Asia Bibi and Sir Roger Scruton don’t have much in common. She is a lowly farm labourer from a rural part of Pakistan where she experienced great poverty, hardship and persecution, on account of the fact that she is Christian. He is an erudite professor, a knight of the realm, and not short of a few bob.
And yet something binds these two into unlikely bedfellows: both are currently keeping a low profile in response to mobs that want to punish them for the crime of insulting Islam.
This week, Bibi was finally released from death row after Pakistan’s Supreme Court overturned the obscene conviction against her for mocking Muhammad (a charge she always denied). But she is in hiding, because mobs of irate Islamists still want her to suffer death for her speechcrimes against Muslims. Scruton, meanwhile, is dodging the public gaze, in far greater comfort than Bibi of course, because mobs of irate leftists want him to suffer social death for his speechcrimes against Muslims.
These two mobs differ only by degree.
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