Supreme Court hears the Ahmadi Supplementary Lists Petition

The Supreme Court of Pakistan's Bench No. 1 comprising the Honourable Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, Mr. Justice Gulzar Ahmad and Mr. Justice Azmat Saeed is hearing what is in this writer's opinion the most important case which covers the issue of citizenship rights as these interact with voting rights.

#REMOVEHATE REPEAL THE 2ND AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF PAKISTAN

Read this insightful blog over at Huffington Post and thought I'd share it with my readers.

Unless protestors #RemoveHate against all groups, they cannot #RemoveHate against any. That's why I always had trepidations about the Shiite sect becoming the next target -- the next Ahmadis if you will. Leading Pakistani analysts feel the same way.
So here is my unifying proposal for all Pakistani Muslims: redeem yourselves by starting a #RemoveHate Twitter campaign. You cannot change the discriminatory laws and you cannot change the school curricula -- at least not that easily. But why not, physically and literally, tear down the banners, whitewashing the graffiti and throw away the pamphlets that incite hatred or violence against any religious group?
Americans may argue to confront such hate speech with "more good speech." But here lies the rub: These banners actually incite violence by calling minorities "worthy of death" and leaving thousands dead.
These deaths -- or target killings -- are not happening in a vacuum. Just look at the anti-Ahmadi play book: First, the political arm of the Saudi funded Wahabi sect pigeonholes a minority sect as non-Muslims. This is followed by changing the public opinion and poisoning the public discourse, which manifests as hate filled banners and graffiti, and culminates into constitutional edicts and discriminatory laws.

Pakistan must undo the 1974's 2nd amendment to the constitution, the 1984 law i.e. Ord XX against Ahmadis and open up the office of the President and Prime Minister to all citizens of Pakistan as the bare minimum to save itself from dissolution and disintegration it faces today.

It can be our civil rights moment.

Pakistan's Ahmadis and the threat of genocide

LAHORE Jan 23, 2012: They are officially denounced by the state as heretics. Their places of worship are demolished.  Hardly a week goes by without one of them being murdered in cold blood.  Their children are expelled from schools. Even their dead are not spared. They are not allowed to bury their dead in a public cemetery and their special graveyards are desecrated by masked men.  The precipice at which the Ahmadis of Pakistan stand and the horrors that are likely to follow, however, are not unknown to the readers in the west, especially to the survivors of the Holocaust in Germany.

Pakistan and the global blasphemy law

The miscreants who attacked a Hindu temple in Karachi to prove their religious bona fides have been charged under Section 295-A of the Pakistan Penal Code. It is about time. Now let us also consider the state of that forced minority the faithful love to hate, i.e. the Ahmedis. Who is going to bell the cat and charge the passport offices of the country under Section 295-A for routinely abusing this community?

The state, with deliberate and malicious intent, through words written describes the founder of the Ahmaddiya Jamaat as an ‘imposter’ and a ‘liar’. The state must realise that it cannot have it both ways. It cannot declare an entire community non-Muslim and then deny them the protections that are granted to other religions. If Ahmedis constitute a religious minority, then its founder falls squarely within the ambit and scope of Section 295-A. Ahmedis may be considered non-Muslim, but does that mean they are to be considered non-citizens as well?

Do Ahmadis have a right to live in Pakistan?

http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20120831&page=8

n 25 August, 2012 former prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani attended the Khatm-e-Nabuwat Conference in Golra in Islamabad. Talking to reporters after the conference, the former prime minister said the mission of Pir Mehar Ali Shah, the patron saint of Golra, came to its fruition in 1974. It was a reference to the excommunication of Ahmadis by the Parliament. The community was declared nonMuslim through a constitutional amendment by the Pakistan People's Party government in 1974. The PPP views the amendment as a feather in its cap and many of its first rank leaders are known to proudly state that their party did Islam a favour.

Our varying standards of constitutional due process

A 42-year-old hardworking, honest teacher at a government school in Rabwah was brutally tortured by police. The injuries he sustained led to his untimely demise. His name was Abdul Qudoos. The irony is that this law-abiding citizen for God knows what reason was picked up as a suspect in a murder investigation but was never formally charged. In a blatant violation of the constitutional rights guaranteed to the citizens of Pakistan under Article 10 of the Constitution, which requires production before a magistrate within 24 hours of the arrest beyond which custody is unlawful, Qudoos was tortured for many days and only allowed to go after it looked like he was not going to survive. 

Persecution of Ahmadis in the Islamic Republic

The basic premise on which we won ourselves Pakistan was that a permanent majority cannot and should not dominate a permanent minority on account of numeric strength. Yet contrary to that founding logic, Pakistan is today legally a totalitarian fundamentalist theocracy

A fresh round of hate has been unleashed against the hapless Ahmediyya community once again. A young woman has been expelled from her university for daring to stand up to hate speech against her community on campus in Lahore. In Rawalpindi, ignorant and boorish mobs have been agitating to close down an Ahmedi ‘place of worship’ for being ‘unconstitutional’. In other words, practising their own faith in their own space is deemed unconstitutional by a mob that has probably never opened the constitution. All the while this community goes on praying and fasting for Pakistan, where a majority continues to persecute them for believing differently.