Only religious thugs love blasphemy lawsBlasphemy is not a protector of religious freedom, as the UN maintains, but its mortal enemy If the circumstances were not so hideous, the successful attempt by Pakistan to persuade the UN Human Rights Council to condemn blasphemers who defame religion would have been a black comedy. Every word its diplomats used in 2009 to protest against Islamophobia turned out to be a precise description of the prejudices the Pakistani state was appeasing at home.They told the UN it must approve a universal blasphemy law to protect religious minorities from “intolerance, discrimination and acts of violence”. If they were not the hypocrites they appeared, but honourable men, who wanted to help all minorities and not only Muslims, they must now accept that Salmaan Taseer was butchered for protecting Pakistan’s religious minorities from its own blasphemy law.Taseer did not go so far as to assert that the Qur’an, like the Talmud and the Bible, was the work of men, not God, or criticise the teachings of Muhammad. His crime was to stand up against the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries, a subject that the media of the supposedly warmongering, culturally imperialist “crusaders” of the west barely mention for fear of causing “offence”. He denounced the treatment of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five. She had argued with Muslim women who refused to drink water she had carried because she was impure and therefore the drink she carried was contaminated. They told the local cleric she had taken Muhammad’s name in vain.That was enough for the judge to order that she be hanged by the neck until she was dead. Not much respect shown for her minority rights, then. Nor for the rights of Salmaan Taseer, whose last sight on earth was of Constable Mumtaz Qadri firing 26 bullets into his body, while other members of his bodyguard stood by and let him do it.”Defamation of religion is a serious affront to human dignity leading to a restriction on the freedom of their adherents and incitement to religious violence,” thundered the Pakistani officials to the UN in 2009.Mutatis mutandis, Pakistan has become a country so scared of the inciters of religious violence that liberals stay silent for fear the assassins will come for them; a land so benighted Jamaat-e-Islami and other mobster theocrats can get away with blaming Taseer for his own death and treating his killer as a hero for enforcing the will of god.”RIP Pakistan,” sighed Salman Rushdie after Taseer’s murder. “What should one say of a country in which an assassin is showered with rose petals while a decent man lies dead?” Despair is a reasonable response to a failed state. When Islamists have penetrated the bodyguards of leading politicians and threaten one day to capture nuclear weapons, it may be the only response. But the relativism which asserts that human rights are all well and good for us but not for the peoples of the poor world is no response at all.
via Only religious thugs love blasphemy laws | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer.
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