Who’s surprised by the Abdul Rahman case?

Thus it was dizzying to hear of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s plea to Afghan President Hamid Kharzai that, as Fox News reported last week, “she hope[d] Afghanistan would uphold in its constitution in considering Rahman’s case.” The Orwellian approach was echoed by her spokesman, Sean McCormack, who insisted that “freedom of worship [and] freedom of expression … are bedrock principles of democracy … that are enshrined in the Afghan constitution[.]…”

A much different reality could not escape any sensible person who actually takes the time to read the Afghan constitution. The State Department is midwife of a document fully reflective of a country that is 98-percent Muslim and in which the Taliban and al Qaeda remain forces to be reckoned with. It is a pervasively Islamic evergreen with a few shiny human-rights ornaments attached — the latter giving “democracy project” obsessives some cover for the inevitability that astonished Americans would one day come-a-callin’ to ask how, in the midst of our war against Muslim extremists, the United States could have abided the installation of Islam and its draconian law as ultimate authority in a country we had given American lives to liberate.

The ongoing blather about freedom of this and freedom of that is remarkable naiveté. The Afghan constitution is categorical that Islamic law will apply to any matter in which there is not another directly applicable law. And, by the constitution’s own terms, there can be no contrary laws in any event because “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”

It is precious to listen to Secretary Rice now pine about how bedrock Islamic tenets — like the well-known death penalty for what, in Muslim countries, is the well-known “crime” of apostasy — were somehow balanced by lip-service nods to freedom of religion. Rice — in monotonous chorus with her top ambassador to the Muslim world, Karen Hughes, and, for that matter, the president himself — has been telling anyone who would listen that Islam is the “religion of love and peace.”