Vin Suprynowicz

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (and here I thought Muslim residents of America generally WERE Americans, which would make that read “Council on American-American relations”) busies itself urging American college campuses to bar “anti-Islamic speakers,” revealing a modest blind spot when it comes to the American tradition of widespread tolerance of differing viewpoints that led to members of the Muslim faith being welcomed here, in the first place.

The outfit (which has a right to speak out however it chooses, of course) also offers to teach people how to “challenge the anti-Sharia campaign” — an interesting undertaking, if there’s supposedly no plan to impose Muslim religious law, here.

CAIR also protests FBI agents being taught “to view the faith of Islam itself as the source of terrorism and extremism.”

Most modern Muslims are neither terrorists nor supporters of terrorism, of course. That’s important to remember — even as we wonder how much time FBI agents should really spend investigating Buddhist or Quaker or Unitarian teachings as a likely source of terrorist acts.

But if Islam is universally a religion of peace and tolerance, how shall we explain that this week in Iran, not merely a majority-Muslim country but a Muslim theocracy, Iranian Christian Pastor Yousef Nadakhani faces execution because he has refused to recant his Christian faith?

“Despite the finding that Mr. Nadarkhani did not convert to Christianity as an adult, the court continues to demand that he recant his faith or otherwise be executed,” says Leonard Leo, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

So it would be all right to execute him, based on Sharia law, if his offense was that he HAD converted to Christianity as an adult? And anyone still wonders why there’s some concern here in America about Sharia law being cited in our courts?

In fact, the Supreme Revolutionary Court in Qom, far from reversing this death sentence, recently ruled that if the pastor is found to have been a Muslim prior to his conversion (regardless of his age at the time), the court may carry out his execution.

We’re informed Iran hasn’t executed anyone merely for being a Christian pastor since 1990. Such admirable restraint. There’s even still some chance the Iranian court may bow to international pressure and settle for merely imprisoning Pastor Nadakhani for life for his “offense” — though it’s not a very hopeful sign that, for the offense of defending in court Pastor Nadarkhani and 19 other “aspotates,” well-known Iranian human rights attorney Mohammad Ali Dadkhah was himself recently sentenced to nine years in prison.

The case is not isolated. A senior Iranian mullah recently declared Christianity to be a greater danger to Islam than Satanism, and at least 285 Christians have been reported arrested in 35 Iranian cities in the first six months of 2011, many charged with crimes of conscience that carry death sentences.

(While I suspect Satanism may fall more into the category of protest or parody, rather than a real religion, I fail to see how anyone else worshipping anything else is a “danger” to any established religion. Do Southern Baptists lose a lot of sleep knowing that someone, somewhere, is lighting incense before a cow skull?)

At any rate: How repulsive. How barbaric. Is this the 21st century, or the eighth? Members of all faiths should loudly condemn any nation or government that makes freedom of conscience a capital offense.

Meantime, the turbaned and wild-eyed rulers of this bizarre and lurid slave state, which for all the failings of the politically repressive Pahlavi clan was successfully using its oil wealth to build a modern, urbane, secular middle class a mere 30 years ago, certainly aren’t doing much good for the cause of promoting tolerance for Muslims and Islam in the West, any more than those loonies who keep trying to murder that poor Danish cartoonist (and who actually do murder Dutch filmmakers), or so-called “Major” Nidal Malik Hasan, who accepted a free medical education from U.S. taxpayers, and then proceeded to shout “Allah is Great” and shoot down a whole bunch of the soldiers he was supposed to be taking care of, down at Fort Hood a few years back.

Which had nothing to do with his being a Muslim — don’t even suggest that — according to his chief defense counsel, one Barack Hussein Obama.