Iran will hang a man for the crime of being a Christian:
source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/3179465/Hanged-for-being-a-Christian-in-Iran.html

Eighteen years ago, Rashin Soodmand's father was hanged in Iran for
converting to Christianity. Now her brother is in a Mashad jail, and
expects to be executed under new religious laws brought in this
summer. Alasdair Palmer reports.

A month ago, the Iranian parliament voted in favour of a draft bill,
entitled "Islamic Penal Code", which would codify the death penalty
for any male Iranian who leaves his Islamic faith. Women would get
life imprisonment. The majority in favour of the new law was
overwhelming: 196 votes for, with just seven against.

Imposing the death penalty for changing religion blatantly violates
one of the most fundamental of all human rights. The right to freedom
of religion is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and in
the European Convention of Human Rights. It is even enshrined as
Article 23 of Iran's own constitution, which states that no one may be
molested simply for his beliefs.

And yet few politicians or clerics in Iran see any contradiction
between a law mandating the death penalty for changing religion and
Iran's constitution. There has been no public protest in Iran against
it.

David Miliband, Britain's Foreign Secretary, stands out as one of the
few politicians from any Western country who has put on record his
opposition to making apostasy a crime punishable by death. The protest
from the EU has been distinctly muted; meanwhile, Germany, Iran's
largest foreign trading partner, has just increased its business deals
with Iran by more than half. Characteristically, the United Nations
has said nothing.

It is a sign of how little interest there is in Iran's intention to
launch a campaign of religious persecution that its parliamentary vote
has still not been reported in the mainstream media.

For one woman living in London, however, the Iranian parliamentary
vote cannot be brushed aside. Rashin Soodmand is a 29-year-old Iranian
Christian. Her father, Hossein Soodmand, was the last man to be
executed in Iran for apostasy, the "crime" of abandoning one's
religion. He had converted from Islam to Christianity in 1960, when he
was 13 years old. Thirty years later, he was hanged by the Iranian
authorities for that decision.

Today, Rashin's brother, Ramtin, is also held in a prison cell in
Mashad, Iran's holiest city. He was arrested on August 21. He has not
been charged but he is a Christian. And Rashin fears that, just as her
father was the last man to be executed for apostasy in Iran, her
brother may become one of the first to be killed under Iran's new
law.

Not surprisingly, Rashin is desperately worried. "I am terribly
anxious about him," she explains. "Even though my brother is not an
apostate, because he has never been a Muslim – my father raised us all
as Christians – I don't think he is safe. They assume that if you are
Iranian, you must be Muslim."

Her brother's situation has ominous echoes of her father's fate.
Rashin was 14 when her father was arrested. "He was held in prison for
one month," she remembers. "Then the religious police released him
without explanation and without apology. We were overjoyed. We thought
his ordeal was over."

But six months later, the police came back and took her father away
again. This time, they offered him a choice: he could denounce his
Christian faith, and the church in which he was a pastor – or he would
be killed. "Of course, my father refused to give up his faith," Rashid
recalls proudly. "He could not renounce his God. His belief in Christ
was his life – it was his deepest conviction." So two weeks later,
Hossein Soodmand was taken by guards to the prison gallows and
hanged.

Life for Rashin, her siblings and her mother became extremely
difficult. Some Muslims are extremely hostile to people of any other
religion, never mind to those who they consider apostates: Ayatollah
Khomeini declared that "non-Muslims are impure", insisting that for
Muslims to wash the clothes of non-Muslims, or to eat food with non-
Muslims, or even to use utensils touched by non-Muslims, would spoil
their purity.

The family was supported with financial and other help from a
Christian church based in Iran. That support became even more critical
as Rashin's mother began to lose her sight. Rashin herself was
eventually able to leave Iran. She now lives in London, married to a
fellow Christian from Iran who successfully applied for asylum in
Germany.

It took years for Rashin to understand how her father could have been
legally executed simply for becoming a Christian. In 1990, there was
no parliamentary law mandating the death for apostates. What, then,
was the legal basis for Hossein Soodmand's execution?

"After the revolution of 1979, Iran's rulers wanted to turn Iran into
an Islamic state, and to abolish the secular laws of the Shah,"
explains Alexa Papadouris of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a human
rights organisation that specialises in freedom of religion. "So the
clerics instituted a mandate for judges presiding over criminal cases:
if the existing penal code did not include legislation on whether a
certain kind of behaviour is an offence, then the judges should refer
to traditional Islamic jurisprudence." In other words: sharia law.

"That automatically created problems" says Mr Papadouris, "because
Islamic jurisprudence is not codified law: it is a series of
formulations developed across generations by scholars and clerics.
Depending on the Islamic school or historical era, these formulations
can differ and even contradict each other."

On one subject, however, sharia law is unequivocal: men who change
their religion from Islam must be punished with death. So when the
judge heard the case of Rashid's father, he could refer to sharia and
reach a straightforward decision: the death penalty. There was no
procedure for appeal.

Nevertheless, in the 18 years since Hossein Soodmand's execution,
there have been no judicially sanctioned killings of apostates in
Iran, although there have been many reports of disappearances and even
murders. "As the number of converts from Islam grows," notes Ms
Papadouris, "apostasy has again become a serious concern for the
Iranian government." In addition to 10,000 Christian converts living
in Iran, there are several hundred thousand Baha'is who are deemed
apostates.

There is another factor: President Ahmadinejad. "The President didn't
initiate the law mandating the death penalty for apostates," says
Papadouris, "but he has been lobbying for it. It is an effective form
of playing populist politics. The Iranian economy is doing very badly,
and the country is in a mess: Ahmadinejad may be calculating that he
can gain support, and deflect attention from Iran's problems, by
persecuting apostates."

The new law is not yet in force in Iran: it requires another vote in
parliament, and then the signature of the Ayatollah. But that could
happen within a matter of weeks. "Or," says Papadouris, "it could
conceivably be allowed to drop, were there a powerful enough
international outcry".

Time may be running out for Rashin's brother. She believes that the
new law will be applied in an arbitrary fashion, with individuals
selected for death being chosen to frighten others into submission.
That is why she fears for her brother. "We just don't know what will
happen to him. We only know that if they want to kill him, they
will."
________________________

Muslims attack gay men in Washington:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjcpo3KcHSI

Charles the Hammer saved the West from Islam 1276 years ago:
http://www.rightsidenews.com/200810122203/editorial/charles-the-hammer-saves-the-west-from-islam-at-tours.html

Reasons for the Backwardness of Muslims:
http://www.news.faithfreedom.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2114&theme=Printer