A War Against What?
Charles Johnson
Tue Oct 1, 2002 at 8:27 am PDT • Views: 222
Daniel Pipes points out that our press and government continues to avert their eyes from the real enemy, using as an example the recent string of attacks against Christians in Pakistan.
There is no doubt about the motives of the perpetrators: Militant Islamic groups brazenly speak their minds, declaring their goal is “to kill Christians” and afterwards bragging of having “killed the nonbelievers.”
Victims know full well why they are targeted - “just for being Christians,” as one person put it. A local Christian leader states “that the terrorist attack was an act by al Qaeda or some pro-Taliban organizations.”
Pakistani law enforcement also recognizes who engages in this violence and why. “We are investigating whether there is an anti-Christian gang operating in Karachi, made up of jihadis,” the city’s chief investigator explains.
A provincial police chief comments about the Sept. 25 carnage: “Unlike the usual terrorists, the killers [last week] showed no haste. They took a good 15 minutes in segregating the Christians and making sure that each one of their targets gets the most horrific death.”
A survivor of that slaughter recounts that the murderers separated Christians from Muslims by requiring each hostage to recite a verse from the Koran. Those who could not were seated at a table in the library, bound to chairs, gagged, and shot in the head (except for one person who was shot in a bathroom).
Politicians and journalists, however, pretend not to recognize the problem.
Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf reacted to the Sept. 25 butchery with seeming bewilderment: “I could not say who [was behind the killings]. It could be al Qaeda, it could be any sectarian extremists within, or foreign elements of RAW.” (RAW is the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s intelligence agency.) Pakistan’s interior minister likewise emphasizes that RAW’s role “cannot be ruled out.”
The media is almost as bad: Paul Marshall of Freedom House shows that American and European reporting on these many massacres in Pakistan overlooks the militant Islamic dimension, instead presenting the atrocities as vaguely anti-Western in purpose.
Frank says: