Pakistan may have another opportunity to execute another blasphemer for insulting Islam. This time it is an 11-year-old Christian Pakistani girl Rifta Masih accused of burning Islamic texts. In the meantime, Christians have been persecuted in the area as a local mullah claimed a witness saw the girl burn pages from an Islamic text.
Rifta Masih was arrested after demonstrators called for her death. Christians living in the area have been ordered to leave their neighborhood. A Muslim leader told the Christians to remove all their belongings from their houses by the first of September. In the meantime, Muslims have refused to sell or give Christians food or water. The girls parents have fled in fear of their own safety.
There are different accounts on what was allegedly burned with some saying that pages for the Koran were burned while others claim it was a small pocket book of Qur’anic verses.
The accuser is Hammad Malik, 23, who is described as a “scoundrel” by the Christian community. He claimed he saw her carry out a bag of garbage and noticed the burned pages. A local mullah claimed that there was another witness. That was enough to send hundreds into the streets calling for the death of the little girl.
I have written extensively on the rise of blasphemy or hate speech prosecutions against religious critics in the West. The Obama Administration has been working with Pakistan and other Muslim nations to develop an international standard for blasphemy prosecutions. The West has steadily yielded to the demands of religious groups that free speech must be curtailed in the name of faith. At the same time, Western governmental and religious leaders have denounced agnostics and atheists as one of the greatest threats facing the West (here and here and here and here). President Obama and Hillary Clinton have been facilitating this trend by working with Muslim nations to develop an international standard allowing for the prosecution of those who insult religion. The Administration has drawn a dangerous line with Muslim countries in first supporting the concept of an international blasphemy standard. As I have mentioned before, the efforts of the Obama Administration to work with these countries on an international blasphemy standard is a threat to free speech around the world. After first supporting an international blasphemy standard, the Administration sought to get Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries to adopt the Brandenburg standard as the basis for such prosecutions. This case also shows why the use of the Brandenburg standard is so dangerous in the hands of such officials who view free speech as the cause of imminent violence. Past cases show that even the suggestion of blasphemy is enough to trigger violent riots in some Muslim nations. Because any joke or image of the Prophet can trigger violence, the standard is immediately satisfied in countries like Egypt and Pakistan, which can then claim some legal legitimacy under the standard created with the United States.
Secretary of State Clinton continues to push for the implementation of the new international effort to criminalize certain forms of anti-religious speech as our Muslim allies expand their definition of blasphemy.
Source: Guardian
Not exactly the death penalty but reprehensible just the same:
http://kfor.com/2012/08/18/46913/
School withholds valedictorian’s diploma for saying “hell”
Posted on: 10:42 pm, August 18, 2012, by La’Tasha Givens and KFOR-TV, updated on: 02:47pm, August 20, 2012
PRAGUE, Okla.– There’s a bit of diploma drama going on between a local high school and that school’s valedictorian.
David Nootbaar is furious his daughter’s school is keeping her diploma.
He said, “She has worked so hard to stay at the top of her class and this is not right.”
Kaitlin Nootbaar graduated from Prague High School, the Red Devils, in May and was named valedictorian.
When tasked with writing the graduation speech, her dad said she got her inspiration from the movie “Eclipse: The Twilight Saga.”
Nootbaar said, “Her quote was, ‘When she first started school she wanted to be a nurse, then a veterinarian and now that she was getting closer to graduation, people would ask her, what do you want to do and she said how the hell do I know? I’ve changed my mind so many times.’”
He said in the written script she gave to the school she wrote “heck,” but in the moment she said “hell” instead.
Nootbaar said the audience laughed, she finished her speech to warm applause and didn’t know there was a problem.
That was until she went to pick up the real certificate this week.
“We went to the office and asked for the diploma and the principal said, ‘Your diploma is right here but you’re not getting it. Close the door; we have a problem,’” Nootbaar said.
He said the principal told Kaitlin she would have to write an apology letter before he would release the diploma.
A move her dad believes is illegal.
“She earned that diploma. She completed all the state curriculum. In four years she has never made a B. She got straight A’s and had a 4.0 the whole way through.”
Kaitlin starts college in a few days on a full scholarship, making the administrators’ decision even more appalling to her family.
We tried to get the school’s side of the story.
Superintendent Dr. Rick Martin said in a statement, “This matter is confidential and we cannot publicly say anything about it.”
Kaitlin doesn’t plan on writing an apology letter because she doesn’t feel she did anything wrong.
Her family supports that choice.
Kaitlin sent KFOR-TV this statement Monday afternoon:
“First off, I would like to thank everyone who is backing me on this, especially my friends and family. And to those who don’t agree with me, that is fine also. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and is free to comment however they choose. It’s one of the great advantages of living in a free country. A country where we are free to speak. I would also like to note that I do not hate Prague. I have loved that town since I was a child. I don’t hate the school either, the teachers have always been great! I don’t feel that the whole town should suffer from the mistakes of few. Again, thanks:)”
Pete:
it does seem, at least to me for what it’s worth, in Mr. Wilson’s case the state was more interested in execution than it was determining if the man was mentally handicapped.
I would say the basis for the defense of mental incapacity should be left to the medical profession and not to those who prosecute the offender.
A true measure of a society is how well it treats its most vulnerable.
wonderful words
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/08/us-usa-execution-wilson-idUSBRE8761H120120808
Gene H. 1, August 20, 2012 at 9:57 am
Fundamentalist Islam!
Because all sane, civilized people want to kill eleven year old girls.
===========================================
The U.S. just locked up an ex-Marine for entertaining a vision of 9/11 that is not officially sanctioned:
(Former Marine In Psyche Ward For His Opinion). There seems to be a blasphemy side to this story. No?
Dear God! And THESE are the kind of people we SUPPORT? The very fact that we would even be discussing a ‘blasphemy standard’ would be laughable but for incidents like these.
A true measure of a society is how well it treats its most vulnerable.
I expect our government to demand the release of this little girl and an offer of asylum for her and her family.
If I may be so bold to ask, could the next time any of us has the opportunity to be on national television, how about making a demand that President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton stand up for what’s right and demand Pakistan rescue this little girl.
And to make it even more egregious — it that is possible, NBC News reports that the girl has Down Syndrome.
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/20/13373433-pakistani-girl-with-down-syndrome-reportedly-arrested-for-blasphemy?lite
Frankly,
Stupidity is so depressing – I don’t want to live on this planet any longer!
I call on Piet Hein:
“When I am weary of toil and endeavor
And wish that i could sleep for ever and ever
This thought my longing allays
I shall be doing it one of these days. “
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0812/down_syndrome_blasphemy.php3
If the info in the jwr article is reliable…
Fundamentalist Islam!
Because all sane, civilized people want to kill eleven year old girls.
Stupidity is so depressing – I don’t want to live on this planet any longer!
Oh my….
Outrageous, but yet the norm! I wonder if they allow her to drive?
“Of all the strange crimes that humanity has legislated out of nothing, blasphemy is the most amazing – with obscenity and indecent exposure fighting it out for second and third place.”
–Robert A. Heinlein
“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.” –Robert A. Heinlein
The better secular law is the law that knows no heresy, no dogma, and no superior religion.
Like U.S. Constitutional law.
Religion, and the Men who push it are the bane of humanity……
“really, what can even be said of this????”
——–
Exactly. These people, fundamentalists of every religious kind, are a danger to themselves and others- to paraphrase an old, politically incorrect Three Stooges line ‘knock it off, you’re bringing down the species’. I have read sci-fi stories of engineered virus’ and I only wish that one could be developed that targets religious hysterics and the religiously inclined uber-delusional. The world would be sooooooo much better off without them.
Reverend…
There are MANY that forget that NOT LONG AGO, people in the bible belt would have thought this was OK, if she was going against the Christian Church…
Of course this in no way excuses this kind of behavior…
This makes me so sad…. 30 years ago, many of the Muslim countries were quite liberal and Progressive….
many of them were moving forward quite well….
NOW there seems to be too many fanatics… and has gone backwards…
really, what can even be said of this????
Burn baby burn. If she did this in Alabama forty years ago they would have strung her up.
Sanity weeps while hope bleeds.