Have you heard about Asia Bibi? She’s the Christian woman who was imprisoned because of unsubstantiated charges made against her by her neighbors in Pakistan. Although she was finally found innocent, she remains in Pakistan. But she can’t live there because radicals trying to kill her. And they don’t want to let her leave the country.

The radically leftist UK Guardian says:

The family of Asia Bibi, the Christian woman who spent eight years on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy before being acquitted three weeks ago, claim they are being hunted by extremists going house to house with their photographs to try to track them down.

Bibi’s family have been in hiding since her acquittal by the country’s supreme court. She is in protective custody as part of a deal between the government and a hardline Islamic party, under which violent protests were called off while a review of the court ruling was undertaken.

Bibi’s lawyer, relatives and supporters have appealed for the family to be given asylum in a European or north American country.

Although the United Kingdom has taken in millions of unskilled immigrants from the Middle East – including many who started sex-trafficking rings  using underage British girls – they don’t want to take in Bibi. Why not?

A few months ago, I added the book “The Strange Death of Europe” to my reading list on the blog. It talks about the immigration policies of all the European nations, and what happens to people who question those policies. Not just to their careers, but to their lives. That book was written by Douglas Murray, and he wrote a column about Asia Bibi in National Review.

He writes:

Her case has had ramifications throughout Pakistani society in the years since. For instance, it provoked the statement by the brave governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, which led to his own murder by one of his own bodyguards. In the days since her release from jail, there have been mass protests in Pakistan where thousands of enraged fanatics have called, literally, for Asia Bibi’s head.

[…][T]oday there are reports that the British government has said that it will not offer asylum to Asia Bibi. The reason being “security concerns” — that weasel term now used by all officialdom whenever it needs one last reason to avoid doing the right thing. According to this report, the government is concerned that if the U.K. offered asylum to Bibi it could cause “unrest among certain sections of the community.” … The “community” that the British government will be scared of is the community that comes from the same country that has tortured Asia Bibi for the last eight years.

The government is right to expect a backlash. There have been cases before of this “community” expressing its views. From the book-burnings and protests over The Satanic Verses affair in 1989 to the mass protest against cartoonists, which was the “community’s” response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015, the Pakistani Muslim community in the U.K. has never been shy of expressing its views. Occasionally you even get a case like that at Easter 2016, when a Muslim from Bradford drove up to Glasgow to kill another Muslim (a shopkeeper called Asad Shah) because Mr. Shah came from a minority Muslim group that his killer deemed heretical. Which you might say is another example of “diversity.”

These days, many people are voting for policies on the basis of how it makes them feel about themselves, or how it makes them look to others. As long as they aren’t spending their own money, or risking their own safety, these feelings-based voters want to be very  generous. Very generous spending other people’s money. Very generous risking other people’s safety. Is that real generosity?

We should definitely have a system that allows highly-skilled immigrants to come here to work. And if they prove that they are hard-working and law-abiding, then they should be able to apply for permanent residency. But we also need to be careful about bringing people in who will not respect basic human rights, like Asia Bibi’s right to religious liberty. That’s not compassion, it’s foolishness.

By the way, don’t expect Western feminists to say anything about Asia Bibi’s situation. That would be going against their “intersectional” allies – something they aren’t willing to do.