ZION'S TRUMPET
1Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the LORD cometh, for it is nigh at hand; Joel 2:1
Show MenuHide Menu

Christian Woman Burned With Acid By Muslim Barbarians – This is islam. This is What They Will Do if They Are Allowed to Take Over in The U.S.

July 9, 2012

Christian woman acid attacked by Muslim, finds new life in Houston

She’s a Christian, so he melts her face with acid. Confused? Don’t be. It’s the sharia. There are hundreds of thousands of stories like this that you never hear about.

Julie Aftab could neither read nor write English when she arrived in Houston for surgery in 2004. Now she's studying accounting at UH-Clear Lake, and considers the scars from the brutal acid attack she suffered in Pakistan at age 16  "my gift from God." Photo: Melissa Phillip / © 2012 Houston Chronicle

Julie Aftab could neither read nor write English when she arrived in Houston for surgery in 2004. Now she’s studying accounting at UH-Clear Lake, and considers the scars from the brutal acid attack she suffered in Pakistan at age 16 “my gift from God.” Photo: Melissa Phillip / © 2012 Houston Chronicle

“Pakistani acid-attack victim finds new life in Houston” Chron.com July 9, 2012 (thanks to David)

She was 16 years old, working as an operator in a tiny, public call office in Pakistan, when a man walked in and saw the silver cross dangling around her neck.

He asked her three times: “Are you a Christian?”

Julie Aftab answered, “Yes, sir,” the first two times, and then got frustrated.

“Didn’t you hear me?” she asked.

They argued, and the man abruptly left the little office, returning 30 or 40 minutes later with a turquoise bottle. Aftab tried to block the arc of battery acid, but it melted much of the right side of her face and left her with swirling, bone-deep burns on her chest and arms. She ran for the door, but a second man grabbed her hair, and they poured the acid down her throat, searing her esophagus.

A decade and 31 surgeries later, Aftab is an accounting major at the University of Houston-Clear Lake with a melodic laugh. She spoke no English when she arrived in Houston in February 2004, but is poised to take her citizenship test later this month.

Doctors in Houston have donated their time to painstakingly reconstruct her cheek, nose, upper lip and replace her eyelids. Over time, her scars have faded from hues of deep wine to mocha.

And, with time, the 26-year-old said, she has learned to forgive.

“Those people, they think they did a bad thing to me, but they brought me closer to God,” Aftab said. “They helped me fulfill my dreams. I never imagined I could be the person I am today.”

Eldest of seven

Aftab was born in Faisalabad, Pakistan, the eldest of seven children in a Christian working-class family.

She dreamed of becoming a doctor, but dropped out of school at age 12 to work in a sewing factory after her father, a bus driver and the family’s sole breadwinner, broke his back in an accident. After the sewing factory closed when Aftab was 16, she took a job as a telephone operator helping people place phone calls from the small office in the city’s center.

It was June 15, 2002, two weeks into her new job, when the customer spotted her silver cross, a gift from her grand­father. She wore it despite knowing it branded her as Christian, a tiny minority in the Muslim-majority country.

You are living life in the gutter, the Muslim man told her.

She tried to ignore him, remembering what her mother had taught her since she was a child:

You are no one to insult someone’s religion. If someone is insulting religion, they have to answer to God.”You are going to hell, the man told her. You are living in darkness.

“I am living in the light,” Aftab replied.

So you think Islam is in darkness? the man demanded.

Aftab was frightened. She knew Christians had been accused of violating Pakistan’s strict blasphemy laws in the past when others had twisted their words, to make it sound as though they had attacked Islam.

“No, you said that,” she replied. “Not me.”

But the man was enraged and returned with the battery acid and his friend. When she finally broke away from them, the acid searing her skin and throat, she ran down the street. As she screamed, teeth fell from her mouth and hit the ground.

Read the rest.

  • Gloria Ervin, right, and her husband, Lee, took Aftab in when she came to Houston in 2004. Their initial six-month commitment became much more, though. Now she's one of the family. Photo: Melissa Phillip / © 2012 Houston Chronicle

    Gloria Ervin, right, and her husband, Lee, took Aftab in when she came to Houston in 2004. Their initial six-month commitment became much more, though. Now she’s one of the family.

    Photo: Melissa Phillip / © 2012 Houston Chronicle

From Atlas Shrugs: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/

  •  
Article Global Facebook Twitter Myspace Friendfeed Technorati del.icio.us Digg Google Yahoo Buzz StumbleUpon Eli Pets

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *