Mick Hartley

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, a journalist based in Lahore, writes at UnHerd on Western progressives' cowardly refusal to condemn Islamism and its blasphemy laws:

A few weeks ago, a Sri Lankan factory worker was lynched by a mob in Sialkot, a city in Pakistan, before his corpse was left to burn in the street. He had been accused of blasphemy for removing posters that bore prayers eulogising Muhammad. Hundreds gathered to participate in the barbarity, while the local authorities stood by. Videos of the man’s body being torched circulated widely on social media.

This was Pakistan’s third blasphemy-related incident in just seven days. Earlier that week, a mob had set fire to a police station after it refused to hand over a man accused of desecrating the Quran. A couple of days earlier, four men were arrested for asking the local mosque to make a funeral announcement for a Christian.

Pakistan is only one of 12 Muslim-majority countries to carry the death penalty for blasphemy; 20 others implement harsh prison sentences. And blasphemy laws are frequently cited. Over the past fortnight, they have been used to censor schoolbooks in Northern Syria, curb digital freedom in Indonesia, send a Saudi man to death row over a tweet, and sentence renowned Egyptian lawyer and thinker Ahmed Abdo Maher to five years in prison.

It is in Pakistan, though, where the crime of blasphemy is most ferociously punished. But not through the courts. Pakistan likes to call itself a “democratic republic”, and therefore shies away from actually judicially executing anyone for sacrilege — unlike, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia. But the state has been known to turn a blind eye to Islamist mobs meting out vigilante justice. Many of the perpetrators actually argue that it is the state’s “failure to hang blasphemers” which means punishment has to be carried out extrajudicially. This claim was echoed in the aftermath of the Sialkot killing by the leader of the Islamist party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-F), who said: “If the state won’t punish those who insult the prophet then such incidents will happen.”

The Islamist mobs are now so emboldened that they will freely target not only religious minorities, but also dissenting Muslims — the “wrong” kind of Muslims — even if they practise and believe in Islam. They have burned down Christian homes, vandalised Hindu temples and destroyed “sacrilegious” mosques belonging to the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect; they have lynched university students, 10-year-olds and even those who had memorised the Quran by heart.

The vigilantes gain their strength from two contrasting, but similarly morally corrupt, sources.

The first, of course, is the Pakistani state itself. The military, who are the de facto rulers of the country, prop up radical Islamist outfits as assets. These range from militia, which might give the state strategic influence in a neighbouring nations, to Islamist pressure groups, which would keep civilian leaders in check if the army’s stooges felt like staging a coup. Groups like the JUI-F could easily mobilise madrassa students against any authority figures by accusing them of working against Islam.

The current Prime Minister, Imran Khan, is really just a puppet, maintaining the democratic façade of this military-ruled realm. He described the Sialkot lynching as a “day of shame” for Pakistan. But he also sends unhelpfully mixed messages about the radical Islamists Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), whose slogans the lynch mob were chanting….

Khan has also, on several occasions, vowed to export Islamic blasphemy laws to the West, so that people over there are similarly “scared of blaspheming against our prophet”. Khan already has many allies in this quest: when Western media refuse to publish the images that lead to satirists or teachers being massacred by jihadists, blasphemy law is upheld. It is reaffirmed whenever educational institutions are intimidated into shunning any critique of Islam, or any learning that makes Islamists uncomfortable. Blasphemy laws are also endorsed when the Council of Europe celebrates Islamic sexism by synonymising the hijab with freedom. The Islamic blasphemy law was formally implemented when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that critique of Islam’s prophet goes beyond the limits of free speech.

Freedom of speech is a now rapidly shrinking human right. For instance, the term “Islamophobia” is conveniently used by progressives to paint satire, or critique of the religion, as racism against the entire Muslim people. Of course, moderate Muslims in the West respond to Islamist violence by excommunicating the radicals among their community, echoing exactly what the jihadists say of them: they are not following “true Islam”. But this is a cop-out: it still allows the moderates to partake in outrage over ‘offences’ such as blasphemy, while shunning any responsibility towards addressing the most violent manifestations of that outrage.

As a result, while Islam remains the only religion that still promotes punishment by death, progressive voices don’t seem particularly interested in preventing that practice in the Muslim world. This absolute dearth of resistance emboldens Islamist leaders to call for global blasphemy codes, using tactics reminiscent of Western social justice warriors: they equate the drawing of cartoons with perpetrations of Muslim “genocide”, and accuse anyone who questions these claims of having a phobia of Islam.

An interesting point there – "using tactics reminiscent of Western social justice warriors". There is a clear parallel between the outraged cries of Islamists that cartoons of the Prophet are like a genocide, and the outraged cries of trans activists that to misgender them or to use incorrect pronouns or to question their beliefs in any way is the exact equivalent of extreme violence. For "Islamophobia" read "transphobia". Two very different ideologies, united in their intolerance and their determination to punish and threaten heretics. No one has actually been killed by an angry trans mob yet, it's true, but as JK Rowling can testify there's no shortage of death threats.

And, talking of Muslim genocide, here's Azeem Ibrahim in the Times – Muslim states put Chinese money above the Uighurs:

When I was growing up as a young Muslim in Scotland, the precarious state of the Muslim world was always blamed on malevolent external actors: the history of colonialism, continued western support for authoritarian leaders, anything. Even the Sunni v Shia sectarian violence was blamed on Israel and the CIA. It was simply out of the question that any of the ills besetting Muslims could be due to the behaviour of Muslims themselves.

Anyone familiar with the history of Islam, however, will know that violent Muslim sectarianism and relentless factional disputes have caused untold damage to the lives and wellbeing of Muslims around the world. Yet despite that fraught history, today something akin to Muslim unity is appearing to take shape, at least on one particular issue: the Uighurs.

More than a million Uighur Muslims are being held in “re-education” concentration camps in Xinjiang by the Beijing authorities, yet Muslim leader after Muslim leader from the Islamic world has come out publicly in support of the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide. Even the Taliban, the most extreme Islamist government in the world, approached Beijing before they came to power in Afghanistan saying they would support the party’s efforts to clamp down on Uighurs in exchange for investment.

And it is not just Muslim leaders who agree. For example, in Pakistan, a country founded explicitly as a land of refuge for Muslims, and where Muslim solidarity is one of the fundamental pillars of all political discourse, it is difficult to find anyone who is critical of China. Many will be openly supportive of China’s “efforts to restore order”.

Not one government in the Muslim world has sacrificed a single Chinese yuan of investment for the Uighurs. Not a single one of them has countenanced joining American efforts to speak for these oppressed Muslims. And hardly any civil society group in the Muslim world has so much as registered a protest. Instead, this has been left almost entirely to non-Muslims in the West.

Sadly, it appears that for Muslim states the Chinese yuan will always be more important than solidarity with suffering fellow Muslims.