The man is on trial for threatening someone who converted from Islam to Christianity, but now he says: “I’m a normal person, I’m not a [Muslim] believer, I have Christian friends.”
That seems unlikely in light of the fact that he is on trial for threatening to kill someone who left Islam for Christianity, in accord with Islam’s death penalty for apostasy. Nonetheless, Judge Klaus-Jürgen Schmid is anxious to accommodate him. If the defendant doesn’t like Christianity, then the crucifix must go!
German authorities such as Judge Schmid, in all their marvelous respect for diversity and multiculturalism, will find that the Muslim migrants they have welcomed into the country will not reciprocate this generous self-abnegation in any way. It will eventually dawn on Judge Schmid that Islam is, in the minds of all too many of those migrants, a supremacist and authoritarian ideology that demands his conversion, subjugation, or death. But by the time he has this realization it is likely to be far too late.
“German judge removes cross during trial of Afghan migrant, faces backlash,” RT, January 25, 2018 (thanks to the Geller Report):
A Bavarian judge who ordered the crucifix to be removed from the courtroom during the trial of an Afghan migrant has faced a backlash. The defendant says he does not mind being tried under the cross.
Klaus-Juergen Schmid, a judge in the Bavarian town of Miesbach, has ordered a crucifix to be removed from the courtroom during the trial of a 21-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker accused of making death threats to another Afghan who converted to Christianity….
Explaining his move, Schmid said that there is no law that requires having a crucifix in the courtroom in the first place. He also said he wanted to show the Afghan man that his decision is not a reflection or a sign of conflict between Christians and Muslims.
“So I did not think it would be proper to convict him under the cross – that was the issue,” he said, as quoted by Bayerischer Rundfunk.
The judge said that he does not want to have the crucifix in the courtroom anymore. “After Bavarian Judicial Law was changed so that neither crosses nor headscarves should be worn by judges during trials, I do not believe it is right that religious symbols should hang in the courtroom,” he said.
The Afghan defendant, meanwhile, said he did not mind being tried under the crucifix. “I don’t care if there’s a cross hanging in the courtroom,” he told Bild newspaper, as cited by Rosenheim24.
The man, who claims to have fled Afghanistan because the Taliban threatened his father, added: “I’m a normal person, I’m not a [Muslim] believer, I have Christian friends.”