On March 16, one of the world’s preeminent Islamofascists, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi took to the airwaves of Al Jazeera to denounce Wafa Sultan and provide the religious basis for her murder. Qaradawi declared that she had “leveled accusations against Islam and the Muslims, and cursed Allah, His Prophet, the Islamic nation, the Shariah, and the Islamic faith and culture. She did not omit anything. She was insolent and stopped at nothing.”

Qaradawi has parlayed his platform as the host of Al Jazeera’s popular “Shariah and Life” program into a prominence in the Muslim world that makes such statements life-threatening to those he criticizes. In a 2004 interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, the sheik ordered those who strayed from Islam to be put to death. He has also described “the abduction and killing of Americans in Iraq as a [religious] obligation so as to cause them to leave Iraq immediately” and supported suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

Al Jazeera thought it wise to apologize for allowing Wafa Sultan to appear. Dr. Sultan has been subjected to death threats and she and her family have been forced to conceal their whereabouts.

What makes this story the more appalling is that such a man and his colleagues at the European Council for Fatwa and Research have been engaged by prominent commercial institutions to serve as “Shariah advisors” in connection with the latters’ “Shariah-Compliant Finance” operations. In that capacity, they not only have a say in where capital and credit flow in Western economies. They are also able to advance the legitimization of Shariah and to engage in what these Muslim Brotherhood types have called “financial jihad.”

During the Cold War, a great Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson led the effort to help protect that era’s most endangered species – Soviet dissidents – by publicizing their plight and penalizing their oppressors. Today, we must do at least a much for our era’s refuseniks, the Wafa Sultans here and elsewhere, for their fates are truly tied to our own.