repeals its blasphemy laws and protects its religious minorities.

As usual, last Christmas was a dark Christmas for Pakistani Christians, and, amid growing fear of persecution and rampant economic and social discrimination in Pakistan, the year 2012 was one of the worst years for them.

Raymond Ibrahim, in his monthly report of Muslim Persecution of Christians throughout the world for December, writes about Pakistan:
Birgitta Almby, a 70-year-old Bible school teacher from Sweden, was shot by two men in front of her home; she died soon after. She had served in Pakistan for 38 years. Police said they could not find the assassins and could not unearth a motive, although Christians close to her have no doubt "Islamic extremists" murdered the elderly woman: "Who else would want to murder someone as apolitical and harmless as Almby, who had dedicated her life to serving humanity?" That service may have included sharing the Gospel with Muslims, an act strictly forbidden in Islam.
Other recent Muslim atrocities against Christians are listed on Jihad Watch.

The list of horrors could continue, but I'm sure that those who do not want to look away and pretend it does not happen have now got the message.

On a positive note, March 2nd has now been proposed as the Annual World Day against Christianophobia, with a petition to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for the recognition of a World Day against “Christianophobia”.

I would have probably preferred "against the persecution of Christians" to another "phobia", but it is true that the latter includes other forms of attack against Christianity, like the ones coming from the Western "progressives" as well as from communist regimes or the 1,400-year-old cult of Islam.

Wednesday 13 February 2013

Pakistan Protest against St Valentines




Pakistan demonstration against St Valentine's Day, or when people prefer hatred to love.

The student movement of Pakistan's main religious party has organized a protest against the festivity which, according to them, propagates "indecency in the world."

Obviously Christians who have the terrible misfortune of living in Pakistan cannot celebrate St Valentine's either.

There have been threats: "We will not allow the holding of any celebration of Valentine's Day," said the leader of the student movement, Shahzad Ahmed. "Either the authorities prohibit them. Or we will stop them way."

Saturday 1 December 2012

Yes, There Is a Link between Islam and Paedophilia

The members of an Oxford Muslim paedophile ring found guilty of raping and trafficking girls aged as young as 11



People often make comments to the effect that there is no relationship between being Muslim and paedophilia, that this non-indigenous religious group has been unjustly targeted.

As an example, here's what I found posted in a student forum:
What I've never been able to grasp is why whenever middle-eastern men commit a crime, they are not identified by their nationality, but by their religion? This is blatantly an attempt to make Islam look bad. If a brit were to rape a teenager, it wouldn't say "Chrisitan [sic] male rapes teenager". How do you even know that these people are in fact muslims? Is it their names?

This might seem irrelevant, but if their seemingly muslim heritage is the only thing that links them together, then it is not at all an epidemic. I could just as easily find an epidemic of increasing Christian murderers in the UK.

PS: I'm not a muslim myself. I just find this extremely hypocritical.
Someone else in the forum corrected the poster saying that these childrens' sexual abuse crimes are not commited by "middle-eastern men" but mostly by UK Pakistanis.

Putting aside the factual errors of the comment quoted above and its naivety, it nevertheless expresses a recurring opinion that we hear frequently.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

First, far from being targeted, Muslim paedophiles have been let off the hook for decades by police, social services and media, who were too afraid to establish the connection between Muslims and paedophilia and left them undisturbed to go about their business sometimes for as long as 40 years.

It is interesting to note that one of the people responsible for the cover-up, Joyce Thacker, Rotherham Council's Strategic Director of Children and Young People’s Services, is the same woman who took three children away from their foster parents because these were members of the right-wing UK Independence Party. In the end, both these scandals helped UKIP and the BNP achieve second and third place in the recent Rotherham by-election, which gave UKIP in particular a record result.

Second, even today, after the truth has been exposed, there is a strong reluctance in public discourse to make this link, reluctance of which the comments I described above are an example. Just look at this video clip of an episode of the BBC programme Question Time to see a glaring case of people falling over backwards in order not to say the "M" word. So great is in many the fear to be called racist and Islamophobic, that they resort to any way to avoid saying "Muslim" and "paedophile" in the same breath, even if it means offending others.

Non-Muslim Asians like Hindus and Sikhs have resented the fact that Muslim paedophiles have been called "Asian men", implying an involvement of the Asian community as a whole which does not exist.

And, as is so blatantly and painfully obvious in the Question Time video clip, Catholicism and the Catholic Church have been dragged into this discussion for no other reason than to distract the public, to draw attention away from the fact that the paedophiles we are talking about are indeed Muslim.

So other, innocent religious groups have been unjustly blamed to avoid accusing the real culprits.

Third, there is a high statistical correlation between the UK's Muslim community and paedophile gangs. The Times and The Daily Mail in 2011 reported some illuminating figures:
Charities and agencies working in conjunction with the police to help victims of sexual abuse in such cases have publicly denied there is a link between ethnicity and the on-street grooming of young girls by gangs and pimps.

But researchers identified 17 court prosecutions since 1997, 14 of them in the past three years, involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by groups of men.

The victims came from 13 towns and cities and in each case two or more men were convicted of offences.

In total, 56 people, with an average age of 28, were found guilty of crimes including rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child.

Three of the 56 were white, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and a majority were members of the British Pakistani community.

Those convicted allegedly represent only a small proportion of what one detective called a ‘tidal wave’ of offending in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and the Midlands.
The fourth is a very strong argument that goes straight to the core and deep to the foundations of the correlation between Islam and paedophilia.

Islam does not forbid paedophilia, indeed it allows and even rules about it. The following Quranic verse refers to times when divorce is allowed  - notice "those too who have not had their courses", meaning prepubescent girls (wives) who had not started menstruating:
And (as for) those of your women who have despaired of menstruation, if you have a doubt, their prescribed time shall be three months, and of those too who have not had their courses; and (as for) the pregnant women, their prescribed time is that they lay down their burden; and whoever is careful of (his duty to) Allah He will make easy for him his affair.

Qur'an 65:4
And from the Bukhari, a collection generally regarded as the most authentic of all hadith (saying or act of Muhammad) collections:
The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with 'Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death). Bukhari 7.62.88

"Allah's Apostle said to me, "Have you got married O Jabir?" I replied, "Yes." He asked "What, a virgin or a matron?" I replied, "Not a virgin but a matron." He said, "Why did you not marry a young girl who would have fondled with you?" Bukhari 59:382
Another hadith compilation confirms what he meant by "young girl":
'A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported: “Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) married me when I was six years old, and I was admitted to his house at the age of nine.” (Sahih Muslim 3309)
It seems hard to believe that Islam has no problem with paedophilia if you don't know that Muhammad, who is for Muslims the ideal man, the "perfect example", the supreme example of conduct, the model to follow and imitate, just as Jesus is for Christians, was indeed a paedophile. He married Aisha, one of his wives, when she was 6 and had complete sexual intercourse with her when she was 9.

The argument that in those times the law and public moral code were different is irrelevant here. First of all, a religion, to be worthy of that name, must give ethical guidance and directions. The self-proclaimed founder of a new religion who passively follows the diktats of contemporary mores without questioning them, without having a vision for the future - as Jesus Christ did, whose ethics is modern and in fact pioneering even today, after 2 millennia -, does not deserve the title of prophet and his is not a religion.

Secondarily, that argument must be overturned. Paradoxically, saying that Muhammad just followed the rules of his day not only gives him and his pseudo-religion the coup de grace, but also encapsulates in one sentence what is wrong with Islam: a 7th-century AD warlord who was simply a slave of his time, killing, slaughtering, having multiple wives, having sex with children, was no better and no worse than many others of his contemporaries; but what has made him so perverse is that he enshrined all these terrible behaviours into moral guidelines for the posterity, so that what could have been consigned to history long time ago, barbarism, gratuitous violence, oppression of women, paedophilia - among his other abominable activities -, has now been set in stone for all future generations to obey to and adopt as an ideal way to conduct one's life.

And this leads us to the fifth point, that paedophilia is commonly practiced with the blessing of the law in Muslim countries today, in 2012, as child marriage. From WikiIslam:
A second look at the question; was Muhammad a pedophile? One of the most disturbing things about Islam is that it does not categorically condemn pedophilia. Indeed, it cannot, for to do so would draw attention to the pedophilia of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Many Muslims cannot condemn pedophilia even if they would like to, for they would have to abandon Islam. Muslims tacitly approve of pedophilia, even if they are embarrassed to say so. So mesmerized are Muslims by the example of Muhammad's pedophilia that they are unable to categorically denounce pedophilia or feel shame. It is prevalent in many Muslim countries disguised as child marriage. The UN is today trying to stop the evil of child marriage among the backward Islamic regions of Asia and Africa. The future of some 300 million young girls depends on it.
Scholar of Islam Raymond Ibrahim writes:
Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: "Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed."

The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl "a divine blessing," and advised the faithful: "Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house."

Monday 15 October 2012

Time To Give Pakistan the South-African Treatment

Jihad Watch has published my article "Time To Give Pakistan the South-African Treatment":
It may seem an unlikely possibility, now that the Islamic world is demanding sharia, in the shape of anti-blasphemy laws, to be imposed all over the globe and Muslim Baroness Warsi, newly-appointed Minister for Faith (i.e. Islam) in the UK government, has signed during the UN recent meetings a surreal agreement between the UK, that old -- and now former -- defender of democratic freedoms, and the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) pledging that the UK and the OIC will "work together on issues of peace, stability and religious freedom", but sometimes attack is the best form of defence.

South Africa was isolated by the international community due to its apartheid policy, which put pressure on Pretoria and played a role in ending the apartheid. The British Commonwealth, of which the country was part, turned out to be particularly important in this process.

During the apartheid, the British felt particularly responsible for what they believed to be South African discriminatory policies because of the strong ties the UK had with that country through the Commonwealth, the international organization that comprises almost exclusively Britain’s former colonies.

In 1958 the African National Congress made an appeal for international solidarity. The Christians and other non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan may be too demoralized and terrorized to even ask for outside help.

I am not here making comparisons between Pakistan and South Africa, which since the end of the apartheid seems to have deteriorated.

The only leaf I am taking out of the South African book is the way international repudiation of a regime or treatment considered as odiously unfair can be an effective weapon against it.

Pakistan, another member of the British Commonwealth, has already been suspended from the Commonwealth twice: in 1999 after Musharraf seized power in a coup, and in 2007, because of its imposition of emergency rule, until “full restoration of fundamental rights and the rule of law“, for its "serious violation of the Commonwealth’s fundamental political values.

Isn’t Pakistan’s treatment of its Christians “a serious violation of the Commonwealth’s fundamental political values”?

Let's see.

The Constitution of Pakistan (PART III, Chapter 1) says: “A person shall not be qualified for election as President unless he is a Muslim of not less than forty-five years of age and is qualified to be elected as member of the National Assembly.”

In addition, the Constitution (PART VII, Chapter 3A) rules that non-Muslims cannot be judges in the Federal Shariat Court, which has the power to abrogate any law considered un-Islamic.

At least since the 1990s, we have started to learn how Pakistani Christians suffer the worst forms of discrimination only because of their religion.

The infamous Pakistani blasphemy law mandates that anyone who offends the Quran must be punished, even with the death sentence.

A 1998 United Nations document on “Prevention of Discrimination against and the Protection of Minorities”, mostly concerned with Pakistan, says: “The use of an accusation of “blasphemy” -- an ill-defined term which can be expanded to mean anything that any accuser dislikes -- merits serious attention. Some accusations of “blasphemy” can be ill-disguised death threats - as was the case in 1994 regarding the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Sudan, Mr. Gáspár Biró - and when they are not, they can be considered as sufficiently dangerous to lead to kowtowing, and even censorship at the United Nations”.

Since 1994, Amnesty International has been calling for a change in that law because it is used as a tool against religious minorities:

AI is concerned that a number of people facing charges of blasphemy, or convicted on such charges have been detained solely for their real or imputed religious beliefs. Most of those charged with blasphemy belong to the Ahamdiyya community but Christians have increasingly been accused of blasphemy, among them a 13-year-old boy accused of writing blasphemous words on the walls of a mosque despite being totally illiterate. The following case histories are supplied: Anwar Masih, a Christian prisoner; Arshad Javed, reportedly mentally ill, sentenced to death; Gul Masih, a Christian, sentenced to death; Tahir Iqbal, a convert to Christianity, died in jail while on trial; Sawar Masih Bhatti, a Christian prisoner; Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, Muslim social activist; Chand Barkat, a Christian acquitted of blasphemy but continuously harassed; Hafiz Farooq Sajjad, stoned to death; Salamat Masih, Manzoor Masih and Rehmat Masih, three Christians.”

In 1996, another Christian, Ayub Masih, was incarcerated in solitary confinement for two years, convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death in 1998 due to a neighbour’s accusations that he supported Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. Eventually his lawyer proved that the accuser had used the conviction to force Masih's family out of their land and take control of the property.

It is supposed to be in connection with this episode that the Pakistani Catholic Bishop John Joseph killed himself in 1998 to protest the blasphemy laws, for the repeal of which he had been campaigning. Before his death, Bishop Joseph had publicly declared that the charges against Ayub Masih were false, and fabricated to force 15 Christian families to drop a local land dispute with Muslim villagers.

Since then the story has just been a repetition of many similar cases, so much so that even homosexual and human rights activist Peter Tatchell – not exactly a friend of the Church – has condemned persecution of Christians in Pakistan, and the Pakistan United Christian Welfare Association has demanded a separate province in Pakistan to protect the country’s around 2.8 million Christians from persecution.

One of the most recent horrors is that of the 11-year-old Christian girl threatened to be burnt alive by a Muslim mob for another false “blasphemy” accusation, while her family and several other Christian families were driven out of their homes in terror.

And Hindus are also an oppressed minority in Pakistan.

The UK’s National Secular Society, whose president Terry Sanderson said: “There is certainly a need for some kind of inter-religious understanding among OIC member states, a number of which suppress Christianity and other religions in a brutal and merciless fashion”, may also be in favour of pressure brought on Pakistan, which is certainly one of the most serious offenders among the OIC’s member states Mr. Sanderson is referring to.

Other campaigns of international political, financial, economic, cultural and sporting sanctions against Pakistan should also be conducted, as they were against South Africa.

South Africa’s bans from sporting events were employed as an effective instrument of pressure, and so could be banning Pakistan from Commonwealth Games, Cricket World Cup, and the like.

Saturday 29 September 2012

Where are British moderate Muslims?

Jihad Watch has just published my article Where are British moderate Muslims?
If there are moderate Muslims in the UK, this is the moment for them to make their voices heard.

Pakistan’s Railways Minister has offered $100,000 for the murder of the filmmaker of The Innocence of Muslims.

In any civilized country, he would be not only fired from his cabinet position but also arrested for the crime of incitement to murder. Instead, Pakistan’s Prime Minister has excused him, and people in his country have demonstrated in his support.

Pakistan is a member of the British Commonwealth. Its High Commissioner to the UK, the equivalent of ambassador for Commonwealth countries, has defended the Railways Minister in an interview with Sky News.

Various British Muslims have also been interviewed, and they invariably expressed the opinion that, if freedom of speech should be protected, then the Pakistani minister is within his rights to say what he wants, and after all, he only hurt one person, not many like the controversial filmmaker. This is Muslim logic for you.

All this is reminiscent of what happened at the time of the Salman Rushdie affair, when opinion polls among British Muslims were showing the majority in favour of the fatwa against the writer.

Let’s not forget that many UK Muslims have come here from Pakistan, so much so that the derogatory term for Asians in Britain is “Paki”.

When we consider Pakistan, the country’s blasphemy law and its use to persecute Christian minorities in the most shameful way and the support that this law enjoys among the Pakistani population, and then we look at this latest episode of a government minister publicly inciting to murder with impunity and people taking to the streets defending him, we have to draw the conclusion that, if there are moderate Muslims in Pakistan, they must be very few or very silent or both.

Is the same true of British Muslims, many of whom are of Pakistani extraction?

Interestingly, Muslim figures prominent in the UK, always displayed for public consumption as representatives of moderate Islam, have turned out, under greater scrutiny, not to be so moderate after all.

Member of the House of Lords Lord Ahmed “savagely attacked Tony Blair for giving Salman Rushdie a knighthood, ...threatened to mobilise 10000 Muslims to prevent democratically elected Dutch MP Geert Wilders from speaking in Parliament, this is despite his own invite of the anti-semitic Israel Shamir who has been accused of denying the holocaust”.

The Pakistani-born peer also said: “Even if I have to beg I am willing to raise and offer £10 million so that George W Bush and Tony Blair can be brought to the International Court of Justice on war crimes charges”.

Former Deputy Leader of the Labour Group, Shadow Lord Chancellor and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice Sadiq Khan “is the lifelong friend of Babar Ahmad, a man indicted in the US on charges of ‘conspiracy to provide material to support terrorists, namely the Taliban and the Chechen Mujahideen; providing material to support terrorists; and conspiracy to kill in a foreign country’. Ahmad ran a website recruiting jihadi militants to go and fight the Russian in Chechnya and Coalition troops in Afghanistan. When arrested, he had in his possession plans for an American carrier battle group with written notations on it like ‘vulnerable to RPG’”.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan, former senior political editor of The New Statesman, on separate occasions called non-Muslims people of no intelligence and compared them to animals and cattle (in so doing revealing, on top of everything else, his speciesism).

And former co-chairman of the Conservative Party Baroness Warsi, unelected, appointed to the House of Lords, amidst public expenses frauds scandals, breachings of both the Ministerial Code and rules on financial declarations, found time to run a business her partner in which, Abid Hussain, has been a leading member of Hizb ut Tahrir, a radical Islamic group the Conservatives promised to ban when they were in opposition.

Disliked by Tories, called by one of them “the worst party chairman” we've ever had, Warsi, who is of Pakistani origin and maintains strong ties with that country, has now more power than ever, with two crucial cabinet posts and a seat at the National Security Council.

Tuesday 21 August 2012

Does Madonna Care about Young Pakistani Girl Lynched and Imprisoned for Being Christian?



No protest from Madonna, Paul McCartney, Sting, Peter Gabriel and others of their ilk here.

Of course, a Christian 11-year-old girl with Down's Syndrome beaten up by a mob, arrested and put in jail in Pakistan, facing the death penalty for having allegedly burnt pages of Islam's Holy Book, under the country's blasphemy laws - portrayed as "strict" by the Western media but in fact simply following the Quran as good Muslims should - is not remotely as bad as a bunch of talentless, publicity-seeking, balaclava-wearing female hooligans trespassing into the Christian Orthodox Cathedral which is the symbol of Russia's liberation from state-imposed atheism, barging into its sanctuary containing the altar, offending the congregation with a vulgar and insulting song and dance full of expletives mocking a Christian prayer and then, after having shown their courage by denying their presence in the church, eventually having to face the consequences of their criminal actions.

First, the facts. The girl, Rimsha, living in a poor outlying district of Islamabad, is accused by her Muslim neighbours of burning pages of the Quran, of which police officials say there is little evidence.
But hundreds of angry neighbors [500 to 600, according to the police] gathered outside the girl's home last week demanding action in a case raising new concerns about religious extremism in this conservative Muslim country. [Emphasis mine; note the term "conservative" in this context]
The police intervened apparently for her protection, because the angry mob wanted to set her alight. As even the BBC says, in Pakistan just being accused of blasphemy, even without solid evidence, carries a death sentence from the mob, if not the state.
Almost everyone in the girl's neighborhood insisted she had burned the Quran's pages, even though police said they had found no evidence of it. One police official, Qasim Niazi, said when the girl was brought to the police station, she had a shopping bag that contained various religious and Arabic-language papers that had been partly burned, but there was no Quran.

Some residents claimed they actually saw burnt pages of Quran _ either at the local mosque or at the girl's house. Few people in Pakistan actually speak or read Arabic, so often assume that anything they see with Arabic script is believed to be from the Quran, sometimes the only Arabic-language book people have seen.
As many as 600 Christians have fled their homes in the area where the girl lives, fearing for their lives.

It is well known that in Pakistan blasphemy laws are often used to harass and persecute non-Muslims, especially Christians, and even for personal vendettas.
"It has been exploited by individuals to settle personal scores, to grab land, to violate the rights of non-Muslims, to basically harass them," said the head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Zora Yusuf.

Those convicted of blasphemy can spend years in prison and often face mob justice by extremists when they finally do get out. In July, thousands of people dragged a man accused of desecrating the Quran from a police station in the central city of Bahawalpur, beat him to death and then set his body on fire.
Actually, he was burnt alive
Attempts to revoke or alter the blasphemy laws have been met with violent opposition. Last year, two prominent political figures who spoke out against the laws were killed in attacks that basically ended any attempts at reform.

The girl's jailing terrified her Christian neighbors, many of whom left their homes in fear after the incident. One resident said Muslims used to object to the noise when Christians sang songs during their services. After the girl was accused he said senior members of the Muslim community pressured landlords to evict Christian tenants.
Pakistan's Minister for National Harmony (you need an office like that in a Muslim country) Dr Paul Bhatti is the brother of murdered Minister of Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti, the country's only Christian government minister, killed for criticizing the blasphemy laws. The Minister said to the BBC that he really fears an umpteenth tragedy, and that the girl with her family should be taken to a safe place possibly out of Pakistan.

There are so many things to say on this, I don't even know where to start.

The media, Western and non, are incredible: they call Pakistan's blasphemy laws "strict" and Pakistan "conservative", not "Christianophobic", "racist", "fascist", "nazi", although in this case these terms, much overemployed (changing "Christianophobic" for some other "phobic") and inappropriately used in the public discourse, would for once be apt.

Somebody who, in a moment of rage during a heated row accompanied by verbal abuse on both sides, utters the word "nigger" (and, if he is the captain of the England football team, even just the word "black") is "racist" and risks being dragged to court; someone who beats up and tries to burn alive Rimsha is "conservative".

Does that sound right to you? Are you sure that the media you read and watch help you to make sense of the world we live in, or do they instead confuse the picture completely?

The behaviour of the Muslim mob in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital city, not some remote rural area, also deserves some reflections.

Who should reflect, in particular, are those who like to talk of great differences between radical and moderate Muslims, and of Islam as a jolly nice religion "highjacked" by what Robert Spencer calls its "misunderstanders".

From the many episodes of this kind that we've seen for a long time, it's obvious that in Pakistan Muslim people who hold these "extreme" views on blasphemy are not extreme at all, in the sense that either they are in effect a majority or their views are tolerated and accepted by a majority, so much so that they are reflected in the law of the country.

If you want to have an idea of the relative numbers, while fewer than 100 demonstrated in Karachi to condemn the murder in 2011 of Minister of Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti, thousands rallied in major Pakistani cities demanding punishment for Asia Bibi (a Christian woman condemned to death for blasphemy) and threatening further protests and anarchy if the government moves to amend the blasphemy laws, and nearly 50,000 rallied in Karachi against the amendment of blasphemy laws and hailing Qadri, the killer of Salman Taseer, the provincial governor who was trying to achieve that amendment, as a hero.

If you want to do something about the fate of Rimsha and her family, the Asian Human Rights Commission has a sample letter and relevant email, fax, address contact details (via Jihad Watch).