Express & Star comment: Taliban murderers deserve to burn in hell
Mohammed Yaseen Khan speaks not just for fellow Muslims but the whole of the Black Country and Staffordshire when he denounces the murderous and barbaric attack on a school in Pakistan.
So does Councillor Aftab Nawaz when he says the killers of 132 children and 10 staff were not representing a faith, but are instead criminals and terrorists.
These are the voices of the real Muslim community, not those who would plan and carry out the massacre of innocents in the name of their perverted ideal. Nowhere in any scripture of any religion is it written that such actions can ever be justified.
The children of Peshawar were in school to prepare them for life.
They were there for an education that would have stood them in good stead. Who could possibly have imagined they would be butchered for no other reason than that they were there?
All of their potential was snuffed out by sick and brutal thugs who attempt to justify their actions by suggesting the Pakistani army had long been killing innocent children and families of their fighters.
Even someone with the flimsiest of grasps on morality would understand that two wrongs do not make a right.
The attack was not random or the actions of a single, deranged lunatic but a pre-meditated, planned assault where bullets were pumped into children's bodies to make sure they were dead.
It is more than 13 years since the UK and the USA began the so-called 'war on terror'. But it is impossible to snuff out evil fanaticism that warps religion to extreme ends.
As Mr Yaseen Khan of the Wolverhampton Ahmadiyya Muslim Association points out, the seeds of this evil were sewn decades ago.
What starts as discrimination and intolerance grows into a fundamentalism so warped that the very reason and motive for it is lost amid the collective madness, cruelty and under disregard for innocent lives shown by the perpetrators of this wicked violence.
Voices like Mr Yassen Khan's must be heard while those who would preach murder and bloodshed should be challenged every time they utter words of hate. Some extremists carry out their despicable actions in the warped belief that there is a place for them in heaven.
If they are correct that paradise exists we can only hope there is a hell as well. That is where they deserve to burn for all eternity.
