How could you not have heard? First George W. Bush told you. Then Condoleezza Rice told you. Later Barack Hussein Obama told you. Even now Hillary Clinton is talking Peace, Love, and Understanding with Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. No doubt she will soon emerge to remind the American people just how wonderful Islam is.
As a practical demonstration of the wonderfulness of Islam, consider all the peace, love, and understanding that went down in the dungeon of a madrassa in Pakistan — until the police raided it and destroyed all that harmony and tolerance.
Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:
Below are excerpts from the accompanying Daily Mail article:
Forty-five students, among them young children, were discovered held in chains in a basement when police raided an Islamic seminary in Pakistan last night.
The male students, some said to be as young as 12 but appearing even younger, were found in what amounted to a dungeon at the Madrassa Zakarya in the Sohrab Goth district of Karachi.
Led barefoot from their prison, captives told officers they had suffered regular beatings and been hung upside down as a form of punishment.
Others said they had been visited by Taliban fighters and that 10 of their fellow students had disappeared in recent months.
One boy said that visiting Taliban members had told them to ‘prepare for battle’. Some Pakistani madrassas have long been suspected of grooming Islamic militants.
Police arrested a cleric and two others at the scene, but the madrassa’s administrator managed to escape during the raid, Pakistan’s Express Tribune reported.
Local police Superintendent Rao Anwar told the paper: ‘Those recovered are aged between 12 and 50 years and are mainly of Pakhtun ethnicity.
‘A few drug addicts and mentally challenged persons were also among those who were recovered.’
‘It seems that the administration was running a sort of religious school-cum-rehabilitation-centre and were receiving considerable sums of money from parents of those kept in for that purpose.’
Sanaa TV, a local station, showed footage of the raid and the chained students, who danced and cried as police began to free them.
‘We were kept in chains and hung upside down and beaten with sticks if we didn’t comply. We were told that we would be given training to fight in Afghanistan,’ one boy said.
Another told how Taliban fighters had visited the seminary, led prayers and told them to prepare for battle.
The raid came after an anonymous tip-off to authorities. Police official Mukhtiar Khaskheli told Agence France-Presse that a full investigation would probe any possible links with militants.
‘The madrassa officials claim that they had chained those students because they were drug addicts and they wanted to rehabilitate them and make them better Muslims,’ he added.
According to the Press Trust of India, most of the captive students had been brought to Karachi from remote parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhawa province, a hotbed of Taliban activities.
3 comments:
It is understandable that a horror of this sort leaves a community with nothing to say.
But I will say it. This is the most horrific kind of child sacrifice. Crueler than slaughtering helpless innocents is to forcibly destroy their innocence as a prelude to their senseless deaths. Whatever moral depravities one may accuse the West of having permitted, they have not fallen so deeply into the moral abyss as to condone this kind of practice.
To say that "we are at least better than this" is grammatically incorrect. Superlatives are applied to the basic adjective of the same meaning. One is "better" than something that is, in some degree "good". But the West, however short it may have fallen of its ideals, is not as horrible as this.
Chiu Chun-Ling.
I am being the Devil's Advocate here. The children do not look emaciated or exhausted owing to the supposed hardship. The whole exercise appears to be a stage managed show! Also, note that no culprits have been apprehended either.
To us, this appears to be a typical deceptive (taqqiyya) act by the Pakistani regime to convince western governments that Pakistani authorities are working against the Taliban.
That the event was managed is very possible. That madrassas do not ever resort to brutality in the service of ensuring a supply of martyrs is not.
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