Asif Mohiuddin, 29, (pictured here) was viscously attacked late at night as he was leaving work by a group of unidentified men who waited for him then jumped and stabbed him repeatedly.
Why would anybody do this? Well, Asif is a well-known atheist blogger in Bangladesh where he runs a Bengali blog titled “Almighty only in name, but impotent in reality,” – in fact, it is one of Bangladesh’s most visited websites.
Not only is this attack outrageous, but so also are the Headlines in the local media. There they are referring to him as a “militant atheist blogger,”. One obvious question leaps out …
- What exactly is “militant” about blogging?
This is not a guy who roamed the streets with a knife seeking to murder, nor was he plotting any violence, nor did he incite hatred, he simply blogged criticism of a batty belief that has churned out a constant flow of clueless violent thugs. He was not even criticising specific individuals, just an idea. Whoever wrote that article there has deployed the word “militant” against the wrong people. That story also reports ...
“The nature of the cuts proved that the attackers wanted to murder him,” Saha said, adding that friends of Mohiuddin who were with him at the time of the attack blamed Islamic “fundamentalists”.
Local police chief Rezaul Islam confirmed the attack but did not comment on the motive.
“The attackers were lurking near his office. He was attacked as he was about to enter the office. Passers-by rushed him to a hospital,” Islam told AFP, adding police were investigating the motive.
Mohiuddin’s blog http://www.somewhereinblog.net/blog/realAsifM has been one of the most visited webpages in Bangladesh and is known for its tirade against religions in one of the most conservative parts of the world.
His blog’s title page called the god “Almighty only in name but impotent in reality”.
In July last year, he ridiculed Muslims and the Koran in a satirical piece on “the mass conversion of supermen to Islam”. Ninety percent of Bangladesh’s 153 million people are Muslims and Islam is the state religion.
Several other prominent Bangladeshi writers have also been attacked in recent years for their stand against Islam and Islamic groups.
Some have responded and claimed, “He also wrote strongly against hinduism.So how can you tell that his attackers were Muslim fundamentalists? They could have been hindu fundamentalists.“. The rebuttal to that daft claim is that within Bangladesh, there has not been a single attack on anyone by the Hindu Extremist, yet in stark contrast there have been almost daily attacks by Islamic lunatics against anybody and everybody who is not aligned with their fanatical lunacy.
Do not take away the wrong impression here, Islam, like most belief systems is vast and diverse, and while many within the culture believe some weird and strange things, they embrace it in a harmless way and would never lift a finger to cause harm to others. However, there are strands of Islamic thought that breed a constant stream of violent thugs, and reaches out into many places manifesting itself in many vile ways, giving a cloak of legitimacy to misogyny, homophobia, violence, stoning and murder. Those who can truly embrace a variation of Islamic thought that enables them to justify any of that can be summed up with just one simple word – evil.
Not so sure about that? Well remember that they attempted to murder Asif simply because he criticised their crazy beliefs.
Thanks for the post. I’m out of the prison after 3 months now on bail, after physical and mental torture. I was arrested because few religious fundamentalist parties demanded my arrest and death penalty for criticizing religion. Anyways, take care…