Abu Wabu

From The Corner, NRO's John J. Miller:
A hard-hitting, smash-'em-up blog entry from Robert Ferrigno, author of Prayers for the Assassin, on everything from Bush's presser yesterday to George Clooney's weight gain.

One of the major subtexts of Prayers for the Assassin is that in a war that will span generations, faith counts, and in contemporary Western society, the cultural elites consider faith largely irrelevant. Proof positive of this emerged at the presidential news conference yesterday, wherein the media poodles managed to simultaneously snap at the president’s ankles while preening for the cameras. Not an easy feat. In their desire to draw blood they nattered on about whether Iraq was in a state of civil war; they shouted civilian casualties and domestic surveillance, they yapped censure and timetables. In an act of Christian charity, W even tossed Helen Thomas a softened Milk Bone allowing her to use the phrase,

blood for oil.

As usual the president strolled off stage-right untouched. No one brought up the one question which might have struck deep at the underlying Bush Doctrine, ie, According to CNN, 278 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan as of March 22, 2006. Mr. President, how do you think those brave men and women would feel if they knew they had died to bring democracy to a country which considers it a capital offense for a Muslim to convert to Christianity? Would they feel their sacrifice was valid? Perhaps you could ask their love ones if the empty place at the kitchen table was worth it to enable Afghan President Karzai to preside over the execution of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan citizen whose conversion to Christianity from Islam is considered an act of apostacy.

No one at the press conference thought to ask the president about this. And whether we might be looking at a similar scenario if and when we bring democracy to Iraq. How to explain such a missed opportunity? The answer is obvious: the assembled media considered questions of religious freedom, of faith and convestion, irrelevant. I’m sure in the White House Press room such questions are irrelevant. They may not be irrelevant to the men and women who answered their nation’s call and put their lives in jeopardy. They are surely not irrelvant to Abdul Rahman, who has been offered numerous opportunities by the Afghan authorities to renounce his Christianity. Abdul Rahman refused. He refused when a few simple phrases would have released him from jail. Would have spared him from execution. He refused.

Abdul Rahman is but one of Ferrigno's heroes of Islam.

Read it all.