A Religion of Peace and Tolerance

How about a quick trip through the latest news of Islam, the religion of peace and tolerance?

In Muqdadiyah, Iraq street vendors have been warned by the Islamists of Al Qaeda not to display tomatoes next to cucumbers because those vegetables are different genders. Mixing the genders is forbidden in Islam! The penalty is death.

The Islamists of Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines kidnapped six road workers and a fisherman and demanded a ransom of five million pesos ($125,000). When the government refused, the Muslim extremists delivered the hostages' heads in sacks to two different military outposts. Allah Akbar!

Five Muslims of the Turkish Hezbollah, 19- and 20- year-old students from an Islamic dormitory, captured three Protestants working at a Bible publishing company in eastern Turkey, bound their feet and hands, tortured them, and then cut their throats with bread knives. The Muslims stabbed one of the Christians 150 times. When caught, one suspect said, "We didn't do this for ourselves, but for our religion. Our religion is being destroyed. Let this be a lesson to enemies of our religion." It certainly is that.

This attack is one of a series of attacks by Muslims on the Christian minority in Turkey, whose 99% Muslim majority find other religions intolerable. This year, Armenian Christian editor Hrant Dink was murdered. Last year, a Turkish kid shot a Catholic priest, Andrea Santoro, dead as he prayed in his church. Two other Catholic priests were also attacked later. Why? Why not? They're just infidels.

Dutch feminist author, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and critic of Islam, lectured at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Local Islamic leaders, no friends of free speech, tried to stop the lecture, arguing that her sharp criticism of Islam in her book, "Infidel," and movie, "Submission," are "poisonous and unjustified" and create dissension in their community. Imam Fouad ElBayly, an Egyptian immigrant who is now president of the Johnstown Islamic Center, condemned her, "She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death." The university showed uncharacteristic courage for academic bureaucrats by pressing on with the lecture in spite of the murderous Muslim talk, taking care to provide extra security.

Two Muslim men attacked journalist Jawaad Faizi when he pulled into the driveway of his editor in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. A car pulled in behind him, the two men jumped out, and began smashing his windows with a cricket bat. Then they struck Faizi inside his car. They ran when he called 911.

Faizi writes for The Pakistan Post in Mississauga. The trouble began when Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, the leader of a Pakistan-based group of Muslims called the Minhaj-ul-Quran, claimed that he had written the name of the Prophet Mohammed on the surface of the moon. When Faizi wrote a column throwing doubt on the preposterous claim, the extremist followers of the Minhaj-ul-Quran began making phone calls cursing him in Punjabi and threatening his life. They told him, "You are not a Muslim, you are supporting Christians."

Faizi has had similar experiences in Pakistan, where one attack landed him in the hospital. Faizi says, "I know these people, they are very intolerant. Even if they are in Canada, their mindset doesn't change. They're intolerant about political opinion, religious opinion, you name it."

Meanwhile, in the Arab Muslim community of Ramle, Israel, the Abu Ghanem family is going for the world record in honor killings, murdering eight women in their family, one by one, over the years. One of them was 19‑year‑old Reem Abu Ghanem, who committed the crime of rejecting the husband her family had picked for her. Her older brother, a paediatrician, smothered her in a blanket soaked in anaesthetic drugs from his hospital. He and his four brothers threw Reem's body in the trunk of a car and drove to an abandoned house on the edge of town where they planned to dump her body in an old well. However, when they arrived they found Reem still alive and begging for her life. So they beat her on the head with a big rock to kill her but that didn't work either. So they just threw her in the well to die. The Arab community kept quiet about it, as they usually do about honor killings. Some saw the brothers as heroes.