freeinfidel

Humanity, law and democracy are poor protection against religiously inspired murder. But they are the only means available to us that offer some measure of safety while allowing us to call ourselves civilised.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the mass-killing of her supporters is the latest in a depressingly long list of faith-fuelled murders. It’s likely the suicide bomber was a Taleban-supported muslim extremist. Such fanatics see the possibility of democracy, even one as flawed as Pakistan’s, as a threat to their goals - that of imposing their bizarre, archaic and oppressive religious views on the rest of the world.

It’s too soon to know what the response will be. Civil war is one possibility. The imposition of yet more Draconian measures by Pakistan’s leader, President Pervez Musharraf, might be on the cards. As a key supporter of the ludicrous War on Terror - which is actually a war on civil rights - he has proved himself only too willing to swap the liberties of Pakistanis for power and control.

Bhutto was no saint. But as one blogger has pointed out:

“The people who killed her would willingly kill all of us - all women who dare to uncover their heads, to speak in public, to have ideas of our own. They want nothing less than a theocracy in Pakistan.”

Outside Pakistan, there are those who may want to capitalise on this, to remove more of our civil liberties for our own ‘protection’. These acts fuel a vicious spiral of savagery and opportunism, driven by irreconcilable ideologies. You cannot solve this by bombing, by waterboarding and extraordinary rendition, by surveillance and incarceration without trial.

We need to deploy our greatest asset as highly evolved animals - our intellect. We need to encourage (not impose) the spread of democracy. We need to support the raising of living standards, to fight the most powerful recruiter for religious fundamentalism and extremism - poverty. We need laws and individual rights to safeguard personal freedoms and remove some of the other key motivations for extremism - the sense of disenfranchisement and victimisation.

What’s required now, above all, is rationality. We can only hope that, as religion continues to dwindle, as medieval ideas give way to modern understanding - of our world and each other - we will see less of this faith-inspired butchery. In the meantime, in Pakistan, we can only hope that sense prevails.

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