Witness to Faith, Pervaiz Masih

Maybe you've heard this story, but today it's news to me; anyway, it deserves much repeating. Most people, if faced with a gunman who seems intent on committing a horrible crime would either freeze or try to run away. How many of us would have the courage to die that we might save elite women of a society in which we are of the lowest ranks?

ISLAMABAD, Oct 21: The courage shown by two unsung heroes, including one who lost his life during the two suicide bombings in the International Islamic University (IIU), saved lives of hundreds of girl students in the institution’s cafeteria on Tuesday.

Pervez Masih, a 40-year-old Christian worker, saved scores of lives at the double-storey cafeteria, where around 400 female students were present at the time of the attack.

“There would have been dozens of deaths had the suicide bomber not been blocked by Pervez Masih,” said Saifur Rehman, a senior security official of the IIU.

The other hero, Mohammad Shaukat, survived the attack but he is fighting for his life on a bed in the surgical ward of Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, as a shot fired by the suicide bomber hit him in lower abdomen.

Narrating the scene of the suicide attack on the cafeteria for women, Shaukat told Dawn that: “The attacker clad in a black burka was heading towards the cafeteria for female students at a time when they were having their lunch. I felt something wrong as no girl student, even one who observes veil, wears a head-to-toe burka on the women campus. I intercepted the bomber, who shot me, and I fell down but Pervez, who witnessed the scene, understood the designs of suicide bomber and held him at the entrance of the dining hall where the blast took place.”

Organs and flesh of the suicide bomber littered the entrance area and Pervez was thrown at the wall on the other side of the dining hall, said another eye-witness.

Christian writer, Mark Earley, elaborates (HT: Vladtepes)

In late October, at Islamabad’s International Islamic University, an Islamic suicide bomber tried to attack the women’s side of campus. But there worked a lowly janitor, Pervaiz Masih, who like so many of the 2 percent Christian minority in this 95 percent Muslim country are relegated to the most menial jobs in society-garbage collectors, sewage workers, and servants.

The suicide bomber was making his way to a cafeteria of some 300 to 400 women students, when Masih came between him and his goal. Masih is a common name among the Christian minority-it means Messiah. And on October 20th, Masih certainly followed in the footsteps of Jesus, the true Messiah. He refused to let the bomber pass. In the process the bomb detonated, killing Masih, the bomber, and three girls nearby. Meanwhile, the 300 to 400 Muslim girls inside the cafeteria were unharmed.

In the midst of the rubble from the explosion lay two martyrs. A so-called Muslim “martyr” had maliciously murdered others. Meanwhile, a Christian martyr had laid down his life for his brethren. A Christian died to save Muslims from a fellow Muslim.

CNN reported Professor Fateh Muhammad Malik, a rector of the university, as saying that Pervez Masih “rose above the barriers of caste, creed and sectarian terrorism. Despite being a Christian, he sacrificed his life to save the Muslim girls.”

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that not “despite being a Christian” but because of being a Christian, Masih laid down his life.

As news cameras showed the garbage-strewn cemetery [see video here] where Masih is buried, I couldn’t help but think of God’s great reversals. A King born in a manger. A hero buried beneath garbage. And I couldn’t help thinking how one day this upside-down world would be turned on it its head at the second Advent, when Christ comes in glory.

In the meantime, pray for persecuted Christians in Pakistan who suffer under unjust blasphemy laws, and who as recently as this past July were murdered, beaten, and had their homes set on fire simply for bearing the name of Jesus.

Pray that Masih’s heroic actions will help many Pakistanis to see Christians in a different light. And pray that Islamic extremists would have their eyes opened to what it means to be a true martyr, that is, to give one’s life to save others, not to give one’s life to kill others.

Most people, I dare say, would be unable to make the split-second decision not to run away but instead to put one's life on the line for others, for women who probably never gave you a second's notice unless, perhaps, it was in caste-bound condescension. Most people couldn't make that important moral decision because in some important sense they are less free than the illiterate janitor with the name of "messiah".

Gil Bailie has put up a quote, from Hans Urs von Balthasar, which might throw some light on this event:

. . . from the true Christian there radiates the kind of freedom that is constantly only being sought after by the non-Christian. In modern times, the freedom of man is a theme which preoccupies both Christian and non-Christian, and a competition is in process as to who can understand this freedom more profoundly, who more effectively put it into practice.

Bailie adds:

One could argue that the failure to understand the true nature of freedom is at the heart of the contemporary crisis, and, moreover, that the very notion of the "true nature" of anything has been put into question by our confusions about freedom.

The Bloody Cost Of Willful Denial

Writing from a nation at war with itself, Pakistani blogger Nadeem F. Paracha's passionate post reminds us that the world is filled with souls at war with reality, and how tragically common it can be for the human mind to imprison itself within a cage of lies, binding itself into a slumber so deep that neither bullets, burnings nor bombs can successfully wake it from a living dream of willful denial.

A Nation Of Sleepwalkers:

...
Take for instance the recent case of a famous TV anchorman who visited a devastated area in Peshawar that was bombed by a remote-controlled car bomb. He talked to about 10 people at the scene. More than half of the folks interviewed spouted out those squarely unproven and thoroughly clichéd tirades about RAW/CIA/Mossad being the ‘real perpetrators’ and that ‘no Muslim is capable of inflicting such acts of barbarity.’
...
I felt bad for the few bystanders at that Peshawar bombing site who kept contradicting their more gung-ho contemporaries by reminding them that for months the shopkeepers where receiving threatening letters from the Taliban warning them that they should stop selling products for women and ban the entry of women in the area.

One shop-owner who said he lost more than millions of rupees worth of goods in the blast was slightly taken aback when the anchor asked him who he thought was behind the bomb attack. For a few seconds he looked curiously at the anchor’s face, as if wondering why would a major TV news channel be asking a question whose answer was so obvious. ‘What do you mean, who was responsible?’ he asked. ‘The Taliban, of course!’

Fasi Zaka wrote a scathing piece on the floozy response of some students who chanted slogans against the Kerry-Lugar Bill outside the freshly bombed Islamic University. He was battered with hate mail, even from those who did agree with him that it were the Taliban who bombed the unfortunate university. But these folks turned out to be even worse than the deniers. They are apologists of all the mayhem that takes place in the name of Islam in this country.

Every time the barbarians set themselves off taking innocent men, women, and children with them, these apologists suddenly emerge to write letters to newspapers and try to dominate internet forums explaining the intricate ‘socio-economic problems’ that are turning men into terrorists.

Saturday Night Stirrings

A sobering shower of grey stories, fallen from the margins of headline news, for late-night contemplation on a wet autumn evening.

Generation Of Ingrates: Shocking statistics from the UK, with the infuriating revelation that Britain's war memorials are being increasingly desecrated by thieves and vandals at the rate of more than one a week:

Most of the vandals are never caught, and those who are face little deterrent. Offenders found guilty of criminal damage under £5,000 can only be dealt with in a magistrates' court, where the maximum sentence is six months' jail.
MPs and military campaigners yesterday voiced disgust at the trend and expressed concern that the incidence of desecration is growing when British soldiers are fighting and dying on the front line in Afghanistan.
The figures have been compiled by the Tories. Defence spokesman Dr Liam Fox said: 'At a time when we are honouring those who have sacrificed themselves for our security, this sick and despicable trend is a miserable commentary on contemporary Britain.'

Islamists' War On Women: While US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was visiting Pakistan in late October, a car bomb targeting Peshawar's women erupted in the Mina Bazaar, a market selling wedding dresses, toys and food to the poorer residents of the northern city. Over 100 people were killed, of which at least 60 were women and their children.

This grim figure is double that of the death toll from a car bomb driven by an islamist through Peshawar's busy Khyber Bazaar in early October. 49 people were killed and over a hundred wounded when explosives diabolically laced with bearings and shells erupted next to a bus filled with women and children.

In reading the regional media we can see how the scale of the islamists' attacks may change, but the hatred towards the intented targets remains the same.

Two girls' school were bombed last week in Pakistan's Khyber Agency; it's startling to learn how common such horrors have now become:

Militants have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in the northwest of the country in recent years.
Nearly 200 schools were destroyed in the Swat valley alone during a two-year Taliban uprising to enforce sharia law in the district.

On Wednesday, two women teachers driving home from school were dragged from their car and sprayed with machine gun fire in the Bajaur Agency, in the northwestern corner of the FATA, Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

Earlier Saturday, "suspected militants" threw a grenade into a girls' school in a Quetta suburb, injuring two teachers and an 8-year old student.

Grenade and bomb explosions and drive-by shootings are fairly frequent in impoverished Baluchistan province, which is gripped by an insurgency.

16 bodies are still missing from the forementioned late October Peshawar market bombing. It takes a strong heart to read through recent accounts of loved ones still holding out hope that they might recover the remains of their missing families. It is feared that the massive fire unleashed in the crowded marketplace as a result of the bombing has probably burned the missing bodies to unrecognizeable ashes.

"Finding the dead bodies of these missing people is equal to impossible", says a Peshawar public official. Finding a way to understand the depth of the evil triggering these innumerable cruelties seems equally impossible.

Monday Fallout

Grey skies to greet grey stories fallen from the headlines on a wet Monday morning.

Stolen Innocence: Tragic story of South African Girls as young as 11 being abducted by relatives and condemned to lives little better than sex slaves, in a tribal custom known as "ukuthwalwa" (translated as "to be carried"). One rescued young lady talks about her ordeal, began when an aunt and her own brother arranged for her to be traded to a 42-year old man for some cows:

Nangamso Gezana, 15, says she was abducted in May in Lusikisiki and taken to Rustenburg, where she and her new husband lived in a shack for one month.
"I don't know how many times I thought of killing myself," she says.
"I was like a slave, cooking and cleaning for a man I did not even want. A man who did bad things to me and would not stop even when I cried.
"I think that men are evil."
...
Ms Sinama says she knew she had to leave when she learned that her husband was suffering from HIV.
"I saw his medical certificate in the house, it was written HIV positive. I knew that if I stayed I would get sick and die," she says.

From Morocco's "Little Maid" custom in North Africa, to this tribal custom in South Africa, the scourge of slavery is alive and well across the African continent. And the rest of the world, even the US. One estimate puts the number of slaves in our "enlightened" modern era at 27 million trapped souls. One of the militant atheists' criticisms of the Bible that I can't resolve is why there is so little to say in there about ending the evil of slavery; it's as if the Lord presumes we are such a wicked species that we will never do what it takes to fully stop the vile practice anyway..? Murder and theft are condemned so specifically, but not a crime that murders faith and robs humans so deeply of their humanity? At best the only explanation I can arrive at is that slavery survives as a reminder of our fallability, a reminder that the practice of serving man as god leads only to slavery, whereas it is man serving God that leads to liberty.

Meanwhile, slavery persists, rising in civilization's shadows century after century in direct proportion to the illusion we amuse ourselves with, that we've finally put an end to it. Shame on us all.

The Art Of Biography: UK Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer reports on biographer Richard Thorpe's suggestion that biography itself, as a literary subject, may be about to exhaust itself:

Mr Thorpe talked in his lecture about biography as we know it being a 20th-century phenomenon. Before that there was the "stained glass window", or reverentially monumental, approach of the Victorians; though when J A Froude tried to be monumental and reverential to Carlyle he found himself savaged by Carlyle's family and friends for having dared to cast aspersions on the relationship between the Sage and his wife, Jane.

That all changed with Lytton Strachey, and Eminent Victorians in 1918, where warts-and-all really came into its own. Now, a biography without a decent measure of salaciousness is hardly wanted on the voyage. No secret is too dark to expose; no biography can be considered serious, indeed, unless it is exposed. We have certainly had a golden age of the genre; but how long it will continue is anyone's guess. Books on themes, phenomena, abstracts are all the rage now.

The trouble for those who do persist with biography is this: that the detailed dismemberment of a person and his or her reputation that is now expected by the reading public can make the very task of biography
unpalatable for the writer. It is very, very hard to write a life even of someone one admires. To write one about someone one loathes must be appalling. When Philip Ziegler wrote his superb life of Mountbatten he had to put a notice on his writing-desk that read: "Remember, when all is said and done, he was a great man".

Intolerant Pakistan: Shabaz Bhatti, Pakistan's first Christian Minorities Minister, delivered a candid address last week to the annual conference of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a UK-based charity that supports the persecuted church worldwide and has long campaigned for Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to be repealed. He pledges an attempt to curtail Pakistan's notorious anti-Christian violence and persecution against minorities in general:

Shabaz Bhatti told hundreds of Christians in London on Saturday that the Pakistani government was ready to review the notorious blasphemy law that is routinely misused by Islamic extremists to attack and imprison Christians.
He acknowledged that Christians were being attacked, imprisoned and killed under the pretext of committing blasphemy and that the blasphemy charges being brought against Christians were false.
The blasphemy laws, he continued, had created intolerance, disharmony and a “sense of insecurity” among minorities.
...
“The blasphemy laws have remained a tool in the hands of extremists to victimise minorities and innocent Muslims in Pakistan,” said Mr Bhatti... In the wake of the recent attacks in Gojra and Korian, which left eight Christians dead, he said the government was determined not to allow any more innocent Christians to be victimised.
...
Mr Bhatti: “In many cases of violence, it is not only the law which is creating disharmony. It is the mindset of the people who take advantage of the law and the situation and they instigate and incite the people to kill the Christians, the minorities and the innocent people so we need to work to change the mindset of the people and through these intiatives and others we can bring a change in their mindset.”

Friday Fare

As the gate swings shut on another week, we pause for some news before strolling into a pleasant weekend.

Unaware: Jonah Goldberg on President Obama's "shortcuts" comment from this week's press conference, about Churchill not using torture. "Churchill and Great Britain didn't quite take the firm stand against 'torture' that Obama and [Andrew] Sullivan suggest."

Unwelcome: Polish minister plans to extend law prohibiting the production of fascist and totalitarian propaganda so that it includes clothing and anything else that could carry an image related to an authoritarian system.

"The proposal, which could see the faces of some of the leading lights of communist history such as Lenin and Trotsky removed from t-shirts and flags, reflects a Polish view on communism far different from the rose-tinted and romantic images often found in the West.
After experiencing 40 hard years of communism, as well as the horrors of Nazi occupation, few Poles have qualms equating under law the inequities of Nazism and communism.
"Communism was a terrible, murderous system that claimed millions of lives," said Professor Wojciech Roszkowski, a leading Polish historian and member of the European parliament.
"It was very similar to National Socialism, and there is no reason to treat those two systems, and their symbols, differently. Their glorification should be prohibited.' "

Uncivilized: Media reform, taliban-style. "Any media personnel engaged in ‘anti-Taliban’ and ‘pro-western’ agendas will face dire consequences, according to the militants. After bombing schools, barbershops and CD stores — not to mention flogging and killing civilians — the Taliban have now announced their intention to ‘reform’ the media and make it ‘mend its ways’...
‘It is the duty of the media to give space and time to statements which have a positive impact on society.’ "

Unshackled: Students in 3 Washington state schools raise tens of thousands of dollars to free 120 slaves from bondage, through the International Justice Mission.

The teens in this well-to-do suburban area have learned about families working in brick kilns in India and brothels in Cambodia where children their own age — and even younger — are sold into slavery.
"I count my blessings, because they're in such a bad place," said eighth-grader Nellie Hoehl, one of Ensey's students at Pine Lake Middle School.
...
For 10 weeks this spring, about 50 students arrived at school early each Wednesday to paint signs, write letters, sell concert tickets and plan collection dates to raise money for the IJM. That work is going on right now, and ends May 14.
"Everybody talks about it, even when it's not fundraising time," said eighth-grader Angela Moran.
...
It's even changed the way they think about money when they go shopping.
"Every time I go to buy something," said eighth-grader Casey Kovarik, "I think there's something better I could do with the money."

Covenanting with all the victims of the Jihad and of those who aid and abet Jihad through anti-US posturing

I've been spending the morning reading some of the news and opinion on the murder of Benazir Bhutto. And now I have to run out the door, without time to say more to announce our weekly Thursday Covenant Zone meeting, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee. Look for the guys in the blue scarves if you want to join us and discuss how Canada and the West can protect its covenants and freedoms from the threat of Jihadist violence. And how can we grow our covenants to bring more of humanity into the modern world? I am reminded, as I review some of Stanley Kurtz's essays on Pakistan, how much this is a problem not simply of Islam but of Islam as it buttresses a particular form of kinship and tribal society:

What D’Souza can’t see is that, far more than America’s secular Left, it is the distinctive nature of Islam itself, and of Middle Eastern social life generally, that forces this all-or-nothing choice. A non-creedal religion whose jurisdiction extends to vast areas of social life; a communal religious identity that punishes disloyalty with death; and a marriage system that generates (and harshly polices) a pervasive ethos of in-group solidarity: these are the real sources of the all-or-nothing choice between Muslim tradition and modernity. This is why the current alternatives in the Muslim world sometimes seem to be boiling down to an untenable choice between Iranian theocracy, on the one hand, and Turkish secularism, on the other.

If we want to change any of this, it will be impossible to restrict ourselves to the study of religious Islam. The “self-sealing” character of Islam is part and parcel of a broader and more deeply rooted social pattern. And parallel-cousin marriage is more than just an interesting but minor illustration of that broader theme. If there’s a “self-sealing” tendency in Muslim social life, cousin marriage is the velcro. In contemporary Europe, perhaps even more than in the Middle East, cousin marriage is at the core of a complex of factors blocking assimilation and driving the war on terror.