Category: humanity at its worst

Asia Bibi’s request for asylum was indeed rejected by Britain

November 24, 2018 • 11:20 am

As I reported in the last few weeks (see here, here, and here), the case of Asia Bibi (real name Aasiya Noreen), the Pakistani Christian woman convicted of blasphemy and then freed, has taken some distressing turns. After spending eight years in solitary confinement for an accusation of blasphemy that proved to be false (blasphemy is a capital crime in her benighted land), Noreen was set free by Pakistan’s Supreme Court. While she was in prison, two Pakistani politicians were assassinated simply for supporting her, and the Supreme Court judges have been threatened similarly.

(From the Spectator) Asia Bibi at a jail in Sheikhupura, located in Pakistan’s Punjab Province, November 20, 2010. (Reuters/Asad Karim/File Photo)

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. Here’s a short video showing Noreen’s husband:

As I reported on November 10, there was a report that the UK had refused asylum to Noreen because of the potential unrest it would cause:

Wilson Chowdhry, chairman of the British Pakistani Christian Association, said two countries had made firm offers of asylum, but Britain was not one of them.

“I’ve been lead to believe that the UK government had concerns that her moving to the UK would cause security concerns and unrest among certain sections of the community and would also be a security threat to British embassies abroad which might be targeted by Islamist terrorists.

Several readers, exercising better diligence than I, deemed Cowdhry and the British Pakistani Christian Association shady, and doubted that Britain really would reject such a request for asylum. But now, after a report in Quillette from Hardeep Singh, a Sikh journalist, it seems more likely that my report was true—that the UK did refuse asylum for Noreen. Read the article below (click on screenshot):

In this piece we get two corroborating pieces of evidence that the British government acted reprehensibly by refusing Bibi asylum. First, we have an email to Cowdhry from a government official confirming the report.

Chowdhry has received threats for lobbying for Bibi’s safe passage to the West. He has been accused by hard-line Muslims of making up accounts about the British government’s decision not to grant Bibi asylum, despite having an email from an All Party Parliamentary Group secretary confirming the position.

If you don’t believe Chowdhry, ask to see the email.

Second, we have this letter to Teresa May from May’s now-resigned PM Trade Envoy to Pakistan, which contains a bit about Noreen’s fate:

The relevant bit:

This states clearly that the government is failing to offer help to Noreen. Indeed, if the initial reports were wrong, why hasn’t Britain announced they would give her asylum? The Australian Home minister has said as much, adding that “Britain initially suggested it would offer Bibi asylum but then pulled out, reported for fear of unrest from Muslims in the UK and of threats to diplomats in Pakistan.”

Finally, we have this report from the Guardian:

Tom Tugendhat, the foreign affairs select committee chair, asked the Foreign Office permanent secretary, Sir Simon McDonald, whether the episode “does not raise the question that either staff should be withdrawn or security increased or otherwise UK policy is effectively dictated to by a mob?”.

Tugendhat took the committee into lengthy private session after McDonald said he did not wish to give evidence in public on a such a sensitive issue

McDonald defended Britain’s efforts to find a third country to take Bibi, saying this would allow UK policy objectives to be achieved without any risk to its staff.

That’s just disgusting.

I hope Noreen is allowed to leave the country, for if ever a person deserved asylum as protection against persecution, it is she. And if some country other than Britain gives her asylum, that’s wonderful, but it’s a blot on the British government. That government has been whitewashing Islamist misdeeds for a long time, and it’s time for a supposedly democratic society to step up and act on its principles.

Speaking of “democratic societies”, why hasn’t the U.S. offered her asylum?

h/t: cesar

Monday: HuffPo stupidity

September 26, 2016 • 2:32 pm

I can’t refrain from looking at PuffHo. I no longer derive anything useful from that dreadful aggregator site, but I look anyway:  the same way rubberneckers look at a traffic accident as they drive by. I’m fascinated by their obsession with hijabis, and by theircomplete abandonment of objective political reporting.

And so this week I’ll feature at least one dumb headline per day from the site. Actually, there are two today (click each screenshot to go to the article—if you must):

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The life-giving illustrations below aren’t impressive:

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“Memory of the Camps”: a Holocaust documentary

January 29, 2016 • 11:30 am

If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to a newly-revised 58-minute Frontline documentary called “Memory of the Camps,” a film produced by the British and American military film services, and partly directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Narrated by Trevor Howard, it’s a graphic depiction of what the Allied armies found when they liberated several concentration camps. WARNING: The scenes are graphic and can be very disturbing.

The film, intended to enlighten the German public about what their government had been up to, was never shown (read about the film’s history here). The reels languished in the Imperial War Museum in London for years, but were reassembled and shown on Frontline (PBS) in 1985. The previously missing sixth reel, on Auschwitz (beginning 54:30), has been restored in this fairly new version.

I hadn’t seen the whole thing until yesterday (I watched it at lunchtime: not a good idea), but I think everyone who hasn’t seen it should. Howard’s narration is low-key and undramatic, yet the scenes are horrifying. Some day I’ll put up the pictures I took at Auschwitz when I visited Krakow a few years ago. It’s a must-see site for those visiting Poland.

Anyway, click below if you have an hour and won’t be driven away by seeing some of the horrors of the camps.

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Two years ago the New Yorker wrote about the film in a piece by Richard Brody called “Hitchcock and the Holocaust.” I’ll give just one excerpt:

The images of emaciated corpses dragged through the dust, carried on the back, swung and tossed into pits atop other contorted and emaciated corpses, have been pressed into memory by shock and horror—not necessarily these specific images, but possibly others of the many, many hours of documentary images filmed when, after the war, the Allies liberated the camps. What’s preserved in the editing of the film is the astonishment of Allied soldiers upon discovering the camps. Their discovery was also the world’s discovery, and the film conveys the sense of a world out of joint, a total catastrophe that defies comprehension and seems like a sort of ubiquitous madness, even as its careful industrial organization becomes all the clearer.

Yet it may be the very familiarity of such images—no one of which has particular ascension over another—that shifts the emphasis, in “Memory of the Camps,” to two sequences. One presents the response of British medical authorities to the louse infestation that was responsible for the spread of typhus: burning the empty barracks. The flames that consume the wooden structures and rage in the night have a metaphorical power—suggesting both the incineration of millions of corpses, and a sort of divine vengeance against the perpetrators—that raises the images outside the realm of journalism and into a terrifying realm of art. The other, showing the mass graves covered over with earth and marked by placards, evokes, in the barrenness and vastness of the graves, the totality of the Nazi crimes that, somehow, seem to surpass their particular enumeration. In this sequence, “Memory of the Camps” comes closest to fulfilling its title—it becomes a film about memory, akin to Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog,” in which the images of the victims in the camps already belong to the archive, and the facts of the Holocaust need to be rescued from oblivion.