Hahaaaaaaaaa the evangelical "Christians" either want Bush out of the Middle east or have him forceably convert the muslims. . . .yeah that worked really well with the crypto jews. . . .hahahaaaaaaa . . boy how does this work? "Tolerance" means not forcing your beliefs on someone. . but I guess it is okay to force "democracy" on others so they can be "tolerant". . hahahaaaaa

http://www.forward.com/articles/7585
News
Evangelicals Reconsider Bush's Drive In Mideast
Case of Christian In Afghanistan Alarms Activists
By Ori Nir
March 31, 2006

WASHINGTON — With support for President Bush already at record lows, some Christian conservative leaders say that they are reconsidering their support for the administration's push to democratize the Muslim world.

Religious conservatives spent the past few weeks urging the White House to stop an Afghan court from executing Abdul Rahman, a convert to Christianity who is accused of violating Islamic law. After complaints from American officials, the case was dismissed. But the controversy left the Christian Right questioning the Bush administration's assumption that Muslim countries can become democratic even while adhering to Islamic law and Muslim customs.


"This has been a huge wake-up up call for a lot of people in the evangelical Christian population," said Jim Jacobson, president of conservative human rights organization Christian Freedom International. "The administration has been saying all along that democracy is the answer to all the problems. What people have seen in this case, however, is that democracy isn't the only answer and it does not resolve problems of religious discrimination and problems of the heart."

The relationship between democracy and religious rights in the Muslim world may become an election issue in coming months, according to Jacobson and other religious conservative activists.

"Certainly, in this election cycle, evangelical Christians are going to ask questions unlike before about our policy there," Jacobson said. "People who've been very, very supportive of the president's policies are asking questions like never before, and this should be a wake-up call for everyone."

The anger within the GOP base comes at a time when Bush is increasingly dependent on Christian conservative support for the Iraq War and for the administration's hawkish positions.

"That's why erosion in support among that camp is very significant," said Timothy Shah, a senior fellow in religion and world affairs at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Support for the war has consistently been 20 percentage-points higher among evangelical Christians than among the general population, Shah said. At the same time, he added, evangelicals are twice as likely as other Americans (40% to 20%) to view the protection of religious freedom worldwide as a top American foreign policy goal.

Though particularly upset over recent events in Afghanistan, Christian conservative groups also say that the rights of religious minorities are violated by other allies of the United States, including Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, as well as by Iraq. Theses conservative organizations tried to influence the new Iraqi and Afghan constitutions that the United States helped draft. To their dismay, however, in both cases the new constitutions ended up recognizing Shari'a, or Islamic law, as the main source of legislation.

"So far, [Christian conservative] opposition was theoretical," Shah said. "With the Abdul Rahman case, the other shoe dropped: There was a concrete case that illustrated the contradiction between a modern constitution and Islamic law."

Afghanistan does have a modern constitution, adopted with the help of the United States, that guarantees religious freedom. It stipulates, however, the dominance of Muslim law.

In a letter sent to the president last week, the chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Michael Cromartie, warned that in Afghanistan, "with a judicial system instructed to enforce Islamic principles and Islamic law, the door is open for a harsh, unfair, or even abusive interpretation of religious orthodoxy to be officially imposed, violating numerous human rights and stifling political dissent for Muslims and non-Muslims alike."

Cromartie, who was appointed by Bush to head the commission, is also the vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an organization dedicated to reinforcing the bond between Judeo-Christian values and public policy. Earlier this month, in an opinion article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the eve of Bush's March 4 meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad, Cromartie called on Bush to urge Musharraf to protect religious minorities. He also argued that, despite Musharraf's promises more than five years ago to stop discrimination against religious minorities, "discriminatory legislation fosters an atmosphere of religious intolerance" in Pakistan. Cromartie stopped short of arguing that Bush was turning a blind eye to Pakistan's religious intolerance to advance the war on terrorism. Commissioners were disappointed to find out that Bush did not focus on religious freedom in his meeting with Musharraf, the Forward has learned.

Outrage among conservatives was even higher over Afghanistan, because of America's intense involvement there.

"Americans have spent blood and treasure to help build democracy in Afghanistan and in Iraq and to combat terrorism, yet we find that people who are not Muslims can be killed [there] just for their religious belief. That's shocking," said Bill Saunders, human rights counsel at a leading conservative organization, the Family Research Council. "It is a failure that [members of the Bush administration] have to rectify," he said. Saunders added that if Muslim countries "don't democratize in a way that protects religious freedom, it's almost not worth doing."

An organization that typically fights abortion rights and gay rights, and cheers the president's conservative agenda, the Family Research Council is one of several conservative groups that last week openly doubted the president's success in spreading democracy in the Muslim world. The group organized a letter-writing campaign to the White House, calling for the president's intervention to save Abdul Rahman, a 41-year-old former medical aid worker who faced the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws against converting to another faith. After the dismissal of Rahman's case, many of Bush's supporters credited the president for saving the Afghan convert. A cartoon in the conservative Washington Times on Monday showed the president rescuing the Afghan convert — at the last moment — from a beheading.

The sense that Bush's idea of democracy differs from that of many of his conservative supporters has been on display since the case of the Afghan convert started making headlines last week. "Democracy is more than purple thumbs," said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins in an outraged statement, alluding to recent elections in Iraq and in Afghanistan. He added: "Americans will not give their blood and treasure to prop up new Islamic fundamentalist regimes. Religious freedom is not just 'an important element' of democracy; it is its cornerstone."

Anger over the Rahman case is a product of the frustration that has been building within the Christian conservative community for years, said Jeff King, president of Washington-based International Christian Concern. The organization assists persecuted Christians worldwide. "President Bush has been pushing Islam as a religion of peace," King said. "Many agree with him, because they want to be politically correct or to help the Republican party line, but the truth is that the world of Islam is persecuting Christians, and we should say what we think about it."

King said American Christians are gradually concluding that as the administration pushes for democracy in Muslim countries, it is focusing on holding elections at the expense of ensuring religious freedom and protecting the rights of religious minorities. If elections continue to benefit Islamist parties — as happened in Egypt and in the Palestinian territories — questions from Christian conservatives over the president's policy will only get tougher, King said.

Like other Americans, conservative Christians find the Afghan case particularly disturbing because of the administration's deep involvement in shaping Afghanistan's new regime and the White House's frequent attempts to paint Afghanistan as the successful story of a theocracy turned democracy, observers said. Also, the case of Rahman put a personal face on a widespread problem.

The crisis over the case may have irreparably hurt both Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is being criticized in his own country by those who accuse him of bowing to American pressure, Shah said.

"It may well be," the Pew scholar said, "that damage has already been done."

I've talked to some evangelicals - I actually have many friends that are strictly conservative & christian. A lot of them are upset over the lack of morals in society today. They feel Bush has spent too much time on Iraq & Afghanistan and not enough here. I'm not saying I agree with them, simply that they feel this way and I can understand their point - American society is going pretty downward in terms of morals.

As for your actual post - most of the Christians I know were disturbed over the recent Afghan government trying to kill the guy who converted.

__________________
"If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and all the
impersonators would be dead.
-- Johnny Carson

Funny so many were for the colonial expansion of "democracy"prior to the war in Iraq . . . I guess the principles of "democracy" aren't enough to keep the blood lust up. . . since the evangelicals are intolerant of the arab's version of "democracy" which is intolerant to Christians. . .but has no problem with the intolerance of Israel's "democracy" to the arabs who happen to be "Christian". . . . . yeah I can see why "democracy" has failed. . . .

Two days later, after touring other settlements in the Esdraelon Valley, including Mishmar Ha'emek, [Yosef] Weitz wrote in his diary: 'I am increasingly consumed by despair. The Zionist idea is the answer to the Jewish question in the Land of Israel; only in the Land of Israel, but not that the Arabs should remain a majority. The complete evacuation of the country from its other inhabitants and handing it over to the Jewish people is the answer.' (12)

Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Nur Masalha. (Washington, D.C.: 1992) Page 132.

When the war ended Israel was not entirely free of Arabs, but the 140,00-1500 who had remained (93) – many of them Christian and Druze, and mainly concentrated in the Galilee and what was known as the Little Triangle – were permitted to remain. The borders of the new state had been pushed through conquest from the 55 percent of the Mandatory Palestine alloted to Jews under partition to 77 percent. The bulk of the land had been acquired ans was now tilled by Jewish settlements, and the size of the Arab minority was apparently considered manageable. It is interesting to note that one of the Transfer Committee's final recommendations submitted to Ben-Gurion on 26 October 1948 was that the Arabs should not exceed 15 percent of the population in mixed cities such as Haifa. Transfer Committee member Ezra Danin later wrote
that the recommendations stipulated that the Arab minority as whole should not be more than 20 percent of the total population of Israel. (94) In 1949, the Arab minority constituted about 17 percent of the state. While the new Jewish state may not have been quite as Jewish as England was English, it was close enough to satisfy the new state's leaders – a miraculous simplification indeed.

Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Nur Masalha. (Washington, D.C.: 1992) Page 199.

[Chaim] Weizmann may have discussed the idea of Jewish statehood and transfer when he me with Roosevelt in 1939, as he told Attlee he intended to do. The Zionists also apparently later sought American financial aid for the implementation of their plan to transfer Palestinian to Arab countries. (15) In a departure from the discretion that generally surrounded public mention of transfer during that period, Weizmann wrote an article in the prestigious American quarterly Foreign Affairs in January 1942 calling on the Western powers to support the creation of a Jewish “commonwealth” in Palestine – a foreshadowing o the formulation used in the Biltmore program in May of that year, which marked the first official mainstream Zionist demand for a state in all of Palestine. In the same article,he also asked the West to pressure the Arabs to accept a population transfer. (16) A statehood plus transfer plan was likewise communicated to Roosevelt's personal envoy General Patrick Hurley, during the latter's visit to Palestine in 1943. Upon his return Hurley reported that the Yishuv leadership was determined to establish a Jewish state that would include the whole of Palestine and Transjordan, and that it was intent on forcing the “eventual transfer of the Arab population to Iraq.” (17)

Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Nur Masalha. (Washington, D.C.: 1992) Page 129-130.