Saturday, May 01, 2004

Religion of Peace update

At least five Westerners killed in office attack in Saudi Arabia

One of the Westerners who survived the initial shooting was stripped, tied to a stolen vehicle and dragged through the streets as the assailants fled, according to witnesses interviewed by reporters from The Saudi Gazette, an English-language paper in Jidda.

Later reports put the death toll at six, including two Americans.

I wasn’t going to mention it, but while I was in Strasbourg, there was a large rally in the town square of Muslims demanding that France stop “racism and xenophobia” against people of the Islamic faith. Only later did I learn that the rally was held a day after a Muslim cleric was expelled from France for his somewhat uncivilized positions:

VÉNISSIEUX, France, April 23 — This town's largest mosque is temporarily leaderless, its chief cleric having been expelled from France last week for advocating wife beating, stoning and other medieval Islamic views at odds with the principles of the modern French state.

If I declare stoning a barbaric practice, am I being “xenophobic” towards Islam? Does Allah smile if Western engineers are brutally murdered for the crime of trying to help build a Mideast economy? I get the strong impression that the Muslim position on this is “No” with a “But.”

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