Home Media Reports 2005 Mong attack The ‘foreign hand’ again!

Sunday, October 9, 2005

EDITORIAL: The ‘foreign hand’ again!

Eight worshippers were killed and 16 injured in Mandi Bahauddin when three unidentified assailants opened fire while they were offering morning prayers. This has almost become a regular opening of news items coming out of Pakistan since this country took its first steps on the road to “Islamisation” and “piety”. Sunnis and Shias have been regularly killing each other; Deobandis and Barelvis — both Sunni — have also killed each other; minorities have been attacked by “pious” Muslims of all hues and denominations and, of course, the great bugbear of the faithful in this country since its inception has been the Ahmadiyya community.

In the case of the Mandi Bahauddin attack, the slain and the injured belonged to the Ahmadiyya community. The place where they were praying, since 1974 when the community was declared non-Muslim, cannot be called a mosque under law. Bait-ul Zikr (the house of prayers) is how it is referred to if the Ahmadiyya do not want to get into trouble. The morning some of them were killed and injured, they were not looking for trouble, but were invoking God instead. But trouble was coming their way in the form of three men bent on shedding blood.

The Deputy Inspector General Police told the media that the police suspect a “foreign hand” behind the incident because the country has made great strides in improving its image and its enemies — hidden, presumably — do not want that to happen. They want to keep Pakistan in the doghouse. The DIG may be right but might we take the presumption of pointing out that this country, since its Islamisation, has given birth and sustenance to any number of lunatics and millenarians who are prepared to commit the most dastardly acts in the name of God; and that given our self-sufficiency in this industry, we do not really need a foreign hand to damn us.

The government is going through the usual motions of condemning the attack and announcing the paltry sums of Rs 100,000 and Rs 50,000 in compensation money to the families of the deceased and injured, respectively. The police are probing the incident. But when will we finally begin to look into the real and root causes of such attacks? Even heathens had a code about not shedding blood in a prayer place. That code has been broken by the faithful. There can’t be anything more shameful than that.

If killing Shias can ensure entry into Paradise, how much easier it would be to do so by killing people of the Ahmadiyya community that has been branded as heretical and against whom the clergy continues to fulminate and incite the good Muslim to commit aggression. Some foreign intelligence agency might have perpetrated this act but if and when the people who actually committed the crime are apprehended, the police will find that they may actually belong to one of the various local extremist groups. Outsiders can fish only in troubled waters. *

Source: www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_9-10-2005_pg3_1