Bangladeshi Blogger Ananta Bijoy Das Hacked to Death for Criticizing Islam

After jihadists attacked a Muhammad cartoon exhibit in Texas, the media blamed Pamela Geller for provoking Muslims to violence. Yet in other countries, we see the harsh consequences of not standing up for freedom of speech. Bangladeshi blogger Ananta Bijoy Das, for instance, has been hacked to death for criticizing Islam, and police have no idea how to stop the wave of violence against critics of Islam. Will the media continue blaming bloggers for provoking Muslims?

Ananta Bijoy Das

CNN—The attack on bloggers critical of Islam has taken on a disturbing regularity in Bangladesh with yet another writer hacked to death Tuesday.

Ananta Bijoy Das, 32, was killed Tuesday morning as he left his home on his way to work at a bank, police in the northeastern Bangladeshi city of Sylhet said.

Four masked men attacked him, hacking him to death with cleavers and machetes, said Sylhet Metropolitan Police Commissioner Kamrul Ahsan.

The men then ran away. Because of the time of the morning when the attack happened, there were few witnesses. But police said they are following up on interviewing the few people who saw the incident.

"It's one after another after another," said Imran Sarker, who heads the Blogger and Online Activists Network in Bangladesh. "It's the same scenario again and again. It's very troubling."

Das' death was at least the third this year of someone who was killed for online posts critical of Islam. In each case, the attacks were carried out publicly on city streets.

In March, Washiqur Rahman, 27, was hacked to death by two men with knives and meat cleavers just outside his house as he headed to work at a travel agency in the capital, Dhaka.

In February, a Bangladesh-born American blogger, Avijit Roy, was similarly killed with machetes and knives as he walked back from a book fair in Dhaka.

The three victims are hardly the only ones who have paid a steep price for their views.

In the last two years, several bloggers have died, either murdered or under mysterious circumstances. (Continue Reading.)

Muhammad Orders the Execution of Critics

When Muhammad entered Mecca, he ordered his followers only to fight those who refused to surrender to him, except certain people who were to be executed whether they surrendered or not. In our earliest detailed biographical source on the fall of Mecca, Ibn Ishaq lists eight people who were to receive the death penalty. The charges against four of the eight were "insulting Muhammad." One of the four critics was eventually pardoned; the others were killed.

Politicians, the media, and Muslim groups assure us that Muhammad never retaliated against people who insulted him. Too bad these modern apologists weren't there to tell Muhammad how tolerant they would one day imagine him to be.

Here's the passage from Ibn Ishaq, with details on the critics underlined. Pass it on.

Sunan Abu Dawud 4361 (Muhammad on Killing Critics of Islam)

Here's Sunan Abu Dawud 4361 (4348 in some editions), in English and Arabic, along with the rating (sahih). In this hadith, a man kills the mother of his children for speaking against Muhammad. Muhammad, in response, says that no one is to punish the man.

So when Muhammad's own companions killed critics of Islam, and Muhammad approved, why do politicians, the media, and Muslim groups keep insisting that killing critics has nothing to do with Islam?