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Closure on Rahman; closure on democratization
Abdul Rahman has arrived in Italy, where he has been granted asylum. Let us be clear about what this means. It wasn’t the Afghan authorities’ cancellation of his trial and of his impending death sentence that saved his life. It was his departure from the entire Muslim world that saved his life, since in the absence of his “legal” execution he would certainly have been murdered by order of various clerics. As Richard Cohen has pointed out, the whole Islamic world either wanted to kill Rahman or went along with his prospective execution. Therefore the meaning of this incident is now fixed and established and cannot be denied: Afghanistan and the rest of the Muslim world believe in killing anyone who converts from Islam, just as the Koran commands. This should tell even the brain-dead clique in the White House, not to mention their “best and brightest” neocon advisors, that the planting of liberal democracy in Muslim countries is inherently impossible. There is no longer any excuse for the president or his supporters or anyone to tout the chimera of Muslim democratization.
Unless, of course, by “democracy” they mean nothing more than popular elections of sharia and terrorist regimes. Email entry |