My latest at PJ Media:
The New York Times generally ignores the global persecution of Christians, but a notable exception came Monday, when the Gray Lady published an article entitled “Sewer Cleaners Wanted in Pakistan: Only Christians Need Apply.” But the Times remains committed, like all of the establishment media, to ignoring or downplaying incidents of Islamic jihad and Sharia supremacism, and so it had to find a new culprit: discrimination against Christians in Pakistan, the Paper of Record would have us believe, is the fault not of the Muslim majority, but of another embattled minority: the nation’s Hindus.
“A recent spate of deaths among Christian sewer cleaners in Pakistan,” the article tells us, “underscores how the caste discrimination that once governed the Indian subcontinent’s Hindus lingers, no matter the religion.”
In a 2013 article for the Hudson Institute, former Pakistani Parliamentarian Farahnaz Ispahani noted that “at the time of partition in 1947, almost 23 percent of Pakistan’s population was comprised of non-Muslim citizens. Today, the proportion of non-Muslims has declined to approximately 3 percent.”
How likely is it that this tiny and rapidly dwindling minority exercises such an outsize cultural influence in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? The New York Times doesn’t ask, much less answer, this question, but simply asserts that even when the partition of India saw most of the subcontinent’s Hindus settle in India rather than in the new Muslim state of Pakistan, the Hindu caste system lingered on, albeit in a somewhat transmuted form: “But when the Indian subcontinent broke up in 1947 and Pakistan was formed as a homeland for the region’s Muslims, a new, informal system of discrimination formed. In Pakistan, Muslims sit at the top of the hierarchy.”
This new hierarchy, the Times claims, is the same as the old hierarchy. Referring to one of the sewer cleaners profiled in the piece, the article goes on to claim that Christians in Pakistan are relegated to cleaning sewers because that’s the work their Hindu forbears did….
There is much more. Read the rest here.