IF YOU'RE MENTALLY ILL IN PAKISTAN, YOU MIGHT HAVE TO DIE

Well this kind of sucks:

Kasur District Court sentenced Abdul Hameed, 45, to death for blasphemy. In the charges filed against him by Imam Ghulam Mustafa Zia, Mr Hameed is said to have built a replica of the Kaaba (Islam’s earliest place of worship containing the ‘Black Stone’) in his courtyard and proclaimed himself prophet... According to some eyewitnesses who testified at the trial, Hameed built the Kaaba replica and invited local Muslims to come on pilgrimage since the “original stone” was in his courtyard.

Hannah Arendt very famously wrote about the Nazi banality of evil, where everyday practices and thoughtlessness add up to the singular horror of the Holocaust. We've got some problems with that thesis, but one way or another that's certainly not what we're increasingly dealing with in the Muslim world. This is religious insanity being used as a positive justification for everyday atrocities, which end up in spectacular acts of terrorism.

And it's spreading.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]