14-year-old unrepentant after Pakistan bombing

[nalnn]

Source: CBS News

His accomplices brought carnage to a Sufi shrine, but the 14-year-old suicide bomber who was captured after his explosives failed to detonate was unrepentant.

"Let me go, I want to be a martyr," he said as he was being led away, according to police officer Khalid Mahmood. "I want to send all you policemen to hell!"

The boy, identified as Fida Hussain, was arrested at the shrine in central Pakistan shortly after Sunday's twin suicide blasts, which killed 42 people and wounded 100 others. The complex close to Dera Ghazi Khan in central Pakistan was crowded with thousands of people attending an annual festival.

--SNIP--

The practice of visiting shrines is common among Muslims across South Asia, and those who do so insist they are not doing anything that contravenes Islamic law. The attacks on the complexes have caused anger, but many people — including educated, middle class Pakistanis, choose to believe in conspiracy theories that hold Americans or other non-Muslim, foreign powers responsible.

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/04/501364/main20050351.shtml?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.3

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emphasis mine:

How does one fight such ignorance?

[Democracyinkind]

1. Such ignorance is a fact of humanity - in Pakistan as well as the rest of the world.

Exchange the words "Pakistanis" "Americans" and "non-muslim" with any other words of the same class and the statement will remain true.

Truisms don't say that much about the world we live in, after all.

Which is not to say that the people behind these bombings don't deserve the worst.

[Ian David]

2. The same sorts of people who believe empty planes flew into the WTC which were then imploded.

There is always a subset of crazies who will do whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to make themselves believe that those who ARE responsible are the ones they WANT to be responsible.

Pakistan must have someone whose name translates to English as "Alex Jones."

[denverbill]

If you think it's ignorance to think Americans might be responsible, I beg to differ.

We've got Predator drones flying around that country dropping bombs every week on 'suspected terrorists'. I don't think it's all that ignorant to think that any explosion could be a Predator strike. It's human nature to want to point the finger at the foreigner rather than at your own people, especially when it fits a pattern of behavior. Virtually every American I know initially blamed Muslims or Arabs for the OKC bombing.

[nalnn]

4. These quoted are

supposedly 'Educated'. And while an educated person could surmise that it was an American attack, one would think that living in the society as divided as they do, it would be more logical to believe that another sect of their own countrymen did this rather than some foreign power.

[WatsonT]

6. I can tell the difference between a predator drone

and a suicide bomber.

Can't you?

Also for the OKC analogy to fit they would still need to believe that even after the authorities caught the person responsible.

[fujiyama]

8. Spare me the excuses

Pakistan has been propped up by the US, China, and Saudi Arabia for so many years. They're perhaps the largest beneficiary of military aid, following Israel (and maybe Egypt). With the amount of military and non military aid they receive the country could be prosperous, if it wanted to.

And note, the article mentions EDUCATED Pakistanis still believing these nonsensical conspiracy theories, not just poorer ones in the tribal areas where the drone attacks take place. The country is in denial, including its government - and it's unable and really unwilling to face the fact that it's biggest threat is not the US, but it's own crazies. Extremism is rampant and minorities have basically been killed, cowed into silence, or driven out of the country - and by minorities, I don't necessarily mean Christians or Hindus, but Muslim sects like Sufies and Shiites.

This suicide attack is just one more, in a long pattern of them by extremist groups. We hear of one almost every other week it seems like.

[bengalherder]

3. He's a 14-year-old kid

Our are implanted with different, more commercialistic imperatives, but they are still 14 years old.

Cults, no matter their flavor, like to get 14 year olds whether they are religious cults or consumeristic cults. You got at least five years or so of heavy lifting before they start thinking for themselves...if ever.

[Poll_Blind]

5. I'm reminded of some scenes in "The Killing Fields" where the little girl...

...becomes a mass murderer and is eventually found murdered, herself.

Children, as history and the present have taught us, make exceptionally strong-willed killers if trained as such. I recall reading that some of the fiercest fighters during the fall of Berlin were simply children, 14 or under, who had been trained their whole lives to die for Nazi Germany.

God, I can't get my head around humanity sometimes.

PB

[cosmicone]

7. Pakistan is a basket case. Unfortunately,

we throw money at the age old problems to continue the shenanigans of Pakistan. Left alone, it is economically not viable without handouts till time eternal.