Religious tolerance for me, but not for thee

Just another reminder that the principles of liberal democracy and Sharia law are not compatible: In New York, Muslims want to build a mosque near Ground Zero and most Americans, while hating the idea, agree they have the right to do it. Meanwhile, in Kuwait, Christians are denied permission to build churches:

A group of Christians has complained that Kuwait City’s Municipal Council is preventing them from getting land to build a church. “The Municipal Council is the big problem preventing us from getting land; not all of the members, just the Islamic fundamentalists,” said Archimandrite Boutros Gharib, head of the local Greek Catholic Church.

Recently the municipal council blocked an attempt by the Greek Catholic Church to acquire land in Mahboula, an area in the Ahmadi governorate south of Kuwait City. The request has been pending for several years.

A new church would reduce over-crowdedness in a villa currently used for worshiping, Fr Gharib said.

According to the Greek Catholic clergyman, both the government and the country’s leader, Emir Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, have given their approval and blessing to the Church to have its property built. However, the Council has not followed suit. What is more, β€œThe council did not give us any reason,” he added.

β€œWe found the higher levels of government say yes and the lower levels of government say no,” said Rev Andrew Thompson, the Anglican chaplain to Kuwait, who stressed that religious fundamentalists controlled the municipality.

As Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch points out, and as the “fundamentalist” councilmen understand, Islamic law prohibits dhimmi (Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians) peoples from building new places of worship or even repairing the old ones. Yet, while while American Muslim groups complain if someone just speaks out against the building of a new mosque in the US, they say nothing about the far worse (and genuine) religious persecution practiced in Muslim lands. Indeed, Muhammad himself ordered that only Islam shall be practiced in the Arabian peninsula. I suppose the city councilors could argue that, hey, at least they’re allowing those dhimmi Christians to practice at all. Be grateful.

This isn’t an argument for tit-for-tat discrimination or, as some might put it, “they can build a mosque in New York when we can build a cathedral in Mecca.” To do so would be to abandon our own deeply held principles.

But neither can we ignore blatant hypocrisy and religious discrimination for the sake of an intellectually addled multiculturalism, regardless of how warm and fuzzy it makes us feel. Instead, it is incumbent on us to challenge and call out the advocates of Sharia in every case where their religious law, which they see as their duty to impose on us, conflicts with the basic human freedoms Western civilization holds dear.

If we don’t we may eventually find ourselves in the same unhappy state as the Greek Catholics of Kuwait.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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