This became a cause célèbre only because of the presence of American troops in Afghanistan: having Rahman killed for apostasy under their noses would have made too explicit a debacle of the already farcical neocon phantasy known as “democratizing the greater Middle East.”

No, when Christians are routinely mistreated and killed by our other trusted friends and allies of the United States in the region – notably Pakistan, Egypt, and even the “secular” Turkey – you don’t hear about it, there are no vigils, no protests, no offers of asylum. In Pakistan, murders, endemic discrimination, and constant harassment of Christians – who are mainly poor and account for a mere one percent of the population – is persistent. Any dispute with a Muslim – most commonly over land – can become a religious issue. Christians are routinely accused of “blasphemy against Islam,” an offense that carries the death penalty as Pakistan has some of the strictest blasphemy laws in the Muslim world. Charges of blasphemy can be made on the flimsiest of evidence – even one man’s word against another – and since it is invariably a Muslim’s word against that of a Christian, the outcome is preordained.

In Egypt, supposedly a friend of the United States and the second largest recipient of the U.S. taxpayers’ largesse, not a single murderer was convicted following the January 2000 massacre of 21 Coptic Christians in the village of Al-Kosheh, and smaller-scale massacres continue unabated. ~Srdja Trifkovic

Via Clark Stooksbury