Guardian “Moderate Islamist” Update: Tunisian constitution bans non-Muslims from Presidency

H/T Harry’s Place

The following news, about Tunisia’s new discriminatory constitution, is quite interesting in light of the baffling suggestion by the Guardian’s Jonathan Steele, in Oct., that secular (anti-Islamist) Muslim parties competing in the Tunisian elections were playing on Islamophobia.

Such news  is similarly interesting in context of the Guardian’s surreal characterization of Rached Ghannouchi (after his Ennahda Party won the elections) as a “moderate” Islamist.

So, it turns out that Tunisia’s newly elected constituent assembly, dominated by the “Moderate Islamist Party” Ennahda, approved a “mini-constitution” which, the Guardian’s Brian Whitaker is evidently shocked to discover, bans non-Muslims from seeking the Presidency.

As Whitaker dryly notes, a real democracy would never “stipulate that presidential candidates must belong to any particular religion.”

You think?!

But, what’s even more indicative of Tunisian Islamists’ intolerance towards non-Muslims is the demographics of the nation:

Out of more than 10 million citizens, 98% are Muslim, 1% are Christian, and 1% are Jewish.

Tunisian Islamists evidently fear that their society may be corrupted by the pernicious influence of non-Muslims, who make up a whopping 2% of the population.

Of course, don’t expect such legally codified discrimination against non-Muslims in Tunisia to get in the way of the Guardian’s continuing tale of a democratic Arab Spring, any more than previous evidence of  Ghannouchi’s record of support for terrorism, advancement of antisemitic conspiracy theories, and (of course) his wish that Israel be destroyed, tempered their enthusiasm for his brand of “moderate Islamism”.

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