Forced Conversions to Islam Have Real Consequences

Hat tip to LGF for pointing the way to the latest from Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times. Here is a blurb to whet your appetite:

Did you see that video of the two Fox journalists announcing they'd converted to Islam? The larger problem, it seems to me, is that much of the rest of the Western media have also converted to Islam, and there seems to be no way to get them to convert back to journalism.

Consider, for example, the bizarre behavior of Reuters, the once globally respected news agency now reduced to putting out laughably inept terrorist propaganda. A few days ago, it made a big hoo-ha about the Israelis intentionally firing a missile at its press vehicle and wounding its cameraman Fadel Shana. Shana was posed in an artful sprawl in a blood-spattered shirt. But it had ridden up and underneath his undershirt was spotlessly white, like a summer-stock Julius Caesar revealing the boxers under his toga. What's stunning is not that almost all Western media organizations reporting from the Middle East are reliant on local staff overwhelmingly sympathetic to one side in the conflict -- that's been known for some time -- but the amateurish level of fakery that head office is willing to go along with.

Incidentally, anyone who dismisses the gunpoint conversion to Islam of the two Fox journalists as inconsequential is overlooking a salient fact. While under normative Islamic law, Christians and Jews are not to be compelled to convert, once they do convert, the penalty for backsliding is--death. The Fox journalists will have to be wary for the rest of their lives about attending a church, celebrating Christmas or Easter, or any other act that might lead Islamic radicals to conclude that the journalists are apostate Muslims, and lead to a Salmie Rushdie-style fatwa of death.

[For a characteristically unserious and stupid example of the "conversion, so what" genre, see "Praise Allah and pass the hair gel," a September 1 column by comic Bill Maher in the print Los Angeles Times. (Interestingly enough, the Los Angeles paper of record chose not to make this column available online. The link is to a .pdf copy of the article.) As always, the breadth and depth of Mr. Maher's ignorance is truly mind-boggling, exceeded only by his value-free cynicism. He writes, "If conversion to Islam is all that it takes to get the terrorists off our backs, then all I have to say is , if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." His justification is that the act of conversion to Islam would be meaningless. Yes, I know that it is a humor column. We will see if the Islamists get the joke.]