In an editorial today entitled “Under Siege,” the New York Times laments the recent violence committed by radical Islamists against Christians in Egypt and Iraq. Yesterday, the Times ran an editorial entitled “A Brave Man Killed,” in which it lamented the assassination of Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province who had called for the repeal of Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy law. This law, popular with Pakistan’s Muslim majority, imposes a mandatory death sentence on anyone convicted of insulting Islam.
Under the anti-blasphemy law, a Christian mother of four was sentenced to death.
The Times recognizes these symptoms of a virulent disease but is incapable or unwilling to connect the dots in order to decipher its cause or scope – global Islamic fundamentalism.
Pakistan is imploding because of the rising influence of radical Muslims inside and outside the government. As reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute, on January 4, 2011, just a few hours after the assassination of Salman Taseer, more than 500 Pakistani religious scholars and clerics issued a statement lauding the assassin, who was Taseer’s bodyguard. They praised the assassin for keeping alive a “tradition of 1,400 years in Islam” which requires the killing of anyone committing an act of blasphemy against Prophet Muhammad.
The two most powerful Muslim countries today – Saudi Arabia and Iran – are Islamic fundamentalist regimes intolerant of any religions other than Islam.
We saw what happened when the fundamentalist Taliban ran Afghanistan.
Christians in Sudan and Nigeria have suffered violence and persecution at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. The Sudanese are trying to solve this problem by holding a secession referendum to split off the more non-Muslim southern portion of Sudan from the Muslim majority north. Not so fast, says the spiritual leader of the radical global Muslim Brotherhood. This leading Sunni scholar, Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi, has warned that it is prohibited for a Muslim to vote for the secession of South Sudan. Does anyone really believe that the violence will end if the secession is approved?
Even supposedly moderate Muslim regimes are infected by the Islamic fundamentalist disease. Turkey, for example, opposed the appointment of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to the post of Secretary-General of NATO because of his unwillingness to apologize for the cartoons of Mohammad that had appeared in the Danish press and sparked riots and violence throughout the Muslim world.
Ruled by an Islamic party, Turkey is beginning to turn away from the principles laid down by the founder of the modern day secular Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. He believed that Islamic religious law must be separated from secular law.
Attaturk said:
We must liberate our concepts of justice, our laws and our legal institutions from the bonds which, even though they are incompatible with the needs of our century, still hold a tight grip on us.
We are witnessing a worldwide attempt by Islamic fundamentalists to fuse mosque and state together and to establish the absolute supremacy of Islam where they rule. They will use whatever means is most effective in the circumstances to accomplish their objective, whether it be via terrorism or via stealth infiltration and manipulation of existing institutions.
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