In 2005 I learned of one outcome. In northern Nigeria – a country that had previously checked in as provisionally polio-free – a group of Islamic religious figures issued…a fatwa that declared the polio vaccine to be a conspiracy by the United States (and amazingly, the United Nations) against the Muslim faith. The drops were designed, said the mullahs, to sterilize the true believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Nobody was to swallow them, or administer them to infants. Within months, polio was back, and not just in northern Nigeria. Nigerian travelers and pilgrims had already taken it as far as Mecca and spread it back to other polio-free countries…

You may say this is an “isolated” case…but you would be mistaken. Would you care to see my video of the advice given by Cardinal Alfonso Lopez de Trujillo, the Vatican’s president of the Pontifical Council for Family, carefully warning his audience that all condoms are secretly made with microscopic holes, through which AIDS virus can pass? Close your eyes and try to picture what you might say if you had the authority to inflict the greatest possible suffering in the least amount of words…To make such a statement in Rome is wicked enough, but translate the message into the language of the poor and stricken countries and see what happens.

The Islamic authorities have been no better and sometimes worse…In Iran, a worker found to be HIV positive can lose his job, and doctors and hospitals have the right to refuse treatment to AIDS patients. An official of Pakistan’s AIDS Control Program told Foreign Policy magazine…that the problem was smaller in his country because of “better social and Islamic values”. This is a state where the law allows a woman to be sentenced to be gang-raped in order to expiate the “shame” of a crime committed by her brother…a plague like AIDS is assumed to be unmentionable because the teachings of Koran are enough in themselves to inhibit premarital intercourse, drug use, adultery and prostitution. Even a very brief visit to, say, Iran, will demonstrate the opposite. It is the mullahs themselves who profit from hypocrisy by licensing “temporary marriages”, in which wedding certificates are available for a few hours, sometimes in specially designated houses, with a divorce declaration ready to hand at the conclusion of business. You could almost call it prostitution…The last time I was offered such bargain it was just outside the ugly shrine to the Ayatollah Khomeini in South Tehran. But veiled and buraq-clad women, infected by their husbands with the virus, are expected to die in silence. It is a certainty that millions of other harmless and decent people will die…all over the world as result of this obscurantism.

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