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.
Both men were reacting to an amateur video satirizing Mohammed, whose emergence on the Internet has been blamed for protests targeting American diplomatic missions across the Islamic world. According to wire services at least 12 deaths have been linked to the protests since Thursday, with deaths reported in Tunisia, Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen, Lebanon and Egypt.
The two clerics' calls are a new salvo in an unremitting campaign by Islamic political and religious leaders, spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), to pressure non-Muslims to treat Islam with deference.
In a statement released by the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA), Asheikh "appealed to all countries and international organizations to criminalize acts ridiculing all prophets and messengers (peace be upon them)."
The kingdom's Arab News pointed out that he was referring to such figures as "Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed."
Well, that last line of prophets would make the liberal artists in New York eligible for a Islam beheading. Let me be the first to tell the cleric to fuck off and he can take his goofy ass moon god and shove it up his ass along with Mohammed's beard.