theguardian: Andrew Brown’s blog –
The proper response, as to almost all catastrophes, is immediate unstinting humanitarian aid, and a sober recognition that there are many bad things we can’t as a matter of fact do much about. It calls for action. When you can’t act – and there is essentially nothing that we or even our government can do to help fight the terrorists in Pakistan.
An article in the Times today asks why there isn’t anger (paywalled link)about the massacre of Christians in Peshawar. Pakistan’s Express Tribune talks of “collective outrage” while the Washington Post talks of the Church of Pakistan receiving “calls of outrage from religious leaders from across the globe”. The implication, particularly in the Times piece, that there ought to be outrage is clear. But when you think about it, outrage is an almost wholly pointless and destructive emotion and the world would be better with much less of it.
The murder of 80 or more Christians, men women, and children, some of them queueing for food, is a completely horrible crime. It is not remotely excused by the drone campaign against Islamists in the mountains. It’s not diminished by the comparable atrocities committed by Islamists against other minorities in Pakistan, Shia and Ahmadiyya Muslims. Those have passed with even less mention in the western press, although one detail of the campaign against the Shia was in a way more shocking even than the use of suicide bombers against church congregations: at one stage the Sunni extremists were deliberately assassinating Shia doctors on the grounds that to kill a doctor is also to kill many of the patients she would otherwise have saved.
