In Pakistan, a Muslim mob has killed a seven-year-old girl and her baby sister (as well as their grandmother) in the latest carnage to defend the faith from blasphemy. The cause of the outrage was a simple picture posted on Facebook that was deemed offensive to Islam. The mob accused members of the Ahmadi sect, who live under continual discrimination by the Pakistani government and the threat of death from Muslims over their faith.
The violence later on Sudnay in the town of Gujranwala, began when a Muslim man accused an Ahmadi man of posting “objectionable material.” The picture showed the Kaaba – the cube-shaped structure in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, but also showed a naked woman. That was enough for Muslims to not only file a blasphemy charge with the police but a mob to attack and burn down the homes of innocent Ahmadis. They ended up killing the girls, the grandmother, and causing another woman to miscarry her baby. Yet, such violence is viewed by these extremists to be the act of truly faithful Muslims and pleasing to God. It is such a disconnect with any form of recognizable morality that makes this crime so hard to even fathom.
I do not just blame the mob, however. I blame Pakistan for its codification of the prejudice against this sect and treating them as heretics. The country’s incorporation of religious tenets into the criminal code legitimates these acts of hatred. It is also another example of how there is no common ground over blasphemy.
For many years, I have been writing about the threat of an international blasphemy standard and the continuing rollback on free speech in the West. For recent columns, click here and here and here.
Much of this writing has focused on the effort of the Obama Administration to reach an accommodation with allies like Egypt and Pakistan to develop a standard for criminalizing anti-religious speech. We have been following the rise of anti-blasphemy laws around the world, including the increase in prosecutions in the West and the support of the Obama Administration for the prosecution of some anti-religious speech under the controversial Brandenburg standard.
These cases reflect the true purpose of blasphemy laws: to silence minority sects and religious critics in the name of a “true faith.” Fortunately the effort of Hillary Clinton and others in the Administration to reach a compromise on blasphemy failed, though there continue to be efforts to create an international standard.
Four years ago, Muslims killed 86 Ahmadis. A large crowd watched as the homes of Ahmadis were looted and then burned. In the meantime, according to the article below, blasphemy charges are soaring in Pakistan from just one in 2011 to at least 68 last year.
Source: Telegraph
Jill, From what I read one of the main criticisms of Obama by the religious right is that he is not biblical enough rather than what you are saying. Scahill has rightfully addressed the fundamentalist christian influence on the army. At the same time the fundamentalist christians are saying the Obama is denying them their religious freedom by not allowing them to make the military more christian.
Fiver, the Assemblies of God stopped short of animal handling in their ecstatic states, they just scared small children while under the influence of the Holy Spirit, by yells, cries and strange languages. As teens we were expert at sneaking out of church before it was time to be dragged down to the alter to “Give our hearts to Jesus”. It tells me a lot about Sarah Palin that she never had the good sense to leave that cult.
So … Professor Turley, what is it do you want us – as We The People – to do about this?
The shortfall of punditry is that it can describe a problem, define a problem, even predict a problem, but it flounders on prescribing solution.
With the mess of US foreign policy directly contributing to the evolving mess in the world as humanity casts about for a new world order compelled by the American retreat under President Obama from our longstanding leadership duties, and opportunists charge into the gaps, pundits are alternately complaining – at times within the space of the same paragraph – that Bush was guilty of “overreach” and Obama is guilty of “disengagement”.
After 9/11, President Bush sought a solution that, while controversial and difficult in the start-up, was finally on track and working by the time he left office. Obama, disastrously, lost us the hard-won progress made under Bush when he fundamentally changed course from Bush, but at least “disengagement” has been an attempt at a solution to a problem, however misguided.
So again, you’ve described a problem in the world that strikes at our fundamental civilizational social-cultural preferences. Prescription step – what is it do you want us to do about this?
and to think these people have nuclear weapons and some of the best boy toys the U.S. can give them.
Just got off the phone with God. He agrees: the Assemblies of God are a bunch of whacked out idiots. But what was surprising was that God didn’t just take issue with the mental illness or shameless mendacity behind rolling around on the floor and speaking in tongues. God found serious animal rights problems and latent hypocrisy issues. After all, rolling around on the floor poses serious risks to the rattlesnakes should a handler drop one. And really, how can a person honestly pretend to speak in tongues one day and demand English Only laws the next?
SMM, Since Obama will not hold past torturers to account and presently himself engages in torture, is he using his religion to promote torture? We have under Obama a “crusader” army with Jeremy Scahill having a picture of the troops wearing Christian crusader patches under Obama. Is this using religion as a promotion of war?
What is you chain of reasoning here?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/why-sarah-palins-sacreligious-torture-nostalgia-matters/361289/ “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” Palin uses her religion to promote torture.
Annie, I think you might want to research this. So my question is again, although you personally find it offensive that people roll on the floor and speak in tongues, what is your chain of reasoning that this is wrong behavior while what other churches do is acceptable behavior.
Also, how do you evaluate individual members of each church? Although you were a member of the Assemblies of God, you do not hold with these beliefs now. At the time you were a member, did you hold these beliefs? Did holding them make you a bad person? Does every person who rolls on the floor and speaks in tongues deserve to be accounted badly?
Does a person who orders murder and torture while attending what you account as a more “normal” church, get a pass on his actions because he attends this more normal church? I’m asking for you to draw out the implications of what you are saying.
Annie, Thanks, very interesting.
SWM, we were ethnic Germans from Hungary,Yugoslavia, Romania, Czecholsovakia. In the 1700’s many Germans left Germany for the Eastern frontier to settle the lands won back from the Turks, at the behest of Queen Maria Theresa.
Would not be this violent if our government did not stir it up, create false flag plots & arm the terrorists they helped create. See ILLUMINATI SELLOUTS EXPOSED on YouTube..
The Reverend Wright’s Church that the Obama family formerly attend was a UCC church which is the most liberal of the the mainline protestant churches.
“Annie, Is Obama’s church a teacher of weird nonsense or Is it only Palin’s church? How do you personally determine whose set of beliefs are weird non-sense in these particular cases? What is your a chain of reasoning comparing one person’s set of beliefs to another?” I will answer because I have been in the episcopal church across form the white house that the Obamas often attend. It really was not weird at all.
Those who didn’t grow up in a cult such as the Penetcostal church have NO idea, none.
Jill, Obama’s church appeared to be quite normal compared to the one I grew up in. I don’t think people threw themselves on the floor speaking in tongues, did they? Or did they cry and yell, roll on the floor while under the influence of the Holy Spirit? Did they jump I the middle of the sermon and speak in tongues, and have someone else jump up right after to translate what the Holy Spirt said? Naw that church was TAME compared to the Assemblies of God back in the 60’s.
SWM, at the end of WW2 the ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe were expelled or left of their own cognition to Germany or Austria, or any country that would take them in as refugees. My parents and their entire village, those who weren’t caught by the Russians, went to Austria for refuge. In the Displaced Persons camp, there were American missionaries, some evidentially Pentecostal Evangelicals, who took advantage of a scared, defeated, bunch of refugees who were without their Lutheran churches in a Catholic Austria and converted them en masse. My parents entire village converted to Pentecostalism. M relatives who were no at that DP camp in Austria, remained their traditional Lutheran.
Annie, Is Obama’s church a teacher of weird nonsense or Is it only Palin’s church? How do you personally determine whose set of beliefs are weird non-sense in these particular cases? What is your a chain of reasoning comparing one person’s set of beliefs to another?
Annie, How did end you up in the pentecostal church? I know a few Hungarian immigrants, and they are all catholic.
@annie
The people in the mob were being their own highest power. Better if they had believed in “thou shalt not kill.”
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter