confined themselves to making the modest point that Pakistan's death penalty for blasphemy was excessive and barbaric, and that was enough to condemn them. Their killers murdered them for the previously unknown crime of advocating law reform: blew them away for the new offence of blaspheming against blasphemy.What the hell is wrong with these killers!
Christopher Hitchens was, as usual, on the correct path when he wrote:
look at the grinning face of Mumtaz Qadri, the man who last week destroyed a great human being. He did not explain. He boasted. As "a slave of the Prophet," he had the natural right to murder Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, not even for committing "blasphemy" but for criticizing a law that forbade it for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. And this sweeping new extension of the divine right to murder not only was not condemned by the country's spiritual authorities; it was largely approved by them. No argument, no arraignment, no appeal—permission to kill anybody can merely be assumed by anybody, provided only that they mouth the correct incantations.The answer to "why kill?" is increasingly nothing but "because." It isn't as if there is a single ideological bottom line (again, not that such a "guiding principle" makes it any better!)
This is only one of the many things that go to make up the hideousness of Islamic jihadism, but I believe that it has received insufficient attention. Amid all our loose talk about Muslim "grievances," have we even noticed that no such bill of grievances has ever been published, let alone argued and defended?
In another essay, Hitchens wrote about the massive problem that Pakistani liberals face in a country where Taseer's killer is hailed as a hero:
"It's very important for us to know: Who is our hero? Salman Taseer—who stood for the rights of human beings—or the person who madly killed him?"This precarious position for Pakistani liberals is emphasized in the Guardian piece as well:
But in Rawalpindi's market, where open gutters and cracked pavements seem like an entirely different country compared with the plush offices of Islamabad's politicians and elite, the decision seems to have already been made.
"Nowadays, he's perfectly heroic," says Imran Shiekh, the owner of a small jewelry store tucked away in the market's depths. "Qadri did the right thing, and he did it well. Ninety-nine percent of Pakistanis would agree."
One Pakistani journalist I spoke to described his fellow liberals as members of a persecuted minority, who now knew that if they spoke out, they would be shot down. Salmaan Taseer's daughter, Shehrbano, wrote a heartbreaking piece for the Guardian in which she despaired of a "spineless" Pakistani elite that was too frightened to praise her father or condemn his murderers.I can't figure out why the US is still out in Pakistan and Afghanistan when we seem to have no influence whatsoever on anything that happens there.
In a rare column that is not flooded with awful metaphors, Thomas Friedman writes about AfPak against the background of the protests in the Arab world:
The truth is we can’t do much to consolidate the democracy movements in Egypt and Tunisia. They’ll have to make it work themselves. But we could do what we can, which is divert some of the $110 billion we’re lavishing on the Afghan regime and the Pakistani Army and use it for debt relief, schools and scholarships to U.S. universities for young Egyptians and Tunisians who had the courage to take down the very kind of regimes we’re still holding up in Kabul and Islamabad.
I know we can’t just walk out of Afghanistan and Pakistan; there are good people, too, in both places. But our involvement in these two countries — 150,000 troops to confront Al Qaeda — is totally out of proportion today with our interests and out of all sync with our values.
