Sharia Law, the binding legal and ethical component of Islam derived from the Quran and Hadiths mandates that those who apostatize from Islam be put to death. In Islamic countries that base their civil laws on Sharia, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, this punishment is routinely carried out by the civil magistrate. However, in most Islamic countries it is far more common for the relatives of the apostates to carry out the killing themselves as a point of honor.
For instance, some friends of mine from Philadephia have been serving as Christian Missionaries in an Islamic country [forgive me for being purposely vague here, but I don't want to expose them] where conversion is illegal. As a result, while they have many Muslims attending their bible study, most of them balk at the point of baptism and none of them are willing to discuss their faith openly. A couple of years ago, one young woman was convicted that she should make an open profession of her faith and be baptized. When she told her parents of her decision, her family threatened that they would kill her if she went through with it. She decided to be baptized anyway, and that week her own father and brother slit her throat and left her in the gutter to die. The father was taken into police custody, but was not charged with a crime and was later released. In the eyes of the community what he did was quite justifiable and indeed necessary.
On the other hand, Muslims are delighted to be able to actively promote their religion in the West and to actively seek converts, while they deny the right to convert, evangelize or even build non-Islamic houses of worship in their own countries, nations like Saudi Arabia are pouring billions of Petrodollars into the promotion of Wahabbi Islam worldwide. The largest Islamic Study center in the world, for instance, was recently built in Fairfax, VA (near Washington D.C.) with Saudi funds.
Gentlemen, I know you are doggedly committed to the postmodern concept of cultural relativism, but the fact is some ideologies and worldviews are better and some are worse than others. For instance, in fighting the Second World War, the West took it for granted that Representative Democracy was superior to Fascism, that freedom was superior to oppression, and that man was endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights regardless of where he was born.
I would put it to you that some of the obvious consequences of that idea are that men have a right to Convert, a right to worship freely as their conscience directs, that women have a right to be educated, a right not to go about veiled from head to toe and a right not to be stoned to death if they venture outside their homes without their nearest male relatives.
All of those rights are denied by Sharia law, therefore either we accept that we are at war with Sharia as an ideology (just as we were at war with other totalitarian ideologies from 1939-1945 and from 1946-1991) or we will fail to promote any permanent change abroad, and gradually be overtaken by that ideology at home. As Edmund Burke wrote and Churchill repeated, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"
- SEAGOON
