Nobel Laureate Wiped From Pakistan's Textbooks As Heretic

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."

Comments

Ah don't worry...

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:Ah don't worry...

[Chrisq]

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"

Re:Ah don't worry...

[sneakyimp]

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?

Re:Ah don't worry...

[bitt3n]

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.

actually, terrorists tend on average to be relatively wealthy and well-educated, from relatively well-to-do countries

Backwards country

[grasshoppa]

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/

Re:Backwards country

[Oh Gawwd Peak Oil]

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.

More proof as if we needed any

[cvtan]

"Religious" governments are ALWAYS a bad idea.

Re:Ah don't worry...ALL!

[Chrisq]

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.

Re:Ridiculous comparison

[Hatta]

People can handle accidental, isolated deaths. Yes, someone dies, but there is no malicious force that caused it. ...

People cannot accept someone else who is out to kill them intentionally because of hatred or a belief system.

I find sporadic intentional, malicious deaths to be far more acceptable than widespread preventable accidental deaths. Any decent human being would feel the same. The important thing is to minimize the loss of human life. Whether there's intentionality behind the deaths is irrelevant.

The problem is, most people aren't decent human beings and care more about being slighted by foreigners than about actually saving lives.

The reason there ever was a "war on terror" isn't to "funnel money to corporate buddies" â" it's because, to be blunt, we don't put up with that shit

What's sad is that you probably actually believe that. If that were actually true, we'd have actual reasons for going to war, instead of flimsy pretexts.

e.g. Afghanistan, we're there to get Bin Laden, but once we get there we stop looking for him and waste years spending money for nothing. Who does that benefit besides military contractors?

e.g. Iraq. What reason is there to invent a non-existant link between Saddam Hussein and OBL, and hype up non-existent WMDs based on evidence that was known to be false?

Why did we go intervene in Lybia and haven't done much yet in Syria? One's an oil producing nation, the other isn't.

You've made a bold assertion in that "we don't put up with that shit". What sort of mechanisms are in place to prevent that shit from happening? If a well connected vice president actually decided to go to war in order to benefit his cronies, how does the system prevent that? What reason is there to believe that ANY US politician makes ANY decision without considering how it would profit their friends and campaign contributors?