Oddly enough, the real culprits were Sunni Muslim jihadists who hate the Shi’ites. Yet the Western world is much more worried about “Islamophobia” than about this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, and its root causes in Islamic law’s death penalty for heresy and apostasy. This is despite the fact that untold numbers of people around the world have been murdered this year (and in years past) because of Islam’s teachings of jihad and the death penalties for heresy, apostasy, blasphemy etc., and no one at all has been killed because of “Islamophobia.”
“Anti-Shiite violence rises in Pakistan as Islam’s sectarian divide moves beyond the Middle East,” by Saeed Shah for the McClatchy Newspapers, November 30 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
KARACHI — More members of Pakistan’s Shiite Muslim religious minority were killed by Sunni Muslim extremists this year than in any previous year, a development that could further destabilize this key U.S. ally and draw it into the widening Shiite-Sunni conflict that up to now has been manifest primarily in Middle Eastern countries.
Unlike conflicts in Iraq and Syria, where the violence runs both ways, nearly all the deaths along the sectarian divide in Pakistan are on the Shiite side. Anti-Shiite groups here have linked up with Pakistani Taliban militants, who are close to al Qaida and were previously focused on attacking the security forces, forming a deadly coalition.
Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries are believed to support Sunni hardliners in Pakistan, while Iran is thought to be providing some aid to the Shiites. The biggest anti-Shiite group, Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP), operates openly in Pakistan.
According to Hasan Murtaza, an independent researcher, 456 Shiites have been killed this year through Monday in violence that has stretched across the country. Of those, 103 deaths took place in Karachi and 120 in the western city of Quetta. That’s more than double the casualties of 2011 and, Murtaza said, the highest figure since Pakistan came into existence in 1947.
The violence reached a grim climax this month as eight bomb blasts targeted Shiite processions commemorating Muharram, the month of ritual mourning that began Nov. 16. At least 31 people died.
“Are we also not human? Democracy surely means that every community is allowed to live the way they want,” said a sobbing Salma Jaffri, mother of Waseem, a 22-year-old who was shot in the head by unseen gunmen as he attended a Shiite funeral procession in Karachi’s Liaquatabad district earlier this month….
Democracy?