Religious tolerance in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Islamic world

Nick Cohen in The Guardian has written an excellent piece entitled 'The Pakistan killings are not about blasphemy

Western liberals are happy to denounce white extremists, while covering up militant Islam with a blanket of political correctness'

Do go and read the whole piece, as is so often the case with Nick 'not Jewish despite the surname' Cohen he makes a lot of sense and is not scared of breaking the left-wing taboo of not criticising Islam. Here's how Nick Cohen ends his piece:

'The difference between Islamism and the rest is that liberals are happy to denounce white extremists, while covering up militant Islam with the wet blanket of political correctness. They do not confine themselves to saying that, of course, society must protect people from being murdered for their religion, as Slobodan Milosevic murdered the Bosnian Muslims, and punish employers who refuse jobs to members of creeds they dislike, as Protestant employers in Northern Ireland once refused to hire Catholics. They maintain it is illicit to criticise religious ideas. Thus, along with the admittedly faint fear of violence, western writers who want to provide arguments against religious misogyny, homophobia, racism and censorship must also live with the fear that their contemporaries will accuse them of orientalism or Islamophobia.

The world may pay a price for the monumental blunder of treating religious ideologies – which are beliefs that men and women ought to be free to accept or reject – as if they were ethnicities, which no man or woman can change. Not the smallest reason why the Arab revolution is such an optimistic event is that al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood have been left as gawping bystanders. Their isolation cannot last. Eventually, if Arab states move towards democracy, there will be a confrontation with political Islam. Arab liberals, like Pakistani liberals, will search the net for guidance. They will discover that far from offering strategies that might help, timorous western liberals have convinced themselves that it is "racist" to criticise raging fanatics who no longer even bother to pretend that they are anything other than liberalism's mortal enemies.'

How could anyone disagree?

Well some Guardian readers obviously think differently to me, here's one comment:

'IndianMuslim25

6 March 2011 1:06PM

Asking Pakistanis to focus on the blasphemy law is asking a rape victim to please mind not littering the street or making a noise while she's been done over. For obvious reasons, most won't go near the subject especially when religion has been dragged (intentionally, in my view) into this whole 'war on terror'.

Pakistan is being raped by the Americans and also by the religious right. But the religious right has been fostered and fed by American money, and it also a reaction to the continual violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and the murder of her citizens.

If the West so casually ignores these mass killings, why expect Pakistanis to focus on a few victims of the blasphemy law?'