It took them three months, and then some, to get back to their depraved antics; but Bangladesh’s notorious fundamentalist Islamists have taken their first atheist life for the year.
Five such atheist/secular activists were killed in 2015 alone, all hacked to death by terrorists for having the nerve to criticise their dear Islam. Nazimuddin Samad is the latest victim, killed by attackers who waylaid him whilst returning from a class.
Samad was a law student who happened to be an atheist and campaigned fervently online for secularism in the deeply Muslim state. His activism seems to have ruffled some feathers, and he was killed for it.
Samad was returning from class with a companion when four assailants on a motorbike attacked him with machetes and a gun.
“At least four assailants hacked Nazimuddin Samad’s head with a machete on Wednesday night.” Deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan police Syed Nurul Islam told Agence France-Presse.
“As he fell down, one of them shot him with a pistol from close range. He died on the spot,”
Local reports say eyewitnesses confirmed that the attackers were chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ whilst carrying out the murder. According to the Guardian, his name was one of 84 on a list of secular activists released by a terrorist group in the country.
It’s astonishing that in a single country, this can happen again and again and the authorities rarely do anything about it. Of course, it’s because they tacitly agree with the sentiments of the terrorists, even if they wouldn’t kill those bloggers themselves. It’s another example of religion warping the moral compass of people, whilst they go around laughably claiming they are the moral ones and unbelievers are immoral.
Islam is a religion with a history steeped in violence, founded by a warlock, its holy book filled with violent and oppressive commands against the infidel, and historically powerless minorities such as gays and women. Like any of the other Abrahamic religions, people are trying to live their lives via texts written from a time of brutal savagery, when man as a species was still in its infancy; and as we see all too frequently, that can lead to disastrous results.
At this point, the human race should be savvy enough to realise we can tell what is good or bad for ourselves using reason and logic, and not be so brainwashed as to always fall back on unchanging texts from millenia ago that contain horrible, outdated edicts. When that happens, people can read them literally, and carry out those commands, whilst simultaneously feeling confident enough to claim the vacuous moral high ground of being the ones obeying God’s commands.