Certainly it is barbaric by the civilized standards of today to condemn someone to death for converting from Islam to Christianity. It's symbolic of the whole struggle we're in today against the militant extremists who would turn the whole world into a theocracy of their design. But I think people like Howard and Blair, not to mention leaders in this country, need to be careful not to confuse two issues when they say things like:
As far as I am concerned, it would just be quite unacceptable to the Australian people or Australian soldiers to be having their lives on the line to defend, in any way, a practice that involved people being persecuted because of their religious beliefs."
You hear this sentiment a lot in discussions about the Mideast. Why should we try to encourage democracy among a people whose values are so different from ours? They will then just use that democracy to elect leaders and adopt policies that are as inimical to our interests as anything the dictators could come up with. But despots seldom change, and the hope is that democracy can be a civilizing influence. We certainly should fight the extremists in the short term, but that tends to involve killing people who want to kill us. In the long run, people have to change the way they look at things, and there aren't too many shotcuts that can substitute for democratic institutions that can only develop when freedom begins. Whatever can be said about the intolerance still in Afghanistan, does anybody really think it's worse than it was under the Taliban? At least the leaders today bowed to international pressure, however they want to disguise that fact? Would the Taliban have done so?
We have surrounded ourselves in this country with the comfortable myth that we fled the old world to "escape religious persecution." Perhaps, but we did not come here to preach the value of religious freedom. We came so that we could be as inflexible about the religion we wanted to practice as were the people who tried to force a different religion upon us. Our early history was not one on of great religious tolerance. That came after great struggles and much suffering.
