http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/09/19/charlie-hebdo-and-sharia-versus-freedom-of-speech/
Charlie Hebdo and Sharia Versus Freedom of Speech
My forthcoming book Sharia Versus Freedom [1], elaborates in great detail the grave threat, Sharia, Islam’s totalitarian “universal law” poses to our bedrock Western liberties—especially freedom of conscience and speech.
Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French tabloid, has just published [2] (9/19/12) a new series of cartoons lampooning Islam’s prophet Muhammad.
According to one of contemporary Islamdom’s most popular and respected clerics, Yusuf al-Qaradawi—who will no doubt raise vociferous objections to the publication of these caricatures, and perhaps even issue a fatwa calling for the “punishment” (i.e., death, imprisonment, etc.) of the cartoonist—Muhammad remains the “Jihad Model [3]” for all Muslims justifying the creed’s mission for violent subjugation of the “infidel” and sanctioning murderous “martyrdom operations,” in modern parlance homicide bombings, to achieve that end.
As Qaradawi himself, legions of other mainstream Muslim legists, including the mainstream Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, and the laws of many Islamic nations affirm, Charlie Hebdo’s publication of such “blasphemous images” is a criminal act punishable [1], at minimum by fine and imprisonment, or even death—all in accord with Islam’s freedom of speech abrogating “Holy Law,” the totalitarian Sharia [1].
Professor Carl Brockelmann (1868–1956), the renowned scholar of Semitic languages, and arguably the foremost Orientalist of his generation, made these candid observations [1] about the sharia’s injunctions pertaining to penal law, in 1939—Islamic law being “valid” eternally, and all too widely applied in Brockelmann’s era, till now.
Blasphemy with respect to God [Allah], the Prophet, and his predecessors is punished by death, as is defection from Islam, if the culprit persists in his disbelief.
Almost three-quarters of a century later, Rising Restrictions on Religion, a report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life issued August 9, 2011, examined [1] the issue of “defamation” of religion, tracking countries where various penalties are enforced for apostasy, blasphemy, or criticism of religions. “While such laws are sometimes promoted as a way to protect religion, in practice they often serve to punish religious minorities whose beliefs are deemed unorthodox or heretical,” the report noted. The Pew report, consistent with Brockelmann’s assessment from 1939, found that application of the sharia at present resulted in a disproportionate number of Muslim countries, twenty-one—Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Brunei, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Maldives, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Western Sahara, and Yemen—registering the highest (i.e., worst) persecution scores on their scale. Furthermore, the Pew investigators observed [1],
Eight-in-ten countries in the Middle East–North Africa region have laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion, the highest share of any region. These penalties are enforced in 60% of the countries in the region.