While serving in British India during the nineteenth century, General Charles James Napier was reportedly approached by a delegation of locals upset at a ban on the practice of Sati (widow burning), defending it as customary.
His response was as Mark Steyn puts it, impeccably multicultural:
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
[Note - given the Domenech saga there could be a temptation to cry plagiarism here, this should IMO be avoided since as far as I can tell the two columns were submitted practically simultaneously and while they share this anecdote they tell it in different ways, spell Suttee/Sati differently and have no other points in common other than the same comparison between behaviours then and now]
In his column Steyn asks whether the West is willing to stand up for its ideals and not unsurprisiningly or even terribly originally compares the Western response to Abdul's fate to the Islamic response to the Danish cartoons. Even less surprisingly, going on feministe's sarcastic fisking of Blake's column, the answer appears to be no. For further evidence, as the Rottweiler Puppy notes, all one needs to do is look at antics of the future head of the "British Empire" - Prince Chuckles - who seems retermined to grovel in front of any Muslim he can find and apologise for the "ghastly Danish cartoons" but not the Afghan (or Saudi) attitude to Christians.
There is, unfortunately, one problem with Suttee analagy - that is that the Western custom today seems to be best summed up by this joke: A man is walking home, is mugged and left bleeding and unconscious by the roadside. Two social workers come along and when they see him one says to the other "the people who did this really need our help"
God knows the British were a trifle free with the death penalty - why else is there a saying about "you may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb"? - and looted foreign treasures without a shred of guilt, but despite that the British did, on the whole, uphold basic human rights by actively stamping out the slave trade (in India, Eastern Africa and Arabia as well as across the Atlantic), stopping Suttee and other charming practises and generally acting as a civilizing influence on the world. I don't think we should go back to the days of the British Raj but I also think that we need to sometimes be a trifle more assertive about insisting that other countries adhere to documents like the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the Abdul Rahman case Afghanistan is clearly in violation of one article of this declaration:
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
I do wonder why many "liberals" in the West seem unwilling to insist that others adhere to this document when they are only too keen to make sure that the US, UK etc strictly abide by it and other similar ones. If it weren't for their frequent denunciations of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination one might think that they were being distinctly racist in their double standard on Human Rights.
Update:AP also notes that the Afghan constitution incorporates the above mentioned Article 18
Legal experts have said that the case against Rahman is based on contradictory laws.
Afghanistan's constitution is based on Shariah law, which states that any Muslim who rejects Islam should be sentenced to death, according to Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy chairman of the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.
But the constitution adds that "the state shall abide by the ... Universal Declaration of Human Rights." Article 18 of the Declaration guarantees the freedom to worship and to "change" religion or belief.