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Condi: Democracy Will Evolve In Afghanistan
 Afghanistan's prosecution of a man who converted from Islam to Christianity shows how a fledgling democracy struggles to recognize individual rights, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.
| ... and how the resident holy men do their best to ignore them. |
Afghanistan is "going through one of the most difficult debates that any society goes through, and that is the proper role of religion in the politics of the state," she said.
| I don't think they're having a debate about it. I think they've said that anybody who converts from Islam to anything else has to be killed but that their sources of aid and support are bound up with people who have those funny ideas about individual liberty. |
Officials in Afghanistan said Abdul Rahman, who faced a possible death sentence for converting from Islam to Christianity, was to be freed after a court on Sunday dismissed the case against him, citing a lack of evidence.
| ... and not citing his freedom to believe what he damned well pleases. |
Rice said she had no independent confirmation, but said that development "would be a very good step forward" if true. "This is an evolutionary process," Rice said on Fox News. "It's a young democracy."
| They've made it up to about 714 A.D., but they've still got a long way to go. The question is whether they really want to make the trip... |
Afghanistan's U.S.-backed president, Hamid Karzai, has faced mounting foreign pressure to free Rahman. Muslim clerics have called for Rahman to be killed.
| That's because they're holy men. It's holy to want to have people killed when they deviate from your straight-and-narrow. They have a blood fetish. |
"We, as Americans, know that in democracy, as it evolves, there are difficult issues about state and church, or in this case, state and mosque. But there are difficult issues about the rights of the individual," Rice told CNN's "Late Edition."
| ... or, in Islamic countries, the lack thereof... |
"We're going to stand firm for the principle that religious freedom and freedom of religious conscience need to be upheld, and we are hoping for a favorable resolution in this case," Rice said.
Very good. But, Muslim clerics will always rail against democracy - except where they control a majority vote - because it implies popular sovereignty, while they recognize only their concocted deity ("allah") as sovereign. There was a brief period of Secularism in post colonial Arab speaking entities, but that has washed away.
Rahman was being prosecuted under Afghanistan's Islamic laws for converting 16 years ago while working as a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Rahman's case represents a "crossroads for their judicial system," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. "Let's hope they make the right decision," he told CNN's "Late Edition." "If they don't, I think there are going to be a great many problems."
| I don't think the holy men intend taking any of the roads available to them. They intend to stay precisely where they are. That's because none of the roads available present the option of holy men running the country. |
Rice was asked if Christian missionaries from the United States should be encouraged to go to Afghanistan. "I think that Afghans are pleased to get the help that they can get," she told NBC's "Meet the Press."
| And I'd guess the holy men would be whipping up the rubes to kill them within hours of their arrival. |
Stephen Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that Afghanistan is "trying to reconcile a religious background of their country with a commitment they made in their own constitution to the universal declaration of human rights."
A National Security adviser who is unaware that Islam is a total integration of church and state, is in the wrong line of work. Forget Hadley, it's like this Condi: Muslim = abd-allah = slave-of-allah. Toss away your Karen Armstrong/John Esposito ink-abusers and read Robert Spencer.
| I think they both know the issues here. Hadley has it right IMO: the Afghans generally aspire to democracy, which is a new thing for them. Now they have to think through what that means in practice and whether it's really compatible with Islamacism. The death penalty for apostates arguably isn't in the Q'uran, by the way - it's in the interpretations that have been added. A lot of Islamic countries don't have it in their legal code. There are Islamic precedents the Afghans could follow other than the Taliban's. |
Posted by: Listen to Dogs 2006-03-27 |
