Assassination underscores religious intolerance in Pakistan … News of the assassination came to Rev. Majed El Shafie at 3 a.m. Wednesday morning in Toronto. That was when Peter Bhatti, a fellow Christian living in Canada, called to say that his brother, Shahbaz Bhatti, had been killed in Islamabad. Peter Bhatti was "brokenhearted," Mr. El Shafie recalled in an interview. "He called me to get the rest of his family to Canada from Pakistan. He was like, ‘I beg you, just help me get them out of Pakistan.'" Shaken by the overseas death of his long-time friend, the clergyman added: "How much more blood until people wake up about freedom of religion in Pakistan?" – Globe and Mail
Dominant Social Theme: Why can't the East be more like the West?
Free-Market Analysis: The assassination of the Christian Minister for Minorities in Pakistan, Shahbaz Bhatti is a tragedy on a number of levels. The mainstream media has explained the tragedy rather well (see excerpt above) emphasizing the horrors or intolerance and Islamic fundamentalism. But in this article we want to examine the idea that the whole story has NOT been told and that institutionalized intolerance is often seeded and cultivated by the Anglosphere as part of a larger divide-and-conquer strategy. In Pakistan and generally throughout the Middle East we would argue that this is so.
There is no doubt the shooting of Bhatti is a shocking and tragic event. It was also a bold one. He was shot by masked gunmen in broad daylight, according to the Globe and Mail Report, after visiting his mother in Islamabad. "The assassination is yet another sign of Muslim-majority Pakistan's slide into fundamentalism and anarchy," the Globe and Mail observes, and indeed it is.
Of course, Bhatti was a target in Pakistan, which has grown increasingly intolerant of outside religions other than Islam (presumably Sunni Islam). And Bhatti may have made himself more of a target with what the Globe and Mail calls his (outspoken) contempt for Islamist extremism. "He openly campaigned against sharia law, and had spoken out against a 25-year-old blasphemy law that he felt singled out non-Muslims in Pakistan. Such pronouncements, he frequently acknowledged, made him a marked man. In fact, he prepared several videotaped messages to be broadcast in the event of his death." Here's some more from the article:
"The forces of violence, militant banned organizations – the Taliban and al-Qaeda – they want to impose their radical philosophy in Pakistan," he said in one. "I'm ready to die for a cause. … I would prefer to die for my principles, and for the justice of my community, rather than to compromise on these threats." Canada's Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, was particularly affected by the death of Mr. Bhatti, whom he considered a friend. "I was struck by how resigned he was about his expected martyrdom," Mr. Kenney said in a statement. "He told me that he would not marry, because he did not want to leave a widow or orphans behind when that time came." …
Mr. El Shafie, who hails from Egypt's persecuted Christian minority, had worked on several other projects with the Bhatti brothers over the years. (Peter Bhatti was en route to Pakistan Wednesday to mourn his brother.) "I knew Shahbaz for the last six years. We worked together in many, many ways. He was like a brother," Mr. El Shafie said. "He believed in what he was doing and he died for what he believed." … Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban are apparently claiming responsibility for Mr. Bhatti's death.
What occurs to us however is that if one tracks the genesis of the current rising extremism, it begins to look less like a homegrown exercise and more like a program of deliberate Anglo-American power elite provocation. This conclusion can be reached if one accepts the generally held perspective that Saudi Arabia – an Anglo-America client state – has been in the business of exporting Wahhabi fundamentalism for a number of decades. It is Saudi Arabia in particular that has helped fund various fundamentalist Sunni movements including the Madrassas in Pakistan and the Al Shabob regime change in Somalia.
It is well known by now that the CIA assisted in shaping the initial presence of Al Quaeda in Afghanistan to oppose the Russians. The Taliban, radicalized Pashtun warriors, were in many cases educated in Saudi-Arabia funded Madrassas. Everywhere one looks there is considerable funding (via Saudi Arabia of course) that supports Islamic fundamentalism and extremism. Supposedly, the Saudis have spent close to US$90 billion prosletyzing for Wahhabism throughout the Islamic world in the past 20 years. it beggars common sense to believe however that if the US were disconcerted by this spending that the Saudis would continue it.
We have spent considerable time recently explaining how we believe the current Western-initiated wave of regime change sweeping the Middle East may replace "strong man rule" with Islamic republics. The idea, always, is to polarize religious ideologies in order to create tension between East and West. Anglosphere money power then exploits this via military actions and by imposing further authoritarian mechanisms on its own citizens.
In the era of the Internet there is perhaps considerably more awareness of this sort of manipulation than in past eras. Daily India for instance yesterday carried a remarkable speculation about the assassination entitled "RAW, MOSSAD or CIA could be behind Pak minister's assassination." The report was derived from a Pakistani publication, the Nation. The Daily India news brief summarized the Nation's perspective, reporting that a "foreign hand" could have furthered the assassination.
The report acknowledges that the assassination has been claimed by the Tehrik-e-Taliban-Pakistan, which has apparently been behind a string of terrorist attacks in the country. But it then points that "Links between foreign intelligence agencies like RAW, MOSSAD and CIA and militants have been suspected. RAW [Indian intel] is even known for having provided financial and military support to spread violence in Pakistan," it added.
What would be the justification for such attacks? According to Daily India, the Nation speculated that it was "pretty much apparent" that those who carried out the assassination "would have in mind the consequences for our image abroad and the anxiety it would create within the religious minorities."
The paper also apparently made the claim, according to "well-informed sources", that the Obama administration "deployed over 400 pro-India and pro-Israel CIA agents in Islamabad, Quetta, Peshawar, Lahore and Karachi, the country's biggest cities." It added that these individuals came from private security companies like LLC, Xe services or Blackwater and that leading Indian and Israeli tycoons have been "secretly and heavily funding such companies to carry out clandestine operations in the Middle East, Asia and Africa as per their interests."
This sort of paranoia – justified or not – is reinforced by current events, specifically the recent capture of a US diplomat, Raymond Davis, who shot and killed three Pakistani men and remains in a Pakistan jail. We reported on this recently in an article entitled "Unraveling of a Pakistan Scam" and quote part of a ZeroHedge.com article entitled "CIA Agent Caught Red-Handed Aiding Pakistani Terrorism?" The cut-line reads, "News that the American accused of killing two Pakistani men is a CIA contractor has intensified an already highly charged situation in Pakistan." You can see the article here:
https://thedailybell.com/1786/Unraveling-of-Pakistan-Scam.html
Fundamentalist zealotry, especially leading to murder, is always tragic. But what is even more tragic in our view is the inextricable involvement of the West in inciting these sorts of activities in furtherance of a divide and conquer strategy leading to further control of the developing world. Instead of helping these countries prosper, the Anglo-American power elite seems content to cultivate extremism as part of a larger program of destabilization and infiltration.
Whether such programs can continue to work in 21st century – when publications such as the Nation and Daily India speculate in real-time on these supposedly top secret machinations – is a question we regularly submit in these modest pages. This is perhaps the dilemma that the Anglo-American elite faces in the Internet era.