Dr. Younus Shaikh, Pakistani Rationalist and founding President of the Rationalist organization of Pakistan, “The Enlightenment”, who was once sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan and whose statement to the UN on that affair can be found in The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, writes the following in the conclusion of “Islam and Women” in News from Bangladesh (thanks to EPG):
The rise of Saudi-sponsored extremist Islam is a danger to civilization everywhere. All extremist Muslims are potential terrorists and Allah’s soldiers. There should be no tolerance for this religiously organized intolerance against liberalism, human rights and women’s equal status and other manifestations of our civilization. Muslims in civilized and democratic societies should be required to take the oath of loyalty to the state and democracy. Political right to vote to those whose political loyalties are located in some far off desert is not only harmful but also suicidal for the state as well as for the very ideology and system of democracy. Political right to vote for those who wish to destroy the very system of democracy? Think again, Ladies and gentlemen.
There is no place for optimism for a liberal Islam. Nearly all Islamic states and states have failed to appreciate the basic human rights of their people, their women and their minorities. Saudis and Emirates are the worst offenders; and are the financial godfathers of fundamentalism, extremism and Islamic backwardness everywhere.. Nearly every Islamic country is dangerous not only for itself but for the world as a whole. Pakistan, for example, after supplying Iran and with Korea with nuke-secrets continues to offer the dangerous technology; Vietnam and Brazil are the new customers. The nuke-terrorist Dr. Abdul Qadir Kahn is safe, well protected and facilitated by the State of Pakistan, with full impunity, of course.
You civilized people! Yesterday you refused to acknowledge the dangers inherent in the rise of the Christian Nazi and Communist ideologies.
I respect Dr. Younus Shaikh a great deal, and I know this will fire up the anti-Christian people who post here regularly, but I maintain that any unbiased look at the actual content of both the Nazi and Communist ideologies will reveal that both explicitly reject Christianity. The Nazis intended to restore ancient German paganism, and found a great deal of resistance from Christians — particularly Catholics (contrary to common belief today). In the elections in the early 1930s they always ran weakest in Catholic Bavaria. Hitler’s concordat with the Vatican was no different from concordats the Vatican concluded with many other states; none of them signified an endorsement by the Vatican of that state’s ideology. Pope Pius XI denounced Nazi racism and anti-Semitism in the 1937 encylical Mit Brennender Sorge, which was pointedly written in German (all others were in Latin). Pius XI famously remarked, “Spiritually, we are all Semites.” And the idea that Pope Pius XII collaborated with Hitler, although accepted virtually everywhere today, is actually not borne out by the historical evidence. Even the author of Hitler’s Pope has renounced his own thesis; the real story of Pius’ thoroughgoing opposition to Hitler can be found in Ronald Rychlak’s book Hitler, The War, and The Pope. And the Communists, of course, closed churches wholesale and set themselves up as active opponents of Christianity.
I say all that because the moral equivalence between Islam and Christianity implied in the statement here by Younus Shaikh, and stated openly by many Islamic apologists and their allies, is false, misleading, and ultimately harmful to the resistance to the jihad.
But in every other way Dr. Younus Shaikh speaks with a clear and prophetic voice:
Yesterday you supported Islamic Taliban even when they trampled rights of their women under their feet. Your refusal to confront militant Islam today may cost us more dearly than our individual lives-our cherished achievement -our civilization. Beliefs have consequences-the centrality of Islam to mental, social, intellectual and cultural backwardness; organized offences against women and minorities; fundamentalism, extremism and modern terrorism are impossible to deny. “Religions of peace and tolerance” are mere empty words.
Islam is an organized crime against humanity!