The Falstaff defense

Is it right, is it fair, that people should go to jail merely for carrying out their religious duty? IC Liverpool reports:

A lawyer defending al Qaida-linked suspects standing trial for the 2003 suicide bombings in Istanbul told a court that jihad, or holy war, was an obligation for Muslims and his clients should not be prosecuted.

“If you punish them for this, tomorrow, will you punish them for fasting or for praying?” Osman Karahan—a lawyer representing 14 of the 72 suspects—asked during a nearly four-hour speech in which he read religious texts from an encyclopedia of Islam.

Now this really takes the cake. The attorney for the defense is actually arguing that jihad, including the murdering of infidels, is a religious obligation on every Muslim, and therefore to punish a Muslim for murdering infidels would be an illegitimate attack on his religion.

This is carrying to a no longer amusing extreme the hilarious logic employed by Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1 when his friend Prince Hal calls him a thief, and Falstaff, never at a loss, replies:

Why, Hal, ‘tis my vocation, Hal. ‘Tis no sin for a man to labor at his vocation.

As Andy Bostom reminds me, the notion that Muslims should not be prosecuted for killing non-Muslims, as ludicrous as it appears, is no joke, but “is an accepted understanding of the uniquely Islamic concept of Dar al Harb, within the institution of jihad, which states explicitly that the lives and property of the non-Muslim ‘harbis’ are ‘mubaa’ or licit for the Muslims.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 21, 2005 12:24 PM | Send