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The release of the Fox News personnel brings up what I think is an interesting moral question. If you give in and 'convert' so you can get back to your family etc., are you violating your true faith? I don't think anyone can say for sure what they would do under such prolonged duress and I wouldn't judge someone harshly for having a breaking point, but I hope I would resist even to death any effort to force me to deny my faith. I started a poll on this at FreeDominon, and thought you might want to have a go...

OPINION Infidels Must Convert, Pay Tribute or Die By Ed Koch Last week Pope Benedict XVI made a statement enraging Muslims throughout the world. Muslim leaders are demanding an apology. In the streets of a number of countries, Muslims have marched to show their anger. Violence was reported by the New York Times: “In the West Bank town of Nablus on Saturday, a day after street protests and grenades were thrown at a church in the Gaza Strip, two churches were lightly damaged in firebombings.” The Pope’s actual statement, according to the Times, “recount[ed] a conversation on the truths of...

Submit or die: An offer infidels can't refuse? Commentary By CLIFFORD D. MAY Many commentators have noted the apparent irony: The pope suggests Islam encourages violence _ and Muslims riot in protest. Many commentators have pointed out the apparent hypocrisy: Muslims are outraged by cartoons satirizing Islamic extremism while in Muslim countries Christianity and Judaism are attacked viciously and routinely. Many commentators are missing the point: These protestors _ and those who incite them _ are not asking for mutual respect and equality. They are not saying: "It's wrong to speak ill of a religion." They are saying: "It's wrong...

"... disbelievers will be cast into an eternal fire. But Allah is also ever merciful, and the West can change its ways and turn to the purifying power of Islam ..." -- Kidnapped Fox reporter Steve "Khaled'' Centanni, channeling his captors. We don't often get to watch our media people convert to Islam, so the footage of Fox News' Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig has been riveting. Some people can't get enough of watching planes fly into the World Trade Center towers; I can't get enough of Centanni and Wiig pledging allegiance to Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him. The common...

Say Anything to Live I've been struggling all this week to find the right words regarding Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig who were released after being forced to convert to Islam. Many Conservatives are defending it including Captain Ed who writes: Warren wants kidnapped hostages to die for Christianity and the West rather than jolly along their kidnappers to gain their own freedom. That may be a splendid sentiment, but it results in dead Westerners rather than dead Islamists, and I fail to see how that represents any kind of victory. One of the reasons why Western culture is superior...

I was planning to maintain a tasteful silence about the forced conversion of Fox newsmen Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig. I expressed my gratitude at their release, and was going to let the humiliating subject lie.Others haven’t, however, so let’s go: Centanni and Wiig -- abducted, bound and blindfolded by armed Islamic terrorists in Gaza -- were told they had to convert to Islam.They did so.They later said nice things about the Palestinian cause while still in the custody of Palestinian terrorist leaders. There was some premature debate among armchair heroes on the Internet about whether they should have done...

Chestlessness - August 30, 2006 The case of the two Fox News journalists, held hostage in Gaza, is worth dwelling upon. They were released after their captors had made tapes of them dressed as Arabs and announcing they had changed their names and converted to Islam. Lately I have been looking at the large -- at how the West is proving unable to cope with a threat from a fanatical Islamic movement, that it ought to be able to snuff out with fair ease. (See my column last Sunday.) But the large is often most visible in the small. The...

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.

'I Can't Hate Them for What They Did,' Olaf Wiig Says Aug. 31, 2006 — - Despite being taken hostage at gunpoint in Gaza by a jihadist group and held captive for 13 days, Fox News cameraman Olaf Wiig says he can't condemn his captors. "It's really complex," Wiig said on "Good Morning America." "In some ways, I feel such sympathy for the Palestinian cause. You know, in my heart. You know, I can't hate them for what they did. I resent on behalf of my family what they did. But there's a funny bit of me that's sympathetic to...

Journalists' Forced Conversion Not Contrary to Islamby Robert Spencer Posted Aug 30, 2006 The most bizarre element of the two weeks of captivity suffered by Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and photographer Olaf Wiig was the video that surfaced depicting their conversion to Islam. Even before the journalists revealed that their conversions had been coerced, there were indications that they were not acting freely. While reading a statement he himself had ostensibly written, Centanni stumbled over words, appeared to puzzle over the handwriting, and seemed to grimace after pronouncing the words “peace be upon him” after the name of the...

Richard Zimler's novel, Guardian of the Dawn, documents the little-known Portuguese Inquisition in India, in 16th century Goa. He points out that, apart from their laws and religion, the Portuguese also imported and enforced their infamous methods of interrogation to subdue troublemakers. Zimler has won numerous awards for his work, including a 1994 US National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and 1998 Herodotus Award for best historical novel. The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon was picked as 1998 Book of the Year by British critics, while Hunting Midnight has been nominated for the 2005 IMPAC Literary Award. Together with...

SEVERAL thousand Christians took over the compound of the Coptic Orthodox cathedral in Egypt's capital today, hurling stones at riot police in a protest over a woman who was allegedly forced to convert to Islam. The stones injured at least 30 people, including 21 police. Some policemen were seen wiping blood from their heads in the streets outside the compound in the city's Abbasiya district. Police sealed off the compound, parking 40 trucks around its walls, and closed adjacent roads. Protests began at the cathedral on Sunday as word spread that the wife of a Coptic priest in Abou al-Matameer,...

Thousands Protest Egypt's Neglect of Coptic Persecution Hundreds to thousands of Coptic demonstrators in the Egyptian provinces of Cairo, el-Minia, el-Behara and Assiut gathered Dec. 5-6 to protest the recent escalation in anti-Coptic hate crimes Hundreds to thousands of Coptic demonstrators in the Egyptian provinces of Cairo, el-Minia, el-Behara and Assiut gathered Dec. 5-6 to protest the recent escalation in anti-Coptic hate crimes and the Egyptian President’s inattention to Coptic pleas for protection from government persecution. According to sources, the on-going two-day protest is a response to the Egyptian government's sanction of anti-Coptic hate crimes such as arson, torture, murder,...

10 May, 2004 PAKISTAN Forced conversion to Islam fatal for Christian boy New incident reveals frightening trend Lahore (AsiaNews/Ucan) – Outrage at the death of a Catholic boy forced to convert to Islam at the hands of torturous abductors has prompted the Pakistan Catholic Bishop’s Commission of Justice and Peace, to take up the legal case. The Christian youth died of injuries inflicted by a teacher and students at an Islamic school. The National Commission for Justice and Peace declared May 4th that the incident reflects a worrying trend of forced conversions. Javed Anjum, an 18-year-old commerce student was seized...

10 May, 2004 PAKISTAN Forced conversion to Islam fatal for Christian boy New incident reveals frightening trend Lahore (AsiaNews/Ucan) - Outrage at the death of a Catholic boy forced to convert to Islam at the hands of torturous abductors has prompted the Pakistan Catholic Bishop's Commission of Justice and Peace, to take up the legal case. The Christian youth died of injuries inflicted by a teacher and students at an Islamic school. The National Commission for Justice and Peace declared May 4th that the incident reflects a worrying trend of forced conversions. Javed Anjum, an 18-year-old commerce student was seized...