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In this mailing:
* Raymond Ibrahim: Death for "Blasphemers" in Pakistan
* Amir Taheri: Boris of Britain: What Went Wrong?


** Death for "Blasphemers" in Pakistan ([link removed])
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by Raymond Ibrahim • July 17, 2022 at 5:00 am
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* "Muhammad Irfan came to my shop for wheel balancing for his motorbike. I balanced the wheel and demanded my amount of labour as settled between us. Muhammad Irfan refused to give me money and said, 'I am a follower of Peer Fakhir [a Muslim ascetic] and don't ask for money from me.'" — Ashfaq Masih, Christian falsely accused of "blasphemy" and sentenced to death by hanging, chuchinchains.ie, July 7, 2022.
* "They both made conspiracy against me and lodged a false FIR [First Incident Report] against me. I told the real story to a police officer but he did not record my version but conducted investigation ex-parte. I neither uttered any derogatory word against Prophet Muhammad nor can think about it." -- Ashfaq Masih, chuchinchains.ie, July 7, 2022.
* The Muslim judge, Khalid Wazir, presiding over the case, went so far as to state that "it could not be believed that a Muslim will spin a story in this regard," while simultaneously describing the evidence presented by Masih's defense team as "not believable. "
* "I don't remember any case where the lower court decided to grant bail or freed anyone accused of the blasphemy law. The judges are aware that such cases are made to punish and settle personal grudges with the opponents, especially against the Christians.... Masih's case was very clear—the shop owner wanted him out and Naveed was a business rival who implicated him in a false blasphemy case. He is innocent and has already spent five years in prison for a crime he never committed." — Nasir Saeed, Director of the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement, claas.org.uk, July 7, 2002.
* Masih's case is now at least the third death sentencing of its kind since the start of this year.
* In February 2022, Zafar Bhatti, 58 — another Christian man who had been serving a life sentence under a false accusation of blaspheming Muhammad in a text — was given a death sentence.
* In January 2022, Aneeqa Atteeq, a Muslim woman, was sentenced to death after a Pakistani court pronounced her guilty of insulting Muhammad in text messages she had sent to a man via WhatsApp. She had offered a more plausible if not prosaic explanation: the man who reported her was getting "revenge" on her because she had refused his advances.
* Horrific as it is to be accused of blasphemy in a Pakistani courtroom, it is even far worse to fall into the hands of a Pakistani mob. A decade-old report found that in Pakistan, between just 1990 and 2012 alone, "fifty-two people have been extra-judicially murdered on charges of blasphemy."
* "Anyone Who Touches the Prophet, No Punishment—Just Kill!" — Yello Babo, Muslim cleric in Nigeria, Persecution.org, May 16, 2022.

On July 4, 2022, a Christian mechanic who had been imprisoned for the last five years, awaiting trial under a false accusation of "blasphemy" for allegedly insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, was sentenced to death by hanging in a Pakistani court. (Image source: iStock)

On July 4, 2022, a Christian mechanic who had been imprisoned for the last five years, awaiting trial under a false accusation of "blasphemy" for allegedly insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, was sentenced to death by hanging in a Pakistani court.

Five years earlier, on June 5, 2017, Ashfaq Masih, 34, had gotten into a quarrel with Muhammad Naveen, a rival who had established a mechanics' workshop near Masih's. According to Masih's not guilty plea, Muhammad "was jealous because my business was running better," and, after their altercation, "threatened me with dire consequences." On the following day, June 6, according to Masih:

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** Boris of Britain: What Went Wrong? ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • July 17, 2022 at 4:00 am
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* In other words, none of Johnson's macro-political choices forced him towards the exit.
* He was forced out by drip-drip reports of peccadilloes, what ancient Greeks called skendein....
* The Boris episode underlines the poverty of democratic debate in Britain today where politics is reduced to sloganeering with the sole aim of winning elections. The fetishistic approach turns elections from a means to serve precise aims to an end in themselves. The result is the short-termism that deprives Britain and other Western democracies of strategic thinking.
* As for Sir Keir Starmer, the opposition Labor Party leader, no one is asking what he offers as policy but whether he could win an election. The obsession with elections and lack of interest in actual policy is fed by daily opinion polls analyzed and aggrandized by pundits and focus groups. What matters is the process leading to power, not what to do once in power.

Pictured: Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street on July 13, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

It is hard to believe, but it was only a year ago that Boris Johnson, imagining himself at the peak of glory as a political leader, was waxing lyrical about his "strategic goal" of rescuing millions of Britons out of poverty and neglect. Adopting the sobriquet of a 17th-century movement known as the "Levellers," he renamed a Ministry to the "Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities," headed by the heavy-weight member of his Cabinet, Michael Gove.

Needless to say, as it was typical of good old Boris, he never spelled out what he meant to do under a flag borrowed from the English Civil War. As for Gove, the minister in charge, all he could reveal was that the aim was to elevate the degraded northern part of England up to the level of modernity and prosperity achieved in the southeast.

Now we shall never know what kind of miracle was in the offing because Johnson has been forced out and, before doing so, fired Gove.

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