AP actually has a decent article about the Saudi cleric Sheik Mohammed Munajjid, who recently explained why Mickey Mouse should be killed.
Funny and sad all at the same time - I mean, for the love of Allah, why couldn't he have picked Barney?
Meanwhile, the same article covers the criticism that Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan, chief of the Saudi Supreme Judiciary Council, has taken for suggesting that the owners of satellite TV stations that show "immoral" content could legitimately be killed for it. Iraqi Sunni cleric Sheik Hazim Awad had a very sane response, I thought.
It would be interesting to survey how many judges in various Western countries were clerics of any stripe. I'd imagine the number is vanishingly small.
Almost certainly quite small, because the role of judge has been profesionalized to require a different career path.
You'd have to be a religious leader, then switch to a law career (school, career), and still do so well at it that you become a judge before you hit retirement. Something that colleagues who have practiced law for their entire careers find hard to do.
Alternatively, you could seek religious instruction later in life, having already become a judge. In many Baptist churches (for example), the concept is that you are 'called to preach,' which can happen to anyone at any time. A judge who was also a preacher would not be so odd in those circumstances.
Talmud Sofrim 15:10
R. Shimon ben Yochai taught: Kill [even] the good among the gentiles.
Wow, isn't that like mass genocide???
Take anything out of context and you can make a laughing stock of anyone over anything.
In typical Islam-bashing media frenzy, no one actually bothered to actually notice he was LAUGHING when he said this (yes, it was a video clip). He was indeed talking about rodents and their disgusting traits, and that in his opinion, using what in normal human nature is considered to be filthy and undesirable, as a wildly popular protagonist in children's cartoons, is not the most appropriate choice. Then he said jokingly, in fact, since Mickey Mouse basically is a rodent, and rodents should be exterminated, that in fact Mickey should be exterminated.
He LAUGHED while saying it, get it? Doesn't matter whether you like it or not, but presenting this as some kind of scholarly fatwa to search out and behead a cartoon character just reflects the simple-minded blind media stupidity that the average person is ready to consume and regurgitate blindly.
And of course since it is about Islam or Muslims, hey, it's OK--have a field day. Now if it were about Jews...