by
Les May
Asia Bibi
THERE’s
a pub in Slaithwaite, or ‘Slawit’ as the locals call it, by
the name of ‘The Silent Woman’. I imagine it has
done a roaring trade recently as all feminist journalists and
politicians hide there in case someone should chance to raise with
them the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who has fallen foul of
Pakistan’s draconian, but vague, blasphemy laws.
A
year ago the Twitterati were obsessing about the self
promoting #MeToo
movement; Harriet Harman was in full flow demanding anonymous ‘hot
lines’ so that supposed male miscreants could be ‘outed’ and
Clive Lewis was being
pilloried by MPs Stella
Creasy, Yvette Cooper, Jess Phillips, Mims Davies, Justine Greening
and Guardian journalist
Nadia Khomami,
about something he said,
which none of them actually witnessed. More
recently Boris Johnson was being accused of ‘Islamophobia’ for a
comment about some women
wearing burkas.
So
what have this self righteous bunch had to say about the Asia Bibi
case? Not a lot it would seem. Whilst they are keen to promote the
idea that western women are living in fear of walking down the street
in case some man wolf whistles at them, makes some tasteless remark
or just says something they don’t like, a poor Pakistani woman who
has just had her sentence overturned after eight years in
jail with the
prospect of death by
hanging to look forward to, has been abandoned to
her fate by
these supposed liberals.
If
anyone in this world is a victim it is Asia Bibi. She picked up a
drinking cup belonging to a Muslim woman and was accused of
‘polluting’ it simply by being a Christian woman and
hence ‘unclean’. An
argument followed and lead to her being accused of blasphemy. First
she was beaten up by a mob which broke into her house, then
she was charged with
blasphemy, found guilty and sentenced to death. This was upheld by a
higher court. Last week this sentence
was overturned by the
Pakistan Supreme Court which said the women who had made the
accusations against her were lying.
What
followed was that mobs demanding she be hanged rioted for several
days doing what has been claimed to be £900 million of damage.
Imran Khan, the prime
minister, struck a deal
with the rioters that she would no be allowed to leave the country
until the verdict had been ‘reviewed’. Forcing
her to stay in a country where tens of thousands of people want to
kill her is inhumane. Her
lawyer has left the country in fear of his life.
I
am normally very reluctant to resort to the word ‘racism’ to
describe someone’s attitudes or beliefs,
but I cannot help
noticing that Asia Bibi is a poor, brown, ‘asian’ woman and the
women who do the shouting about ‘misogyny’ are affluent, white
and western.
The
failure of these women to use their positions to draw the attention
of the British public to Asia
Bibi’s plight is
difficult to explain unless they simply do not care, don’t think it
will raise their profile in circles which will help them in their
career or are afraid that they will be accused of ‘Islamophobia’.
There
is one bit of good news. Heywood and Middleton MP Liz McInnes
has written to the
Minister of State, Mark Field, about this case
and asked
him to
encourage his colleagues at the Home Office to consider the religious
elements of this matter before making decisions on asylum.
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