Posted on 02/19/2011 8:50:22 AM PST by ventanax5
On NRO Friday, Paul Marshall lamented the Obama administration’s fecklessness, in particular the president’s appalling silence in the face of the death sentence Said Musa may suffer for the crime of converting to Christianity. This is in Afghanistan, the nation for which our troops are fighting and dying — not to defeat our enemies, but to prop up the Islamic “democracy” we have spent a decade trying to forge at a cost of billions.
This shameful episode (and the certain recurrence of it) perfectly illustrates the folly of Islamic nation-building. The stubborn fact is that we have asked for just these sorts of atrocious outcomes. Ever since 2003, when the thrust of the War On Terror stopped being the defeat of America’s enemies and decisively shifted to nation-building, we have insisted — against history, law, language, and logic — that Islamic culture is perfectly compatible with and hospitable to Western-style democracy. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.
This is not the first time an apostate in the new American-made Afghanistan has confronted the very real possibility of being put to death by the state. In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness — after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam? His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Thanks ventanax5.
ping
Wouldn’t this be the perfect opportunity for “The Won” to show a little empathy? After all, “The Won” claims he himself, converted to Christianity. (Well, he CLAIMS he did).
Last night Bill O’Reilly for once was on track as he articulated the problem of Islam. Geraldo tried to get him back to political correctness, but O’Reilly made it clear what we all know..Islam is contrary to freedom and democracy.
IMHO, the biggest threat to this nation comes from inside, from the open borders, and the hordes of illegal aliens, among them terrorists, who roam across the land. The planes on 9/11 did not take off from Iraq but from American soil. Fighting in Afghanistan led to the breakup of the Soviet Union, and I see our resources used better in other ways than remaining there.
I’ve just read the 1st chapter, but I trust his research. I believe he will be making the case that an Islamist country cannot be democratized, so our noble attempt will fail, and that we are blind to the growing threat within our borders, as you allude to. We all now know that we are broke, and can no longer exert our might and influence. My wife insists that we must be there to prevent the Taliban from obtaining Pakistani nukes. We must do this, but let us no longer fool ourselves that we are effecting change on the ground in Afghanistan, or Iraq. Let our military prepare for surgical strikes, let us build our icbm defense, and as you say, let us focus on the internal threats.
I certainly hope they noticed that both sides targeted westerners, just for being western (Christian, Jew).
Please pray for Said Musa and his family.
“The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.”
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