We must help free Rimshah Masih

BY FARZANA HASSAN, August 23, 2012, Toronto Sun

TORONTO – In sharia-benighted Pakistan, an eleven-year-old Christian girl with Down’s Syndrome has recently been incarcerated for blasphemy.

Rimshah Masih allegedly burned pages of the Quran and other Islamic textbooks, including a Quran primer. The girl was found holding the charred pages. She was subsequently beaten by an angry Islamist rabble which, supported by the usual obscurantist mullahs and bigots, is demanding the severest penalty for this disabled girl.

Unfortunately, Rimshah is not the only Pakistani facing such charges. Asia Bibi, another Christian accused of blasphemy, has languished in prison since 2010. She is the unfortunate woman on death row for allegedly showing disrespect for the Prophet Mohammad.

Pakistanis collectively have shown little outrage at these travesties. In fact, the religious climate of the country has turned even educated Pakistanis into dogmatists who think that freedom of expression stops at religion. The media have reinforced this, especially popular talk shows and television dramas.

Concern from the international community has dwindled disturbingly, as Pakistani clerics await Asia Bibi’s hanging.

In both cases the charges appear unfounded. No one knows how Rimshah acquired pages of the Quran or the primer—or if the charred pages were indeed taken out of these books. And no one really knows what Asia Bibi actually said to the women who accused her of blasphemy.

Bibi, a mother of four, dared to touch the eating utensils of nearby Muslim women. When she merely expressed displeasure at segregated and elitist eating practices, she was accused of blasphemy. Since then, fanatics have harassed her family. Rimshah’s family has fled, as have hundreds of other residents of her Christian neighborhood.

Christians suffer daily in Muslim countries. Their lives are in constant peril because of radical Islam’s assault on beleaguered Christian communities.

Attacks on Christian churches have become common. While all religious minorities are targeted in Muslim countries where radical Islam has taken root, Christians are particularly vulnerable because they are accused of allying themselves with the “crusader” West, particularly after 9/11.

In yet another outrageous case, eleven nurses—including three Christians—were recently poisoned in a Karachi hospital for not fasting during Ramadan. Fortunately all are recovering. We now also hear reports of Samuel Yacoob, an eleven-year-old Christian boy, who was tortured and beaten to death in Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Christians in Islamic countries are voiceless and suffer under an intolerable legal framework, with its archaic and reprehensible blasphemy laws. They also endure attacks on places of worship, economic hardship and workplace discrimination.

Muslims everywhere must protest blasphemy laws, demand freedom for Rimshah and Asia Bibi and offer protection for members of their religious community. Blasphemy laws in Pakistan must be repealed.

The international community can also help. France has taken up Rimshah’s cause. Canada must also put pressure on the Pakistani government to release these victims of religious bigotry.

The legal framework of Pakistan requires an overhaul. More fundamentally, the masses need to be educated to respect human rights and freedom of expression, even in religion. Only when its citizens can be persuaded that civic responsibility begins with tolerance will Pakistan step out of the dark ages and strive for the dignity all of its diverse people deserve.

By DAVID E. SANGER, The New York Times, 10/14/12

Click here to read the story on the NY Times website

WASHINGTON — Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats.

That conclusion, of which President Obama and other senior officials are aware from classified assessments of the Syrian conflict that has now claimed more than 25,000 lives, casts into doubt whether the White House’s strategy of minimal and indirect intervention in the Syrian conflict is accomplishing its intended purpose of helping a democratic-minded opposition topple an oppressive government, or is instead sowing the seeds of future insurgencies hostile to the United States.

“The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” said one American official familiar with the outlines of those findings, commenting on an operation that in American eyes has increasingly gone awry.

The United States is not sending arms directly to the Syrian opposition. Instead, it is providing intelligence and other support for shipments of secondhand light weapons like rifles and grenades into Syria, mainly orchestrated from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The reports indicate that the shipments organized from Qatar, in particular, are largely going to hard-line Islamists.

The assessment of the arms flows comes at a crucial time for Mr. Obama, in the closing weeks of the election campaign with two debates looming that will focus on his foreign policy record. But it also calls into question the Syria strategy laid out by Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger.

In a speech at the Virginia Military Institute last Monday, Mr. Romney said he would ensure that rebel groups “who share our values” would “obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks, helicopters and fighter jets.” That suggests he would approve the transfer of weapons like antiaircraft and antitank systems that are much more potent than any the United States has been willing to put into rebel hands so far, precisely because American officials cannot be certain who will ultimately be using them.

But Mr. Romney stopped short of saying that he would have the United States provide those arms directly, and his aides said he would instead rely on Arab allies to do it. That would leave him, like Mr. Obama, with little direct control over the distribution of the arms.

American officials have been trying to understand why hard-line Islamists have received the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition through the shadowy pipeline with roots in Qatar, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia. The officials, voicing frustration, say there is no central clearinghouse for the shipments, and no effective way of vetting the groups that ultimately receive them.

Those problems were central concerns for the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, when he traveled secretly to Turkey last month, officials said.

The C.I.A. has not commented on Mr. Petraeus’s trip, made to a region he knows well from his days as the Army general in charge of Central Command, which is responsible for all American military operations in the Middle East. Officials of countries in the region say that Mr. Petraeus has been deeply involved in trying to steer the supply effort, though American officials dispute that assertion.

One Middle Eastern diplomat who has dealt extensively with the C.I.A. on the issue said that Mr. Petraeus’s goal was to oversee the process of “vetting, and then shaping, an opposition that the U.S. thinks it can work with.” According to American and Arab officials, the C.I.A. has sent officers to Turkey to help direct the aid, but the agency has been hampered by a lack of good intelligence about many rebel figures and factions.

Another Middle Eastern diplomat whose government has supported the Syrian rebels said his country’s political leadership was discouraged by the lack of organization and the ineffectiveness of the disjointed Syrian opposition movement, and had raised its concerns with American officials. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing delicate intelligence issues, said the various rebel groups had failed to assemble a clear military plan, lacked a coherent blueprint for governing Syria afterward if the Assad government fell, and quarreled too often among themselves, undercutting their military and political effectiveness.

“We haven’t seen anyone step up to take a leadership role for what happens after Assad,” the diplomat said. “There’s not much of anything that’s encouraging. We should have lowered our expectations.”

The disorganization is strengthening the hand of Islamic extremist groups in Syria, some with ties or affiliations with Al Qaeda, he said: “The longer this goes on, the more likely those groups will gain strength.”

American officials worry that, should Mr. Assad be ousted, Syria could erupt afterward into a new conflict over control of the country, in which the more hard-line Islamic groups would be the best armed. That depends on what happens in the arms bazaar that has been feeding the rebel groups. In several towns along the Turkey-Syria border, rebel commanders can be found seeking weapons and meeting with shadowy intermediaries, in a chaotic atmosphere where the true identities and affiliations of any party can be extremely difficult to ascertain.

Late last month in the Turkish border town of Antakya, at least two men who had recently been in Syria said they had seen Islamist rebels buying weapons in large quantities and then burying them in caches, to be used after the collapse of the Assad government. But it was impossible to verify these accounts, and other rebels derided the reports as wildly implausible.

Moreover, the rebels often adapt their language and appearance in ways they hope will appeal to those distributing weapons. For instance, many rebels have grown the long, scraggly beards favored by hard-line Salafi Muslims after hearing that Qatar was more inclined to give weapons to Islamists.

The Saudis and Qataris are themselves relying on intermediaries — some of them Lebanese — who have struggled to make sense of the complex affiliations of the rebels they deal with.

“We’re trying to improve the process,” said one Arab official involved in the effort to provide small arms to the rebels. “It is a very complex situation in Syria, but we are learning.”