Rifqa Bary in Context: Muslims Who Convert To Christianity and The Price They Pay…….

Borrowed from Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs, which dovetails nicely with what Bruce Bawer spoke about the other night at the International Free Press Society conference in Canada.  First up, is what Bruce Bawer spoke about concerning the multiculturalists who treat Muslims as a collective, as opposed to how they treat the native European as an individual. Real stunning when you think about it. KGS

Bruce Bawer: And in many cases they shamefully close their eyes to honor killings. The murders by parents and siblings, of girls and women who in some cases doing no more than looking at a boy the wrong way, have according to Islamic beliefs, soiled family honor. European authorities are so much a prisoner of multiculturalism that they´could actually believe that their obligation in such matters is not to protect innocent children from brutality, but to display sensitivity to cultural difference.

Within Muslim communities, there are only a very few unimaginably bold men and women, who dare to speak out against the traditional sharia based autocracy of the Mullahs and Imams. And when they did so, they were not defended, let alone praised for it by the government, media or by professors,but were rather accused of betraying their people and rocking the boat. Take the writer Whalid Al-Kalbaisi, who came to Norway from Iraq many years ago, and has recounted a conversation he had with the Ethnic Norwegian Director at what Al-Kalbaisi described as an “international cultural center.

This cultural bureaucrat plainly thought of himself as being devoted heart and soul to the welfare of immigrants, but when Al-Kalbaisi raised the question of the freedom of Muslims to criticize or even leave their own religion, the cultural bureaucrat was displeased. “You are a Muslim Whalid”, he said, “and you must not lose your identity. ” “But do you believe”, Whalid asked, “that I will lose my identity if I believe in the freedom of expression?” “Listen” the man replied, “this is something that you decide yourself, but your attitude causes a lot of problems. We want to create a multicultural society and we don’t want to dissolve these foreign cultures, your attitude alters all our plans, it creates conflicts between immigrants.”

And so it goes, while Western Europe multicultural mentality views native Westerners as individuals, who have an inalienable right to self determination, and views Muslim immigrants as a member of a group with its own collective self definition, and while those within the group who labor to reinforce to enforce that self definition are rewarded. Those who try to live as individuals in ways that are inconsistent with the community orthodoxy, are seen as making problems, creating conflicts. For the only legitimate identity they have in the eyes of European multiculturalists, is a collective identity, an identity yoked entirely and irreparably to skin color, ethnicity and religious background.

If ethnic Europeans choose to belong to any religion or none, but are expected to respect the law, Muslims, as Al.Kalbaisi has pointed out, are seen as quote, religious beings by nature, and therefore as people who cannot be expected to conform to European law and culture, but who cannot be blamed for adhering to the most inhuman of Koranic precepts. It is precisely this kind of thinking, this type of multicultural thinking that has led judges across Europe to give perpetrators of honor killings, not heavier sentences, because their crimes are premeditated, but lighter sentences because their crimes in the eyes of the perpetrators of native cultures are not crimes at all.

Julia Duin wrote a very moving October 2002 piece in the Washington Times about the plight of Muslim apostates to Christianity here in the US. Much thanks to Dr. Andrew Bostom for sending it on. Read the whole thing.

Daring Leaps of Faith

One Washington area pastor asked not to be named because of a nearby mosque that has been scrutinizing him.

“I have seven Muslims who have converted,” he said. “I do not want any trouble.”

Ann Buwalda, an immigration lawyer for Just Law International in Fairfax, said she’s been approached by Pakistani converts who are refugees. One man, “Masih,” was working at a retail store in Northern Virginia, she said, when a Muslim co-worker from Pakistan noticed he was wearing a cross. The man asked Masih why he was wearing it.

“I am Christian,” said Masih. The Muslim co-worker became angry, called him derogatory names in their native language, shoved him in a hallway and thereafter tried to get him fired and threatened him after work one night.

“He told the security guards at the retail store, so the employer has separated the two,” Ms. Buwalda said.

“I worry about these people. I have given him a cell phone so he can call 911 if these guys stalk him. He has informally told police about it but filed no report” because, she adds, most refugees view American law enforcement in the same light as police from their own countries: people to be avoided at all costs.

She tells of another young female convert who wears a cross and who was stalked by a Muslim Pakistani taxi driver in the retail store where she works. Yet another Pakistani woman who converted to Christianity was threatened with death by Pakistani neighbors. “That kind of stuff, it’s frightening when it happens,” Ms. Buwalda said.

Victor Gill, a Pakistani immigrant who lives in Philadelphia and who leads a ministry called Christian Voice of Pakistan, said converts are regularly harassed in the United States.

“The threat is real,” he said. “They think they are doing something to earn credit with God when they kill Christians. When John Walker Lindh converted to Islam, his family supported him. But not so for the converts here. The Koran said people who leave Islam must be killed.”

Killing converts

Actually, that instruction is in the Hadith, a collection of the sayings of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. It has been enforced in varying ways. Female converts are usually imprisoned in a room — for months or years — as a sort of psychological torture until they recant. As for the men, all the traditional schools of Shariah (Islamic) law stipulate that “apostates” — those who leave their faith — must die. But before they die, they lose all civil liberties. Their children are taken away, their marriage is dissolved, they lose their family inheritance and they cannot be buried in a Muslim graveyard.