A short distance from the children’s playground
A Taliban splinter group says it did the Lahore bombing that killed more than 70 people (and more of the injured are expected to die).
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar said it had targeted Christians celebrating Easter, though police have said they are still investigating the claim.
There were scenes of carnage as parents searched for children amid the debris.
What a glowing advertisement for a religion: We Blow Up Children.
M Ilyas Khan of BBC News Islamabad offers analysis:
The bombing of the amusement park on Easter Sunday was the bloodiest attack on Christians in Pakistan since the 2013 Peshawar church bombing that killed more than 80 people.
But many believe there may be a wider context to the latest attack – 27 March was the deadline set by an alliance of more than 30 religious groups for the provincial government of Punjab to withdraw a new women’s rights law they oppose.
Ah, I see – so on the deadline a “religious group” aims its bomb at women and children playing in a park. “If the government won’t take your rights away, we’ll do it by killing you. Let’s see your fancy ‘rights’ now, bitches.”
And supporters of Mumtaz Qadri, a police guard executed last month for the 2011 killing of a provincial governor who advocated reform of the blasphemy laws, have also launched protests. They brought forward the customary 40th day mourning for Qadri by 13 days to coincide with 27 March and several thousand have now occupied a high-security zone in Islamabad to press demands which include the implementation of Sharia law.
God’s fascists taking over bit by bit.
The explosion, believed to have been carried out by one suicide bomber, hit the main gate to the Gulshan-e-Iqbal park in the early evening, a short distance from the children’s playground.
Officials said the device had been packed with ball bearings.
Read that slowly. Think about it.
This is what religion does – fills someone with so much hate that they’ll kill themselves in dreadful ways in order to kill innocent people, just to deprive others of freedom or rights.
It is never the hierarchy that commit suicide, however.
Why can’t the fanatics see that? Why don’t they question? If it really is what god wants, why aren’t the clerics blowing themselves up? “Oh, I’m not worthy to kill myself – I’ll make the sacrifice to stay alive and maintain all this horrible, horrible Earthly power, and let you get all the posthumous glory!” Seriously? Does no one see that, if self-sacrifice were really the ultimate expression of holiness, the people at the top would be clambering over one another to give everything up?
History has shown the following to be true, over and over and over again:
when you keep most people poor, and desperate, and somehow – against all the evidence – manage to persuade them that the source of the problem isn’t you and your cronies, who are actually the only people trying to help them get to some mythical heaven or promised land;
when you persuade them that this horrible existence you have imposed on them is the fault of even more poor and desperate people wanting a few rights;
when you tell them that there is a supernatural entity who wants them, and them alone, to spend eternity in paradise, just as long as you, the intermediary, keep communicating with that entity – and that those people over there are trying to send them to hell…
then you can have wealth, and power, and no-one will threaten your security. Indeed, they will hand over their last possessions and even fight to the death to ensure you keep your wealth and power.
There is a good reason that atheists are the most hated grouping.
It isn’t just the situation with the religious in the near, middle, and far East. Look at the way the American Dream is worshipped in the USA, and the way poor White people are perpetrating violence on other poor people who aren’t as white as them, whilst adoring obscenely wealthy people like Trump. Or the way that the obscenely wealthy politicians in European countries are managing to shift blame for the poverty created by greedy bankers onto migrants and refugees.
Divide and conquer. Divide and conquer.
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