This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
Reuters correspondent Zeeshan Haider files a report from Islamabad that tells us that
Scores of activists from an Islamist charity linked to a banned Pakistani militant organisation died in the devastating earthquake that struck Pakistan’s border with India at the weekend.
The militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was outlawed by Pakistan in January 2002, a month after its fighters were accused of taking part in an attack on India’s parliament in New Delhi — an act that brought South Asia’s nuclear rivals to the brink of war.
A spokesman for Jamat-ud-Dawa, a group drawn from the ranks of Lashkar, said the charity’s mosques, hospitals, schools and Islamic seminaries were obliterated in Saturday’s earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people.
“Many of our members have been killed. They are in scores while several others are still trapped under the rubble,” the spokesman said on Sunday.
The spokesman, who did not want to be identified, said the Taiba hospital run by Jamat-ud-Dawa in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, and several of its mosques and offices were destroyed.[Reuters]After their deaths, Reuters has elevated the jihadi terrorists of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the Lashkar-e-Taiba from being mere ‘militants’ to the more exalted status of ‘charity workers’. Even if the likes of the Lashkar and their co-travellers style themselves as ‘charities’, where did Reuters’ famous ‘journalistic neutrality’ disappear to while publishing the article?
No one deserves a death as terrible and indiscriminate as the one brought about by the earthquake. But organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba deserve their benign labels even less.
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