Religious tolerance

The Council on American-Islamic Relations busies itself urging American college campuses to bar “anti-Islamic speakers,” revealing a modest blind spot when it comes to the American tradition of widespread tolerance of differing viewpoints that led to members of the Muslim faith being welcomed here, in the first place.

The outfit offers to teach people how to “challenge the anti-Sharia campaign” — an interesting undertaking, if there’s supposedly no plan to impose Muslim religious law, here. CAIR also protests FBI agents being taught “to view the faith of Islam itself as the source of terrorism and extremism.”

The great majority of modern Muslims are neither terrorists nor supporters of terrorism, of course. But if Islam is universally a religion of peace and tolerance, how shall we explain that this week in Iran, not merely a majority-Muslim country but a Muslim theocracy, Iranian Christian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani faces execution because he has refused to recant his Christian faith?

“Despite the finding that Mr. Nadarkhani did not convert to Christianity as an adult, the court continues to demand that he recant his faith or otherwise be executed,” says Leonard Leo, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

We’re informed Iran hasn’t executed anyone merely for being a Christian pastor since 1990. Such admirable restraint. There’s even still some chance the Iranian court may bow to international pressure and settle for merely imprisoning or exiling Pastor Nadakhani for his “offense” — though it’s not a very hopeful sign that, for defending in court the pastor and 19 other “aspotates,” well-known Iranian human rights attorney Mohammad Ali Dadkhah was himself recently sentenced to nine years in prison.

The case is not isolated. An Iranian mullah has declared Christianity is a greater danger to Islam than Satanism, and at least 285 Christians have been reported arrested in 35 Iranian cities in the first six months of 2011, many charged with crimes of conscience that carry death sentences.

How repulsive. How barbaric. Is this the 21st century, or the eighth? Members of all faiths should loudly condemn any nation or government that makes freedom of conscience a capital offense.

Meantime, the rulers of this slave state, which for all the failings of the politically repressive Pahlavi clan was successfully using its oil wealth to build a modern, urbane, secular middle class a mere 30 years ago, certainly aren’t doing any good for the admirable cause of tolerance for Muslims and Islam in the West.