February 25, 2010:  Al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan recently kidnapped three Sikhs and beheaded one of them. Al Qaeda, as a radical Sunni Moslem group, finds it offensive for non-Moslems to live among Moslems. While 96 percent of Pakistanis are Moslem, there are six million Hindus, Christians and Sikhs living in Pakistan, and Islamic terrorists (not just al Qaeda) have been terrorizing and murdering them for decades. There is also long standing violence between radicals among the 138 million Sunni Moslems, and the 35 million Shia. The Sunnis generally initiate the violence, and these killers don't always get along with al Qaeda. That's because the Islamic radicals often have violent conflicts over minor points of theology or customs. The dozens of Islamic radical groups are often at war with each other, when they are not going after non-Moslems and foreigners.

Many of the minorities, especially the non-Moslem ones, want to get out of Pakistan. Most would be happy with permission to enter India. Pakistan is hostile to this idea, because it's a point of pride that non-Moslems have lived for so long in Pakistan. India is willing to accept these persecution victims. The Sikhs are particularly anxious to get out. Partly because many of them (there are only 20,000 Sikhs in Pakistan) are refugees from Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan. Islamic radical hostility to non-Moslems has been growing for over a century. In the 19th century, Turkey and Western nations ruled most of the worlds' Moslems, and kept this terrorism under control.

But the Turks (who are Moslem) lost their empire in 1918, and Western nations withdrew from Moslem areas by the 1960s. Since then, the Islamic terrorism has grown, even though Islamic leaders deny it. The religious hostility is something of a dirty little secret within the Moslem world, where there is not a lot of effort to eliminate it. Many dictators of Moslem populations quietly support the violence against non-Moslems, as a way to distract the population from their primary problem (living in a dictatorship.)