Islamist Watch reports details about the criminal prosecution of Christians who proselytize Muslims. What makes this newsworthy is that the prosecution trend reported is in the United States. See here. Ruth R. Wisse writes at the Wall Street Journal (full access via Google) of uber-educated Harvard students responding violently to criticism (by Mr. Martin Peretz) of Muslims:
After the event adjourned, the afternoon turned ugly as police had to protect Mr. Peretz while he walked across campus surrounded by a mob of screaming students. On Sept. 4, blogging at the New Republic’s web site, he lamented that Muslims don’t respond more vigorously to acts of terrorism against their own people:”Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf [of the proposed Cordoba House mosque] there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”
Apparently, there were no student protests or violent reactions over the serial use by Muslims of suicide bombers against Muslim civilians in Iraq and in Afghanistan. No report today of protests at Harvard in response to the Muslim bombing of civilians at the Shirkat mosque in the Takhar province of Afghanistan. So long as no one criticizes Muslims for such conduct, no protests at Harvard are expected. Not to be outdone, a class of nearby Yale students interviewed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to better understand him and his goals, shortly after Ahmadinejad explained to the UN the possibility that the US staged 9/11. Fifty years ago, our intellectual elites cozied up to Communist dictators and murderers. (Of course, many Academics as well as most Hollywood still fawn over the same in Cuba.) The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The legitimacy of the Ivy League sympathies and of the criminal prosecution of those who seek to convert Muslims in this country depends at least in part on whether Islam poses a threat. Were the agents of 9/11 and the numerous attacks against the US the acts of fringe radicals or are they representative of a large percentage of Muslims? A recent and well-considered analysis by the Center for Security Policy concludes that Shariah, a fundamental component of Islam, poses a serious threat to the security and well-being of the United States.
Today, the United States faces what is, if anything, an even more insidious ideological threat: the totalitarian socio-political doctrine that Islam calls shariah. Translated as “the path,” shariah is a comprehensive legal and political framework. Though it certainly has spiritual elements, it would be a mistake to think of shariah as a “religious” code in the Western sense because it seeks to regulate all manner of behavior in the secular sphere – economic, social, military, legal and political.
Shariah is the crucial fault line of Islam’s internecine struggle. On one side of the divide are Muslim reformers and authentic moderates – figures like Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president of Indonesia and leader of the world’s largest libertarian Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama – whose members embrace the Enlightenment’s veneration of reason and, in particular, its separation of the spiritual and secular realms. On this side of the divide, shariah is a reference point for a Muslim’s personal conduct, not a corpus to be imposed on the life of a pluralistic society.
By contrast, the other side of the divide is dominated by Muslim supremacists, often called Islamists. Like erstwhile proponents of Communism and Nazism, these supremacists – some terrorists, others employing stealthier means – seek to impose a totalitarian regime: a global totalitarian system cloaked as an Islamic state and called a caliphate. On that side of the divide, which is the focus of the present study, shariah is an immutable, compulsory system that Muslims are obliged to install and the world required to adopt, the failure to do so being deemed a damnable offence against Allah. For these ideologues, shariah is not a private matter. Adherents see the West as an obstacle to be overcome, not a culture and civilization to be embraced, or at least tolerated. It is impossible, they maintain, for alternative legal systems and forms of governments peacefully to coexist with the end-state they seek.
Full report here.
Sapphire Sky 