Islam a Religion of Tolerance: Get a Grip on Reality

The post 9-11 world saw the United States and Canada launch a war against terror. The first theater of operation of this war took place and continues to unfold in the nation of Afghanistan. The international coalition overthrew the ruling Taliban party replacing it with a supposedly democratic government. Part of the war on terror is to destroy terrorism by liberating oppressed people and allowing them to exercise their new found freedom with the installation of democracy. The theory is a good one. Unfortunately, in the example of Afghanistan, I fear that we have replaced one terror group with another.

In Afghanistan, there are two governing orders. First, the country is regulated by specific ordinances that are enshrined in formal statutes. The second, is Sharia law. Whatever is not covered by specific ordinance is covered under the religious tenets of Islam. This has been placed in stark relief this week in an article found in USA Today.

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20060320/a_wobs20.art.htm

The text of the article is below:

Afghan may face death for alleged conversion

A man in Afghanistan is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death after being charged with converting from Islam to Christianity, a crime under the country's Islamic sharia laws, a judge said Sunday.

The trial highlights a struggle between religious conservatives and reformists over what shape Islam will take here four years after the ouster of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime.

The defendant, Abdul Rahman, 41, was arrested last month after his family accused him of becoming a Christian, according to Judge Ansarullah Mawlavezada. Rahman was charged with rejecting Islam. His trial started Thursday.

Below is another article posted by Michelle Malkin for the Jewish World Review that deals with the same topic.


http://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=571

Who will save Abdul Rahman?
Filed under: Front Page, Opinion, News, Islam

By Michelle Malkin, Jewish World Review



Abdul Rahman is a man of faith. “I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in Christ. And I am a Christian,” he declared this week.

See a video of Abdul Rahman on Michelle Malkin’s website

Unfortunately for Rahman, he was originally born a Muslim in Afghanistan — and he has been forced to defend his religious conversion in his home country’s court, where he now faces the death penalty for turning to Jesus. Despite the defeat of the totalitarian Taliban and the existence of a U.S.-backed “moderate” democratic government, it is a capital crime for Afghanis to openly embrace any religion other than Islam. Sharia law, embedded in the Afghan constitution, overrides its human rights provisions.

Rahman’s family has denounced him as mentally ill. Afghan officials are thirsting for his blood. “We will cut him into little pieces,” jail employee Hosnia Wafayosofi told the Chicago Tribune as she “made a cutting motion with her hands.

The Tribune reported that p rosecutor Abdul Wasi demanded Rahman’s repentance and called him a traitor: “He is known as a microbe in society, and he should be cut off and removed from the rest of Muslim society and should be killed.” The country’s attorney general says Rahman should be hung. The judge handling the case, who has been photographed wielding Rahman’s Bible as evidence against him, threatens: “If he doesn’t regret his conversion, the punishment will be enforced on him. And the punishment is death.”

This is a watershed moment in the post-Sept. 11 world. The Taliban are out of power. And yet today, an innocent man sits in the jail of a “moderate” Muslim nation praying for his life because he owned a Bible and refuses to renounce his Christian faith. Rahman, who converted many years ago while working for a Christian aid agency in Germany, “is standing by his words,” fellow jail inmate Saya Miakel told Canada’s Globe and Mail. Another cellmate, Khalylullah Safi, reported: “He keeps looking up to the sky, to G-d.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, left-wing Amnesty International had nothing to say about the case. But neither did President Bush, a man of faith and a Christian brother. During his extensive White House press conference on the War on Terror and the defense of freedom overseas, Bush spent plenty of time describing what life was like for Afghanis before Operation Enduring Freedom:

“There was no such thing as religious freedom. There was no such thing as being able to express yourself in the public square. There was no such thing as press conferences like this. They were totalitarian in their view. And that would be — I’m referring to the Taliban, of course. And that’s how they would like to run government. They rule by intimidation and fear, by death and destruction. And the United States of America must take this threat seriously and must not — must never forget the natural rights that formed our country.”

President Bush, who will defend Abdul Rahman’s natural rights from being usurped and terminated by Afghanistan’s Islamic executioners?

Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council raises the unpleasant question Bush evaded and no one in the White House press corps bothered to ask:

“How can we congratulate ourselves for liberating Afghanistan from the rule of jihadists only to be ruled by Islamists who kill Christians?…President Bush should immediately send Vice President Cheney or Secretary Rice to Kabul to read Hamid Kharzai’s government the riot act. Americans will not give their blood and treasure to prop up new Islamic fundamentalist regimes. Democracy is more than purple thumbs.”

Embarrassingly, the governments of Italy and Germany have already stepped forward to make direct appeals to Karzai to save Rahman’s life.

Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has ducked the issue so far. Our feckless State Department is “monitoring” the situation.

If we sit on the sidelines and watch this man “cut into little pieces” for his love of Christ, we do not deserve the legacy of liberty our Founding Fathers left us. How about offering Rahman asylum in the United States? Perhaps Yale University, proud sponsor of former Taliban official Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, can offer Rahman a scholarship. Where’s the Catholic church, so quick to offer sanctuary to every last illegal alien streaming across the borders? And how about Hollywood, so quick to take up the cause of every last Death Row inmate?

Several things come to my mind. First,Why did we bother to lose American and Canadian soldiers in a war on terrorism that deposed a criminal organization only to empower a religious organization that would seek to enforce Islamic rule with the sword? Second, I am frustrated with the West's depiction of Islam as a benign and peaceful with the soul of toleration as its core value. Third, there are forces of evil in this world that will not yield to persuasion as many on the left would have us believe. Fourth, the warfare we fight is a spiritual one. Yes, I agree with Pat Robertson and others, that anything that would hide the truth of Jesus and deny the spread of the Gospel is empowered by the demonic.

We have here the tale of a man, whose only crime was to receive Jesus Christ as his personal saviour and for that he is to forfeit his life. Make no mistake, this is Islam unmasked at its core. It never has never and will never brook any competing ideaology. The trial and the likely execution of this man is not being carried out by fanatical homocide bombers bent upon destroying the West. His accusers are everyday run of the mill conservative, and dare I say fundamentalist, practitioners of Islam. This is their mainstream belief on full exhibit for the world to see and yet we walk with the delusion that it is only a few radicals that would do such things.

I am fully aware that Christians need to die for their faith rather than capitulate their trust in Jesus. I know that as a Christian, true life is to be found in the presence of God. We are not to become overly enthralled with the things of this life because there is more to life than this earthly plain. I am fully conscious that Jesus specifically warned His followers that opposition and even persecution could await anyone that claims to be a Christian.

I am also aware that the State has been given the sword as an instrument of preserving order and righteousness. I am also aware that as a Christian, I have an obligation to speak the truth in love. Sometimes hard and difficult things need to be said in the name of love, but the truth is the truth. I am also aware that we need to stand up and protect the weak, the powerless and the marginalized. This means being involved in correcting injustice and speaking out against any atrocity that would seek to mar God's image bearers.

We are kidding ourselves if we think that the cure to the worlds problems with terror is to replace a violent form of Islam with a benevolent form of Islam. It simply does not exist.

Soli Deo Gloria