John R. Houk
© November 16, 2018
I
have followed the plight of persecuted Pakistani Christian Asia
Bibi for many years now. In case you haven’t heard of her, here is the simple
outrageous circumstances Asia has faced for nearly a decade.
Asia Bibi (aka Aasiya
Noreen) was sentenced to death because she defended Jesus to fellow
Muslim laboring women angry Asia was drinking from a Muslim designated well (a
description from a 2016 post):
Asia was raised in Ittan Wali, a
small, rural village in the Sheikhupura District of Punjab, thirty miles
outside of Lahore, and one day in 2009, she was picking berries in the
sweltering heat, in a field with a group of Muslim women, who worked on the farm
of Muslim landowner, Muhammad Idrees. Her family was one of only three
Christian families in the village of more than 1,500 families
During this time, she was asked by
some of the other women, to get some water for them from a well. On the long
and dusty walk back, she took a sip of water from the vessel, and when the
Muslim women discovered this they became extremely angry, and in an exchange,
she told them: “Our Christ sacrificed His life on the cross for our sins....
Our Christ is alive.”
After uttering these words that she
used to defend her faith against the mocking co-workers who tried to make her
convert to Islam, she could never have dreamed the shocking consequences that
would follow.
The Muslim women began to beat
Asia. Then some men took her and locked her in a room. They announced from
mosque loudspeakers that she would be punished by having her face blackened and
being paraded through the village on a donkey.
…
“Local Christians informed the
police, who took Asia into protective custody before the Muslims could carry
out their plan. Christians urged the police not to file blasphemy charges, but
the police claimed they had to go forward because of pressure from local Muslim
leaders.”
After a lengthy trial, on Nov. 8,
2010, Asia Bibi was sentenced to death by a judge. The judge also fined Asia
$1,190 (U.S.) and told her she had seven days to appeal the decision. …. (FRESH
CALL FOR RELEASE OF ASIA BIBI; By Dan Wooding [Intro by
John R. Houk]; SlantRight
2.0; 5/17/16)
She language in prison for eight years not knowing if the
death sentenced would be carried out, fearing for her life from prison guards
& prison inmates as well as existing in squalid
conditions that threatened her life. On October 31, 2018 Pakistan’s
highest court finally resisted Muslim death threats and overturned her death
sentence due to inconsistent evidence. BUT the Pakistan government kept Asia
languishing in prison fearing Muslim bloodthirsty Muslim rioting.
Protests among bigoted Muslims wanting to hang Asia Bibi for
blaspheming their false prophet became rampant anyway. Indeed, the so-called
religion of peace Muslims began attacking Pakistani Christians because the
government was hiding Asia Bibi from Islamic Supremacist Muslim mobs:
These Muslims are so mad for the
blood of one poor Christian woman, who has already suffered on death row for
eight years, that they are taking out their bloodlust on random Christians
within the country. This is a human rights abuse of monumental proportions, but
you won’t hear a word about it from the United Nations or the world “human
rights” organizations. They’re too busy looking for new ways to condemn Israel.
“Report: Unable to Reach Asia Bibi,
Pakistan’s Islamists Attacking Random Christians,” by Edwin Mora, Breitbart, November 12, 2018 (Unable
to Reach Asia Bibi, Pakistan’s Muslims Attacking Random Christians;
By Pamela Geller; Geller Report; 11/14/18)
I am finding out from the National
Review that the Pakistan government has finally released Asia
Bibi from prison but – so far – has kept her and her family’s location secret
from the Pakistani public.
Asia Bibi and family need asylum outside of Pakistan if
their survival is to prevail. The so-called tolerant Brits and EU Multiculturalist
governments have refused asylum because they all have admitted so many Islamic
Supremacists into their nations, THEY ALL FEAR bloody Muslim rioting!
I have discovered that Senator Rand Paul has taken up Asia
Bibi and Family’s asylum cause calling on President Trump to grant asylum:
A top Republican Senator has urged
US President Donald Trump to grant asylum and refugee status to Pakistani
national Asia Bibi, a Christian woman recently freed from prison after her
blasphemy conviction was overturned.
Bibi, a 47-year-old mother of four,
was released from Multan jail earlier this month after the Supreme Court in its
landmark decision acquitted her of blasphemy charges.
Senator Rand Paul said that he was
worried that Bibi won’t survive and he personally took up the matter with
President Trump last week.
“I’ve been fighting for them to
free Asia Bibi. I’ve talked to the President about granting her asylum and
refugee status here,” Paul told CNN in an interview.
A senior member from an American
think-tank has also suggested that Bibi should request asylum.
“President Trump should invite Ms
Bibi to come to America and request asylum. To do so would be just, moral and
wise,” Clifford D May, president of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies,
said in an op-ed in The Washington Times this week. (US
Senator seeks political asylum for Asia Bibi; By PTI; The Indian Express; 11/16/18 12:44:33
pm)
Below is the National Review article that has a great update
on Asia Bibi.
Further Reading:
Pakistani
blasphemy law victim Asia Bibi released – The Australian
PAKISTAN:
“Help us leave” pleads Asia Bibi’s family – Aid to the Church in Need
JRH 11/16/18
In this current state of media censorship & defunding, consider
chipping in a few bucks for enjoying this Blog.
***********************
The Lessons of the Asia Bibi Case
By NINA SHEA
November 16, 2018 6:30 AM
The daughters of Asia Bibi
pose with an image of their mother outside their residence in Sheikhupura,
Pakistan, in 2010. (Adrees
Latif/Reuters)
Pakistan has released the purported blasphemer against
Islam. Now what nation will have the courage to grant her asylum?
Asia Bibi, the
Catholic mother imprisoned in Pakistan for nine years and condemned to hang for
violating that country’s strict blasphemy law, has drawn broad sympathy
throughout the West. Lacking credible evidence, and despite her denials, lower
courts plainly yielded to Islamist pressure in making the illiterate field hand
the first Pakistani woman to be given a death sentence for insulting Islam’s
prophet, Mohammed. Then on October 31, Bibi finally received justice in an
acquittal by Pakistan’s supreme court. But when she was released a week later,
she found that mobs were baying for her blood throughout Pakistan — and, most
surprisingly, that the West held out no firm offer of a safe haven.
Islamabad has given assurances that Bibi has been taken to a
secret, secure location inside Pakistan, pending a permanent place of refuge.
But her escape seems stalled. The West’s response so far of passive
hand-wringing while Bibi faces mortal danger indicates more than poor planning;
it shows a failure to fully comprehend the deeply radicalizing effects of the
blasphemy taboo within the world’s second-largest Muslim nation — and the
inroads it has made in the West.
Western leaders have consistently expressed concern for Bibi
during her nearly decade-long ordeal. Human-rights advocates, such as the
indefatigable Lord David Alton, who just last month met personally in Pakistan
with the chief justice, have vigorously championed Bibi in the British
parliament. Yet when the moment of truth arrived, London quickly decided it
would not give her asylum owing to security
concerns. The U.K. has its own radical Islamist leaders within its
million-strong Pakistani community to worry about, including Anjem Choudary,
paroled last month following a terror-law conviction. Lord Alton called the
British decision “craven.”
In Paris, the city hall had an enlarged photo of Bibi by its
front entrance when I last visited several years ago, and France has long been
discussed as a place of asylum for her. But deadly Islamist attacks
against Charlie Hebdo’s editors for blasphemy, and most recently
against French Jews, make asylum there unthinkable. Last week Italy and Canada revealed their engagement in
“sensitive” multilateral talks on Bibi’s case, but so far neither has offered
an actual legal grant of asylum. Also last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
apologized for Canada’s turning away the MS St. Louis and its
907 desperate Jewish passengers seeking refuge from German Nazis 79 years ago.
Hopefully, he will apply the St. Louis lesson to throw a
lifeline to Bibi.
A recent appeal on Bibi’s behalf by 190 European
parliamentarians demands her safe passage from Pakistan but says nothing
specific about where she can go next. The European countries most welcoming to
refugees — the Scandinavian states, Germany, the Netherlands — all have a
recent history of Islamist rioting and murder over perceived blasphemy against
Islam: by irreverent cartoons, Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film on the
treatment of women, a papal speech at Regensburg University, etc. Providing
indefinite, round-the-clock security to a marked person such as Bibi would be
costly, as the U.K. learned with Salman Rushdie. And Amsterdam has already had
to withdraw much of its embassy staff from Pakistan this week following threats
received after the nation granted asylum to Bibi’s lawyer and the Dutch
politician Geert Wilders mocked the Muslim prophet on Twitter.
In a landmark blasphemy case in October, the European Court
for Human Rights upheld an Austrian court’s conviction of a political activist
on charges similar to Bibi’s, albeit they don’t carry the death penalty. For
the sake of keeping social peace, Europe’s highest civil-rights court validated
that country’s interest in criminalizing speech that “defames” the prophet
Mohammed and in establishing a right to have “religious feelings protected.” The Austrian
defendant had criticized the prophet as a “pedophile” for marrying a
six-year-old; Bibi’s alleged insult is not disclosed, since repeating it would
be deemed another act of blasphemy in Pakistan.
In truth, the anti-blasphemy movement went international
several decades ago. After Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989
against anyone connected with Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses,
several of its editors, translators, and sellers were either attacked or
murdered in Japan, the United States, Norway, and Turkey. The Saudi-based
Organization of Islamic Cooperation leveraged the 2005 Danish cartoon crisis to
get Europe to police speech to protect Islam. Since then, the EU has adopted
hate-speech bans on anything deemed Islamophobic by anyone. (Charges in the
Austria case were brought by a secular magazine, not Muslims.)
Europe is trying to placate the Islamists by giving in on
the blasphemy issue, but Bibi’s experience is a case study on how legitimizing
religious speech taboos only fans the flames.
Bibi was arrested in 2009 after she triggered a dispute with
Muslim women when she, an “infidel,” took a sip of water from a communal cup
while harvesting a hot field. The Muslim women accused Bibi of blaspheming
their prophet during the course of this heated exchange. At trial, the Muslim
berry pickers gave conflicting testimony and were manipulated by a local imam —
facts that were overlooked by the trial court and Bibi’s devastatingly
inexperienced trial attorney but would be determinative for the supreme court.
In 2010, Bibi was convicted and sentenced under section 295-C of the 1986
blasphemy law. For her own protection, she was confined in an isolation cell,
where she cooked her own food to avoid poisoning.
With the blasphemy law already infamous as an oppressive
tool for settling personal scores against Christians and other minorities, Asia
Bibi attracted the sympathy of Punjab’s governor, Salman Taseer, and Pakistan’s
minorities minister, Shahbaz Bhatti. Both were assassinated in 2011. The murder
of Bhatti, a Christian, occurred with impunity, while Mumtaz Qadri, the killer
of the Muslim governor, was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, whereupon
he became lionized as a martyr for the faith.
Qadri’s fans include a large part of the Pakistani lawyers’
association, whose members, in their trademark black suits, showered rose
petals on him as he entered the courthouse. They volunteered by the hundred to
defend him pro bono. In 2008, this same lawyers’ association was
enthusiastically cited by the New York Times as a hopeful sign
for upholding Pakistan’s “liberal tradition,” and as “perhaps the most
consequential outpouring of liberal, democratic energy in the Islamic world in
recent years.” But as lawyers rallied around the blasphemy issue, it became
deeply illiberal. Saiful Mulook, one of the last of the true liberals, who
represented Bibi in her appeal, had to flee for his life last week and go to
the Netherlands.
Another figure inspired by Qadri is hardline cleric Khadim
Rizvi, who organized Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP), a burgeoning political party
centered on fighting blasphemy against Islam. Last week TLP incited massive
protests against Bibi in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi, paralyzing key
transportation routes. To restore order, the government blocked cellphone
service and social media throughout the country for three days. Prime Minister
Imran Khan also reportedly gave Rizvi a chance to appeal the supreme court’s
decision to release Bibi and promised to block her from leaving the country.
Meanwhile, Rizvi has been calling for the murder of the judges, It’s not clear
what the prime minister will do if Bibi gets an actual visa and promise of
asylum from the United States, for example. So far he hasn’t had to cross that
bridge.
Bibi’s husband, Ashiq Massih, told me two and a half years
ago, after a conference — held in New York and sponsored by the Holy See — on
persecution that Pakistan’s supreme court wanted to release his wife but,
concerned about anti-blasphemy rioting, was waiting “until things cooled down.”
The court, tired of waiting, finally released Bibi last week, and Pakistan’s
ensuing descent into radicalism, wholly separate from the Taliban, has been on
full display. Asia Bibi is the litmus test of whether the United States and the
rest of the West are really willing to defend persecuted religious minorities
around the world.
NINA SHEA — Nina
Shea is the director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and
a co-author of Silenced, How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking
Freedom Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 2011).
___________________
Persecuted Asia Bibi NEEDS
ASYLUM after Release from Pakistan Prison
John R. Houk
© November 16, 2018
________________
The Lessons of the Asia
Bibi Case
