Save this helpless child from religious fanatics! International campaign needed

By Dilip -
Hafiz Mohammed Khalid Chishti, the imam of the mosque who allegedly issued a decree on his mosque’s loudspeaker to burn Christians of Mehrabadi village alive in the aftermath of 11-year-old Rimsha Masih being accused of blasphemy, denied instigating a hate campaign against the community. Chishti was said to have declared that, ‘All you chooras (a derogatory term for South Asian Christians) must leave here immediately or we will pour petrol on you and burn you alive …You sweepers are only deserving of such treatment.’ 

http://criticalppp.com/archives/225111

Saviour 1: Hafiz Khalid Chishti, local Sunni cleric told The Express Tribune on Friday that he never played a pivotal role in sparking any tensions, after Rimsha, who reportedly suffers from Down Syndrome, allegedly burned pages inscribed with verses from the Holy Quran. “Neither I, nor any of my followers participated in the protest rallies. Nor did they instigate any hate campaign against the Christian community of Mehrabadi,” Chishti said, adding that “It was a legal issue that involves Rimsha and the eyewitnesses, which will be resolved in the court of law.” Clarifying his position, the imam told The Express Tribune that he went to Rimsha’s home after people showed him the papers Rimsha had burned.

 He found an angry crowd outside and three to four women attacking her. He claimed that the protestors demanded custody of Rimsha to burn her alive, but he rescued her and later handed her over to the police. Rimsha committed ‘conspiracy’ Despite backtracking from his earlier stance, Hafiz Chishti was still scathing of the alleged blasphemy committed by Rimsha Masih, saying what she did was a “conspiracy” to insult Muslims.  He told AFP that “The girl who burnt the Holy Quran has no mental illness and is a normal girl. She did it knowingly; this is a conspiracy and not a mistake. She confessed what she did.”
Chishti claimed that the local Christian community had previously caused antagonism by playing music in services at their makeshift church during Muslim prayer time and said burning the pages was deliberate. “They committed this crime to insult us further. This happened because we did not stop their anti-Islam activities before,” he said. “Last Christmas, they played musical instruments and there was vulgarity in the streets during our prayers time. I warned them but they did not stop.” During his sermon at Friday prayers, Chishti told worshippers it was “time for Muslims to wake up” and protect the Holy Quran. (Source)
Saviour 2: Interior Minister Rehman Malik: The Interior Ministry, led by Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik, has asked the Islamabad police to oppose the bail request of Rimsha Masih, an 11-year-old Christian girl accused of burning pages of the Holy Quran, on the pretext that her release would put the lives of Rimsha and her family in danger, BBC Urdu reported on Saturday.
An Interior Ministry official, asking not to be named, told BBC Urdu that the Intelligence Bureau and the Special Branch of the Islamabad Police had informed the Interior Ministry in writing that there was serious threat to the lives of the Christian family if the girl, reportedly suffering from Down Syndrome, was released on bail. The official said that Rimsha was more safe in jail and the administration should keep her in custody until the matter was fully resolved and public sentiment ‘cools down’. The report said that the matter could turn more serious if it was tried to resolve in haste.
Investigating officer of the case, Munir Hussain Jaffery told BBC Urdu that the police prosecution branch had not received any notice from the court regarding Rimsha’s bail application, the hearing for which has been scheduled for August 30.
The BBC Urdu report said that the Islamabad Police had sent a preliminary report to the Interior Ministry which said that Rimsha could not read or write but she had admitted to setting the holy pages on fire. The police have also decided to set up a medical board to ascertain the age and mental health of the accused minor girl. Additional Deputy Commissioner Farasat Ali Khan told BBC Urdu that the police had asked the Polyclinic Hospital to form a medical board and Rimsha would be presented for examination before them on August 27 (Monday). The board will present its report within one week, he added. (Source).  Based on the security argument, all PPP ministers, Ahmadis, Shias, Balochs etc should be thrown in jail to save them from never ending murder, harassment and persecution by religious fanatics and trerrorists.
If protection is a valid reason for Rimsha being jailed, then Rehman Malik too deserves to be in jail because of immense threat to his life by “foreign-sponsored” TTP, LeJ etc. That will be apt as the LeJ chief Malik Ishaq, ASWJ chief Ludhianvi and LeJ-ASWJ regional operatives in Karachi, Quetta, Peshawar are allowed to freely incite violence by federal and provincial governments. How else can we describe a State which can provide security to an innocent, mentally-handicapped girl in a prison only: a failed state!
Hats off to Rehman Malik and of course Pakistan Peoples Party.
By Abdul Nishapuri
http://criticalppp.com/archives/225229

 SEE ALSO: Aug 27:
Pakistani Muslim leaders support Christian girl accused of blasphemy
Islamic leaders in Pakistan on Monday came out in support of a Christian girl with learning difficulties who is being held in prison, in an unprecedented public denunciation of the blasphemy law by hard-line mullahs. The All Pakistan Ulema Council, an umbrella group of Muslim clerics and scholars, which includes representatives from fundamentalist groups, joined hands with the Pakistan Interfaith League, which includes Christians, Sikhs and other religions, to call for justice for the girl, Rimsha, who is accused of blasphemy. They also demanded that those making false allegations be punished. Tahir Ashrafi, the chairman of the council, warned that the "law of the jungle" was gripping Pakistan, with police routinely pressured by baying mobs to register blasphemy charges, as happened in the case of Rimsha, which has made headlines around the world...

In January last year, a leading politician from the ruling Pakistan Peoples party, Salman Taseer, was gunned down by one of his bodyguards after he described the statute on blasphemy as a "black law" and called for the release of a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, convicted under it. Taseer's murder was condoned and even celebrated by many in Pakistan – the judge who eventually convicted his self-confessed murderer had to flee the country. Asia Bibi remains behind bars, despite the flimsiest of evidence against her. Pakistan's minister for minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, was also assassinated last year after he questioned the law. In 2009, after rumours of the desecration of the Qur'an, an angry mob attacked the Christians in the town of Gojra, burning at least eight alive.

 And: Pakistan mother denied presidential pardon for 'insulting Islam
Faiza Mirza: Memoir of a Hindu girl
Mehr Tarar: And We are Muslims?

Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more