Special Report: Pakistan's threat within - the Sunni-Shia divide

By Michael Georgy

About 20 men dressed as Pakistani soldiers boarded a bus bound for a Muslim festival outside this mountain town and checked the identification cards of the passengers. They singled out 19 Shi'ites, drew weapons and slaughtered them, most with a bullet to the head.  The shooters weren't soldiers. They were a hit squad linked to the Sunni Muslim extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, or LeJ. They had trekked in along a high Himalayan pass that hot August morning to waylay a convoy of pilgrims.

Here and across Pakistan, violent Sunni radicals are on the march against the nation's Shi'ite minority.  With a few hundred hard-core cadres, the highly secretive LeJ aims to trigger sectarian violence that would pave the way for a Sunni theocracy in U.S.-allied Pakistan, say Pakistan police and intelligence officials. Its immediate goal, they say, is to stoke the intense Sunni-Shi'ite violence that has pushed countries like Iraq close to civil war.  To Read More…. 

My Take – I have noted in the past  that the only thing a Muslim hates worse than a non-Muslim is someone who subscribes to a version of Islam not his own.  I often hear how Muslims don’t kill Muslims, and it is true....sort of!  The problem in the western world is that we just have trouble getting the idea that Muslims don’t consider all who profess Islam to be real Muslims. 

The sectarian violence in Europe for many years can be a way of understanding this.  Christians were killing Christians of different creeds for centuries in Europe and North Africa.  The Vandals, as an example, professed Christianity, and yet when they conquered North Africa they killed all the Catholic priests.  Why?  It was a theological division over the Trinity.  The Vandals were Arian Christians and the Catholics were Athanasian Christians.    The really big difference in this comparison between Christians and Muslims is that Christians were supposed to know better because the founder was against such things.  Muslims are expected to kill non-Muslims.  Islam’s founder called it Jihad!