While the Flotilla Incident was happening I was busy reading the Qur’an. Since the waters are still murky around Gaza I’ll refrain from commenting. It’s going to be a long week.

I’m on the chapter called “Women”, ostensibly because there are passages of Leviticus-like lawgiving on the the treatment of women interspersed among further injunctions to “kill them wherever you find them.” Here is to be found a brilliant commandment to convert the unbelievers on penalty of death:

Do not take them for friends until they emigrate in the cause of God. If they refuse, sieze them and kill them wherever you find them, and do not take them as friend or ally, etc…

It’s not much worse than much of Deuteronomy, really, except that it was written a thousand or so years later. So Muhammad no longer has the excuse of antiquity for this kind of barbarism.