I'm not joking. Simon Jenkins - usually a fairly thoughtful journalist was clearly drugged or drunk when he wrote this:
The slaughter of Christians in Peshawar this weekend showed that wherever crowds gather they are vulnerable to any group with a brainwashed youth and a bomb. It might be sensible to discourage like-minded crowds from gathering in one place, be they co-religionists or party faithful or merely the wealthy.
I am at a loss for words. And Jenkins then makes is worse by saying we shouldn't build shopping malls because they might be a terrorist target. I'm assuming that Simon would also close football stadiums, large hotels, nightclubs, markets, mosques and beaches?
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1 comment:
Apart from the obvious fact that this is all about Islamism- nothing to do with western foreign policy, since Pakistani Christians are natives who have nothing whatsoever to do with the west and most Kenyan non-Muslims are either black or Asian- a lot of this is connected to the blasphemy "laws" that are in place. They are what should be dismantled.
For two reasons. (1) often, they are just used out of pure spite or to rid a village of people who are unpopular or having something other villagers covet, as in the Asia Bibi case (2) if they actually were blasphemers and insulted religion, I don't see why any sensible person would care, certainly not to the degree of getting the law involved.
Likewise in Russia, where the church's influence on legislation has been almost as bad. And this is why I became a secularist, and I've got no idea why secularism is a dirty word on both the "left" and "right".
Finally, it's of interest. How many people vaguely thought every African lives in a mud hut, reliant on big charity to keep them from death's door, and didn't even know there were shopping centres in Kenya? I want a world where people are safe to go to shopping centres wherever they are. And it seems to me that with secular liberalism- social and economic- that is a likely future.
Finally, Jenkins did start off promisingly enough by expressing his fears about a seurocratic reaction. That is another thing that needs to be said.
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