Overlooked Story of Islamic Horror and Abuse

From American Thinker (see link at end)

    August 24, 2009

                                  Killing Rifqa

    By Andrew Bostom

    Rifqa Bary faces death for her apostasy from Islam, while the media
    ignores the solid religious and institutional grounding for the
    practice. Today. In America.

    Magdi Allam, is an intrepid Egyptian-born writer and vociferous critic
    of jihadism who was publicly converted to Christianity from Islam by
    Pope Benedict XVI during an Easter eve service in St Peter's Basilica
    broadcast worldwide, Saturday March 22, 2008. Writing at the time of
    his public apostasy, Allam highlighted the West's weakness and
    flaccidity, foremost, its stifling multiculturalism.

    Allam decried the multicultural ethos for blandly asserting the
    "equality" of cultural and religious mores, even abjuring rational
    criticism of Islamic religious bigotry -- such as authoritative
    Islam's living, consensus jurisprudence that those who apostasize from
    Islam must be killed -- lest the tender sensibilities of Muslims be
    offended. He noted how in his adopted homeland of Italy, every Muslim
    can go to a mosque, but in the Muslim world there is ongoing and
    long-standing discrimination against religious minorities -- notably
    Christians -- entirely ignored by Western multiculturalists, of all
    ilks. Allam observed, moreover, the perverse phenomenon that in
    Western countries,

    "When a Westerner decides to convert to Islam, that's fine, but when a
    Muslim converts to Christianity, it is suddenly the end of the world.
    Everyone condemns him, as though he has done something of which he
    should be ashamed."

    And Allam concluded with this appropriately stern warning:

    "I say that it is time to put an end to the abuse and the violence of
    Muslims who do not respect the freedom of religious choice. In Italy
    there are thousands of converts to Islam who live their new faith in
    peace. But there are also thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity
    who are forced to hide their faith out of fear of being assassinated
    by Islamic extremists who lurk among us.  If in Italy, in our home,
    the cradle of Catholicism, we are not prepared to guarantee complete
    religious freedom to everyone, how can we ever be credible when we
    denounce the violation of this freedom elsewhere in the world."

    The unassuming and previously unknown Rifqa Bary, has now become,
    arguably, America's most conspicuous apostate from Islam to
    Christianity.  Truncated, grossly warped media depictions of her
    plight demonstrate that the American chattering classes remain
    stubbornly unwilling to even acknowledge, let alone confront Islam's
    malevolent doctrinal intolerance, ignoring Magdi Allam's plaintive
    appeal.

    Rifqa Bary is a 17 year-old Sri Lankan native who was living in New
    Albany, Ohio (a suburb of Columbus) until recent dramatic events
    precipitated her flight to Orlando, Florida. An excellent student and
    High School cheerleader, Rifqa apostasized from Islam, clandestinely
    practicing Christianity for some 4-years by her account. Hard
    evidence, i.e., a FaceBook webpage captured by Pamela Geller --
    consistently ignored by the media, including Fox News -- clearly
    documents that she was a professing Christian over two years ago, at
    any rate.

    Geller's singularly tenacious and thorough reporting has provided the
    chronology and context which elucidates Rifqa Bary's plight. Rifqa was
    "exposed" as a Christian apostate from Islam by her father's Columbus
    area mosque -- the Noor Islamic Center, a hotbed of jihadism and Jew-
    and other infidel hatred. As Bary's August 18^th legal petition
    records,

    "The child's parents are devout followers of Islam and members of the
    extreme Noor Islamic Cultural Center in Columbus, Ohio. This is where
    the internationally known Hamas cleric, Salah Sultan, was the resident
    scholar before being banned from the United States. Salah Sultan is
    known as a global terrorist who publicly advocates the killing of
    Americans and Jews. The largest cell of Al Qaeda operatives was
    operating from the largest mosque in the Columbus area. Columbus is
    one of the cities under current investigation concerning the U.S.
    operations of Al-Qaeda. The child is a target for the radical Muslim
    community of Columbus, Ohio."

    Subjected to paternal abuse (bruises on Rifqa's limbs classmates
    allegedly brought to the attention of her High School counselor),
    Rifqa ultimately felt compelled to flee Ohio in July when her father
    threatened to murder his "apostate" daughter. She found temporary
    refuge in Orlando, Florida with Reverend Blake Lorenz, pastor of the
    Orlando-based Global Revolution Church, whom she had met through an
    online Facebook group. With Lorenz at her side, Rifqa Bary provided
    this desperate appeal (captured in full on YouTube) during an ~
    6-minute interview with WFTV:

    "If I had stayed in Ohio, I wouldn't be alive. In 150 generations in
    family, no one has known Jesus. I am the first -- imagine the honor in
    killing me? There is great honor in that, because if they love Allah
    more than me, they have to do it. It's in the Koran. I'm fighting for
    my life. You guys don't understand. ... I want to worship Jesus
    freely, that's what I want. I don't want to die."

    This past Friday August 21, Orlando Circuit Judge Daniel Dawson's
    decision granted her the right to remain protected within Florida's
    foster care system until another hearing is held September 3rd.

    The mainstream media narrative, in stark contrast to Pamela Geller's
    hardboiled (while patent) shoe leather reporting, was apparently
    developed via inept, lazy and uninformed pseudo-investigation,  and
    imbued with an impenetrable "see no Islam" mentality. Hence the
    repeated media portrayals of Rifqa Bary as a delusional teenage rebel,
    "brainwashed" to leave her loving middle-American Muslim home by a
    Florida-based fringe Christian cult. Although Fox News television has
    at least reported the story, it has also been a (the?) major purveyor
    of this warped narrative, and its coverage has been devoid of the
    critical Islamic context -- in legal theory and practice -- regarding
    apostasy.

    Fox News legal analysts -- with the exception of one who hosted a
    pellucid ~ 4-minute discussion by security expert Frank Gaffney --
    have endlessly spoken about "jurisdiction," Florida versus Ohio, yet
    they appear incurious about the corpus of germane Islamic
    jurisprudence -- which remains applicable in our era -- sanctioning
    the killing of apostates. Fox News has ignored moving and informed
    written public appeals in support of Rifqa Bary by two prominent,
    remarkably courageous Muslim apostate intellectuals who have sought
    refuge in America, Nonie Darwish, and Wafa Sultan.

    Fox News has also failed to provide its vast audience with the
    insights of the most authoritative contemporary scholar on apostasy in
    Islam -- Ibn Warraq, author of the definitive modern work on the
    subject, "Leaving Islam." Mr. Warraq is also a refugee from lethal
    Islamic intolerance now living in America. All three of these
    individuals -- Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, and Ibn Warraq -- are
    readily accessible to Fox News, but the media giant has thus far
    chosen not to interview them and share their views.

    Punishment by death for apostasy from Islam is firmly rooted in the
    most holy Muslim texts -- both the Koran (verses such as 2:217 and
    4:89) and the hadith (i.e., collections of the putative words and
    deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as compiled by pious Muslim
    transmitters), as well as the sacred Islamic Law (the Shari'a). For
    example, Muhammad is reported to have said "Kill him who changes his
    religion," in hadith collections of both Bukhari and Abu Dawud. There
    is also a consensus by all four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence
    (i.e., Maliki, Hanbali,  Hanafi, and Shafi'i), as well as Shi'ite
    jurists, that apostates from Islam must be put to death. Averroes (d.
    1198), the renowned philosopher and scholar of the natural sciences,
    who was also an important Maliki jurist, provided this typical Muslim
    legal opinion on the punishment for apostasy:

    "An apostate...is to be executed by agreement in the case of a man,
    because of the words of the Prophet, `Slay those who change their din
    [religion]'...Asking the apostate to repent was stipulated as a
    condition...prior to his execution."

    The contemporary (i.e., 1991) Al-Azhar (Cairo) Islamic Research
    Academy-endorsed Shafi'i manual of Islamic Law, 'Umdat al-Salik (pp.
    595-96) states:

    "Leaving Islam is the ugliest form of unbelief (kufr) and the
    worst.... When a person who has reached puberty and is sane
    voluntarily apostasizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed. In such
    a case, it is obligatory...to ask him to repent and return to Islam.
    If he does it is accepted from him, but if he refuses, he is
    immediately killed."

    The media's ignorance (or denial) of relevant Islamic jurisprudence on
    apostasy is compounded by its obliviousness to public pronouncements
    by North American Muslim legal scholars and clerics urging draconian
    punishments for Muslims who renounce Islam in Canada, or the US.

    Syed Mumtaz Ali, the late architect of Canada's Sharia (Islamic Law)
    tribunal, and law professor Ali Khan, for example both advocated
    extending Islamic apostasy laws to the West. Mumtaz Ali, in a
    disturbing essay, affirmed the traditional Islamic legal viewpoint
    that apostates must "choose between Islam and the sword," arguing
    further that if Canada were to act in accord with its own Charter of
    Rights and Freedoms, the Canadian government must grant the country's
    Islamic community authority to punish those Muslims who apostasize, or
    malign their faith.

    Washburn (Topeka, Kansas) University Law Professor, Ali Khan, another
    practicing Muslim, provided a more original, but no less chilling
    rationale for Muslims in the West to violate -- fatally -- the basic
    freedom of conscience of their co-religionists. Khan argued in The
    Cumberland Law Review that apostasy from Islam is an "attack" upon
    "protected knowledge," which if deemed (i.e., by some Islamic tribunal
    one must assume!) to be "open, hostile, and voiced contemptuously,"
    justified punishment by death. Ali Khan is convinced that traditional
    Islamic law precepts antithetical to freedom of conscience
    nevertheless trump this foundational Western freedom, because,

    "Islam is the truth beyond doubt. [And] [t] hese rules preserve the
    dignity of protected knowledge, discouraging an `easy in, easy out'
    attitude toward Islam."

    Just this April, Harvard Muslim chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser explained
    approvingly to a Muslim student that the traditional Islamic practice
    of executing apostates from Islam, remained both venerable, and
    applicable:

    "There is great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and
    preserved position (capital punishment), and so, even if it makes some
    uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human-rights
    discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand."

    With the exception of my colleague Diana West, the mainstream media
    completely ignored this important and revealing story, emanating from
    Harvard, no less.

    Rifqa Bary's public apostasy from Islam is a watershed event which
    will gauge just how far into the depths of stultifying Islamic
    correctness we have descended. Diana West recently provided this
    unflinching assessment of what is at stake if we fail to muster the
    requisite moral and intellectual fortitude:

    "...the war against alienating Islam is not a war I want to fight -
    and no adherent of Western liberty could believe it is the war we want
    to win. Indeed, this war effort turns out to be the same thing as
    fighting for Islam. It calls us to self-censorship, self-abnegation,
    self-extinguishment. It depends on and encourages our submission."

    [Note: I would like acknowledge my indebtedness to the work of two
    exceptionally courageous, and intellectually honest journalists,
    Pamela Geller, and Diana West. Pamela has done the only serious
    investigative reporting on Rifqa Bary's case. Diana West coined the
    apt phrase, "see no Islam" as part of her unique, ongoing analysis of
    the dhimmitude of the American intellectual class.]
    Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad  (Prometheus,
    2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.

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    24, 2009 - 10:09:15 AM EDT