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Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Why Pakistanis aren't protesting the Mumbai massacre

In his op-ed piece today in The New York Times ("Calling All Pakistanis"), Thomas L. Friedman asks a question:
On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai? [emphasis mine]
    ...We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here.
Maybe Thomas L. Friedman is right that such a protest is needed. But I doubt that it's going to happen. And I have a question of my own: Why not?

The reason seems to be that people in a Muslim society (people who fancy themselves completely subservient to "Allah") don't seem to ever get that motivated unless they think their religious dignity is being insulted or threatened. Obviously, people who think their religion calls on them to kill other people (even by killing themselves to accomplish it) value their religious beliefs incommensurably higher than they do lives (even their own). Fortunately not many Muslims (but still a horrifying number) sign up to strap on the explosives, but unfortunately, as Sam Harris reported in his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, an international Pew Research Center survey indicates that quite significant percentages of Muslims in many countries feel that it is acceptable to kill in "defense of Islam"—whatever that means1.

I don't have a copy of Harris's book to quote from, but I did find on the web a May 22, 2007 Pew Research Center report on Muslim Americans [2019: no longer available apparently]. The report appears to derive from later findings of the same Pew Global Attitudes Project that Harris cited. American Muslim responses to the question, "Can suicide bombing of civilian targets to defend Islam be justified? How often?" are compared with those of Muslims in some European, African, and Middle Eastern countries. The percentages of Muslims who responded:
    "Often/sometimes"     ["Rarely"]
U.S. (all Muslims):    8%    [5%]
    (younger than 30):    15%    [11%]
France:    16%    [19%]
Spain:    16%    [9%]
Great Britain:    15%    [9%]
Germany:    7%    [6%]
Nigeria:    46%    [23%]
Jordan:    29%    [28%]
Egypt:    28%    [25%]
Turkey:    17%    [9%]
Pakistan:    14%    [8%]
Indonesia:    10%    [18%] [pp. 59-60]
I quote the "rarely" answers [in brackets] because Harris added those figures to the "often/sometimes" answers to come up with the percentage who felt that suicide bombing to defend Islam could be justified at least in some circumstances. Thus, he might have said: In the United States, 26% of Muslims 18-29 feel that suicide bombing to defend Islam can be justified. Which is how USA Today reported it:
Poll: A quarter of younger Muslim Americans support suicide bombings in some circumstances
My point is that there seems to be a swell of opinion among Muslims that religion tops everything (as in mine versus yours [or your life]). So don't expect any protests of the Mumbai killings in Pakistan.
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  1. Were the Catholics from Europe "defending Christianity" when they punished or put to death the Aztecs who wouldn't convert?

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