It was quite a scene, by the Kohati Gate in Peshawar this morning, where two of Pakistans Islamist savages blew

themselves up among parishioners leaving All Saints Church after morning services. About two hundred Christians have been killed or maimed, by the local press estimate. As I write, the police are putting down a Christian demonstration, demanding justice. The police in Pakistan are utterly corrupt; many are also Islamist psychos. There may well be additional attacks on the mourners, when the dead from the slaughter are buried. There have been innumerable attacks on Christians of all confessions, throughout Pakistan; this would seem to be the largest to date. Since the foundation of Pakistan as an Islamic state which in itself involved the slaughter of a million non-Muslims trying to get out Christians have been persecuted. There remain perhaps three million of them, mostly Catholic, keeping their heads down in the land of their birth. Violence against them began to increase when the first explicitly Islamist president, Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, came to power in 1978, raising the persecution to quasi-official status by targeting them as apostates through state-enforced Shariah law. Zia is remembered for the judicial murder of his predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; for advancing Pakistans nuclear weapons programme; & for himself perishing along with several of his generals & American diplomats in an aeroplane crash that was probably not an accident. But he had blood on his hands from many other crimes, through his eleven years in office, & a long army career before that. And now, long after his death, the Mujahideen he sponsored (against India, & against the Russians in Afghanistan) have come home to roost, & the toll among Christians rises daily. The victims are of little interest to Western media, or to Western diplomats endlessly courting Pakistan as a regional ally. Those who have courageously sought to protect them within Pakistans courts & cabinets have inevitably been assassinated. The Vatican, & various Christian field missions have worked valiantly to spread the news, but the attitude even of sympathetic Western media is unalterable. They think the constant slaughter of religious minorities in Muslim countries is something to be taken as a matter of course, equivalent to a law of nature. They seldom cover the slaughter of non-Christian minorities, either. Their indifference to hard news lifts only in such cases as the Islamist attack on the Nairobi mall, where some white people were among those killed.

Iraq is no longer of interest now that the Americans are out; Afghanistan will likewise soon disappear. The news from Egypt & Syria is comprehensively misreported, with frequent Islamist attacks on Christians in both countries ignored. I first viscerally noticed this phenomenon after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, along with the Cambodian & Laotian dominoes. Hundreds of thousands drowned at sea, trying to escape the Communist devils; thousands burst across the Thai frontier giving accounts of massacres our media dismissed as wild exaggerations. In fact, millions were butchered. But quite apart from the absence of newsworthy white victims, the liberal press did not wish to be reminded that their own expectations had proved entirely wrong, or that the warnings of their most impassioned rightwing critics had proved entirely right. The late socialist, Mark Gayn, was to my memory the only fleeing journalist who had the honesty to confide, in light of what was happening, that he must have been misrepresenting the reality for years. The rest simply changed the subject. Its a funny old world, as Mrs Thatcher used to say, whenever crimes of great enormity were committed. She was of course quoting P.G. Wodehouse.
PUBLISHED: September 22, 2013 FILED UNDER: Uncategorized

8 Responses to In other news

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Vishal Mehra September 23, 2013 at 1:53 am Slaughter of a million nonMuslims trying to get out.They had preferred to stay and were killed for precisely that.Pakistan would have lacked permanence with a strong minority. Thus the slaughter was undertaken by a very secular set, not unlike Young Turks of a previous generation, to make the fact of partition irreversible. Mick Leahy September 23, 2013 at 7:50 am May the Lord have mercy on these poor Christian souls. I suppose I should pray for the bombers souls as well, but I cannot bring myself to do it and it is hard to imagine their having sufficient time between stirrup and ground to repent their evil deeds nor the will to do so. Such a world as this necessitates Justice. I would imagine it is very frustrating for those of an atheist world-view, most of whom presumably share a natural human sense of justice, to know that such deeds will forever be unpunished, allowing the wicked to always have their way, the last laugh.

David Warren September 23, 2013 at 10:14 am I dont want to provoke a long debate about what happened in the Partition, though it is the elephant in the room, overlooked whenever possible in the account of modern Subcontinental history. I have noticed that all casualty estimates have been declining through the decades since 1947, not I think because fewer were killed than first believed, but because all parties have an interest in disappearing the history. (I noted the same phenomenon in a post some time ago, about the estimates of dead from the firebombing of Tokyo.)Vishal Mehra is quite right that much of the killing was done, especially of Hindus & Sikhs in the western Punjab (& of Muslims to the east) by mobs inspired by secular politicians in the cause of ethnic cleansing. But much of the worst carnage was visited upon those actually in the act of migrating, including whole trainloads stopped & all the passengers massacred.I particularly do not wish to provoke a numbers game it is sufficient to insist that the numbers were extremely high, & that beyond the fatalities were the millions upon millions displaced, losing all they had & then being cast as pariahs when they finally crossed the frontiers into safety.The key point Vishal makes is one I have insisted upon myself in much past journalism: that the game-players were very secular, democratic politicians, focused upon their own opportunities to secure power. More fundamentally than fundamentalism, Pakistan was the victim from her conception of very cynical politicians, using Islam as the nuclear weapon in their demagogic armoury though often themselves surprised to find how effective it was in the manufacture of corpses. Writing from Lahore at the end of the last century, I noted that the selfappointed puritanical enforcers, during Ramadan for instance, were chubby little bureaucrats in white short-sleeve & khaki trousers, who got their thrills from bossing people around, & would use any pretext. They were buying into Islamism as they had bought into Nationalism before.Islamism (as opposed to Islam) has been, from its earlier 20th century origins, ideological not religious in nature. It is anti-Christian, & anti-Semitic, in surprisingly post-modern ways; it is sectarian, along the lines of the Sunni/Shia divide, but on both sides also, murderously opposed to all mystical & genuinely religious (Sufi) strains of the religion, which remain beyond its control. It is well-defined as an explicit politicization of Islam.We should not be surprised, again & again, to learn that Islamist terrorists came from upwardly mobile families, that they had not been very religious before, that after conversion they still seemed to spend much more time in secular entertainment than in prayer. It should be understood, that as a

general rule applying the world over, the Devil is not very religious.The greatest stupidity from the West, has been to insist on democratization, & therefore politicization, throughout the Middle East. It is impossible to imagine a strategy that plays more directly into Islamist hands. . Robert Eady September 23, 2013 at 10:53 am One would think that a good place for the West to start would be to cut off all aid to Pakistan as well as trade until the murderers of Christians are brought under control. The trouble is that the Russian and Chinese communists will align themselves with any government that the U.S. and its allies oppose. If all states that allow the imperialistic Islamist faction to murder Christians were cut off from aid and trade with the West at once, however, the communists would be burdened with an enormous welfare commitment. This might work against them for the short term, but may not in the long term. (Please note here that the Fall of Communism is a pernicious myth.)With Obama as President and Kerry as his foreign runaround, the enemies of the United States can smell the weakness, floundering, and indecision, and are already busy taking advantage of it. There is no relief in sight for the U.S. either. The Republicans are in disarray and leaderless, and the Democrats can bribe with their own tax money (and borrowed money) the powerful U.S. minorities and win election after election. After another decade or so of Democrat rule America will be reduced to impotence as a world power.What remains to think about is how the communists will be able to control their Islamist allies once America becomes an isolationist backwater crippled by financial problems and social disintegration. Will the Russian and Chinese communists join as one block? What will happen to Israel? . Carlos Caso-Rosendi September 23, 2013 at 2:15 pm The greatest stupidity from the West, has been to insist on democratization, & therefore politicization, throughout the Middle East. It is impossible to imagine a strategy that plays more directly into Islamist hands.It is not stupidity but an adroit sleight of hand when the leader of the free world is Sheik Obubu el Benghaziri, blessed be his name. . Kevin Middlebrook September 23, 2013 at 10:14 pm Whenever my will to live gets too high, I know I can rely on David Warren to set me straight. . Stephen Sparrow September 24, 2013 at 6:18 am Kevin, your comment reminds me of a saying by Chesterton: The Doctrine of the Fall is the only cheerful view of life. Kevin Middlebrook September 24, 2013 at 3:49 pm Stephen, I actually paraphrased (that word is more polite than plagiarized) a comment on a

books dust cover that I read. The actual words were, Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.