Dear Friends: 

Here’s the crux of an AP story issued out of Cairo today (March 10, 2006): The lawyers for a cleric have urged a judge in Yemen to condemn to death a local editor who published the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.  

According to the story, the editor of the Yemen Observer, Mohammed Al-Asadi, told The Associated Press he is being prosecuted by both the state and a prominent Islamic cleric, Sheik Abdulmajid al-Zindani, whom the United States has accused of supporting terrorism. The editors of two other Yemeni papers that published the cartoons, Al-Ra'i al-Am and Al-Huriya, have also been charged with offending Islam. 

Such stories bother me. They make a travesty of the spirit of Islam, if there was such a thing to begin with. 

This raises the grotesque subject of democracy versus freedom of _expression, which is the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom that is sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and I am not ashamed to say that without utter freedom of _expression the fanatics of Muhammad’s Islam will continue to bulldoze common sense and decency with their dogmatic, fanatical, medieval mentality which is obnoxiously ossified, totalitarian and intolerant.  

Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality and, what’s more, originality and truth, as it has done for centuries.

We who live in the Free West should disown the Muslims who have nothing better to do than hold demonstrations, burn embassies and bomb people. We should tell them to go to hell and to hell with their Islam—all in the interests of free speech and _expression.  

Islam has had fourteen hundred years to demonstrate its “peace”; it is now time Muslims stopped their diddle-daddle-prattle and tightened their drawstrings to walk the talk and to practise the “peace” they preach—or piss off. 

I already feel better for having said that! 

Rashid Mughal 

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Yemen-Editor-Trial.html
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