You may recall that in September Pope Benedict gave a speech in Germany in which he stated that “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” and in which he referred to a 14th- and 15th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus.

The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war. He said, I quote, ” ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.

As may be expected, this speech inflamed the fabled “Muslim street” and Muslim clerics and leaders of Islamic nation demanded apologies from the Pope. The “street” rioted across most of Islamia, as directed by their leaders.

Via email I received from Michael Edward McNeil some highly relevant links as this story continues. First stop, David Warren:

An extraordinary thing happened [in mid-October]. Thirty-eight Muslim scholars and chief muftis, from across the Muslim world, jointly replied to the Pope’s speech at Regensburg (and more have associated their names with this document, since). It was presented to the Vatican’s envoy at Amman; the full text in English is available through the Islamica magazine website, the Catholic website, Chiesa, and elsewhere. I look through the list of signatories, and they are a “who’s who” of the learned leaders of a faith that has always aspired to be led by its most learned. …

The signatories renounced and condemned violence against Christians in the name of Islam. They accepted without qualification the Pope’s post-Regensburg clarifications, and both accepted and applauded his call for dialogue. They unambiguously denounced and rejected all terrorist interpretations of the word “jihad”; they insisted on the priority of Surah 2:256 of the Koran (”There is no compulsion in religion”), stating explicitly that it is not obviated by later Koranic passages or Hadiths.

Firas Ahmad, senior editor of Islamica Magazine, notes the paucity of coverage this extraordinary document received in the Western media:

On October 12th 38 highly respected and theologically diverse clerics from the Muslim world wrote what is widely considered a respectful and engaging “Open Letter” to the Pope in response to his controversial comments about Islam made during his Regensburg address in September. Not only was the letter of historical significance, but it also represented an articulate and reasoned invitation to dialogue from Muslims with the Papacy on matters of theology and faith. The signatories included top scholars from Bosnia, Croatia, Egypt, the United States, the United Kingdom, Jordan, Kosovo, Oman, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Iran.

Around the same time, a single Muslim cleric in Australia, Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, delivered a sermon to about 500 followers where he allegedly compared some women who do not dress modestly to uncovered meat being left out for a cat.

I wonder which story received more news coverage.

The open letter signed by 38 scholars, who represent all eight major schools of thought in the Islam, is more representative of the global Muslim community than this one lone Australian cleric. However, judging by the prevailing media coverage any casual reader would think the exact opposite.

Buddy, take a number and wait in line.

Anyway, the six-page letter really is quite extraordinary, collegial in tone and highly civilized in content and reason. It is online here. Its major headings are:

There is no Compulsion in Religion
God’s Transcendence
The Use of Reason
What is “Holy War”?
Forced Conversion
Something New?
“The Experts”
Christianity and Islam

Read the whole thing; it’s very informative. I have to wonder, though: if the signing scholars are the foremost of the Islamic world, then are they teaching this sort of thing to the Muslim ummah?

Pieter Dorsman reports this astonishing statement:

A few weeks ago, [Dutch] Justice Minister Donner – known for his legalistic approach to most issues – said in an interview that if two-thirds of the Dutch population would support it, the Dutch constitution would have to be amended in order to introduce Sharia law. The immediate broad public outburst over the minister’s remarks was, given their factual and legal basis in the principle of majority rule, surprising.

Pieter asks, reasonably enough,

If a situation could arise where a majority could agree to shred a constitution in favor of religious law – and one from the Middle Ages at that - than doesn’t a democracy have an obligation to devise mechanism whereby such choices could be neutralized?

Can a free people, governed by a constitution, amend their liberty away?

I don’t mean secession, of course, and since the Confederacy couldn’t make their claim of independence stick it can be argued that the Union never really was dissolved.

But suppose, for example, that over time enough Americans became united to force an amendment to the Constitution that said this:

The First Amendment to this Constitution is repealed. State governments shall have the authority to regulate speech. State governments shall have the authority to and prescribe religion for residents therein and regulate the practice thereof.

And suppose that three-fourths of state legislatures approved the proposed amendment? Now substitute some form of sharia imposition for this “amendment” and you migyht have an idea of what the Dutch may be looking at.

Endnote: ISTM that the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution are inviolate as adopted. In 1789, the Constitutional Convention sent their product to the States for approval over the objections of some delegates that as written the socument did not shut the door on tyranny.

They demanded a “bill of rights” that would spell out the immunities of individual citizens. Several state conventions in their formal ratification of the Constitution asked for such amendments; others ratified the Constitution with the understanding that the amendments would be offered.

Twelve amendments were actually offered. Two failed and the other 10 were ratified. These became known as the Bill of Rights.

Now, because the Constitution was ratified into the law of the land only because the Bill of Rights was also offered, ISTM that the BofR cannot be amended or repealed without actually demolishing the foundation of the ratification of the entire Constitution itself. Would the repeal or amendment one or all of the first 10 amendments be tantamount to dissolving the Union? And if three-fourths of the states ratified such an amendment or repeal, would that justify non-ratifying states to secede?

A strictly speculative exercise, of course. For now, that is. For now.

Glenn Reynolds reports thay even the Huffington Post is running away from Hugo Chavez.

Too late. The Republican National Committee has already invited Chavez and Iranian nutcase-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to go together on a nationwide speaking tour.

Holocaust Denier Gets Three Years in Jail

By VERONIKA OLEKSYN
The Associated Press
Monday, February 20, 2006; 8:16 PM

VIENNA, Austria — Right-wing British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison Monday after admitting to an Austrian court that he denied the Holocaust _ a crime in the country where Hitler was born.

Irving, who pleaded guilty and then insisted during his one-day trial that he now acknowledged the Nazis’ World War II slaughter of 6 million Jews, had faced up to 10 years behind bars. Before the verdict, Irving conceded he had erred in contending there were no gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Where is the ACLU when you need it?

Tehran, Iran, Jan. 07 – An Iranian court has sentenced a teenage rape victim to death by hanging after she weepingly confessed that she had unintentionally killed a man who had tried to rape both her and her niece. …

She described how the three men pushed her and her 16-year-old niece Somayeh onto the ground and tried to rape them, and said that she took out a knife from her pocket and stabbed one of the men in the hand.

As the girls tried to escape, the men once again attacked them, and at this point, Nazanin said, she stabbed one of the men in the chest. The teenage girl, however, broke down in tears in court as she explained that she had no intention of killing the man but was merely defending herself and her younger niece from rape, the report said.

The court, however, issued on Tuesday a sentence for Nazanin to be hanged to death.

It seems that under sharia law, when a woman is being raped she really is supposed to lie back and enjoy it. Then, of course, having been violated she is therefore unclean and has brought permanent dishonor to her family because her virginity can never be restored. So she must be killed by her father or brother to return honor to the family. No, this isn’t satire, and odds are that Nazanin has already been hanged.

Is this what Muslims really want, sharia law? Well, yes it is.

An important and largely overlooked poll confirms the impression that secularism has been vastly eroded in the Palestinian territories (as well as in Egypt and Jordan). The Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan in Amman published the results a year ago, under the title: “Revisiting the Arab Street: Research from Within.” The pollsters drew all sorts of dubious conclusions from their data (I visited the center last spring and heard them first-hand). But one set of findings was impossible to spin, and should have constituted a flashing red light.

The pollsters asked Muslim respondents what role Islamic law, the shari’a, should play in legislation. The results were astonishing:

Asked whether Shari’a should be the only source of legislation, one of the sources of legislation, or not be a source of legislation, most Muslims believed it should at least be a source of legislation. Support was particularly strong in Jordan, Palestine, and Egypt, where approximately two-thirds of Muslim respondents stated that the Shari’a must be the only source of legislation; while the remaining third believed that it must be “one of the sources of legislation.” By comparison, in Lebanon and Syria, a majority (nearly two thirds in Lebanon and just over half in Syria) favored the view that Shari’a must be one of the sources of legislation.

Even more remarkable, responses didn’t vary with level of education: “Pooled data from Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt indicate that 58% of respondents with low education, 59% of those with moderate education, and 56% with higher education believe that Shari’a must be the only source of legislation in their countries.”

This is the force driving the Islamist surge across the region, and it’s why Islamists will carry any free and open election. The call for shari’a is the prime marker of Islamism, and if two-thirds of any public desire it, an astute campaign by an Islamist party can readily translate this into ballots. Shari’a allegiance may be an even more reliable indicator of voting behavior than straightforward questions about voting preferences.

Not good news, especially for women. The National Council of Resistance of Iran has more information about Iran’s rampant use of capital punishment.

Okay, putting the name of Barbara Walters next to a special TV documentary about Heaven (ABC, 9 p.m. EST) is not something that would occur to most people. She’s not a religion scholar or even a religion correspondent. I had already checked “skip” on this one until I heard Barbara being interviewed on Sean Hannity’s radio show this afternoon. There was a guest host whose name I don’t recall. They played a long audio clip of Barbara’s interview of a failed Islamist suicide bomber. For those of us who’ve been studying Islamist suicide bombers, the revelations are not new. But for the general viewing audience they might be quite eye opening.

Witnesses at Saddam Hussein’s trial offered gripping details of their torture by the dictator’s regime.

BAGHDAD — The first witnesses to take the stand against Saddam Hussein confronted him Monday with chilling testimony about an aerial assault on their village, mass arrests, torture by electric shock, and executions after the Iraqi leader survived an assassination attempt there.

In the tumultuous, daylong hearing, leadoff witness Ahmad Hassan Mohammed recalled that after his arrest he peeked through his blindfold in a torture chamber and saw a machine that “looked like a grinder” with hair and blood on it.

Jawad Abdul-Aziz Jawad, who followed him to the stand, said Iraqi troops used helicopters to fire at homes in Dujayl within hours of the 1982 assassination attempt and later sent bulldozers to destroy the palm groves and orchards that were the village’s livelihood.

“There were mass arrests, women and men,” Mohammed said in a rambling, tearful account often disrupted by outbursts from the defendants. He said he was taken to a field of half-buried bodies. “I recognized them,” he said. “They were my neighbors.” …

… Mohammed painted a harrowing picture of the former regime’s dungeons as experienced by a 15-year-old boy.

He said intelligence police knocked at the door of his family’s home the day after the assassination attempt. They took him, his parents, seven brothers, four sisters and a niece to Room 63 of the Hakmiya intelligence center in Baghdad, a large hall filled with Dujayl residents.

Relatives were tortured in front of one another, he said. Interrogators used rubber hoses and acid. His brother Moshen was questioned with the aid of an electrically charged whip in front of his father, Mohammed said. It was there he recalled seeing the bloody grinder.

“If I had to describe all the torture, I would need 10 days,” he said, his voice breaking.

Seven relatives died in captivity, he said. Beaten but spared because of his youth, he was banished with others to a desert prison camp for four years.

Saddam repeatedly interrupted the proceedings.