Sentenced to Death for Thinking

In Pakistan, a woman named Asia Bibi was sentenced to death after allegations were made that she was “denigrating the Prophet Muhammad,” according to news media.

The allegations were reported to authorities five years after the ostensible incident, evidence was scant, and the narratives of the purported witnesses were weak and not too consistent.

Such scenarios are not uncommon where Islam prevails. Aged fifty, Asia Bibi is the mother of five, and was sent to

death row for allegedly denigrating the Prophet Muhammad during an argument with a Muslim colleague over a cup of water. Her lawyer argued that lower courts wrongly overlooked the five-day delay between the incident and the police report filed by a local imam, who wasn’t present at the argument.

Pakistan is exemplary of many Islamic republics, which routinely sentence people to death for ‘blasphemy’ - but the definition of that word is stretched very thin. Mere accusations often suffice for conviction. The possession of a New Testament book, or attendance at any non-Muslim religious gathering, can easily be interpreted as ‘blasphemous.’

Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and others are executed, imprisoned, or beaten for the simple fact that they are not Muslims.

These people are, in effect, punished for thinking.

In the case of Asia Bibi, diplomatic pressure from Europe and North America may yet have an effect. The Pakistani supreme court may hear an appeal of her conviction. Perhaps she will be allowed to live.

Collaborating in the Ukrainian Genocide: Holodomor

In one of the more horrific aspects of Stalin’s mass murders, he discovered that the easiest way to kill millions of people was to simply starve them. Soviet soldiers set fire to fields and barns, slaughtered animals, and then left the area.

The farmers died by painful starvation.

One of the areas in which Stalin applied this technique was in the Ukraine. Some regions of that country expressed hesitation about the Soviet-Communist plan for collectivization.

Ievgen Vorobiov writes about Grigoriy Petrovskiy, a Ukrainian who actually aided Soviets in their mass murder. Far from protesting Stalin’s deadly communism, he carried out Stalin’s killing schemes:

Petrovskiy is notorious for having abetted the Soviet policy of Holodomor: forced requisition of food from Ukrainian peasants that resulted in mass starvation and the deaths of an estimated 3 to 5 million Ukrainians in 1932-1933. Even as a quarter of the Dnipropetrovsk region’s population was wiped out by the artificial famine, Petrovskiy proclaimed triumphantly in September 1933 that “the collective farm system has finally defeated all its enemies.”

Nearly a century after the fact, historians have discovered the full extent of the atrocities, details of which were kept partly secret until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Most Ukrainians (as well as at least 17 countries) recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.

The USSR had help, not only from the traitor Petrovskiy who turned against his own people, but also from an American: Walter Duranty.

A reporter for the New York Times, Duranty aided Stalin by suppressing details of the millions of deaths. Instead, Duranty reported that Stalin’s communist collectivist program was a success, and that the ordinary people were benefitting from it.

Why did Duranty lie? Why did he willing aid the century’s most prolific murderer? Either Duranty received payment from Stalin, or he was ideologically sympathetic to Stalin’s cause.