Abdul Rahman is Safe, but the Problem Persists

Italy Takes In Afghan Convert

I'm very glad that Rahman wasn't torn to pieces by an Afghan mob after being released. I'm also glad that the man (currently--we'll see how long the situation lasts, given the Religion of Peace's propensity for ignoring national borders when inconvenient) doesn't have to live like some homeless fugitive, because Italy took him in.

However, I'm very unhappy that Rahman had to be gotten off the Afghan legal hook on a technicality. If "insufficient evidence" rings false to me (the man converted to Christianity sixteen years ago with the full knowledge of his family--if the guy hasn't left any discernable breadcrumbs since the Soviet Union fell, then I'm a ballerina named Fifi), then it's got to ring false to the Muslisms calling for Rahman's head, and the decision will carry neither public-square nor legal weight.

It's simply unacceptable that people don't have freedom of religion without fear for their lives in a infant democracy that we're still spending blood and treasure to protect. The President and his administration have been disturbingly mealy-mouthed on the subject: the words held to account may be some of the most ill-chosen in the President's verbal history. And why on God's green Earth did the Italians need to offer sanctuary? Good on them for doing so, but Rahman should have been given a first-class seat on the first Boeing leaving for Hawaii.

It's been said before elsewhere, but I'll amplify: we're seeing nothing more than the fruits of allowing Islam's Sharia law to be installed as fundamental to the Afghan and Iraqi constitutions. This business of death being the penalty for renouncing Islam isn't some Afghani or even Islamofascist concoction: it comes straight from the Hadiths, or accounts and quotations of Mohammed:

Narrated 'Ikrima: 'Ali burnt some people and this news reached ibn 'Abbas, who said, "Had I been in his place I would not have burnt them, as the Prophet said, 'Don't punish (anybody) with Allah's Punishment.' No doubt, I would have killed them, for the Prophet said, 'If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.'" — Volume 4, Book 52, Chapter 149, Number 260. p. 160-161.

(quoted from the Wikipedia Article on Apostasy in Islam)

This is something we'll see more and more of as time goes on: there are thousands of people in Afghanistan alone who are in similar danger to that which Rahman has just escaped.

-Rich