Christians in Pakistan have suffered the secondary effects of U.S. intervention abroad.
On St. Patrick’s Day, 2018, four men waved down a rickshaw driver in a suburb of the Pakistani megalopolis of Karachi. The men, all Muslim and led by a Muslim cleric, recognized the cabbie, who happened to be a Catholic they had harassed many years prior. They pulled him out of the rickshaw, beat him almost to death, and then set fire to the vehicle, his only source of income.
I know that Christian, whose name is Michael D’Souza. My wife and I befriended him during three years living in Bangkok, where he and his family had fled in 2012, seeking asylum and refugee status. With the assistance of some family and friends, we paid his family’s airfare when they decided, after almost a year in Bangkok’s infamous Immigration Detention Center, to return to Pakistan in summer 2017.
