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PERSECTION OF CHRISTIANS – No mass rallies? Raheel Raza and Zeenia Shah
In the past eight months, leading up from the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas, our streets have been engulfed with mass rallies calling Israel a human rights violator.
Ironically many of the protestors are not Palestinian or Arab but come from countries that have a proven track record of human rights violations.
For instance, Canadians of Pakistani heritage, many of whom were front and center at these protests forget to look at and protest against what is happening in their own homeland.
Officials from Pakistan confirmed in June 2024, that 77-year-old Nazir Masih, of Sargodha, had died of his injuries almost a week after he was lynched over accusations of blasphemy.
Masih, a member of Pakistan’s small Christian community, was accused of desecrating pages of the Holy Quran. In response, an angry mob of a few thousand men attacked him, and then looted and destroyed his home and business.
A similar incident took place less than a year ago in another Pakistani city, Jaranwala, where mobs destroyed hundreds of Christian homes and Churches after two residents were accused of committing blasphemy. Not long before that, there was another similar incident, and before that, another.
Although mob lynching is not unique to Pakistan, mob attacks over allegations of blasphemy have become a bizarre recurring phenomenon in the country, often targeting the country’s most vulnerable group, its religious minorities, who make up just 3 per cent of the country’s population.
Masih’s nephew, 38-year-old Kashif Anjum, who lives in Niagara Falls, Ontario, said “that this is the fifth attack of this nature in the area.” Other than a few videos that circulated online, these attacks rarely make the news, he said.
Days after Masih was lynched, a large group of Pakistani Christians gathered in front of the Pakistani consulate in Vaughan, demanding justice and protection for Pakistan’s religious minorities.
Anjum attended the event with the hope that Canadian Members of Parliament would take notice, as Masih’s remaining family is still in danger in Pakistan. Unfortunately, none attended or acknowledged the attack online, and despite being contacted, local news organizations did not include it in their coverage.
The Pakistani Christian community is used to being overlooked, which is a common experience for marginalized groups. Even efforts to prompt the mainstream media to report on Christian persecution in Pakistan have not yielded any results.
Canadian politicians with Pakistani heritage, who consistently speak out about Islamophobia (which they have a right to do so), rarely, if ever, address the almost daily attacks against Pakistan’s religious minorities. While intolerance towards religious minorities is deeply ingrained in Pakistani society and culture, Christians of Pakistani heritage, had hoped that in a diverse and tolerant country like Canada, their lives and perspectives would also matter. Unfortunately, the community feels completely shut out of every discussion and completely ignored.
Sunil Gulzar, Christian socio-political activist, Morning Star News, May 29, 2024, Pakistan writes: “Christian sanitation workers work long shifts even in extreme weather conditions…. these workers are often ridiculed and mistreated because of their Christian faith…. They often face salary delays and no job security. They are discriminated against even by their Muslim colleagues, and now we are witnessing incidents of physical violence against these weak people.”
In April a UN press release expressed alarm that Pakistani officials have done nothing to prevent the abductions and forced conversions of thousands of young religious minorities girls and women.
Approximately 1000 little Christian and Hindu girls are targeted for abduction every year in the country according to the release.
These forced marriages are often “validated by the courts, often invoking religious law to justify keeping victims with their abductors rather than allowing them to return them to their parents,” the release said.
“The experts emphasized that child, early, and forced marriage cannot be justified on religious or cultural grounds under international law when the victim is a child under the age of 18.”
These girls are subjected to unimaginable sexual abuse, forced to change their religion and are kept as sex slaves by Muslim captors and never see their families or the inside of a classroom again. Yet Pakistan, and Pakistanis globally, have taken very few, if any, measures to end this practice.
Just weeks after the UN press release a video of a male Uber driver in Toronto made rounds online. In the video, the driver tells his female passenger that if she was in Pakistan, he “could just kidnap her.” The woman laughs off the comment, but can be heard saying, “that’s not that flattering it’s kinda scary.”
For Pakistan’s minority community, a video showing someone making light of the abductions of girls in the streets of Toronto was a stark reminder of the widespread issue of targeted abductions. In the video, the driver says, “in Canada, I cannot touch you, there are laws,” highlighting the lack of protective laws for young minority girls and women in Pakistan.
The Pakistani Christian community in Canada expected reporters to link the press release with the video of the Uber driver, but once again, they were left disappointed.
In the past, the Pakistani Christian community in Canada has never felt neglected or overlooked, even in the absence of representatives in any area of government or journalism. The community firmly believed that Canadian institutions have consistently been just and inclusive of their voices. Unfortunately, the same can not be said about the current state of Canada which for them is starting to closely resemble that of Pakistan.
Raheel Raza is Director of Muslims Facing Tomorrow and Zeenia Shah is a freelance journalist who is a Christian from Pakistan
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