Recently the number of emails and Facebook messages telling me that I have gotten it all wrong, wrong, wrong, and that Islam is actually a Religion of Peace and Tolerance, has sharply increased. Someone somewhere must have called for me to be bombarded with messages about my alleged ignorance of Islam. The only problem with all such messages, and with various windy pseudo-academic “refutations” of my explanations of Islam’s doctrines of warfare against unbelievers and their subjugation under Sharia, is that however good they sound on paper, somehow the last people to be convinced seem to be Muslims themselves.
And so we have 10 Muslim countries among the 13 most severe violators of religious freedom. Somehow they seem to have missed the memo about Islam’s respect and tolerance for non-Muslims. And of course in reality, their behavior here is entirely in line with the hatred and contempt that Islam inculcates for the unbeliever, “the most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6), and the Qur’anic directive to Muslims to be “merciful to one another, but ruthless to the unbelievers (48:29).
“Turkey On US Watch List For Violating Religious Freedoms,” from ANSAmed, April 30 (thanks to Insubria):
(ANSAmed) – ANKARA, APRIL 30 – Turkey remains on a US panel’s watch list of 12 countries for its violations of religious freedoms, Today’s Zaman daily newspaper reports. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its annual report on Thursday, designating 13 Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) in terms of such violations while also putting 12 others on a watch list for close monitoring in that regard. Turkey remains on the watch list this year also. It was designated for close monitoring for the first time in 2009. The fact that very little has changed in terms of restrictions imposed on people has resulted in it retaining its status as a violator country in the view of the USCIRF. According to the report, this year’s CPCs are Myanmar, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam. In addition to these 13 countries, designated the worst violators of religious freedoms around the world, the 2010 watch list includes Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Laos, Russia, Somalia, Tajikistan and Venezuela as well as Turkey with respect to “the nature and extent of violations of religious freedom engaged in or tolerated by the governments.” The panel’s report also criticized the current and former US administrations for doing little to make basic religious rights universal.(ANSAmed).
That’s because both the current and the former U.S. administrations were committed to the notion of Islam as a Religion of Peaceâ„¢, and didn’t dare call any serious attention to the routine violations of religious freedom in so many Muslim countries — to have done so would have created cognitive dissonance.