Apostate Muslims begin fight for religious freedom from Islam

posted at 12:54 pm on September 11, 2007 by Bryan
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Here’s a sign of hope.

A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam.

The provocative move reflects a growing rift between traditionalists and a younger generation raised on a diet of Dutch tolerance.

That tolerance has been a very one-way street for far too long.

Ehsan Jami, the committee’s founder, who rejected Islam after the attack on the twin towers in 2001, has become the most talked-about public figure in the Netherlands. He has been forced into hiding after a series of death threats and a recent attack.

The threats are taken seriously after the murder in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an antiimmigration politician, and in 2004 of Theo Van Gogh, an antiIslam film-maker.

Speaking to The Times at a secret location before the committee’s launch today, the Labour Party councillor said that the movement would declare war on radical Islam. Similar organisations campaigning for reform of the religion have sprung up across Europe and representatives from Britain and Germany will join the launch in The Hague today.

“Sharia schools say that they will kill the ones who leave Islam. In the West people get threatened, thrown out of their family, beaten up,” Mr Jami said. “In Islam you are born Muslim. You do not even choose to be Muslim. We want that to change, so that people are free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in.”

Mr Jami, 22, who has abandoned his studies as his political career has taken off, denied that the choice of September 11 was deliberately provocative towards the Islamic Establishment. “We chose the date because we want to make a clear statement that we no longer tolerate the intolerence of Islam, the terrorist attacks,” he said.

“In 1965 the Church in Holland made a declaration that freedom of conscience is above hanging on to religion, so you can choose whether you are going to be a Christian or not. What we are seeking is the same thing for Islam.”

The intolerance of which Jami speaks isn’t the result of any “hijacking” of Islam: It’s from the Koran and the Hadith. The Times obfuscates a bit in a “Related Link” to this, but it’s a doctrine shared by millions of Muslims the world over. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, apostasy can earn a beheading. We ought to ask ourselves, if a Muslim living in the Netherlands has to live in hiding after renouncing Islam, is the world becoming more like the tolerant Netherlands or like the Kingdom of Saud?

Mr Jami, who has compared the rise of radical Islam to the threat from Nazism in the 1930s, is receiving only lukewarm support from his party which traditionally relies upon Muslim votes. His outspoken attack on radical Islam has led to a prelaunch walk-out from fellow committee founder Loubna Berrada, who herself rejected Islam.

Well I think that answers the question.

I wish Mr. Jami well. He has a long and dangerous fight ahead of him, with few allies at hand to support him. He’ll be castigated as a bigot and probably called a Nazi before it’s all over, to say nothing of the very real physical threat that has already seen Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh murdered and Ayaan Hirsi Ali exiled to the US. But it’s a fight worth waging, if there ever was one.

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