Khurram Zaki
A prominent journalist and human rights activist has been murdered in Karachi.
[Khurram Zaki] was an editor of the website Let us Build Pakistan, which condemns sectarianism and is seen as promoting democratic and progressive values.
The spokesman for a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban has said they were behind the shooting.
He said they killed him because of his recent campaign against a cleric of the Red Mosque in Islamabad.
Mr Zaki and other campaigners had filed a court case charging Abdul Aziz with incitement to hatred and violence against the Shia minority.
The case was brought in response to the cleric’s refusal to condemn attacks such as that on a school in Peshawar in 2014 in which 152 people, most of them schoolchildren, were killed.
Human rights activists don’t murder people, because they’re human rights activists. Murderous theocrats do murder people, because they’re murderous theocrats. They win and we lose.
Two other people were badly wounded in the Karachi attack, on Saturday night – a friend who Mr Zaki was dining with and a bystander.
Staff at the website paid tribute to their murdered colleague, and vowed to continue to stand up to militant groups.
Their statement said his contribution as a citizen journalist in supporting the rights of minority groups was “much bigger than [that of] all journalists combined in Pakistan”.
“His death is the grim reminder that whoever raises voice against Taliban [and other militant groups] in Pakistan will not be spared. And when they have to murder, they never fail.”
They win, and we lose.
H/t Helene
If they murder all the opposition, they win by default. Especially since that tends to make remaining opposition keep quiet if they want to live.
My condolences to the loved ones of Khurram Zaki.
Exactly – it’s a win-win. Physically remove some of the opposition, and terrorize the remainder. People who respect other people’s rights are always at a disadvantage.
Sometimes I just get the urge to post the simple statement “I hate people”. Then I remember all the great people I know, and I realize that I don’t hate people. I just hate the way many people behave.
A few years back Islamists torched a church in Karachi. A group of local women, almost all of them Muslim, began a funding drive to rebuild it. They did, but only a few months later the same Islamists burned it down again.
There are good people in Pakistan, but their efforts to improve things are always thwarted by theocrats.