The ideological odd couple, updated

Elisabeth Wolff was fined $547 plus court costs for insulting Islam. But it could have been a lot worse for her.

In several nations where the United States has invested billions of dollars in foreign and military aid, not to mention thousands of American lives — in, for example, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan — she could have been executed. Her head could have been lopped off in the third nation on that list.

According to the Hanafi school of Islam, she could have been imprisoned and beaten until she repented her blasphemy.

So it might be said that, heck, Wolff is getting off almost Scot free. She’s an Austrian lady who noted that Mohammed, at age 50, according to a number of Islamic texts, consummated his marriage to one of his wives, Aisha, when she was nine or 10 years old. “What do you call it if it is not pedophilia?” asked Wolff at a seminar on Islam.

Wrong question! The secular authorities lunged at her and hauled her before the bar of justice.

A local court imposed the fine, and an Austrian appeals panel confirmed it. And now a high-minded juridical conclave — the European Court of Human Rights — has sent shock waves around the Western world by upholding the case against the insufficiently respectful Wolff.

The human rights court didn’t contend that her point about Mohammed’s child bride was untrue. It sidestepped that issue. Rather, the court harrumphed that her words “went beyond the permissible limits of objective debate” and “put at risk religious peace.”

The human rights tribunal also faulted her for failing to provide historical context for Mohammad’s notion that prepubescent girls are acceptably nubile candidates for matrimony.

The court didn’t say exactly what it had in mind here.

Maybe the human rights jurists thought that Wolff should have mentioned that brides in days of yore tended to be culled from the early teen years. It’s sometimes said, in defense of the Messenger’s ephebophilic inclinations, that King John, at age 33, wed Isabella when she was 12.

In any event, child marriage remains a touchy topic in many Islamic jurisdictions. Mohammed took his child bride back in the 7th Century. But because Islam still holds him as role model of perfection, modernday attempts to limit marriageable brides to girls of at least 15 years of age have met with adamant opposition and emphatic rejection in a number of Islamic countries.

The European court’s decision reflects an odd leftish tendency in Europe to fret more about “Islamophobia” than about freedom of speech. And the same one-sided concern prevails among leftish circles in America. This, perhaps, is a phenomenon attributable to the tendency of U.S. Muslims to lean heavily (66 percent) in favor of the Democratic Party, according to polling by the Pew Research Foundation.

There’s a fussy tendency among mis-labelled “liberalism” to take a protective posture toward Islam, despite the faith’s flagrantly illiberal positions on a number of issues amounting to articles of faith on the left. For example:

GAY RELATIONSHIPS. They are regarded on the left as a sacrosanct component of diversity. In the Islamic world, however, such relationships are judged immoral by the lights of the Koran. And many Muslims accept that judgment. For example, according to Pew’s surveys, 96 percent in Jordan; 95 percent in Indonesia; 94 percent in Egypt; 94 percent in Malaysia; 90 percent in Pakistan, and 77 percent in Iraq.

Several Islamic countries — some of them our “allies” — provide the death penalty for homosexuality, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Qatar, Mauritania, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan.

In the United States, American Muslims rank far behind most other American faiths in toleration of gays. A forty-seven percent plurality of American Muslims says homosexuality ought to be discouraged. Only black Protestants are more resistant, with a majority viewing same-sex relationships as unacceptable. In contrast, 57 percent of U.S. mainline Protestants and Catholics, 77 percent of Jews and 78 percent of the religiously unaffiliated accept gays. Overall, 60 percent of Americans now do so.

But in the Muslim Middle East, there’s near unanimity against toleration of gays. Ninety-five percent in Egypt, 97 percent in Jordan and 93 percent in the Palestinian territories oppose acceptance. Indeed, three Muslim turfdoms — Turkey, Jordan and the Palestinian territories — became LESS accepting of gays in the period between 2007 and 2013 when the trend elsewhere outside the Muslim world was moving the other way.

Most Christians in America and Europe ignore or reject the ancient scriptural rantings against homosexuality in Leviticus. But such views remain the prevailing orthodoxy of Islam, promulgated by the Koran. And the tenets of the Koran are not optional. The Koran declares itself infallible and immutable, its text off-limits to modernizing reinterpretation.

ABORTION. A bedrock human right to the left, abortion is emphatically condemned in Islam as contrary to the wishes of Allah. Fully 93 percent in Indonesia (Islam’s most populous nation) say they believe so. So do 85 percent in Malaysia; 77 percent in the Palestinian territories; 74 percent in Turkey; 66 percent in Egypt; 64 percent in Afghanistan; 57 percent in Iraq; 57 percent in Jordan, and 55 percent in Pakistan.

TOLERATION. It’s a top-ranking (maybe No. 1) watchword of the left. But in Islam the “crime” of apostasy — leaving Islam for another faith — is punishable by death, according to the faith’s sacred texts. Those sacred texts are “clear and uniquivocal” on the point, observed Princeton University’s renowned scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis.

Death for apostasy is favored by 86 percent in Egypt; by 82 percent in Jordan; by 79 percent in Afghanistan; by 76 percent in Pakistan, and by 62 percent in Malaysia.

SECULARISM. The American left, a bastion of secularism, stands in opposition to even a moment of non-sectarian silence in the public schools, voicing fears of a creeping Christian theocracy. Secularism, however, has few friends in Islam. In Islam, no wall separates church and state. There is “no equivalent in Islam,” said Lewis, the Princeton scholar. Islamic law — Sharia — surmounts any such constitutional obstacle erected by non-Muslims, or “unbelievers,” as they’re referred to throughout the Koran.

Substantial or near majorities throughout the Muslim world favor imposing Sharia on ALL faiths. This includes 74 percent in Egypt; 61 percent in Afghanistan; 58 percent in Jordan; 50 percent in Indonesia; 44 percent in the Palestinian territories; 43 percent in Turkey, and 41 percent in Malaysia.

BRUTAL PUNISHMENT. The left abhors draconian punishment for crime. Not so the Islamic world. There’s enthusiastic support there for such measures as whippings and worse — limb amputations, for example. Among those favoring such Medieval measures are 88 percent in Pakistan; 81 percent in Afghanistan; 76 percent in the Palestinian territories and 70 percent in Egypt.

Old Testament-style stoning as a punishment for adultery enjoys even more enthusiastic backing in the Islamic world, even though Jesus, a revered prophet in Islam, famously condemned the practice. In the Palestinian territories, 84 percent favor stoning; in Egypt, 81 percent; in Jordan, 67 percent; in Iraq, 58 percent, and in Indonesia, 48 percent.

HATE SPEECH. The American left, and even more so the European left, take an unforgiving view of “hate speech.”

They define the offense in expansive terms. “Hate speech” may include any mention of criminality among illegal aliens.

Or even the term “illegal aliens” itself. It may include, even, any calls for enforcing immigration laws or policing the nation’s borders.

“Hate speech” may include any hesitation to embrace various “progressive” economic, environmental and fiscal policies. It may encompass rapidly evolving crackpot rules regarding transgenderism — maybe, even, heated condemnation of offenders for their “invidious” use of the pronouns “he” and “she” when referring to males and females.

If these are examples of unacceptable hate speech, what, then, are we to make of the myriad examples of nasty, hostile verbosity sprinkled throughout the Koran? For example, to name just a few picked at random:

— The characterization of Jews as “those whom Allah has cursed...and made them pigs, apes and slaves of Taghut” (false religion). So saith the Koran (5:60). It adds that Jews “seek to cause corruption on the earth.”

— The warning “Oh ye who believe, do not take Jews and

Christians for friends... Allah surely does not guide the unjust people.” Koran 5:51.

— “Fight against those who...do not practice the religion of truth...” — meaning Islam, of course — “until they pay the jizya directly and humbly.” Koran 9:29. (The jizya is a tax tribute that defeated “infidels,” i.e., the “unfaithful,” owe to Islam as the price of being allowed to live in a status of second-class citizenship.

Passage after passage of the Koran urges submission to the faith’s deity. This as a matter of fact is what “Islam” literally means, “submission to the will of Allah.” It’s a safe generalization to say that spiritual submissiveness does not top the list of the left’s most admired qualities — despite the left’s peculiar solicitousness toward Islam.

Even a cursory reading of the faith’s texts picks up a drumbeat refrain urging deprivation, defeat, hellfire and other afflictions upon those who decline to submit to Islam.

If the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights is any indication, however, none dare raise the question whether any of this might be thought of as hate speech.

What is most striking here is the left’s contradictory impulses.

The left strives to accommodate Islam despite its extensive, illiberal baggage. Meanwhile, it condemns intolerance and hostility elsewhere on a broad scale. Especially when such intolerance and hostility are believed to manifest themselves among conservative Christians or Jews.

Here’s a question the left might do well to ponder: Is it opening the gates to a Trojan horse whose forces may one day spill out and strike down, with a merciless righteousness, the progressive ideology the left champions?

The rest of us might wonder, in such an event, what then will be the status of one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all?