“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 leavingto 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.
That’s the basic problem with blasphemy laws – all religious beliefs are blasphemous to other religions, and if you give believers the impression that their beliefs are protected by law then they feel entitled to go after anyone who upsets them.
No religious belief should be beyond question, and no-one should be able to claim that another person said something sacrilegious and expect the law to step in on their behalf. And yet, increasingly, even secular societies are considering blasphemy laws. It’s appalling.
I do hope they manage to get her and her family safely out of the country, but I fear that all people who follow a minority religion are going to feel that they have to lose everything and go into exile unless those laws are struck down.
Hey, I wonder if they want to murder her later?