Of course, even if Rahman gets off the legal hook, that doesn’t mean there won’t be fatwas galore coming down from righteously outraged clerics anxious to rid the country, not to mention this terrestrial sphere, of the offensive apostate. And so far, nobody has been cutting Rahman a whole lot of slack.

For instance, Afghanistan's attorney general had said Rahman should be hanged and jail employee Hosnia Wafayosofi told the Chicago Tribune that "we will cut him into little pieces." Senior Muslim clerics also threw in their two cents worth and declared that Rahman should be killed regardless of whether a court decides to free him.

Wow! So much for hearts and minds. And there’s plenty more where that came from as indicated by this further sampling of remarks from various clerics:

"Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die." (This was from Abdul Raoulf, by the way, who was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before it was ousted and is considered a "moderate.")

"Cut off his head! We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there’s nothing left."

"The government is scared of the international community. But the people will kill him if he is freed."

"If he is allowed to live in the West, then others will claim to be Christian so they can too. We must set an example . . . He must be hanged."

"We are a small country and we welcome the help the outside world is giving us. But please don’t interfere in this issue. We are Muslims and these are our beliefs. This is much more important to us than all the aid the world has given us."

Talk about misplaced priorities. The list of unabashedly medieval quotes could go on all day, but take another look at that last quote. "We are Muslims and these are our beliefs."

In other words, being Muslim is an excuse to believe any harebrained claptrap one likes. And this particular harebrained claptrap is the idea that anyone who converts from Islam to another religion deserves to be killed. But that’s what Muslims believe, so the West just has to deal with it, right?

Wrong. Not any more. In the new parlance, that would be referred to as pre-9/11 thinking. The old paradigm of tolerating Middle Eastern oppressiveness and backwardness for the sake of political stability got obliterated on Sept. 11 when we learned that Afghanistan had become world headquarters for Apocalyptic Terrorism, Inc., whose mission statement was to bring down the West.

The new paradigm is that the West is going to have a say in what goes on "over there," even if it’s a far-flung Nowheresville like Afghanistan, because unfortunately, even primitive backward people now have the potential to wreck havoc upon civilization. Two things make that possible: access to Western technology and an utterly irrational disregard for innocent human life on a monumental scale.

Abdul Rahman is just one man and what happens to him may not make much difference in the grand scheme of things. But as long as conditions exist such that there are whole countries full of people who think that killing him is not only okay, but necessary, none of us are safe because those are the fever swamps that breed terrorism.