generalspeaking

Islamic Misunderstandings

Islam, the religion of peace according to its naive practitioners, is not, however, a religion of unity within Islam.

The two major sects, Sunni and Shia, bitterly hate one another, neither believes they can co-exist without raging rancor and bloodshed. And this is the two major sects; throw in the Sufis, the Ahmadiyya and the Ismailis and there alone are millions of Muslims held by the main branches to be misfits insulting to Islam, traitors and apostates whose lives become forfeit under Sharia law.

In Pakistan, that hotbed of virulent, violent jihad, oppression of women and children, whose military and intelligence service are well infiltrated by those steeped in the ideology of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and whose nuclear arms production and constant war-footing against India should send deep, apprehensive shudders down the spine of any thoughtful observer, Sunni terrorists have been slaughtering Pakistani Shiites.

• Smoke rises from the site of a bomb blast in a market in Quetta, Pakistan on Saturday, Feb. 16, 2013. Senior police officer Wazir Khan Nasir said the bomb went off in a Shiite Muslim-dominated residential suburb of the city of Quetta. Residents rushed the victims to three different hospitals.(AP Photo/Arshad Butt)

Three days of protests by thousands of minority Shia in southwestern Pakistan resulted from bomb attacks in Quetta launched by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.  The Shiite population has criticized police and the paramilitary forces for their lack of effort to protect minority Shia. Twenty percent of Pakistan's 180 million people are Shia Muslims.

In a silent acknowledgement that there is more than a little truth to the charges of disinterest by the police, the top officer in Baluchistan was removed and his deputy in Quetta ordered to take his place. Formerly, in earlier bomb blasts that killed innocent Shia, the protests took the form of refusals to bury the dead, an unheard-of situation where tradition has it that burial follows directly on death.

The Shia population used that extraordinary means of delivering the message of their anguish at their vulnerable plight, to deliver a message to the government that it must make an effort to protect them from the deadly Sunni terrorists who plague their lives. 

Relatives of the bombing victims insisted they would continue their demonstration until the leader of Ahle Sunnat Waljamaat - suspected of planning the blast in a double bombing at a billiards hall in January that killed 86 people was hunted down and arrested.

Baluchistan province has seen stepped-up attacks by Sunni terror groups because it has the highest concentration of Shiites in Pakistan. The government has been less concerned with attempting to control sectarian violence at the hands of groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi than its major focus, stopping a bloody insurgency against the state by the Pakistani Taliban.

This is, of course, the very same state that had its military and secret service become involved in aiding, grooming, training, funding and arming the Afghan Taliban.  The Taliban and their colleagues in jihad, al-Qaeda, were sheltered in Pakistan even while the country was claiming it was prepared to commit itself to defeating the violence of jihad, alongside NATO.

It helped immeasurably that the United States would guarantee Pakistan billions in yearly support to the military, even while Pakistan played its double game. And then came the birth of the Pakistani Taliban out of the tribal war lords along the northwest frontier. The threat to the state of Pakistan from its home-bred Taliban now consumes the country just as the Afghan Taliban threaten Afghanistan.

But the tribal bands representing Sunni extremists threaten only the millions of Pakistani Shia, a threat that hardly appears to trouble the leadership of Pakistan, since their threat is not to the state. This is a country which outlawed the very presence of Ahmadi Muslims considering them worthy of death for defiling Islam in their belief of a prophet who succeeded Mohammed.

Human rights and state protection to ensure equality of all citizens under the law is a foreign concept in Pakistan, and the people suffer for it, as violence spreads along with the forces of strict tribal Islamism enforcing its will on the reluctant.

Labels: Conflict, Human Rights, Islamism, Pakistan, Societal Failures, Terrorism

posted by Pieface @ Friday, February 22, 2013