00DAD: If I'm not mistaken (my memory is not that good), once I saw a picture of Justitia Themis and she is a very beautiful woman. Great eyes, if I'm not mistaken (I didn't get to see much of the rest). She's smart as well, and that I can see even without my eyes. I'm afraid, however, that most people -even Mr Zafar- would find me too poor a match for her. My loss.
Inquiry Man and everyone: No wonder the Ahmadiyas claim that "Islam prescribes absolutely no punishment for apostasy". This is one of the things you'd expect from a group that the rest of Muslims consider "apostates". They are mistreated everywhere.
Religious Tolerance in Indonesia - Part 1 (RAW Video)
http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DzNiQfpvtKOo
Religious Tolerance in Indonesia - Part 2 (RAW Video) [Graphic]
http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DHL6GD5xUYig
The first one of these links is one I uploaded when I first posted on this thread. It is "the first part" of "two parts". Both parts show how an Ahmadiyah place of worship was attacked, and how three members of the Ahmadiyah were murdered by a mob, while policemen were there doing absolutely nothing. The fact that many of those pious murderers or bystanders were recording videos of such a fun thing to watch does tell us something about them. The fact that the Indonesian police did nothing tells us something about the kind of political regime that prevails there.
This is an article published on The Economist about this heinous murder:
Lightly on the lynch mob
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/07/religious-persecution-indonesia
"SO, WHAT sort of sentence do you think a man convicted of killing someone by smashing in his skull with a stone might get in Indonesia? Life? Thirty years in prison? Twenty? Five? No. Three months, apparently. (emphasis added).
At least, that was the sentence handed down by a court in Java on July 28th against Dani bin Misra. He was part of a frenzied mob of Sunni Muslim chauvinists, about 1,000 strong, that hacked and beat to death three members of the minority Ahmadi sect of Islam in February. Eleven others were on trial (including the cleric pictured above, white turban on the left). None of the guilty received more than six months for their crimes; none of them were even accused of murder. The ringleader was convicted of nothing more terrible than illegal possession of a machete; he got just over five months. (emphasis added)
Considering the horror of the killings, these verdicts were risible and have been condemned as such by all and sundry—human-rights groups, the American government (which usually leans over backwards to be nice towards its new friend and the world’s largest Muslim country), the EU, as well as Indonesian civil-rights organisations.
It’s a terrible verdict for Indonesia, and for Indonesian justice. On the subject of religious tolerance—and the related matter of Islamic terrorism—it’s as if the country always takes two steps forwards and then quickly takes another step back. A few weeks ago a court finally sentenced one of the country’s most culpable terrorist leaders to a meaningful prison sentence; now another court gives these perpetrators nothing more than a slap on the wrist for what was clearly an awful murder. Furthermore, no one could have been in any doubt as to the savagery and barbarity of the attack on the Ahmadis; it was all caught on film and posted (temporarily) on YouTube.
Most worryingly, the verdicts would seem to give a virtual green light to anyone else who wants to attack the Ahmadiyah, a sect that many Muslims regard as illegitimate and heretical (they face terrible persecution in Pakistan).
There's more but I don't need to copy all of it.
Lest we think it's only the Ahmadiyah that get the heat,
Under attack
The jailing of a jihadist leader still leaves plenty to worry about
http://www.economist.com/node/18867318
THE ordeal of a 22-year-old female Pentecostal trainee-pastor began on the evening of June 9th in Situbondo, a town in east Java. Aprilia Dyah Kusumaningrum was set upon by three men after leaving a church service. The details of what she then suffered are disputed. But she was abducted in a car, ending up hundreds of kilometres away. She managed to make her way home only after local farmers cobbled together a bit of money for her bus-fare.
Theophilus Bela, of the Jakarta Christian Communication Forum, an NGO, says the abductors, who wore serban, a type of turban favoured by Muslims, were Islamic radicals. He tells the story as an illustration of the sort of religious violence that has become all too common in Indonesia. This year has seen perhaps two dozen attacks on churches, mostly on Java, Indonesia’s most populous island. And Islamist attacks are not aimed solely at the Christian minority in a country with the largest Muslim population in the world. In February an Islamist mob lynched some members of the small Ahmadiyah sect, regarded by some orthodox Muslims as apostates, killing four. Members of the Shia minority have also been victims of violence.
There's more, again, but I don't want to make this post exceedingly long.
http://www.economist.com/node/15266768
Pakistan's abused Ahmadis
A mosque by any other name
Members of the Ahmadiya sect face a new rash of persecution
Jan 13th 2010 | Lahore
AS AFZAL TAHIR was reciting the Koran last month, and otherwise minding his own business—an electrical repair shop—four Muslim fundamentalists came to threaten him. If they caught Mr Tahir masquerading as a Muslim again, they said, he would pay for it: with up to three years in prison, which is the penalty for members of the Ahmadiya sect who are convicted of that crime.
AP
Ahmadis consider themselves Muslims, though they differ from the Sunni mainstream on an important point: they believe that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the 19th-century Indian who founded their tradition, was a latter-day prophet. In many Muslims’ eyes, this makes them un-Islamic and blasphemous. Pakistan’s Ahmadis, of whom there may be 4m, were declared to be non-Muslims by the government in 1974. In the 1980s, under General Zia ul Haq, a fundamentalist Sunni dictator, most aspects of Ahmadi worship were in effect criminalised—in some cases by blasphemy laws which carry the death penalty.
The Ahmadis are an educated minority, who do well in commerce and produced Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate. But they are not permitted to call their mosque a mosque, nor to issue the Muslim call to prayer, display Koranic inscriptions or otherwise present themselves as Muslims. Under an arrangement re-established by Pervez Musharraf, the country’s most recent military dictator, Ahmadis have a separate voters’ list and parliamentary seats reserved for their candidates. But most Ahmadis choose not to vote at all. And some, including the leader of Lahore’s Ahmadis, Munir Ahmad Sheikh, argue that those holding the reserved seats, having implicitly accepted their status as non-Muslims, are not really Ahmadis at all.
Seated at Lahore’s main Ahmadi mosque—where an engraving of the Kalima, the Muslim profession of faith, has been crudely planked over—Mr Sheikh diagnoses a new outbreak of anti-Ahmadi thuggery. This is a roughly decennial event, he says, and has manifested itself in recent attacks on Ahmadi mosques in Lahore and intensified intimidation of Ahmadi traders.
A general rise in Islamist militancy, in which jihadists’ competing agendas have tended to merge, may explain this. Economic hardship, which aggravates the property disputes that so often underlie sectarian and religious violence, could be another factor. As can mundane political rivalries: a fiery dispute last September between Pakistan’s central “moon-sighting committee” and the government of North-West Frontier Province, over when to end the Ramadan fast, escalated to the point that supporters of the government likened their opponents to the Ahmadis—in effect, using the sect as a paragon of religious deviance.
So long as anti-Ahmadi sentiment is sanctioned by law, there is little prospect of breaking the decennial cycle. Nor is any political party likely to dare antagonising the Islamists by trying to repeal Pakistan’s anti-Ahmadi laws. It was, after all, a government of the relatively liberal Pakistan People’s Party that first declared the group to be non-Muslim. With most mullahs, the government and the law all ranged against the Ahmadis, it would be surprising if most Pakistanis were not too.
The shop next to Mr Tahir’s is pasted with anti-Ahmadi slogans. One screams “Every Ahmadi is a blasphemer like Salman Rushdie”. Asked whether this wasn’t rather un-neighbourly, the proprietor, Muhammad Rafiq, replies, “Whatever the mullahs say must be right.”
My sincere apologies to Mr Zafar, then. He was not lying. He thinks that Islam prescribes no punishment for apostasy. My sincere apologies again. I can but hope that whoever read my first posts about him can read this now, so his name is clean.
Of Mr Zafar's beliefs, however, the least we could say is that they are not necessarily shared by many of the people one traditionally identifies as Muslims. And that is the relevant point for us.
Is Islam more lenient than the Watchtower towards apostates? Depends on what you understand "Islam" to mean. Justitia Themis (smart and beautiful woman) wanted the original poster to compare apples to apples. Maybe - I speculate here - Ms Justitia would find Mr Zero Zero's comparison fair in that case.
Me, Asshole, thinks that Mr Zero Zero was wrong in his original post. Many people say that only the intolerant few issue fatwas and kill Theo van Goghs and do "honor" killings. Or hang homosexuals because they are homosexuals. The problem I have with this belief is that "the intolerant few" have political and armed power in many of those countries, first, and, second, the "tolerant many" apparently have no way to make their good hears prevail over those of the intolerant few. I would say what the good ole Spanish saying states: "Tanto peca el que mata la vaca como el que le detiene la pata". He who kills the cow is as much in sin as he who only holds the cow's leg.
It's interesting to me that secular governments (including that of asshole Ghadafi) were able to bring the fanatics to restraint.
Now, since the thread was redirected to this
"Imagine, just imagine, if the WTBTS prescribed"absolutely no punishment for apostasy"!
I can say that in that case only a few people would be witnesses. In my humble opinion, it is punishment, in the form of disfellowshipment and the loss of friends and relatives, or the threat of it, on the one hand; and FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), on the other, that keeps people in. A small minority is there just because they are power hungry.
One could speculate what the power hungry would do if they controlled a small land and could create their cherished "theocracy" there. Maybe an Indonesia but by another name, and with a different god, and with similar holy killings.
