To be honest, I am not certain how extremist Islam differs in punishment of 'offenders' very much from how 'offenders' in say, China or North Korea are punished. I mean, sure, it's not public stoning, with the public coerced into participating but it's still extremely harsh and just as deadly. And it's state sponsored, meaning that the people may not be throwing the stones themselves, but they are allowing horrific punishments by their proxy: the government they choose to accept. Throw in forced late term abortions in China and you get the innocence factor thrown in.
My point is that we can no more blame Islam for such atrocities than Islamic extremists can claim justification by Islam for such atrocities. The source of such barbarity is not religion.
The Chinese penal system is harsh but nothing like Sharia.
And "forced" late term abortions is pretty much a fabrication of the pro-life community. It's
not permitted by law, but in a state where the local officials have as much power as they do in China there are occasional abuses. Having too many kids carries a substantial financial penalty, that's all.
A simple test: I have been in various police states, and even had a run-in with the law in one. They are uniformly identifiable by the fear of
any police contact the average person has. Consider our run-in with the law--our actual dealings with the police were hard only because of the language barrier. (The discussion ended up being in German, a language which both the officer and my mother spoke poorly and which my father couldn't meaningfully contribute.) We were able to show it was their own official that had goofed and since we didn't speak the language we couldn't even catch it. Now for the hard part--we were supposed to fill out a report. In Hungarian. Big problems--nobody was willing to translate because it was a police matter. Finally a Viennese businessman overheard our problems and helped--he knew we weren't going to find a local willing to help.
Contrast that with China: Every trip of ours over there these days involves a stop at the local police station to fill out a form. Various relatives have been with us during the registration, none have been worried about stepping into the lion's den. (Note: The typical tourist doesn't need to do this as their hotel takes care of it for them. If you're not in a hotel, though, you have to do it yourself.) Or contrast it with the encounter we witnessed in the marketplace: Due to a misunderstanding a guy selling pornographic DVDs (note: illegal) got the notion that we were interested in buying some and was unhappy at seeing an imagined sale walking away and kept trying to get us to go to where his stuff was. A cop noticed this and shooed him off and he was talking back, not cowering like someone in a police state would.
