Obama Ignores Islamic Violations of Religious Freedom

by  Robert Spencer 

05/04/2010

Has the latest annual report from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) caused any cognitive dissonance in Washington?

It should have: ten Muslim countries were among the 13 designated by the USCIRF last Thursday as Countries of Particular Concern (CPC): Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Along with those, the worst violators of religious freedom around the world, six other Muslim countries were on the USCIRF’s watch list: Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Somalia, Tajikistan and Turkey.

Now wait a minute. Islam is supposed to be a religion of peace and tolerance. Isn’t that what Barack Obama has been telling us (and George Bush before him)? The report was a bracing dose of reality to dispel this rosy view—and yet another reminder of how Obama’s view of Islam and Muslim countries is unrealistic and damaging, and of what it might take to end the jihad against America and the West.

As I show in detail in my book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, the behavior of these Muslim countries toward non-Muslims is entirely in line with the hatred and contempt that Islam inculcates for the unbeliever, “the most vile of created beings” (Koran 98:6), and the Koranic directive to Muslims to be “merciful to one another, but ruthless to the unbelievers” (48:29).

It’s damaging because Obama’s oft-repeated desire to establish a new relationship with the Islamic world based on “mutual respect” is apparently incompatible with any concern for the victims of this pandemic religious oppression. In this Obama is, unfortunately, again following in the footsteps of Bush, who famously proclaimed Islam a “religion of peace” in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The USCIRF report “also criticized the current and former U.S. administrations for doing little to make basic religious rights universal,” according to the ANSAmed news service.

And so while official Washington pretends that Islam teaches peace and tolerance, a Pakistani Muslim last week reportedly called two Christian boys in his employ, Waqas and Zeeshan Masih, a derogatory term for Christian, and then beat them with an iron rod for missing a day of work. He killed Waqas, 14, and seriously injured Zeeshan, 12. Meanwhile, a 14-year-old Christian girl, Sumera Pervaiz, endured five days of torture after being falsely accused of stealing from the home of her employer, a Wing Commander in the Pakistani Air Force.

Another Pakistani Christian, Marwat Masih, was savagely beaten and sodomized by a Muslim mob earlier this month. Marwat Masih is a barber and he committed the heinous crime of cutting a Muslim’s beard.

In Iraq Sunday, Islamic jihadists exploded two bombs near buses full of Christian students, killing one and murdering over one hundred. Last week in Indonesia, thousands of enraged Muslims destroyed numerous cars, burned down several buildings, and attacked a Christian center. What goaded them to this insane frenzy? There were rumors that the Christians were going to build a church. Islamic law forbids Christians to build new churches or repair old ones.

In Iran in mid-April, the Islamic Republic arrested three Christian leaders within the span of a week, for crimes such as running a house church. In Egypt on March 30, a court refused to change the registration of two teenage boys from Muslim to Christian (religion is listed on all Egyptians’ official ID cards), although the boys had been raised as Christians. Their father converted to Islam, and that made them Muslim. The Assyrian International News Agency explained that when their father became a Muslim, the boys “became Muslims in what is called ‘Islamization by dependence,’ by which children follow the religion of a converted parent (to Islam only) until they reach the age of puberty (15), because Islam is ‘the best among all religions,’ according to Egyptian Court rulings.”

Who will speak up for these oppressed people, many of them in nations that are at least nominally allies of the U.S.? Not Barack Obama. He is too busy pretending that Islam is a Religion of Peace—and no inconvenient disconfirming evidence is going to shake that conviction. The human cost of this policy continues to mount.