FFRF wired $20,000 to Bangladeshi physician and activist Taslima Nasrin in March to help her relocate to the U.S. Nasrin, FFRF’s 2002 Freethought Heroine, has long been the subject of Islamic terrorist sanctions called fatwas. Since 2004 she had lived in India after having been forced into exile from Bangladesh in 1994.
Nasrin had appealed to the humanist community for help after her friend, Avijit Roy, was brutally hacked to death on the streets of Bangladesh and his wife was severely injured. After Roy’s death, two other atheist bloggers were murdered with machetes in Bangladesh.
“I vividly remember Taslima telling an international atheist conference in Germany three years ago that she was ‘a woman without a country.’ She told us the freethought community was her country,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president.
“Our community will need to be prepared to give emergency help as we increasingly see atheists and critics of religion persecuted, imprisoned and slaughtered,” Gaylor said at the International Atheist Conference in Cologne, Germany, in publicly announcing the grant May 24.
“Taslima Nasrin is targeted for death,” said Dan Barker, FFRF co-president. “There are at least 13 nations where you can technically be put to death for espousing atheism.”
Nasrin arrived in Buffalo, N.Y., in late May with the assistance of the Center for Inquiry, which is similarly involved with safeguarding secular activists threatened by religious extremists.
