Tag: Pakistan

  • They cannot even implement an order of the country’s highest court

    Asia Bibi’s lawyer has left Pakistan to avoid being murdered by the fanatics.

    Pakistani Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry defended the government against allegations that a deal reached with an Islamist party was capitulating to extremists.

    He said the government would “take all steps necessary” to ensure Asia Bibi’s safety.

    One, of course it’s capitulating to extremists. What else would it be? The court ruled, the murderous theocrats rioted, the government made a “deal” with the theocrats by preventing Asia Bibi from leaving Pakistan to escape the fanatics who want to murder her. That’s capitulation.

    Two, of course the government won’t take all steps necessary to ensure Asia Bibi’s safety; it rescinded the very first step necessary to ensure her safety. It’s already reversed itself on one such step so why should anyone believe it will take all the others?

    Mr Mulook, however, called the agreement “painful”.

    “They cannot even implement an order of the country’s highest court,” he told AFP before he boarded the plane to Europe.

    Mr Mulook said he had decided to leave as it was “not possible” to continue living in Pakistan, adding: “I need to stay alive as I still have to fight the legal battle for Asia Bibi.”

    Pakistan is such a train wreck.

  • “Separate the head from the body!”

    The fruits of religious fanaticism:

    A Christian woman who was acquitted by Pakistan’s Supreme Court after spending eight years on death row for insulting Islam is still being held in an undisclosed location. Her release was delayed after negotiations failed between the government and an extremist religious group that is demanding she be killed.

    Negotiations? What negotiations? What, they should agree to let Asia Bibi be killed a little bit?

    Asia Bibi’s sentence was reversed on Wednesday in Islamabad. Almost simultaneously, followers of a hard-line Pakistani religious group rushed onto major highways across the country to paralyze traffic in protest of the decision.

    They called for Bibi to be killed, along with the three Supreme Court judges who issued the verdict. They also called on Pakistani military forces to disobey the army chief of staffs, accusing him of not being a Muslim.

    Peak religion – kill a woman because someone claimed she “insulted” a long-dead “prophet,” and kill all the judges who ruled her innocent, too. Just kill everyone who doesn’t agree with every syllable of the bullshit you believe.

    Even in a country which generally tolerates a great deal of hate speech by the religious right, the calls against the army chief, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, seemed to stun many in Pakistan. It led to the prime minister, Imran Khan, warning the protesters in an evening televised address that the state could be forced to act against them. Negotiations began shortly after the prime minister’s address to defuse the situation.

    Those talks collapsed early Friday after the government refused the group’s request that Bibi be forbidden from leaving to leave the country.

    Thousands of fanatics crowded the streets today to present their humane and reasoned arguments.

    “What is the punishment for insulting the prophet?” the men chanted in central Islamabad. “Separate the head from the body!” they responded.

    What an inspirational religion they must follow.

  • Beaten with planks until his skull caved in

    And in Pakistan:

    A mob beat a Pakistani student to death at his university campus on Thursday after he was accused of sharing blasphemous content on social media, university and police officials said.

    A group of about 10 students shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the attack on fellow student Mashal Khan, who was stripped naked and beaten with planks until his skull caved in as other students looked on, video obtained by Reuters showed.

    If god is so great why does it need humans killing other humans for not groveling to it enough? If god is so great why can’t it just let us come to our own conclusions?

    In recent months, Pakistan’s government has been vocal about the issue, with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif issuing an order last month for removal of blasphemous content online and saying anyone who posted such content should face “strict punishment under the law”.

    Ten students have been arrested after Thursday’s attack the grounds of a university in the northern city of Mardan, local police chief Mohammad Alam Shinwari said.

    Pakistan is eating itself alive with this shit.

    One of Khan’s teachers recalled that he was a passionate and critical student.

    “He was brilliant ‎and inquisitive, always complaining about the political system of the country, but I never heard him saying anything controversial against the religion,” said the teacher.

    And what if he had? A religion is a belief system, with implications for human beings; we should be allowed to say things about it, even “controversial” things.

    Recently, fighting blasphemy has also become a rallying cry for the government.

    Pakistani online activists believe blasphemy-related crack downs on social media are veiled attempts by the country’s powerful military to limit dissent on human rights violations.

     

    Not all that veiled, really.

  • Most of the dead and injured are women and children

    This hour it’s the turn of Lahore, Pakistan. The BBC reports:

    An explosion in the Pakistani city of Lahore has killed at least 50 people and injured dozens more, officials say.

    The blast was in a large park in the south-west of the city, where many people had gathered late on Sunday.

    The Beeb’s reporter Shaimaa Khalil says speculation is the target was Christians out for the Easter weekend.

    Most of the dead and injured are women and children, a senior local police officer told Reuters news agency.

    One eyewitness said there was chaos, with a stampede breaking out and children separated from their parents in the rush to escape.

    Another told local media of pools of blood and scattered body parts in the park.

    Most of the dead and injured are women and children.

  • Distracted during Ramadan

    Problem-solving in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan – it’s Ramadan, so the thing to do is remove all sources of temptation. Or, at least, one source of temptation to one part of the population.

    Clerics in northwest Pakistan have issued a temporary ban on women shopping unless accompanied by a male relative, a police official said on Saturday, in a step designed to keep men from being distracted during the holy month of Ramadan.

    Police are supporting the ban, announced over mosque loudspeakers on Friday in Karak district in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, district police official Fazal Hanif told Reuters.

    Unaccompanied women will be arrested and shopkeepers may be punished for selling items to women on their own.

    It’s just temporary. Don’t get crabby about it. Ramadan is only a month. Bitchez can put up with being locked up at home for just a month, so get over it. They really shouldn’t be outside without a male relative at all, if you think about it – so limiting it to a month is generous and kind.

    The mosque announcements said the ban was intended to stop men from being distracted during Ramadan, when Muslims are meant to fast from dawn to sunset. The annual period of fasting and prayer falls in July this year.

    The ban was proposed by a faction of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party led by Fazl-ur-Rehman, local administration official Sarfaraz Khattak said.

    Such religious parties have typically performed poorly in Pakistani elections, winning only a handful of seats. But mainstream politicians are often slow to criticize religious leaders, partly for fear of being targeted by their supporters.

    Some residents of the area also oppose the ban.

    “The male members of the family don’t have enough time to take women to the market,” said Mohammad Naeem Khattak. “Where can women go for shopping if they are banned in the market?”

    Oh come on – it just takes a little planning. As soon as the men come home, they can take the women to the market. So that means fasting two or three extra hours! So what? Everybody will be so much purer, it’s obviously worth it.

     

  • The victim should have kept quiet

    That’s all the good news for now. Here’s more bad news. In Pakistan, a girl of 13 was gang-raped by four men, and now she and her family are being persecuted because her family refused to kill her. That’s what they were supposed to do, you see, because the gang rape was her crime, not the crime of the men who did it to her. It’s a “tradition.” (Funny how the story never mentions the word “Islam.” No, “funny” isn’t the right word…)

    The Soomros have faced isolation, fear and intimidation from the four men Kainat accused of raping her, and from the members of the small village who were afraid of challenging moral laws which have been in existence for centuries.

    Moral laws? Not religious laws? Nothing to do with the majority religion?

    The film, which was selected for screening in the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, retells the story of the young girl’s attack while walking home from school down a narrow village street by a shop where Kainat says the owner, Shaban Saikh, and three other men including a father and son held her down and sexually assaulted her.

    The village declared her “kari”, or a black virgin, and ordered her family to carry out an honor killing to end the shame a rape victim brings to a family, according to Pakistani culture.

    And religion. The culture is rooted in the religion. The god of that religion hates women.

    The alleged rapists beat her father and one of her brothers. Her older brother went missing for three months and was found murdered.

    But Kainat’s parents refused to kill their daughter, instead deciding to take up her cause in a legal system which places the burden of proof on the victim.

    The rapists attacked relatives of the victim because they refuse to murder the victim. It’s so twisted it’s hard to read without squirming.

    When Kainat attends court she undergoes a barrage of “nasty” questions, up to 300 at a time, including “what part of your clothing did you remove?” or “who raped you first?”.

    The presiding judge is affronted that Kainat has brought the charges, and rules against her in part because she has accused a father and son of a gang rape.

    “In his view,” the film’s narrator says, “he said that would never happen in Pakistan” and describes Kainat’s accusations “as a product of her own fantasy”.

    The men are acquitted, and, in an interview with the film makers, appear bewildered at why their accuser didn’t just stay at home “and keep quiet”.

    They see their acquittal as proof Kainat “does not have good character. If she was a decent woman, she would have sat at home, silent.”

    A decent “woman” of 13 sits at home silent after four men in her town gang-rape her, murder her brother, and beat up her father and another brother. That makes a lot of sense. Victims of crimes are supposed to imprison themselves and shut up so that the criminals can have a pleasant life. It’s gruesome.

  • Three more

    Three more anti-polio campaigners killed dead in Pakistan. That’s showing them.

    That makes 8 this week.

    Wednesday’s attacks all took place in the restive western frontier province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – one just outside the city of Peshawar and two others in the town of Charsadda. Two men and a woman have been killed.

    The volunteers were taking part in a three-day government-led drive, supported by the World Health Organisation and Unicef, to vaccinate tens of millions of children at risk from polio in Pakistan.

    After a decades-long struggle by multilateral organisations, governments and NGOs worldwide, the disease is now endemic only in three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

    Thank you Allah.

    Women health workers held protests in Karachi and the capital, Islamabad. “We go out and risk our lives to save other people’s children from being permanently handicapped, for what? So that our own children become orphans?” Ambreen Bibi, a health worker, said at the Islamabad protest.

    Women are such whiners.

     

     

     

  • They would regret helping the “infidel” campaign against polio

    First, do no harm.

    First, don’t be evil.

    It’s strange how easily a lot of people lose sight of that basic thought, or never entertain it in the first place.

    What would be high on a list of harms not to do? Killing people who are working to prevent polio in a country where 35 children have been infected with polio this year, when nearly all other countries in the world are polio-free.

    High high high on the list. One, polio is bad; very very bad. Immunizing people against it is an unqualified good. Two, people who are working to immunize children against polio are doing a good thing, and don’t deserve to be killed for doing it.

    And yet, there are people who murder young women who are working to immunize children against polio in Pakistan, where 35 children have been infected with polio this year. The immunization campaign has been suspended in Karachi as a result.

    Three women were killed and a man was wounded in two separate attacks on health workers in Karachi on Tuesday, said senior police superintendent police Imran Shaukat.

    The team had received telephone calls warning workers they would regret helping the “infidel” campaign against polio, said health official Gul Naz, who oversees project in the area where the women were shot.

    An anti-polio worker in Karachi was shot dead on Monday, the United Nations said.

    In the northwestern city of Peshawar on Tuesday, gunmen on a motorbike shot a 17-year-old girl supervising an anti-polio campaign, said government official Javed Marwar.

    She died of her wounds in hospital, a doctor said.

    All of the victims were Pakistanis working with a U.N.-backed program to eradicate polio, which attacks the nervous system and can cause permanent paralysis within hours of infection.

    It has been eradicated in all but a handful of countries but at least 35 children in Pakistan have been infected this year.

    In Karachi, provincial Health Minister Saghir Ahmed said the government had told 24,000 polio workers it was suspending the anti-polio drive in the province.

    It’s monstrous.

  • Law in a theocracy

    Apparently in Pakistan, if you’re a lawyer and you think a case might not go your way, the thing to do is to muse aloud about people who got murdered in similar circumstances if you know what I mean wink wink nudge nudge. At least if you see yourself as a lawyer for Team God.

    A lawyer representing the man who accused a Pakistani Christian girl of blasphemy has claimed that if she is not convicted, Muslims could “take the law into their own hands”.

    Rao Abdur Raheem, who appeared in court for the first time at a bail hearing on Tuesday, cited the example of Mumtaz Qadri, the man who last year gunned down a senior politician who had called for the reform of the much-abused blasphemy law.

    Because a girl of 11, with possible learning difficulties, may or may not have thrown out or burned or carried in a garbage bag a few pages from the Koran or a guidebook on reading the Koran – if she doesn’t get convicted, never mind the evidence or the age or the who cares about a few pages from a mass-produced book anyway growthefuckup, then let’s hope somebody murders her.

    Really? Really, Rao Abdur Raheem? The case is so good? The “crime” is so horrendous? That you want her convicted (and executed, I take it?) or else murdered?

    What a profoundly horrible person you must be. I hope you get over it.

    The girl, Rimsha Masih, whose family says she is 11, was arrested earlier this month and charged with desecrating the Qur’an after a neighbour, Malik Hammad, claimed that he saw her with burnt pages of the holy text in a bag she was carrying.

    Her family had hoped that she would be granted bail on Thursday after a medical report this week found that she was a minor – thus eligible for bail – and has learning difficulties. But those hopes were dashed when Raheem challenged the report in court and the hearing was postponed.

    According to Raheem, the medical report on Masih was illegal, as it followed the orders of a civil servant and not the court, and went beyond its remit of determining her age. He accused the government of supporting her and manipulating court proceedings.

    Speaking outside the Islamabad court after the hearing, Raheem said: “There are many Mumtaz Qadris in this country … This (medical) report has been managed by the state, state agencies and the accused.”

    Later, sitting in his office beneath a large poster of Qadri, Raheem told the Guardian: “If the court is not allowed to do its work, because the state is helping the accused, then the public has no other option except to take the law into their own hands.”

    Sometimes it’s actively unpleasant living in a world with so much obsessive stupid malice in it.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Singing dancing sluts killed for singing and dancing

    Well now I feel sick.

    Last week there were news reports that four women and two men in Pakistan had been sentenced to death for singing and dancing at a wedding. Yes that’s right; singing and dancing at a wedding. It’s fornication, you see, because they were mixed. Only they weren’t – the photographs and video waved around to show the fornicators fornicating actually don’t show that.

    Abdul Majeed Afridi, district police officer, said: “It was decided that the men will be killed first, but they ran away so the women are safe for the moment. I have sent a team to rescue them and am waiting to hear some news.”

    …

    “All of them were shown separately in the video. I’ve seen the video taken on a cell phone myself, it shows four women singing and a man dancing in separate scenes and then another man sitting in a separate shot,” he added.

    Yes don’t bother us with details; they were fornicating.

    Anyway, those women who didn’t manage to run away and who were safe? They’ve all been killed.

     The four women among the six persons sentenced to death by jirga elders on May 28 were killed on June 3 in a remote area some 80km away from Kohistan, according to reports.

    …

    Earlier, district police chief Abdul Majeed Afridi confirmed the jirga’s verdict and assured the accused that all available resources would be utilised to stop the executions. A local resident told The News that the provincial government had intentionally tried to deny the killings so as to avert a massive crisis in case human rights organisations discovered the truth. It has also been learnt that the four women — Sehreen Jaan, Begum Jaan, Bazigha and Amna — had all been subjected to physical and mental torture even though they had not committed any major crime, and that after their execution they were buried without a proper Islamic funeral.

    Because they sang and danced at a wedding. Three things that should have been joyous and pretty and fun and loving – and wo, maybe even sexy – and they were tortured and then murdered for it.

    Fuckfuckfuckfuck.