Courage and spinelessness

In its first session since last week's general elections, the new Iranian parliament is expected to discuss a law that will condemn to death anyone who decides to leave the Muslim faith and convert to other religions.

The parliament, also known as the Majlis, will debate the new law which has been presented by the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Under the proposed law, anyone who is born to Muslim parents and decides to convert to another faith, will face the death penalty.

But...I heard Islam was a Religion of Peace. Where is the moderate, tolerant Islam we keep hearing about?

Currently converts, particularly those who have decided to leave the Muslim faith for Evangelical churches, are arrested and then released after some years of detention.

Ah, there it is.

According to unofficial sources, in the past five years, one million Iranians, particularly young people and women, have abandoned Islam and joined Evangelical churches.

This phenomenon has surprised even the missionaries who carry out their activities in secret in Iran.

An Evangelical priest and former Muslim in Iran told Adnkronos International (AKI) that the conversions were "interesting, enthusiastic but very dangerous".

"The high number of conversions is the reason that the government has decided to make the repression of Christians official with this new law," said the priest on condition of anonymity.

"Often we get to know about a new community that has been formed, after a lot of time, given that the people gather in homes to pray and often with rituals that they invent without any real spiritual guide," he told AKI.

"We find ourselves facing what is more than a conversion to the Christian faith," he said. "It's a mass exodus from Islam."

The total population of Iran is roughly 70 million, of whom 98% are Muslims, of one kind or another (at least officially). Clearly, the conversion of one million people, or 1.4% of the total population, is not going to have an immediate Earth-shattering impact upon the religious make-up of Iran. But it is significant, taking place over a period of just five years, and in the face of such severe persecution of those who do convert. Certainly, it must be worrying the Mullahs, if they want to start executing Christian converts!

But what really struck me about this story related not so much to the future religious direction of Iran, as to the contrast between the courage of these Iranian Christians, and the spinelessness displayed by so many of our own "Christian leaders". In Iran, these brave people are putting their freedom, and, potentially, their lives, at risk in order to reject Islam and embrace Christianity. Meanwhile in Britain, the Canon Chancellor of Blackburn Cathedral expresses his gratitude for Ramadan, the Bishop of Oxford describes plans to broadcast the Adhan - the Islamic call to prayer - over the city as "enjoyable community diversity", and congregations dwindle as churches close and reopen as mosques.

Hat-tip: Gates of Vienna

Masters of Nature

Via Jihad Watch, I read that the Iranian government has recently arrested fourteen western Imperialist crusader spies within Iran's borders. Not only that, however, but these are spies with a difference. In particular, they are squirrels!

Yes, squirrels. According to the Islamic Republic News Agency:

The squirrels were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence services.

So far as I can see, this is no joke.

In fact, it rather reminds me of the recent claims that British troops had released man-eating badgers (!) into the environs of Basra, in an effort to spread panic among the people living there. Which gives rise to the intriguing question, has the animal kingdom thrown its weight behind Western civilisation, in the war with Islam?
Because the only other explanation is that many Muslims are utterly insane, and that couldn't possibly be true, could it?

The latest Islamic conspiracy theory

According to the Iranian newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami (The Islamic Republic), Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses at the request of the Queen, who paid him £500,000 for doing so.

Rather amusingly, the Persian nutters also claim that the knighting of Rushdie

...can be seen as a cover-up to distract the public’s attention from the sexual scandals of royal princes and princesses who are infamous and detested even among the English population, a population who cannot wait for the end of this hated monarch regime which stinks of the Middle Ages.

There's something of the pot casting aspersions on the paleness of the kettle in this, it appears to me. After all, if a popularly-supported and constitutional monarchy "stinks of the Middle Ages" what is the smell of an undemocratic Sharia theocracy?

Terrorist attack in Britain?

AL-QAEDA leaders in Iraq are planning the first “large-scale” terrorist attacks on Britain and other western targets with the help of supporters in Iran, according to a leaked intelligence report.

Spy chiefs warn that one operative had said he was planning an attack on “a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in an attempt to “shake the Roman throne”, a reference to the West.

Another plot could be timed to coincide with Tony Blair stepping down as prime minister, an event described by Al-Qaeda planners as a “change in the head of the company”.

The report, produced earlier this month and seen by The Sunday Times, appears to provide evidence that Al-Qaeda is active in Iran and has ambitions far beyond the improvised attacks it has been waging against British and American soldiers in Iraq.

There is no evidence of a formal relationship between Al-Qaeda, a Sunni group, and the Shi’ite regime of President Mah-moud Ahmadinejad, but experts suggest that Iran’s leaders may be turning a blind eye to the terrorist organisation’s activities.

It follows revelations last year that up to 150 Britons had travelled to Iraq to fight as part of Al-Qaeda’s “foreign legion”. A number are thought to have returned to the UK, after receiving terrorist training, to form sleeper cells.

(Hat-tip: Jihad Watch)

Another reason why, as I've written before, Britain, or Israel, or America, or someone, should be prepared to hit Iran hard. Really, this is the war that should have been waged instead of attacking Iraq, which, although a threat, was a much less significant one.