Young Muslims Fight for the Right to Abandon Faith

A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam.

The provocative move reflects a growing rift between traditionalists and a younger generation raised on a diet of Dutch tolerance.

The Committee for Ex-Muslims promises to campaign for freedom of religion but has already upset the Islamic and political Establishments for stirring tensions among the million-strong Muslim community in the Netherlands.

Ehsan Jami, the committee’s founder, who rejected Islam after the attack on the twin towers in 2001, has become the most talked-about public figure in the Netherlands. He has been forced into hiding after a series of death threats and a recent attack.

The threats are taken seriously after the murder in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an antiimmigration politician, and in 2004 of Theo Van Gogh, an antiIslam film-maker.

Speaking to The Times at a secret location before the committee’s launch today, the Labour Party councillor said that the movement would declare war on radical Islam. Similar organisations campaigning for reform of the religion have sprung up across Europe and representatives from Britain and Germany will join the launch in The Hague today.

“Sharia schools say that they will kill the ones who leave Islam. In the West people get threatened, thrown out of their family, beaten up,” Mr Jami said. “In Islam you are born Muslim. You do not even choose to be Muslim. We want that to change, so that people are free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in.”

Mr Jami, 22, who has abandoned his studies as his political career has taken off, denied that the choice of September 11 was deliberately provocative towards the Islamic Establishment. “We chose the date because we want to make a clear statement that we no longer tolerate the intolerence of Islam, the terrorist attacks,” he said.

“In 1965 the Church in Holland made a declaration that freedom of conscience is above hanging on to religion, so you can choose whether you are going to be a Christian or not. What we are seeking is the same thing for Islam.”

Mr Jami, who has compared the rise of radical Islam to the threat from Nazism in the 1930s, is receiving only lukewarm support from his party which traditionally relies upon Muslim votes. His outspoken attack on radical Islam has led to a prelaunch walk-out from fellow committee founder Loubna Berrada, who herself rejected Islam.

She said: “I don’t wish to confront Islam itself. I only want to spread the message that Muslims should be allowed to leave Islam behind without being threatened.”

...

Jannie Groen, a writer for De Volksrant newspaper, said: “[Among Muslims] he is getting the same reaction as Ayaan Hirsi Ali that he is too confrontational but you are seeing other former Muslims now coming forward. So he has been able to put this issue of apostasy on the agenda, even though they do not want to be in the same room as him and he has had to pay a price.”

Times Online, via Reddit.

Stoning in the Torah and in Reality

The rabbis hardly ever allowed executions. This stuff doesn't apply any more. I understand that. What I can't understand is how people can worship a Being they believe wrote, dictated, or inspired the following verses:

דברים פרק כב
כג כי יהיה נער בתולה, מארשה לאיש; ומצאה איש בעיר, ושכב עמה. כד והוצאתם את-שניהם אל-שער העיר ההוא, וסקלתם אתם באבנים ומתו--את-הנער על-דבר אשר לא-צעקה בעיר, ואת-האיש על-דבר אשר-ענה את-אשת רעהו; ובערת הרע, מקרבך

Deuteronomy 22:23-24. If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.

The moment a teenage girl was stoned to death for loving the wrong boy

A 17-year-old girl has been stoned to death in Iraq because she loved a teenage boy of the wrong religion.

As a horrifying video of the stoning went out on the Internet, the British arm of Amnesty International condemned the death of Du’a Khalil Aswad as "an abhorrent murder" and demanded that her killers be brought to justice.

Reports from Iraq said a local security force witnessed the incident, but did nothing to try to stop it. Now her boyfriend is in hiding in fear for his life.

Miss Aswad, a member of a minority Kurdish religious group called Yezidi, was condemned to death as an "honour killing" by other men in her family and hardline religious leaders because of her relationship with the Sunni Muslim boy.

I watched the video. (You can find it in this thread if you want.) It's horrible. The poor girl is cowering on the ground stripped to her underwear and a bloodthirsty mob is screaming (I assume) for her death as she is brutally murdered.

Maybe you think God didn't mean these verses literally or that they don't apply now. But how can you worship him if he even wrote them? How can you believe that they weren't written by people much like today's Muslim (and Yezidi?) extremists when their actions fit in so closely with the Torah's words?

It's to the rabbis' credit that this sort of "justice" was never common among the Jewish people, at least since Talmudic times. Still, they shouldn't have had to "reinterpret" the text or explain why it no longer applies. It should never have applied and it should never have been written.

Holocaust Denial: The New Creationism?

Ezzie links to Mevaseretzion who posts about a disturbing story out of Britain:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

At first it sounds like political correctness gone mad. But that's not what's really going on:

It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.

The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework.

The report said teachers feared confronting 'anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils'.

It added: "In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.

"But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques."

A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'.

The report concluded: "In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship."

So there are really two things going on here. One is that teachers want to avoid antisemitic statements (or worse?) by their students. The other is that teachers are scared or reluctant to challenge what students have been taught by their parents or religious leaders.

The former is basically a discipline problem. Any reasonable teacher should be able to best a student in a debate about whether the holocaust happened. The way to defeat a bad argument is with a better argument, not with censorship. And any student who cannot refrain from hate speech (e.g. making anti-semitic slurs) should be disciplined or expelled.

The latter is similar, at first glance, to what's been going on in the U.S. regarding the teaching of evolution. Evolution has as much evidence for it as do the Crusades, but many schools do not teach it because of religious nuts. But it's not really the same thing. In America, the anti-evolution nuts are in the majority in many (if not most) school districts, while (presumably) holocaust deniers are still a small minority in Britain. It's bad enough to drop a subject when you have the truth on one side and a majority of people -- including many educators -- on the other. But when both the truth and the majority are on the same side, it's crazy to give in to the nuts.