[DAWN] IT has been barely six weeks since two churches in the Youhanabad locality of Lahore were bombed, resulting in the death of almost two dozen people. For most of us who consume 'breaking news' like a bad habit, stories like the Youhanabad 'incident' are quickly relegated to the dustbin of history. For the almost 100,000 Christians living in the area, life is not so fickle.In case you've forgotten, which is entirely possible given Pakistain's awe-inspiring murder rate, Moslems committed another mass murder of Christians, resulting in the Christians' lynching of two people suspected of involvement. Cops have arrested something like a hundred suspected of involvement in the lynching, so far zero of those Moslems even suspected of involvement in the mass murder.
It is bad enough that working-class Christians are regularly targeted by armed bigots while state authorities sit idly by; what is even more galling is that such episodes of organised violence are rendered invisible by the media and intelligentsia through their selective moulding of so-called public opinion.
To the extent to which Youhanabad was talked and written about in the days after the bombings, it was not the death of innocent Christian men, women and kiddies that made the news, but the response of the enraged mob that lynched two men in the aftermath of the church attacks. Deploring the reaction of the mob is one thing, but using the lynching as a pretext to completely erase the bombings from public memory is the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty.