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| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| 'Sinful' TV sets torched in northwest Pakistan |
| 2005-07-30 |
| PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Hundreds of Muslims in Pakistan's staunchly conservative northwest have set ablaze dozens of TV sets following a cleric's ruling that watching television was a sin, police said Saturday. The men congregated in a park after Friday prayers and piled up about 25 TV sets, doused them with fuel and set them on fire, said witnesses from the Charsadda district of the North West Frontier Province near the Afghan border. "These people actually responded to a cleric's call," said district police chief Muhammad Iqbal, after a local mullah had said on radio that watching TV was a sin and declared a jihad or holy war against vulgarity and obscenity. The park echoed with shouts of "Allah-o-Akbar" (God is greatest) and "Islam zindabad" (long live Islam), while the emotional crowd also decried an ongoing crackdown on suspected extremists following the London bombings. Parliamentarian Maulana Gohar Shah addressed the crowd and called the 800 arrests and series of raids on Islamic seminaries ordered by President Pervez Musharraf a "conspiracy of the infidel (non-believer) world". A local journalist said that, days earlier, influential local cleric Abdullah Shah had decreed that TV was "not allowed in Islam" after followers had asked him to give an Islamic ruling. |
| Posted by:john |
| #6 Shame! They didn't file an enviromental impact statement. Lots of nasty stuff when you burn a set. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-07-30 17:12 |
| #5 "These people actually responded to a cleric's call," said district police chief Muhammad Iqbal Kinda the weekly problem in Islamostan in a nutshell. |
| Posted by: NYer4wot 2005-07-30 16:45 |
| #4 allen is ack types heh, near classic, worth remembering. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-07-30 16:43 |
| #3 They should have added that radios and communication devices are the works of the devil too... that includes those dadburn vehicles equipped with radios too! |
| Posted by: Threth Greregum9255 2005-07-30 16:35 |
| #2 LOL I am thinking these were all busted sets, All those allen is ack barf types went home and watched themselves on their still functioning TVs. Pakistan needs to do something to test their nukes. Here is a good place to do it unannounced of course. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet 0’ Doom 2005-07-30 16:14 |
| #1 Taliban One-eyed Mad Mulla Omar decreed the same thing... These guys have a hang-up about TVs and fire... |
| Posted by: BigEd 2005-07-30 16:04 |