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Nobel Laureate Wiped From Pakistan's Textbooks As Heretic

Posted by samzenpus on from the getting-erased dept.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Alexander Abad-Santos writes that in any other country, the late Dr. Abdus Salam would be a national hero: he's the Nobel laureate in physics who laid the groundwork for the biggest physics discovery in the past 30 years--the Higgs boson. But that isn't the case in Pakistan, where Salam has been wiped from textbooks and history for not being fundamentalist enough. 'He belonged to the Ahmadi sect, which has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants who view its members as heretics,' says Sebastian Abbot. 'His grand unification theory of strong, weak and electromagnetic fields opened the gateway for the discovery of bosons and laid down the basis for this quantum electrodynamics project,' writes Anam Khalid Alvi for Pakistan's Express Tribune. But Pakistan can't celebrate his achievements, since Ahmadis like Salam are and were prevented from 'posing as Muslims,' and can be punished with prison and even death. By contrast, fellow Pakistani physicist A.Q. Khan, who played a key role in developing the country's nuclear bomb and later confessed to spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is considered a national hero. Khan is a Muslim."

14 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. Ah don't worry... by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Remember, it's all fine, carry on. They keep saying it's a religion of peace and all that. Don't forget that they scrubbed "muslim" off his grave. And other muslims in the region are expected to go out of their way to persecute them.

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    Om, nomnomnom...
    1. Re:Ah don't worry... by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Insightful

      More people get killed by lightning in a couple of months than from terrorism in the last few years.

      Where is the war on lightning?

      Oh... you can't funnel money to corporate buddies if you have a war on lightning.

      This isn't about "terrorism". The routine killing, rape and subjugation of non-Muslims in muslim countries is "business as usual". Its only when they do something to Westerners that they say it is an "act of Terrorism" by a "tiny minority"

    2. Re:Ah don't worry... by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Google doesn't recognize him either. There's no doodle of him. But if you search for him on Bing, you find all the relevant info.

      I think this google search shows that there are lies, damn lies, and Microsoft fanboiism.

    3. Re:Ah don't worry... by nschubach · · Score: 4, Insightful

      https://www.google.com/webhp?q=Bing

      (Hit the I'm feeling lucky button if you like... if not, all your answers can be found via Google!)

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      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
    4. Re:Ah don't worry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, nice choice of source material. I'm sure that's entirely fair and well-considered.

      The important part is that, being in a shit-hole place with shit education where everyone has been miserably poor for centuries has much more to do with you being a violent scumbag than the particular batshit superstitions you subscribe to.

      Meanwhile, any muslim you meet in the states is almost certainly a non-violent person. At least on percentage with christians or atheists.

      But yeah, it's all insanity and we need to eradicate religion in all forms for the good of our species.

    5. Re:Ah don't worry... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      280 people killed in the last killed by muslim terrorists between June 23 and June 29th. 1173 people killed by muslim terrorists in June alone. 19,187 terrorist attacks by muslims since 9/11.

      This from an anti-Muslim hate site. No supporting citations to their numbers, but they promise to "supply sources upon request". Instead of each item linking to some citation, they link to other pages on the anti-Muslim hate site that says the exact same thing as the item.

      Did you know that I'm the Emperor Napoleon? I can supply proof upon request. Instructions on how to request that proof can be found at http:\\morequestionsthananswers.con.

      There are plenty of reasons to be oppose violent Muslim extremists without having to resort to that kind of baloney. If you were really trying to make a valid point in good faith, Mashiki, you could have done so. Instead, you expose only yourself.

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      You are welcome on my lawn.
    6. Re:Ah don't worry... by sneakyimp · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Allah is not the only god in whose name atrocities have been committed and the Koran is not the only poorly written, poorly translated, self-contradictory book purportedly containing the One True God's Word that has been used to justify atrocities. I would agree that religions are usually silly and find it laughable that someone might single out Islam as the silliest one. Christianity -- with so much lip service given to peace and forgiveness -- is every bit as silly. Anyone remember the Crusades?

    7. Re:Ah don't worry... by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It'd be interesting to know how many of the people killed were Muslims themselves. I'd guess a majority in any year. If a bomber blows up a couple dozen police recruits in an Iraqi city, we chalk those up as deaths due to Islamic terrorism, which strictly speaking they are, but they could just as easily chalked up a civil war deaths.

      There are 2.6 million Muslims in the US. That's a lot of people. If, say, 10% were what our media like to call "jihadis", that'd be 260,000 people living here who want to kill us because we're not Muslims. If 1% of those jihadis made at least one attempt each year, that'd be at least 2,600 domestic Islamic terror attacks. It'd be easy for them too. They live here, they know our weaknesses, often can pass as non-muslim if need be -- that's not counting their recent converts of European ancestry (we know converts are usually among the most zealous in any religion). They don't need Al Qaeda to teach them how to make bombs when they have the Internet.

      So how many people in the US have been killed since 9/11 by this fifth column? So far as I can see, none. If Muslim==terrorist, there should be thousands of people killed every year here. Probably tens of thousands killed a year. Why isn't anyone keeping track?

      How low does suspicion have to go before you chuck it out the window? 99.99%? Well that 1 in 10,000. Applied to the 2.6 million Muslims in the US, that's 260 American Muslim terrorists. That's almost surely too high, given the lack of any deaths in the US from home-grown Muslim terrorists, but let's go with that. Your chance of running into a Muslim terrorist here in the US is about the same (under these unfavorable assumptions) as bumping into a retired NASA astronaut.

      The idea that Islam somehow makes someone inclined to terror does not hold up if you control for circumstances (e.g. look at American Muslims).

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      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    8. Re:Ah don't worry... by bhlowe · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Ah, I see what you did.. you compared a country with a religion.. Not quite the assignment, but I can work with it.. Lets see, in Saudi Arabia, you can be executed by beheading, stoning, or firing squad. In the US, its primarlily lethal injection. In the US, capital punishment is reserved almost exclusively for murder. In Saudi Arabia, you can be executed for witchcraft, sorcery, adultery (between two consenting adults) drug use, or simply rejecting Islam.

      The war in Iraq was never a crusade, and "Operation Just Crusade" is never existed. (Feel free to prove otherwise.)

  2. Backwards country by grasshoppa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What kind of backwards country would modify their curriculum to fit religious ideals?

    http://www.aolnews.com/2010/03/12/texas-removes-thomas-jefferson-from-teaching-standard/

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    Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
    1. Re:Backwards country by Oh+Gawwd+Peak+Oil · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But hey, at least you got your +5, America Bashing mod

      It's called not being hypocritical.

      It would be hypocritical to sit around laughing arrogantly at Pakistan, while ignoring the fact that right here at home we can do similar things as well.

      It may not be politically correct point out uncomfortable things about our own country, and you may get all offended and call it "America Bashing," but it is reality.

  3. More proof as if we needed any by cvtan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Religious" governments are ALWAYS a bad idea.

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    Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
  4. The dose makes the poison by swb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Personally I am an atheist, but it seems that low-levels of religious belief seem to do most people little harm and some good and at least in smaller communities seem to provide a certain amount of greater good & charity which might otherwise go missing.

    It would be nice if the people involved could just enjoy getting together for the sake of getting together and do charitable works because helping people is usually the right thing to do without shame-based moralizing and all the hocus pocus, but human experience seems to suggest a more Hobbesian outcome without some kind of organizational direction.

  5. Re:Ah don't worry...ALL! by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are you saying ALL Muslims follow the Taliban? Would any of you have a problem with saying ALL Atheists are baby killers?

    You are setting up a nice straw man there. Not all Muslims follow the Taliban, but all Muslims follow a cdoctrine that says that non-Muslims must be killed or accept inferior status. Read the Qur'an.