Lassana Bathily, a Muslim employee at the HyperChacher supermarket in Paris, saved the lives of 15 Jewish shoppers, when he hid them in the supermarket’s basement freezer after the terrorist, Amedy Coulibaly, entered the store and opened fire.

Bathily also had the presence of mind to also turn the freezer off.

freeman3 wrote:There is a lot to be said for politeness and courtesy in civilized society. The ability to mingle in public without fear of insult, ridicule, or worse is part of civilized life. We allow unpleasant ideas under the the rubric of freedom of expression, and rightly so, but I do not see harassment and intimidation of other persons in public as protected expression. There may or may not be laws criminalizing such behavior, but such conduct should be intolerable in a civilized country.

Ray Jay wrote:Here's something that we can all agree with -- here's a hero:

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breakin ... 015/01/10/

Lassana Bathily, a Muslim employee at the HyperChacher supermarket in Paris, saved the lives of 15 Jewish shoppers, when he hid them in the supermarket’s basement freezer after the terrorist, Amedy Coulibaly, entered the store and opened fire.

Bathily also had the presence of mind to also turn the freezer off.

that blasphemy must be punished is an extreme ( or rare) interpretation of Islam seems pretty naive...

Well, since it is part of Sharia law clearly it is neither rare nor extreme. Predominant is probably more accurate

Sharia Law is a significant source of legislation in various Muslim countries, namely Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran, Brunei, United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Blasphemy in Islam is impious utterance or action concerning God, Muhammad or anything considered sacred in Islam.[1][2] The Quran and the hadith admonish blasphemy, but do not specify any worldly punishment for blasphemy.[3] Various fiqhs (schools of jurisprudence) of Islam have different punishment for blasphemy.[3] Where Sharia pertains, the penalties for blasphemy can include fines, imprisonment, flogging, amputation, hanging, or beheading.[4]

But Christianity was not willing to extend the same sort of tolerance when it took over the reigns of imperial power. It was no longer permissible to believe in other gods, and neither was it permissible not to believe in God at all. No dissent or criticism could be tolerated. All citizens had to come into the Christian fold, whether they wanted to or not. To deny Christianity was to blaspheme it, and blasphemy was a crime against God.

The codification of Roman Law carried out by the Christian Emperor Justinian in the sixth century was clear. According to his Corpus Juris Civilis, famine, earthquakes and pestilence were attributable to God's wrath, induced by a failure to punish blasphemers. This was exactly the opposite of what had been believed three hundred years earlier, when Christians had been blamed for the wrath of the gods. The difference was that now the punishment for blasphemy, fixed by Justinian's code, was death.
Blasphemers were liable to a range of punishments which tended to stop them repeating their offence. For trivial cases they had their lips cut off, or were burned through the tongue, or had their tongue cut out, or torn out. For more serious cases they could also be sentenced to a quick death (execution) or a slow one (imprisonment on a diet of bread and water). St Thomas Aquinas regarded blasphemers as heretics, and heretics as blasphemers. For him heresy and blasphemy amounted to the same thing. Like a long line of influential theologians before him, stretching back to St Augustine, he advocated the death penalty for offenders , and this was the prevailing view of Protestant as well as Catholic scholars. The consensus was that there was no choice in the matter because God had been explicit:

A prominent Islamic scholar has launched a blistering attack on Pakistan's blasphemy laws, warning that failure to repeal them will only strengthen religious extremists and their violent followers.

"The blasphemy laws have no justification in Islam. These ulema [council of clerics] are just telling lies to the people," said Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, a reformist scholar and popular television preacher.

I hardly think they're going to be inclined to take any lessons in theology from a bunch of secular white guys who haven't ever read the Koran.

Sassenach wrote:Does it matter though ? If most Muslims believe that blasphemy is sinful and should be punished, and it seems that they do since it's illegal in approximately 70% of Islamic countries and the laws are generally very popular, I hardly think they're going to be inclined to take any lessons in theology from a bunch of secular white guys who haven't ever read the Koran.

And protestations by Islamic leaders after attacks by Islamic extremists that they are misinterpreting Islam should mean little by now.

Condemning all Muslims as having such murderous and illiberal views (views that blasphemy or apostasy, for instance, should be suppressed through either private or governmental violence) is thus both factually mistaken and counterproductive. If you were trying in 1800 to fight the excesses of the Catholic Church — I use this just as a structural analogy here — doing so by condemning all Christians would be a pretty poor tactic. At the same time, the fact remains that there is within Islam a religious denomination, stream, sect, movement, or whatever else that is a deadly ideological, political, and military enemy to us and our way of life

Of course, a lot of majority-Christian countries have blasphemy laws on their books, or laws against vilification or insulting religions - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law has a list of many countries - some of which have removed or annulled such laws.

The penalties are less severe, and in many there have been few recent prosecutions, but it does remain a fact that it's not just Islam that has instituted such laws. In the Republic of Ireland it is written into the Constitution, but it seems a referendum is due soon. On the other hand, Russia has beefed up laws against insulting religion in the last couple of years.