The extremist Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan openly incites to murder and massacre.
by Marco Respinti
Recently, two videos emerged from Pakistan featuring sermons by clerics linked to the ultra-fundamentalist organization Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), to which “Bitter Winter” devoted a series of articles. These speeches chillingly call for the killing of Ahmadis.
In the first video, a TLP-aligned cleric states without hesitation: “We also don’t say that we aren’t going to kill… When we are in government, when Nizam-e-Mustafa [the ideal Muslim society] is implemented, a directive will be given from the top: target and kill every Mirzai [Ahmadi] in Pakistan.”
He refers to the Ahmadis as “swines,” describing their lives as “humiliated and disgraceful,” and rationalizes their oppression by citing the laws of Pakistan.
He praises the legal limitations that stop Ahmadis from preaching, constructing places of worship, or even denoting themselves as Muslims—and declares that in an ideal Islamic society, they should be killed.
In a second video, derived from the same event, the same cleric insists, “God willing, we will finish them off—and those Jews as well who nurtured them.”
On top of anti-Ahmadi hate speech and incitement to murder, the cleric also adds anti-Semitism. Will the Pakistani authorities take action?
Marco Respinti is an Italian professional journalist, member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), author, translator, and lecturer. He has contributed and contributes to several journals and magazines both in print and online, both in Italy and abroad. Author of books and chapter in books, he has translated and/or edited works by, among others, Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, J.R.R. Tolkien, Régine Pernoud and Gustave Thibon. A Senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (a non-partisan, non-profit U.S. educational organization based in Mecosta, Michigan), he is also a founding member as well as a member of the Advisory Council of the Center for European Renewal (a non-profit, non-partisan pan-European educational organization based in The Hague, The Netherlands). A member of the Advisory Council of the European Federation for Freedom of Belief, in December 2022, the Universal Peace Federation bestowed on him, among others, the title of Ambassador of Peace. From February 2018 to December 2022, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of International Family News. He serves as Director-in-Charge of the academic publication The Journal of CESNUR and Bitter Winter: A Magazine on Religious Liberty and Human Rights.
