{"id":4598,"date":"2016-08-14T12:58:57","date_gmt":"2016-08-14T17:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=4598"},"modified":"2016-08-14T12:58:57","modified_gmt":"2016-08-14T17:58:57","slug":"pakistan-and-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/08\/14\/pakistan-and-england\/","title":{"rendered":"Pakistan and England"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pakistan, or more importantly the\u00a0Islamic Republic of Pakistan<\/strong><\/em>, a religious nation, is being torn apart by … religion. Lawfare’s<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0Rishabh Bhandari and Cody M. Poplin\u00a0report<\/a> on just one facet of the deliberate disintegration:<\/p>\n

\n

Monday\u2019s [bombing] victims were not a random assortment of civilians waiting for medical care, but\u00a0instead\u00a0represented Quetta\u2019s liberal elite. More than 200 lawyers had congregated to mourn the murder of Bilal Anwar Kasi, the president of the Balochistan Bar Association, who had been fatally shot earlier that day. A number of journalists had also arrived to cover Kasi\u2019s death when the bomb detonated.<\/p>\n

One surviving lawyer Barkhurdar Khan\u00a0lamented<\/a>\u00a0that an entire generation of lawyers in Balochistan\u2014Pakistan\u2019s poorest province and the home of a deep-seated insurgency\u2014had been wiped out. \u201cEveryone who has given me a lift home is dead except for one person,\u201d Khan said. Lawyers throughout the country\u00a0boycotted<\/a>\u00a0court proceedings on Tuesday. …<\/p>\n

But lawyers and judges are not targeted solely out of revenge for their role in prosecuting and sentencing terrorists. Instead, Pakistani society is witnessing a systematic attempt to undermine the integrity of its judicial system, drive courts from restive areas, and implement the Taliban\u2019s own form of rough but relatively efficient justice in areas it seeks to control. A Pakistani Taliban spokesman said\u00a0following<\/a>\u00a0an attack three months ago, \u201cPakistani courts give decisions against the laws revealed by Allah\u201d and suggested that undermining Pakistan\u2019s court system is a central component of establishing a state under the Taliban\u2019s interpretation of Sharia law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not hard to apply the lessons learned from the behaviors of the English Royal family to the plight of Pakistan today, as I detailed in this Pillar<\/a>\u00a0(see the section on English History) but has no doubt been done much better elsewhere: as the members of the various sects fall to fighting with each other, their small differences become magnified by the lens of Faith, and a nation which one might think should exist in easy harmony and solidarity has, instead, become a victim of the trivial differences of humanity. Each sect exists to climb to power, and then to direct its fruits to its members, buoyed by the certain faith that God is on their side. So are barbarous crimes sanctified, so do the winners fall to fighting amongst themselves, as God backs each individually, and so do the innocent fall to the sacred knife of the righteous, the power hungry, the lost.<\/p>\n

American fundamentalists, who weep for more power of their own, should soberly assess this lesson from the far side of the world, and perhaps placing God on the sidelines while they reassess how they select leaders and what will serve America best. Even as a secular nation we have a bloody religious history, and we’d best hug our secular, tolerant nature tighter as we continue our tightrope walk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pakistan, or more importantly the\u00a0Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a religious nation, is being torn apart by … religion. Lawfare’s\u00a0Rishabh Bhandari and Cody M. Poplin\u00a0report on just one facet of the deliberate disintegration: Monday\u2019s [bombing] victims were not a random assortment of civilians waiting for medical care, but\u00a0instead\u00a0represented Quetta\u2019s liberal elite. \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4598"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4602,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598\/revisions\/4602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}