As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
Those efforts recently received a dramatic setback when the top religious official in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa earlier this month calling on the faithful to destroy all churches in the Arabian peninsula. The ruling came in response to a request from a Kuwaiti legislator who wanted to know if under Islamic principles the government of Kuwait could ban church construction in the country.
In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons.
The State Department began a three-day, closed-door meeting Monday to talk about U.S. free speech rules with representatives from numerous Islamic governments that have lobbied for 12 years to end U.S. citizens’ ability to speak freely about Islam’s history and obligations. Free speech advocates slammed the event as an effort to gradually curb public criticism of Islam, but it was defended by Hannah Rosenthal, who heads the agency’s office to curb anti-Semitism.
Obama appointee, Howard Gutman made the remarks at a recent conference. “The legal experts at the event were visibly stunned by Gutman’s words, and the next speaker offered a scathing rebuttal to the envoy’s remarks.”
Bottom line: A supermajority, or something close to it, of the new Egyptian parliament will be Islamist. Wonderful.
The Journal says the unofficial split is 50 percent for the Muslim Brotherhood and 15 percent for the even more radical Salafists. The Times says it’s more like 40 percent for the Brotherhood and 25 percent for the Salafists.
The leader of an Islamist party that has never before participated in Morocco’s governments was chosen by the king as the country’s new head of government on Tuesday. The Justice and Development Party won the most votes Friday in a national election made possible by the pro-democracy demonstrations that swept this North African kingdom of 32 million earlier this year as part of the regionwide Arab Spring. King Mohammed VI received Abdelilah Benkirane, the secretary general of the
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