I’ve written quite a lot about the case of Asia Bibi, whose real name is Aasiya Noreen (see my list of posts here). She’s a Pakistani Christian woman who was convicted of blasphemy against Islam under trumped-up charges. She then spent eight years in solitary confinement (blasphemy is a capital crime in Pakistan).

Last year, Bibi was freed from prison by Pakistan’s Supreme Court because the witnesses against her weren’t credible. While she was in prison, two Pakistani politicians were assassinated simply for supporting her, and the Supreme Court judges were threatened similarly. Distressingly, after Bibi was freed, the nation’s Supreme Court kept her in Pakistan because they were weighing an appeal from Pakistan’s odious Tehreek-e-Labaaik party, a party dedicated solely to punishing blasphemy and establishing sharia law.

Now, however, according to the New York Times article below, Bibi has been freed and has arrived in Canada, staying in Ottawa where her two daughters have been since December.  As I reported before, although she appealed to several countries for asylum, including Britain, the USA, and the UK, Britain rejected her appeal on the grounds that it would stir up trouble among certain groups—and you know who those groups are. That’s absolutely shameful, and a blot on a country that’s supposed to harbor the threatened.

But good on Canada for accepting her! (I’d like to know what the US did.)

Remember, every country in the world in which blasphemy is a capital crime is a Muslim-majority country. Religion poisons everything, including freedom of worship and speech.

When I was a kid, my dad would ask me this question. “Jerry, I have some good news and some  bad news. Which do you want to hear first?”

I’d say, “The good news.”

My father would respond: “The good news is that there’s no bad news.”

Then I’d ask, “Well, what’s the bad news, then?”

And my father would respond, “The bad news is that’s the only good news there is.”

You can do the same if the person asks first for the bad news. You then say, “The bad news is that there’s no good news.” When the person responds by asking, “Well what’s the good news?”, you answer, “That’s the only bad news there is.”

But today we have genuine good and bad news.  The good news is that today New Zealand finally repealed its law against blasphemous libel, passed in 1961, which stated this:

Note that what they’re talking about here is, as this site reports, anything that “condemns Christ or Christianity.” But the proviso in (3), which says that you’re not blaspheming if you’re making arguments in good faith and decent language, pretty much rendered the law toothless.  And indeed, there’s been only a single prosecution for violating this law in sixty years:

To date the only prosecution for blasphemous libel in New Zealand has been the case of John Glover, publisher of the newspaper The Maoriland Worker in 1922, although the poem was widely available at the time. The Crown laid a charge of blasphemous libel over the 12 October 1921 issue of The Maoriland Worker which included two poems by British poet Siegfried Sassoon. The alleged blasphemy was the closing lines of Sassoon’s poem ‘Stand-to: Good Friday Morning’:

O Jesus, send me a wound to-day,

And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine,

And get my bloody old sins washed white!

The case was tried in the Supreme Court in 1922. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty with a rider: “That similar publications of such literature be discouraged”.

NZ authorities also tried to censor Monty Python’s Life of Brian and an episode of South Park using this statute, but both efforts failed. The law is, as are all such laws, a vestige of an earlier and more religious time, and, at least in the West, hardly every used.

So today the New Zealand Parliament voted to scrap it.  According to the NZ site Newshub,

[On] Tuesday the Government scrapped the law it labels as “archaic” with the passing of the Crimes Amendment Bill.

“The offence of blasphemous libel has not been prosecuted in New Zealand since 1922, and raises potential Bill of Rights Act concerns,” said Justice Minister Andrew Little.

“This obsolete provision has no place in a modern society which protects freedom of expression.”

Mr Little said laws should be relevant to modern society and the last time a blasphemous libel case was considered, in 1998, the Solicitor-General rejected it.

“The view was expressed that it would be inconsistent with the freedom of expression as protected by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act,” said Mr Little.

As the Wikipedia page notes, “The Bill passed the second reading on the 11 December 2018, the Committee of the Whole House on the 20 February 2019, and the third reading on 5 March 2019. It awaits the royal assent to become law.”

For crying out loud, Kiwis, you are still under the thumb of Queen Elizabeth. Can a bill not become law without the fricking Queen assenting?

Curiously, I have yet to find a single Kiwi who wishes their land to be free from any sort of royal oversight, which seems to me an equally vestigial remnant of an earlier time. A land full of royalists! I’m sure some readers will defend the fact that Elizabeth is officially the Queen of New Zealand, but this makes no sense in a democracy, nor does the idea that the Queen of England should have any iota of power over the citizens of New Zealand.

h/t: Grania

As I’ve reported before (see here, here, here, and here), Asia Bibi (real name Aasiya Noreen) was a Pakistani Christian convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death. After eight years on death row (and the assassination of several politicians who supported her innocence), Bibi was freed by Pakistan’s Supreme Court.  Although she was accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad after an altercation in her village, the Court found those accusations unreliable.

But there was a hitch. As I wrote in November:

In the meantime, Noreen hasn’t been allowed to leave the country, and has gone into hiding. Distressingly, the Supreme Court is keeping her in Pakistan because they are weighing an appeal from Pakistan’s odious Tehreek-e-Labaaik party, a party dedicated solely to punishing blasphemy and establishing sharia law. But if the Court deemed the charges against Bibi insupportable, there’s no reason to force her to stay in Pakistan. Bibi’s lawyer has fled to the Netherlands, and her husband has pleaded to Canada, Italy, the US, the UK, and the Netherlands to grant her asylum.

There was more bad behavior around the question of who would give her asylum. As an article in Quillette and other sources confirmed, she had requested asylum in the UK, but they refused to consider it for fear of unrest among Muslims in the UK as well as attacks on British diplomats in Pakistan. That’s simply reprehensible, and some readers didn’t believe it, but documents support the cowardice of the British government in this respect. Every democratic country who has freedom of religion should be willing to take her in.

Well, the good news is that, according to this article from the January 29 BBC site(click on screenshot), the appeal from the Tehreek-e-Labaaik party was rejected, and Bibi is now completely free. If she’s not found and killed by Pakistani extremists before she leaves the country (and you shouldn’t underestimate the desire of many to do away with Bibi), she’ll be free to find asylum in another land.

  From the BBC report:

Asia Bibi is being kept by authorities at a secret location in Islamabad.

The ruling clears the way for her to leave Pakistan, though it is not clear when that will happen and where she will go. She has been offered asylum by a number of countries, and some unconfirmed reports say several members of her family may already be abroad.

Meanwhile, the court ruling will test the resolve of the far right Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan group, which has conducted a violent anti-blasphemy campaign in the past, though many of its leaders have been under arrest since October when the court first acquitted Asia Bibi.

In a concerted move to forestall public unrest, Pakistani electronic media is underplaying the story.

Many observers believe the ruling will revive the practice of applying standard legal tests of criminal procedure while adjudicating blasphemy cases, as they had increasingly become hostage to vigilante justice by extremists.

I’m guessing she’ll wind up in Canada, which recently took in a Saudi refugee who fled the oppression of her country. That would be lovely, but it’s to the shame of the US and UK that they didn’t offer her immediate asylum. That would have been a no-brainer, but governments are cowed by the threat of Muslim unrest. One wouldn’t think that having a lot of Muslim immigrants in a Western country would make it hard to take in a Muslim refugee, but that’s one of the dangers of the tenacity with which many such immigrants cling to the tenets of their faith.