Freedom Line Blog

From CNS News:

Six months after declaring that all churches in the Arabian peninsula should be destroyed, Saudi Arabia’s top cleric called at the weekend for a global ban on insults targeting all religious “prophets and messengers,” a category that, from a Muslim perspective, includes Jesus Christ.

Saturday’s demand by Saudi grand mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh came on the same day that another of Sunni Islam’s most prominent figures, Egypt’s Al-Azhar University grand imam Ahmed el-Tayyeb, made a similar appeal.

Lest we think this is a phenomenon isolated to the Middle East, let us remember that there is no idiotic attempt to suppress liberty abroad that won’t find a sympathetic ear in our own State Department. Under the Obama Administration, Foggy Bottom has gone out of its way to accommodate the Islamic world’s fervor for anti-blasphemy laws by acceding to sympathetic UN resolutions. This may seem like nothing more than superficial bridge-building, but we know the course these impulses can take in the West, as embodied by the growing trend of aggrieved Muslims attempting to use liberal sensitivity to “hate speech” as a way to exact punishment on their critics from the judicial system.

The islamists’ tactics give the lie to their ideology. On one hand, they want us to believe that they represent a powerful, ascendant culture. On the other, their attempts to forcibly silence their critics betrays a deep and pervasive insecurity.

Great societies disprove their detractors. Weak ones send them to the stocks.