Time To Give Pakistan the South-African Treatment

you are correct.
M

Agreed. Strict quarantine is called for on the OIC. It should be one-way, however. People should be free to travel to those countries, with the understanding that it's a one-way trip. There's no going back.
As for the UN, I'd rather see the US evict the UN from its headquarters in NYC. They can always go back to Geneva. Get the UN out of the US and the US out of the UN.

@Why single out Pakistan?

Applying pressure to one is like applying pressure to all. This would put the OIC more in a position of defense rather than attack - on for example our laws governing freedom - which virtually no Islamic country tolerates.

It is a kind of a weird relationship that some European nations have with Islam - or its organisations - the belief seems to be that we are going to be taken over one day by it - so in preparation we might as well start removing part of our own heads.

- Not that China is possibly the dark horse - Islam is a spent force - that all these efforts are to regain some imagined former glory - if any part were true - this was 'gained' not 'earned' almost entirely from the sword. [Exactly the same trend we are seeing today - nothing personal!]

And of course there were reasonable men like David Cameron willing to give in - willing to capitulate some - power to the undeserving - posturing - war-dogs.

Financially - Muslim nations only have oil.

But the Saudi king could have severed hands sown onto his outer garments - and you would see world leaders bowing - to kiss the two hands he was born with. Such is the money they control!

But the oil is also an Achilles' heel. When new technologies in transport can be upgraded as easily as computers. You may not need to buy a whole new car - you can change some of the electrical components. Then there is the maglev car ideas which uses electricity. http://youtu.be/Ew4Y5HLyT6c

::

Back to Pakistan -

They need to be singled out. When Pakistan was founded - there was about 40% non-Muslims - now they make up only 4% of the population. Let's not forget Hindu treatment as well - which has forced many to flee to India.

This was in a series of letters form Pakistan Christian Congress [PCC] - addressed to Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, informing them of their treatment and requesting refugee status - for persecuted Christians.

MUST READ!

THIS IS MORE THAN TROUBLE WITH BLASPHEMY LAWS _ THIS IS NOTHING SHORT OF APARTHEID!

It will be very important to note in 21st century that Christian are treated as untouchable by Muslim majority on basis of religion and cannot dine at any roadside vendor, restaurant and hotel which is worst type of hate on globe towards Christian in Pakistan. If any Christian on journey or away from home is hungry and attempts to eat in any Muslim owned dinner, he is beaten and tortured by Muslims and forced to pay for plates and glass in which he eats or any thing he have touched.

The churches are being attacked, pastors are being threatened, social activists are charged under blasphemy, teenage girls are gang-raped by Muslims and Christian women are enforcedly converted to marry by Muslims in Pakistan.

The Christian youth has been denied opportunities of professional and higher education in Pakistan which has created socio-economic disaster among poor families. The government have closed doors of employment for Christian youth in armed and civil services to force them to become laborers and accept low grade jobs of sanitary workers.

On the suicide of the Catholic Priest:

The Muslim militants Martyred Bishop John Joseph, a first and only Punjabi bishop of Catholic Church of Pakistan, dioceses of Faisalabad, but establishment forced Christian clergy tools to declare his martyrdom to be a suicide.

And this is the same Pakistan that is making all the noises about a film that doesn't hurt anybody. So that we can amend our laws to look more like theirs.

They are fair game!!

Single out the one - and Egypt should hear this message loud and clear.

The South-African treatment is an effect means of applying pressure the other way.

Tommo

if I have heard correctly, under the apartheid regime at its height two people who were devout practising Christians but of different 'races' - one nonwhite (whether of Indian or African or 'Cape Coloured' descent), one white - would not have been allowed to worship in the same church, sitting in the same pew side by side, nor could they have taken communion side by side (since the churches were segregated), nor would they have been permitted to marry (because it was deemed to be 'miscegenation' if a white person married a nonwhite).

Speaking as a Christian, I find *that* deeply offensive, and I am not sorry that it was brought to an end.

"Speaking as a Christian, I find *that* deeply offensive, and I am not sorry that it was brought to an end."

What has replaced it is far worse, reeking of hatred and racism for the sake of hatred and racism, rather than for the sake of security, which was the main raison' d'etre of the former rule, given that too many among the blacks were, indeed, savages.

So you think apartheid - which *included* the practices I have described, the ban on mixed marriages even of professing Christians and the segregation of churches along 'racial' lines (with punishments for any church that *dared* to be interracial) - should have continued indefinitely?

Me, I refuse to write off South Africa or any other majority non-Muslim African country as permanently 'beyond the pale' morally, socially, culturally or politically.

Why? Because the church is there, and it is strong, and it is growing in people of *all* ethnicities. South Africa is 75 percent Christian...which means that the vast majority of those Christians are *not* white. One-third of that Christian population - about ten million - identifies as 'evangelical', which tends to correlate with a fair level of active commitment; and I would be surprised if they were *all* or *only* 'whites'.

I don't think African tribal people are any less capable of being - over time, over generations - transformed in precisely the same way as our *own* ferocious north/ northwest European tribal ancestors - who practised head-taking, infanticide, concubinage, slave-raiding and slave-keeping, and human sacrifice in various gruesome forms, such as burning people alive in wicker baskets, or ripping out a live man's guts and wrapping them around a sacred tree, or making the 'blood eagle' on the battlefield, and who worshipped some fearsome gods such as Odin "Glutter of the Crows" along with a panoply of 'spirits' that had to be placated) - were transformed (and not, usually, by being colonised, either; Ireland was never ruled by Rome and neither were the Scandinavian countries).

I see Africa through different eyes than you. I see with what D B Hart calls 'the eye of charity'. And I *know* that God is doing things.

http://www.operationworld.org/sout

http://www.taize.fr/en_article12790.html

http://www.taize.fr/en_article13116.html

I belong to the wonderfully old-fashioned Anglican womens' movement, The Mothers' Union. It has an *enormous* membership among African Christian women.

Here is what they are up to in the province of Southern Africa.

http://www.themothersunion.org/province_southern_africa.aspx

I'm backing YHWH, and these ladies, and I *refuse* to throw up my hands in despair, or complacently crow about the supposed ineducability and irredeemability of black people, as you seem all too ready to do.

Perhaps with enough time, non-Muslim Africans can become sufficiently civilized; though one shouldn't be over-optimistic about how long that time would be. The European barbarians took centuries to civilize themselves and to be civilized, and they did a good job of it. I see no evidence that black Africans can unless they assimilate into a largely white culture; and that works better if they are transplated to a white culture -- and even then, such a project is fraught with problems whenever the dominant white culture gets too Kumbayishly optimistic about some abstract "equality" (while inconsistently "respecting" black culture indiscriminately, promiscuously encouraging both the good and bad aspects on pain of feeling "racist" if they reject anything "black").

All I was saying with regard to South Africa is that the Africans who found themselves free of apartheid have made their country horribly worse, with rampant crimes, thuggery, rapes and various social disorders; and this to me shows why the Afrikaaners ruled the way they did. They had to. And I'd wager their rule was a lot more humane and productive than any other black African polity is or ever has been. I know an English Jewish family, orthodox Jews, the father a doctor and scientist with an impressive array of degrees in various medical specialties, his wife and son and daughter all lovely, decent, bright people. The man and wife were born in Johannesburg and grew up there, then relocated to the U.S. for his advancement in his field (leaving before the dissolution of the DeKlerk government). They still have a couple of family members back home; they've told me the horror stories of how the country they grew up in and loved has gone to hell, and how whites are treated by the blacks infinitely worse than the blacks were ever treated by the whites.

Just to pick one item one could pick out of many as an index of the savagery involved in the black culture there: it was (and probably remains) common for black men to have sex with little girls (either through rapes or through underage and thereby forced marriages) not only because they think they can avoid acquiring AIDS that way -- but even more perversely and superstitiously, they actually think they can cure their own AIDS by having sex with little girls -- thereby, of course, transmitting that death sentence to the poor victims (along with the psychological and spiritual scarring such an atrocity causes).

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/hope-emerging-from-despair-hivaids-in-south-africa/50567

In addition, the stats for South Africa at the time of the following article indicated that “over a quarter of men reported raping a woman in their lifetime with nearly one in 20 committing rape in the previous year.” Over 25% of men raped at least one woman! That's a seriously diseased culture.

You write: "Perhaps with enough time, non-Muslim Africans can become sufficiently civilized; though one shouldn't be over-optimistic about how long that time would be."

Who are you to place limits on the power of God to transform human lives and human communities? You seem to be within a few millimetres of declaring Africans qua Africans to be beyond redemption. Me, i'll keep on donating to CMS (the Church Missionary Society) and praying, and I think that - over time - there *will* be change. Jesus told his disciples, "Go and make disciples of *all* nations". He didn't say, 'only go to the ones that look easy'.

"The European barbarians took centuries to civilize themselves and to be civilized, and they did a good job of it."

So it was just easy-peasy, hardly any trouble at all, for Jesus to save and convert Europeans - 'whites' - because they were naturally such sweet, nice people to begin with, all they needed was one or two rough edges polished off; but He can't do the same with black Africans, because they are EVIL all the way through? I think if you were dropped down in the midst of your pre-Christian ancestors when they were busy performing a human sacrifice or a slave raid, you might gain a different sense of what the first missionaries to northwestern Europe were up against and of the depth and miraculousness of the change that was brought about. Our ferocious pagan ancestors were saved by **grace** mediated through the courage and patient persistence of missionaries and spiritual teachers...and so Africans can and will be, also. You have altogether too weak a grasp of the orthodox Christian idea of divine Grace..

It is far too early in the process of the evangelising and Christian discipling of a multiplicity of African people-groups, to dismiss the effort as futile; from the point of view of the church, the process has barely begun, much of what is now nominally Christian Africa was totally pagan one or two or three generations ago.

I see no evidence that black Africans can unless they assimilate into a largely white culture"..

Take away the Gospel and the grace of God - neither of which were first manifested within western/ northwestern Europe, but in the middle East, within the House of Israel - and we wouldn't *have* what you are pleased to call 'white' culture.

anyway, this discussion is a side-track.

The subject of the thread is what sorts of Consequences might be imposed upon Islamic Pakistan for its manifestly cruel and unjust practice of *religion-based* (rather than 'ethnically-based') apartheid, that is, its de facto imposition of dhimmitude upon non-Muslim minorities.

And although the influence of the Islamintern would prevent the UN from doing anything, I think it perfectly possible that individual western - and some non-western - countries might be got to inflict a range of penalties involving such things as ending or cutting aid, a trade boycott, and ramping back diplomatic relations. And a Cricket boycott - given that all the countries Pakistan currently plays cricket with, are majority non-Muslim - seems to me to have possibilities.

Even if activists pushing for such penalties were not able to get them happening, the process would surely increase public awareness, among non-Muslims in the West and elsewhere, of what is going on inside Islamic Pakistan....

And calling formal or de facto dhimmitude 'a system of religion-based apartheid' is not a bad way of forcing your average westerner to *think* twice.

"Who are you to place limits on the power of God to transform human lives and human communities? You seem to be within a few millimetres of declaring Africans qua Africans to be beyond redemption. "

It depends on the context. As a government-building enterprise, I'd be against spending all that money, time and effort. The thing about Christian evangelism of yore is that they had a context -- the colonial west did the heavy lifting establishing and maintaining relative security (not only security and stability vis-a-vis warring non-Muslim tribes, but also in some cases, in protecting both non-Muslim Africans and Europeans from various marauding jihading Muslims), then the Western Christians could travel throughout missionizing more effectively. I don't mind that situation at all -- but it requires a colonialist framework; and now the last 60 years has built up tremendous cultural and psychological resistance (and vilification) against such a framework.

Mate, the church isn't *into* the 'government building enterprise'. Perish the thought.

'Seek ye first the kingdom of God'.

*That's* what the church is about, or is supposed to be about.

Christians obey the command of our Lord, when he said, 'Go ye therefore, and teach *all* nations". He *didn't* say - ;'but by the way, don't bother about them dirty Africans, they're a lost cause'. He didn't say how long it would take. He simply gave the command, and the church obeys; and whether there is an empire around, or not, is immaterial. it's nice if the empire is 'on side', but if it isn't, well, we just keep on keeping on: praying, giving, and - some of us - going.

Further: Christian evangelism in the non-Islamised parts of Africa and everywhere else has been going right ahead during the post-colonial period.

It is still going on. The empires have departed (except for the menacing Empire of Islam, now resurgent thanks to oil money); the church is still there, patiently persevering.

Far from being contingent on empire, the great ingatherings of people into a/ the church in China and b/ the church in Africa - both movements which are *continuing* unabated to this day, despite Mao and his successors in China and despite the post-colonial chaos in Africa (and despite the jihad, too) have both occurred *after* the end of colonial rule. Most people in Africa who identify as Christians, today, have entered the church in the past three decades. Despite everything.

Today, though the church universal continues to support and encourage, a great deal of the front-line evangelising and discipling is done by the indigenous Christians; and a lot of foreign missionary effort is involved in passing on skills that will enable the churches to sustain themselves economically and physically. The aim of any missionary worth his or her salt is to work themselves out of a job and see the 'daughter' church grown to adulthood and producing grandchildren...

In the East, the only help the church in China had from outside, between 1949 and the Nixon era, when all foreign missionaries had been expelled, was sporadic illegal visits, a thin trickle of smuggled Bibles, and radio broadcasts. They had to sink or swim on their own. They swam. Read 'The Heavenly Man' - the memoir of a Chinese Christian. And today the Christians of China, even in the midst of continuing communist/ totalitarian persecution, are looking beyond their own borders...back along the Silk Road, with their eyes coolly set on the spiritual strongholds of Islam. See 'Back to Jerusalem' (an idea that was in fact first conceived of by the tiny, new Chinese church way back before the rise of Chairman Mao, in the 1920s).

(And the Chinese, like the Africans, used to be viewed complacently - especially by the more adamantly sceptical and anti-Christian westerners - as 'proof' that there were large chunks of humanity completely impervious to the Christian gospel...

The African church is growing likewise through the witness of ordinary humble believers, in the midst of civil wars, in despite of AIDS and everything else, steadfastly enduring...frequently defying and criticising...and usually outlasting...the reigns of assorted dictators. The church in Uganda survived Idi Amin (who pandered to and favoured the Muslims), and is still growing. Of course it has its failures, its errors, its corruptions, episodes of heresy, etc..but anyone moderately familiar with the history of the earrly to medieval church in the *west* (or later) is not going to be surprised, or fazed, by that. Humans sin, and fall flat on their faces in the mud, even after they have gotten involved with YHWH. The OT is a massive object lesson in just how thoroughly believers can screw up.

I recently met an Anglican bishop from northern Nigeria who governs a church that is under fire from Jihad almost daily. He is exactly two generations removed from fetish-worship - his grandfather was converted by a nice young Englishman from Cambridge. But all the front-line evangelising in *his* diocese is being done by ordinary black Christians; his own parishioners. They have help from western Christians - NOT from western governments (and i will also add that not all missionaries these days are 'white westerners',one of *the* major missionary-sending nations is South Korea) but I do not think they will remain in perpetual tutelage. They're already challenging the slacker Christianity-and-water adherents in the western churches, reminding them of what they're supposed to believe...the relationship is not all one-way.

There is, too, something else you are forgetting, or don't know, or choose to ignore, in your attempts to see the church as *needing* empire or as dependent child of Empire and doomed to fail without it (*is* that what you're suggesting? if you are, then you're so wrong I hardly know how to begin talking to you).

The missionaries frequently *preceded* the arrival of colonisers - certainly that was the case in much of the Pacific. There's even a book about it: "They Found The Church There".'

From the very beginnings of Christian history, there have always been Christian evangelists way out beyond the reach and often the *awareness* of their national or imperial entity of origin, flying without a parachute.

And it wasn't ever just heroic 'white' Christians. The gospel, in the Pacific - and also in Africa, one finds, if one reads the histories - sometimes triggered a chain reaction: once tribe A had converted (or some of it) then people would set out from tribe A to take the new story to Tribe B in the next island or on the other side of the mountains...In Uganda, a new Christian from one tribe immediately hurried off to the Impenetrable Forest to take the gospel to the tribe who lived there; and he even attempted a translation of scripture portions into their language.

Further, anyone who takes the trouble to look closely into the history of Christian mission soon finds that missionaries were as likely to be *opposed* and *attacked* or undermined, ridiculed and treated with contempt, by the most assiduous and ambitious empire-builders, whether officials or ordinary people (ranchers, businessmen, farmers, merchants, miners) as *supported* or *protected*.

Read David Bentley Hart, 'The Story of Christianity', Charles Williams 'The Descent of the Dove' and Stephen Neill, 'A History of Christian Mission'. And for a particular 'case study', Australia, John Harris, 'One Blood' and 'We Wish We'd Done More' (the first is a general, detailed overview of *all* Christian missionary interaction with native people in Australia; the other is a history of the work of the Anglicans' CMS, Church Missionary Society, in northern Australia).

Charles Williams in 'the descent of the dove', says of the first disciples: 'they set out to generate mankind anew'. When the New Testament talks about 'new birth' and 'new creation' it isn't using those terms lightly.

With God, nothing is impossible.

With *God*, nothing is impossible.

That's where I stand. Now, can you please agree to leave the matter there?