A Christian pastor named Zafar Bhatti was shot to death in a Rawalpindi jail, where he had been taken after having formally been accused of blasphemy. Says NBC News:

Bhatti, who worked to protect the human rights of the country’s beleaguered Christian minority, was on trial after an Islamic leader accused him in 2012 of sending text messages derogatory to the Prophet Mohammed’s mother. Family members say police investigations show the phone was registered to someone else. In recent weeks, Bhatti had received death threats in prison from both inmates and guards, his family told Pakistan-based human rights group Life for All. He was being held in the same cell as [a mentally ill man, also killed, Muhammad] Asghar. Blasphemy is punishable by death in Muslim-majority Pakistan. Blasphemy charges are hard to fight because the law does not define what is blasphemous. Presenting the evidence can sometimes itself be considered a fresh infringement. Those accused of blasphemy are often lynched and lawyers in defending those accused of blasphemy cases have frequently been attacked.

Bhatti, a Protestant pastor, was reportedly tortured in prison to try to wrest a confession out of him. This is indeed the age of martyrs.

This wretched country has received over $67 billion in US aid over the past decades. We are this year giving it hundreds of millions of dollars. And yet it throws Christians in jail on trumped-up blasphemy charges. What a curse it must be to live in that country if you are a religious minority, or a Muslim who wants to live decently and peaceably.

But before we decide if we truly pity the martyr Zafar Bhatti, we should find out what he thought of Israel. Ha ha! Oh, Ted Cruz, you continue to impress with your big fat mouth. In a softball interview with the Evangelical magazine World, about his stunt telling off persecuted Christians in DC, Cruz said:

The response has been very mixed. I have received a great deal of encouragement, both within the Christian community and the Jewish community, people saying simply thank you for standing up and speaking out and speaking the truth. Then, among one particular community, which is sort of the elite, intellectual Washington, D.C., crowd, there has been considerable criticism. … A number of the critics, a number of the folks in the media have suggested, for example, that my saying what I did distracted from the plight of persecuted Christians.

What I find interesting is almost to a person, the people writing those columns have never or virtually never spoken of persecuted Christians in any other context. I have spoken literally hundreds of times all over the country. This is a passion. I’ve been on the Senate floor, and I intend to keep highlighting this persecution. I will say it does seem interesting that the only time at least some of these writers seem to care about persecuted Christians is when it furthers an anti-Israel narrative for them. That starts to suggest that maybe their motivation is not exactly what they’re saying.

Ah ha! Elite intellectual DC anti-Semites, probably blogging their responses from the sofa or their Jew-hating Georgetown cocktail parties. As Daniel Larison points out:

All of these claims about his critics were completely and laughably untrue, and Cruz’s interview produced a quick backlash from these conservatives that reacted poorly to being falsely accused of bad faith and of having biases they don’t possess. Faced with the backlash, he quickly backed away from the failed attempt to vilify his critics and offered an apology. Nonetheless, he confirmed in the process that he was perfectly willing to make false accusations and misrepresent the views of his critics in order to portray himself as some sort of bold truth-teller.

Consider Cruz’s charge that “at least some” of his critics wanted to further an “anti-Israel narrative.” The complaint doesn’t make any sense. It was Cruz that chose to introduce support for Israel into the conversation and made it a point of contention during a gathering focused on an entirely different and unrelated subject. It doesn’t accurately describe the views of his most vocal critics, most of whom wentout of their way to affirm their support for Israel even as they objected to Cruz’s clumsy, offensive behavior. His critics were almost all just as conventionally “pro-Israel” as Cruz is.

True. When I think of the Christian conservatives who were most vocal in criticizing Cruz — Ross Douthat, Mollie Hemingway, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Michael Brendan Dougherty, me — all of us, except perhaps MBD (whose overall position on Israel I don’t know, but who called Israel a “proud, noble, modern country” in his column about the Cruz affair) were open in our support for the Jewish state. Cruz’s remarks were yet another smear designed to rile up Evangelicals. The man is unprincipled.

By the way, don’t miss these powerful remarks by the new Chief Rabbi of France, made a a Holocaust remembrance ceremony at the Grand Synagogue of Paris:

“The situation of religious minorities all over the world and especially in the Middle East resonates, unfortunately, with our commemoration today,” Korsia was quoted as saying by the French news agency AFP. “As our parents wore the yellow star, Christians are made to wear the scarlet letter of ‘nun.’ ”

The Hebrew letter nun is the same sound as the beginning of Nazareen, an Arabic term signifying people from Nazareth, or Christians.

I am grateful for that solidarity.