Hypocrisy: What Muslims Do Best

We saw it back in 2009, when Muslims whined and complained about the Swiss minaret ban while failing to condemn the lack of freedom for Christians to build churches in the Middle East. We saw it when Sunni Islam's top authority, Al Azhar University, severed all dialogue with the Vatican in protest at the Catholic Church's condemnation of Islamic persecution of Christians, saying that this was an unacceptable "interference" in Muslim internal affairs - even though Al Azhar itself had previously tried to interfere in non-Muslim affairs by calling for the minaret ban to be reversed.

It seems that self-righteous hypocrisy is what Muslims do best.

And as Muslims go on bloody rampages through Afghanistan, killing people in response to the burning of a Qur'an, it is worth recalling a September 2010 article by Daniel Pipes which clarifies the continuing hypocrisy of the Muslim world. The article examines a mainstream Islamic fatwa, or sharia legal ruling, from 2003 which states that Muslims have the right to use the Torah or the Bible as toilet paper. When a German woman noticed this fatwa and called in response for a "Koran toilet paper roll", a scholar from Al Azhar issued another fatwa calling for the "shedding of [her] blood".

And over at Front Page, Raymond Ibrahim has a timely list of recent murders and persecutions of Christians committed by Muslims (not even in response to the Qur'an-burning, just "business as usual" in the Muslim world) - none of which have met with any condemnation at all from Muslims (links in the original):

* Afghanistan: A Muslim convert to Christianity was seized and, according to sharia’s apostasy laws, awaits execution.

* Bangladesh: A Christian man was arrested for distributing Bibles near Muslims. Since Wednesday, thousands of Muslims have been rioting, injuring dozens—not because of Jones, but in protestation of women’s rights.

* Egypt: A Muslim mob burned down another Coptic church and dozens of Christian homes; when Christians protested, the military opened fire on them while crying “Allahu Akbar,” killing nine. Another mob cut a Christian man’s ear off “according to sharia.”

* Ethiopia: Muslims went on a rampage burning down nearly 70 churches, killing at least one Christian, and dislocating as many as 10,000. Christians living in Muslim majority regions are being warned to either convert to Islam, abandon their homes, or die.

* Malaysia: Authorities detained and desecrated thousands of Bibles.

* Pakistan: Two Christians were shot to death as they exited church; a Christian serving life in prison for “blasphemy” died in his cell under suspicions of murder.

* Saudi Arabia: An Eritrean Christian has been arrested for sharing his faith with Muslims and is facing the death penalty; other missionaries continue to languish in Saudi prisons.

* Somalia and Sudan: Christian girls—including a mother of four—were recently abducted, raped, and killed for embracing Christianity.

Ibrahim also points out the obvious media double standard coming from the non-Muslim Western media, which has by and large blamed Terry Jones personally for the murders committed in response to his book burning, while largely ignoring all the above Muslim crimes against humanity:

Such is the surreal and increasingly irrational world we live in, where irate Muslims and groveling Westerners obsess over the destruction of one book while ignoring the destruction of many human lives; where a guaranteed and hard-earned American right—freedom of expression—receives a lot of condemnatory huffing and puffing from those charged with protecting it, while murderous, barbarous—in a word, evil—behavior is devoutly ignored.