From Human Events, back in 2004:
These people have to live in fear because of the long-entrenched and continuing unwillingness on the part of American authorities to face up to the realities of Islam. Law enforcement officials either haven't known or haven't cared that Islam mandates the death penalty for those who leave the religion. They assumed, if they knew that this provision existed at all, that Muslims who settled in the United States would discard it and accept the parameters and principles of American secularism. And many have. But many haven't, and it is time that fact be acknowledged. This is especially tough for Westerners, however, since the concept of apostasy is so foreign to today's secular society. As the great ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq noted in a statement read for him last year before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (he could not appear in person because of threats on his life arising from the same Islamic principles): "The very notion of apostasy has vanished from the West. There are certainly no penal sanctions for converting from Christianity to any other religion." However, one who leaves Islam, he explains, "can be seen as someone unnatural, subverting the natural course of things whose apostasy is a wilful and obstinate act of treason against God and the one and only true creed, and a betrayal and desertion of the community." Thus his death is to be actively sought, so as to erase the stain on the community.
