United Liberty

At the Cato Institute, David Boaz relays the Saudi sentencing to death of a man for the “crime” of astrology:

A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a Lebanese television host to death for the crime of “sorcery.” Apparently Ali Hussein Sibat was recognized by Saudi religious police as he made a pilgrimage to Mecca. On his show, he gave advice to callers and made predictions about their future. He could be executed any day now.

It’s disputable how significant the portion of the Islamic faith is that follows the line of thinking that led to Ali Hussein Sibat’s sentencing, but it is very clear, from countless constant and widespread terror attacks to similar backward sentencing occurring throughout the Islamic world (and in supposedly “democratic” regimes such as Afghanistan), that it is not a small phenomenon.

Current TV focusses on two gay Iranian men who fled their native country to find personal freedom in the British city of Leeds.

The trend of labeling the Islamic religion as “totalitarian” is far too provocative to leave unanswered. Those who argue that Islam, or the Muslim faith, is by its very nature totalitarian turn a semantic gaffe into a pejorative and hostile dogma which, in turn, becomes an article of faith for the avid fans of Fox News. Given the social cost of mobilizing a large segment of the population to fear and abhor Muslims, this error must be addressed.

There is an excellent article over at Wall Street Journal by columnist Bret Stevens entitled “How to Manage Savagery.” Stevens tackles an infrequently addressed aspect of the war that is overtaking the Islamic world: that the targets of violence by Muslim terrorists are more often than not other Muslims.

The article is very long and rather academic, but one of the best passages follows:

Remarkably, however, the wars that chiefly roil the Islamic world today are no longer at its periphery. They are at the center, and they pit Muslims against other Muslims. The genocide in Darfur is being perpetrated by a regime that is every bit as Muslim—and black—as its victims. The Palestinians went from intifada to civil war: in 2006 and 2007, nearly as many Palestinians died violently at the hands of other Palestinians as at the hands of Israelis. In Lebanon, there have been bloody clashes this year among Shiites, Sunnis, and Druze. Last year, the Lebanese government had to send troops into Palestinian refugee camps to suppress an insurrectionary attempt by a Syrian-sponsored terrorist group.

It does not end there. Saudi Arabia has been under attack by al Qaeda since 2003. In November 2005, Jordan suffered devastating suicide bombings at three Amman hotels in which nearly all the victims were, like their murderers, Sunni Muslims. In Afghanistan, a Muslim government led by Hamid Karzai—a Pashtun—fights an Islamist rebellion by Taliban remnants and their allies, also mostly Pashtun. In Pakistan, the axis of conflict has shifted from the east to the west, where sizable areas are under the control of Islamist militants; in 2007 alone, some 1,500 Pakistanis were killed in terrorist attacks, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto notably among them.

Then there is Iraq. Though Americans naturally focus on the more than 4,000 U.S. servicemen killed so far since the country was liberated in April 2003, that figure pales in comparison with the number of Iraqis killed in inter- and intra-sectarian violence: Sunnis against Shiites and Kurds, Sunnis against Sunnis, Shiites against Sunnis, Shiites against Shiites. Cumulatively, the number of civilian deaths since early 2006, when sectarian fighting got under way in earnest, now stands at just over 100,000 (according to the Brookings Institution).

All this serves as a useful reminder of another significant fact. In the years immediately prior to 9/11, non-Muslims tended to be the likeliest targets of terrorism. In recent years, Muslims themselves have overwhelmingly been their co-religionists’ primary victims. In 2007, of the nearly 8,000 deaths due to terrorism in the Middle East, only a handful were Israeli. Similarly, of the roughly 270 suicide bombings in 2007, some 240 took place in predominantly Muslim countries. Nearly 100 mosques were also the targets of terrorist attack, many at the hands of Muslims.