Secular Bangladeshi writer murdered in the street
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Source: CNN
Machete-wielding attackers struck in the capital of Bangladesh Wednesday night, killing 26-year-old secular writer Nazimuddin Samad.
Samad, described by Bangladesh police as a masters student at Jagannath University, is the sixth secularist writer or publisher to have been murdered in Dhaka in the last 16 months. Police called the murder a pre-planned attack.
"He was on his way back home from his evening classes when he was circled by a group of three to four people," Senior Assistant Police Commissioner Nurul Amin of the Dhaka Police, told CNN.
"First the attackers hacked Samad with machetes, then shot him."
Police say the attackers then fled the scene on motorcycle. No arrests have yet been made.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/07/asia/secular-bangladeshi-writer-murdered/index.html
mountain grammy
(26,598 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)This is becoming an epidemic. Is it organized or just random haters?
7962
(11,841 posts)of course the ID of the killers is still not known, but I'm betting they werent Hindu
TipTok
(2,474 posts)scioto99
(71 posts)Bangladesh is a majority Muslim country.
Islam, since its medieval origins, has preached that apostasy and blasphemy are terrible sins (often deserving of death, though scholarly opinions vary slightly).
Islam today can be compared to Christianity of the middle ages and beyond. (Remember: Joan of Arc; the prostestant/catholic conflagration that persisted into the Enlightenment, witches drowned or burnt or pressed to death in the New World colonies, a violent ideology that embraced Murdering the Different in the Name of God, etc)
Given that it's 2016, a few brave people chained within the Muslim-majority world are risking their lives to poke their heads out of the cave and say, "I am a free mind; I want to think for myself. I have a right to my own beliefs, no matter what the rich and powerful and machete-wielding murderers threaten me with."
They are getting the witches-in-Salem treatment.
This is not some weirdo isolated incident, and if you think it's just Bangladesh you haven't been paying attention.
Other examples which you are free to google:
At the largest mosque in Scotland, the imam (that's the high priest) recently sent out a screed praising the MURDERER of a Pakistani politiician who tried to soften Pakistan's blasphemy laws.
The Pew research poll that interviewed Muslims in lands across the world found that in many countries, the majority favor punishing free thinkers (that is, people who dare to say Islam is dumb, or atheism is cool, or Mohammed was nothing but the usual power-hungry Arab warlord).
In England, a Muslim man recently murdered an Ahmadi (minority Muslim sect) shopkeeper who dared to write "happy Easter to the Christians of my adopted country". He has proudly announced that he did it for Allah.
ISIS - and every other Islamist army in Syria - is eager to kill any non-Muslim, or any Muslim who doesn't obey their edicts.
Try expressing free thought in Aceh. Try being a Copt in Egypt. Try being a religious minority anywhere in the Muslim world. (Gosh, what did happen to the ancient heritage of Jews who made their homes across the Middle East? Where did they all go? And the Christians - why so many fewer today than there used to be?)
Saudi Arabia, of course, continues to hack the heads off anyone who publicly admits to non-belief. At least they're open about it.
The list goes on.
Please educate yourself.
In my view - in the view of every free person, I should hope - no one is braver than those few who stand up within a coercive, violent world to fight for freedom.
In some cases, it's religious freedom (think of the poor saps persecuted and murdered daily for atheism, Christianity, Judaism, Druze, or - most often - for simply being the wrong flavor of Muslim.)
In other cases, it's personal freedom (think of every British Pakistani girl who runs in terror from an arranged marriage. Did you know that the Brits have a whole police department devoted to preventing slave-marriages of daughters and sisters? Pakistanis and Bengalis make up by far the largest sector).
In some cases, it's intellectual/artistic freedom (think of The Satanic Verses and the Van Gogh murder and the death threats and murder attempts against every cartoonist who - gasp! - draws a picture of Big Mo, and every newspaper too chickenshit to publish those cartoons).
Muslims have been killing their own since the beginning - in other words, for about as long as the Christians did - but unlike the Christians, they haven't yet stopped. One problem is that Muslim sources note that Big Mo *himself* called for the murder of people who publicly mocked him. And as every young Muslim is taught: there is no holier example than Big Mo, seventh-century warlord of Arabia who conquered or killed everyone who wouldn't bow down to his army and his made-up god.
This isn't news. It's just news to you, because the Internet is now telling you about it.
AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)Except with better explosives.
AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)Religion.