CHARGED WITH BLASPHEMY, a young Pakistani girl who also is a Christian was released from jail in Pakistan, seen with a cloth over her head to block her identity, which in the video above is reveal as nothing less than an escape.
Mentally challenged, according to reports, she was whisked away from jail in armored car, then helicopter, and is now in protective custody.
From the Washington Post:
Human rights advocates and a coalition of prominent Muslim clerics have applauded Pakistan’s government for coming to the girl’s defense. Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, all but pronounced the girl innocent. He said the accused never left her home on the day three weeks ago when a young man claimed that he saw her carrying burnt pages of the Koran in a trash bag in her village outside Islamabad.
[...] After word of her alleged crime spread through the mixed Muslim-Christian community where her family lives, a mob threatened to burn the girl alive. Police later said that they arrested her for her own safety.
Dismissing the charges that many believe should never have been brought in the first place is what many hope will be the next step.
Masih was arrested on Aug. 16 after local Muslims in her neighbourhood found her carrying burned pages with Arabic writing in a plastic bag. Though it’s unclear whether the pages were of the Quran — Islam’s holy book — or even where the bag came from, the neighborhood erupted in fury. [...]Last week, the case took a bizarre twist when the imam of the local mosque in her neighbourhood, Khalid Jadoon, was arrested himself, accused of framing the young girl by planting the evidence in her bag. [ABC News]
I suppose it’s nice in a sick kinda way to have confirmation religious fanatic, whether UBERChristian or UBERMuslim are willing to lie through their teeth to try and score political points while destroying others lives.
Let’s unpack this.
Our stalwart ally in the policy formally know as the Global War On Terror was forced by the backwardness of its own people and and law that pandered to their worst instincts to perform an act of high farce. Pakistan was forced to rescue a mentally challenged girl from a mob of Religious fanatics given permission by a stupid law to vent their worst behavior.
I looked at this whisk away and was thoroughly depressed. I first saw all those polo-shirted security agents nervously brandishing some very serious small arms. Then I saw the actual chopper, loaded for bear with a .50 cal machine gun, and nearly soiled myself. All that hardware and hullabaloo to protect one mentally challenged girl from her fellow Pakistanis.
The more I look at Pakistan, the more I am convinced that this is a nation that should have never seen the light of day. Basing a nation on the idea of a common religious confession seems to me to be one of the gravest errors committed in the immediate Post WWII era. The place should be renamed Jinnah’s Folly. An Islamic Republic is a political oxymoron.
I sincerely hope that our political elites have given some thought to what plan B looks like in South Asia; what our National Security arrangements look like when Pakistan inevitably collapses into extremist Salafi state, or just into garden variety chaos.
” Basing a nation on the idea of a common religious confession seems to me to be one of the gravest errors committed in the immediate Post WWII era.”
You mean like….oh, I donknow….Israel perhaps?