Kudos to Tom Trento's United West for this critically important series of man-on-the-street interviews with Muslims attending the recent "Stand with the Prophet" convention in Garland, Texas. It is no spoiler to reveal that on being asked to condemn the Islamic blasphemy law, not a single Muslim interviewed would do so. It really has to be seen to be believed. 

Islamic blasphemy law is Ground Zero in the clash between Islam and the West. It is also the mechanism of Islam's totalitarian command over its folllowers.

Islamic blasphemy law is also wholly and utterly at odds -- no, at war -- with Western standards, Western norms, regarding life on earth as an individual with God-given rights and protected liberties. Such rights and liberties include, of course, the right to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience. This is where we in the West are "coming from" -- the sharia-enforcing media excepted -- endowed by our Creator with rights and liberties outside the control of religious and state authority.

Islam, a collectivist combine of religious, state and legal authority, neither recognizes nor permits any such rights and liberties for its followers -- or, as it is able to project its power, on anyone else. Instead, Islam commands allegiance to its prophet and god on pain of death.

This is as alien a concept as it gets to the Westerner. Death for leaving Islam ("apostasy")? Death for criticizing ("blaspheming") a religion? But this is the foundation of Islam -- as no less an Islamic light than Yusef al-Qaradawi recently declared: "If they [Muslims] had gotten rid of the punishment [often death] for apostasy, Islam would not exist today."

Let's face it: There is nothing "American" about a belief system in which silence is the price of survival.