Mariam The Martyr, Ctd

Paul Bonicelli wants Obama to take up the cause of Mariam Yahia Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman sentenced to death for apostasy because she refused to renounce the Christianity of her upbringing and embrace the Islam of her absentee father:

During the last several decades we have witnessed the rise of regimes of armed groups that claim a foundation in Islam to establish an order characterized by cruelty. They hijack one of the world’s major religions to practice a form of governance that uses brutality to enforce control and intimidation, particularly of women. A regime that is willing to torture and execute a woman recently delivered of her child simply because she holds religious views different from the regime’s dictates is truly barbaric.

And it is a direct challenge to all who have advanced civilization and serve as its guardians, whether they do their work unilaterally or via multilateral forums such as the United Nations. Bashir’s government in Sudan is the latest example; its current persecution of Ibrahim and her American husband and unborn child is a calculated and direct threat to the role the United States has been playing in the world. We should make no mistake about why Khartoum has chosen this time and circumstance to shock the world. The regime is bitter at the United States’ role in the loss of what is now South Sudan. The persecution of Ibrahim is a lashing out at the world that the United States has helped to produce. It is a challenge the United States and the West cannot afford to tolerate.

Ibrahim gave birth to a baby girl in a prison clinic on Tuesday and will be allowed to nurse the child for two years before her sentence is carried out. Her 20-month-old son is also in prison with her. Jonathan Fisher considers how the US government might go about securing their release:

The truth is that western governments have few cards to play in Sudan. This has been even more so since the election of fellow ICC indictee Uhuru Kenyatta to the presidency in Kenya and the outbreak of civil war in South Sudan in 2013, two events which have strengthened al-Bashir’s hand regionally and internationally. Threats and condemnations from the West will sadly do little to change Ibrahim’s fate. But western officials have other diplomatic tools at their disposal, notably flattery and face-time. Even the tyrants of North Korea have been known to offer clemency to prisoners when personally lobbied by former US presidents. Indeed, in 2007, al-Bashir himself pardoned a British schoolteacher imprisoned for blasphemy (naming her class’s teddy bear “Muhammad”) after a visit from British legislators. Instead of lobbying John Kerry to grant Meriam Ibrahim asylum, the two US senators from New Hampshire – home state of Ibrahim’s husband – might be better off catching the next flight to Khartoum.