As Brian details below, Pakistan has released Raymond Allen Davis, the CIA contractor who, despite having diplomatic immunity, has been illegally detained on murder charges arising out of what he maintains was his killing in self-defense of two armed robbers. The Associated Press says the release in exchange for financial compensation to the families of his assailants was permitted under “Pakistani law.” What it doesn’t say is that this “blood money” provision is a Pakistani codification of sharia law.
As Robert Spencer explained a few days ago at Jihad Watch, the sharia principle involved is qisas, or “retaliation,” which allows blood money to be paid by one who causes an accidental killing, or even by a murderer, to the relatives of the deceased. It is essentially a guilty plea that suffices as punishment for the killing if the relatives agree to the arrangement and amount of compensation. As is always the case with Islamic law, qisas pegs the value of a Muslim’s life substantially higher than that of a non-Muslim, and a man’s substantially higher than a woman’s.
In other words, the message to Muslims here, as usual, is that the West can be extorted into elevating sharia principles over the rules of law that apply to everyone else. Davis had diplomatic immunity; Pakistan would have been well within its rights to expel him, but they should not have detained him, much less charged him with murder. Yet, the Pakistani government (our “ally”) ran roughshod over the law in order to appease a Muslim population that despises the United States and screamed for Davis’s prosecution. The Pakistanis then demanded what amounts to a sharia-compliant ransom from the Obama administration, which has now dutifully caved in.
When you tell the world you can be rolled, expect to spend a lot of time being rolled. We have guaranteed that there will be more extortions, and more sharia.