Category Archives: Christian persecution

The Mass Exodus of Christians from the Muslim World

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images (34)By Raymond Ibrahim:

A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway.  Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other.

We are reliving the true history of how the Islamic world—much of which prior to the Islamic conquests was almost entirely Christian—came into being.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently said: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.”  In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”

Ongoing reports from the Islamic world certainly support this conclusion.  Iraq was the earliest indicator of the fate awaiting Christians once Islamic forces are liberated from the grip of dictators.

In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million.  Today fewer than 400,000 remain—the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.

The 2010 Baghdad church attack, which saw nearly 60 Christian worshippers slaughtered, is the tip of a decade-long iceberg.

Now as the U.S. supports the jihad on secular president Assad, the same pattern has come to Syria: entire regions and towns where Christians lived centuries before Islam came into being have now been emptied, as the opposition targets Christians for kidnapping, plundering, and beheadings, all in compliance with mosque calls that it’s a “sacred duty” to drive Christians away.

In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came—was murdered.  One teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians….  Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”

In Egypt, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring.”  In September 2012, the Sinai’s small Christian community was attacked and evicted by al-Qaeda linked Muslims, Reuters reported.

But even before that, the Coptic Orthodox Church lamented the “repeated incidents of displacement of Copts from their homes, whether by force or threat. Displacements began in Ameriya [62 Christian families evicted], then they stretched to Dahshur [120 Christian families evicted], and today terror and threats have reached the hearts and souls of our Coptic children in Sinai.”

Iraq, Syria, and Egypt are the Arab world.  But even in “black” African and “white” European nations with Muslim majorities, Christians are fleeing.

In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled.  According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, church and Christian property has been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.

Even in European Bosnia, Christians are leaving en mass “amid mounting discrimination and Islamization.”  Only 440,000 Catholics remain in the Balkan nation, half the prewar figure.  Problems cited are typical:  “while dozens of mosques were built in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, no building permissions were given for Christian churches.”

“Time is running out as there is a worrisome rise in radicalism,” said one authority, who further added that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina were “persecuted for centuries” after European powers “failed to support them in their struggle against the Ottoman Empire.”

And so history repeats itself.

One can go on and on:

  • In Ethiopia, after a Christian was accused of desecrating a Koran, thousands of Christians were forced to flee their homes when “Muslim extremists set fire to roughly 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes.”
  • In the Ivory Coast—where Christians have been crucified—Islamic rebels “massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands” of Christians.
  • In Libya, Islamic rebels forced several Christian nun orders serving the sick and needy since 1921 to flee.
  • In Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, where nary a Sunday passes without a church bombing, Christians are fleeing by the thousands; one region has been emptied of 95% of its Christian population.
  • In Pakistan, after a Christian child was falsely accused of desecrating a Koran and Muslims went on an anti-Christian rampage, an entire Christian village—men, women, and children—was forced to flee into the nearby woods, where they built a church, permanently resided there.
  • In Somali, where Christianity is completely outlawed, Muslim converts to Christianity are fleeing to neighboring nations, including Kenya and Ethiopia, sometimes to be tracked down and executed.
  • In Sudan, over half a million people, mostly Christian, have been stripped of citizenship in response to the South’s secession, and forced to relocate.

To anyone following the plight of Christians under Islam, none of this is surprising.  As I document in my new book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, all around the Islamic world—in nations that do not share the same race, language, culture, or economics, in nations that share only Islam—Christians are being persecuted into extinction.   Such is the true face of the global Islamic resurgence.

Often forgotten is that, in the 7th century, half of the world’s entire Christian population was spread across what is now nonchalantly called the “Muslim world.”  Then, Islam, born in the deserts of Arabia, burst out in a series of world-altering jihads, conquering and slowly transforming these once Christian nations into Islamic nations.

In order to evade sporadic persecution and constant discrimination, over the centuries most Christians converted, while others fled.  A few opted to remain Christian and live as barely tolerated third-class subjects, or dhimmis, according to Sharia law.

They eventually experienced something of a renaissance during the colonial and post-colonial era, when many Muslims were Westward-looking.

But today, with the international resurgence of Muhammad’s religion, these remaining Christians are reaching extinction, as Islam’s 1400 year mission of supremacy and global hegemony continues unabated—even as the West looks the other way, that is, when it’s not actually supporting it in the context of the so-called “Arab Spring.”

RAYMOND IBRAHIM, a Middle East and Islam specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. A widely published author, best known for The Al Qaeda Reader (Doubleday, 2007), he guest lectures at universities, including the National Defense Intelligence College, briefs governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and has testified before Congress regarding the conceptual failures that dominate American discourse concerning Islam and the worsening plight of Egypt’s Christian Copts. Among other media, he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, CBN, and NPR.

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THE FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE — AND WHY IT MATTERS TODAY

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By Raymond Ibrahim:

Today, April 24, marks the “Great Crime,” that is, the Armenian genocide that took place under Turkey’s Islamic Ottoman Empire, during and after WWI.  Out of an approximate population of two million, some 1.5 million Armenians died. If early 20th century Turkey had the apparatuses and technology to execute in mass—such as 1940s Germany’s gas chambers—the entire Armenian population may well have been annihilated.  Most objective American historians who have studied the question unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide:

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse.  A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied Anatolia, now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.  At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000….  Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

A still frame from the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, which portrayed eye witnessed events from the Armenian Genocide, including crucified Christian girls.

Indeed, evidence has been overwhelming.  U.S. Senate Resolution 359 from 1920 heard testimony that included evidence of “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”  In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem (which agrees with Islam’s rules of war).  Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.”  Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.

What do Americans know of the Armenian Genocide?  To be sure, some American high school textbooks acknowledge it.  However, one of the primary causes for it—perhaps the fundamental cause—is completely unacknowledged: religion.  The genocide is always articulated through a singularly secular paradigm, one that deems valid only those factors that are intelligible from a modern, secular, Western point of view, such as identity politics, nationalism, and territorial disputes. As can be imagined, such an approach does little more than project Western perspectives onto vastly different civilizations of different eras, thus anachronizing history.

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See also: The Weird Phenomenon of Ottoman Empire Nostalgia (counterjihadreport)

Muslim Persecution of Christians: February, 2013

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Half of the Victims Were under the Age of Six

by Raymond Ibrahim:

“We thank our young men, trained in Somalia, for killing an infidel. Many more will die.” — Message signed by Muslim Renewal

Reports of Christian persecution by Muslims around the world during the month of February include (but are not limited to) the following accounts. They are listed by form of persecution, and in country alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity:

Church Attacks

Egypt: Once again, soon after Friday prayers, a throng of Muslims in Fayoum province destroyed a Coptic church. The reason cited this time was that the church is “an unlawful neighbor to the Muslims who live adjacent to it and must therefore be moved.” According to AINA, “The mob climbed to the church dome and started demolishing it and setting it on fire. The dome collapsed into the burning church and caused great damage. Muslims used bricks from the dome and the holy cross and hurled it at the altar inside the church, causing part of it to be demolished; all the icons of saints were destroyed. Muslims tried to assault Father Domadios and threw stones at him, but he was saved by a Muslim family who brought him away from the village in their car.” Local Christian families were reported as staying indoors for fear of being assaulted by the Muslims. And, once again, although state security was present throughout this entire proceeding, it did nothing to prevent it. None of the perpetrators was arrested. Two days later, hundreds of Copts demonstrated, demanding a halt to the ongoing attacks on their churches. In response, the church was attacked again, by Muslims hurling more Molotov cocktails and stones while shouting “We do not want the church.” Some Muslims climbed atop the church again to destroy completely the remains of the wooden dome.

Indonesia: Four churches were firebombed with Molotov cocktails in the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Two were attacked on a Sunday morning in South Sulawesi. Another two churches were attacked a few days later. All the churches suffered various degrees of fire damage. According to Barnabas Fund, the same region was earlier “ravaged in a bloody anti-Christian campaign by Islamic extremists between 1997 and 2001. Hundreds of churches and thousands of homes were destroyed; according to some estimates 30,000 Christians were killed and about half a million driven out in what amounted to ethnic cleansing…. The beheading of three girls as they made their way [to] their Christian school in Central Sulawesi in 2005 was among the most egregious.” Elsewhere, in the village of Mekargalih, some 50 members of the Islamic Defenders Front descended upon a Pentecostal church, scaling its gates, vandalizing the building, and assaulting the church’s minister, including strangling him with his own necktie. The reason cited for this assault was that the church was operating without a permit. Two days later, the only person arrested and currently serving a three month prison sentence, was the minister, for continuing to hold services without a valid permit. The church, which has been running for 26 years, has made repeated attempts, at significant financial cost, to obtain the required permit but has been obstructed by local authorities. This was the third violent attack against the church by the Islamic party in the last two years. According to the minister’s wife, who has also been threatened and harassed, this latest attack has “traumatized” the 400-strong congregation; many Christians are now too afraid to attend services.

Libya: A Coptic Christian church located in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by armed Muslim militants. Initial reports indicate that at least one priest, Fr. Paul Isaac, was injured, as well as his assistant. This was the second church to be attacked in two months. Earlier, on Sunday, December 30, an explosion had rocked a Coptic Christian church near the western city of Misrata, where a group of U.S. backed rebels hold a major checkpoint. The explosion killed two people and wounded two others, all Egyptians.

Zanzibar: Arsonists set the Evangelical Church of Siloam aflame on the island, populated 99% by Muslims. The church was under construction following a previous attack in January 2012. The current attack follows a string of other attacks on church leaders and Christian property across the country. Two days earlier, a Catholic priest was shot dead on his way to church for Sunday worship. Two Muslim youths at the church entrance shot him in the head. A message signed by “Muslim Renewal” later appeared saying, “We thank our young men, trained in Somalia, for killing an infidel. Many more will die. We will burn homes and churches. We have not finished: at Easter, be prepared for disaster.” A few days before the slaying of the Catholic priest, an Assemblies of God pastor was beheaded by Muslims on the Tanzanian mainland. And on Christmas Day, gunmen shot and seriously wounded another Catholic priest as he was returning home from church.

Apostates, Evangelists, Murder and Slaughter

Cameroon: Two Muslim converts to Christianity were shot dead and two others wounded, in the Christian-majority African nation where Muslims make up approximately 20% of the population. One of the converts was previously threatened by the Nigerian Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram ["Western Education is a Sin"] to return to Islam or “face Allah’s wrath.” The attack occurred when these two Muslim converts to Christianity and two others were travelling together around Lake Chad. Their vehicle was stopped by armed men who forced the four Christians out of the vehicle and opened fire on them. The slain Christians leave behind wives and several children.

Iran: Fox News reported that American pastor Saeed Abedini, who is jailed for his Christian faith in the notorious Evin prison, was “facing physical and psychological torture at the hands of captors, who demanded that he renounce his beliefs.” The 32-year-old married father of two, who left his home in Boise, Idaho, to help start an orphanage in Iran, detailed, in a letter to family members, “horrific pressures” and “death threats”: “My eyes get blurry, my body does not have the strength to walk, and my steps become very weak and shaky… They are only waiting for one thing…for me to deny Christ. But they will never get this from me.” Similarly, according toMohabet News, since four Muslim converts to Christianity were arrested soon after Christmas, “they have been taken to the Revolutionary Court of Shiraz several times in a pitiful condition with their hands and feet chained, where their charges were officially announced as participating in house-church services, evangelizing and promoting Christianity, having contact with foreign Christian ministries, distributing propaganda against the regime and disturbing national security. These four Christian converts were arrested as they gathered for worship in a house church on February 8, 2012.” The report goes on to explain the “obvious mental and physical torture” in prison to which Iran’s converts to Christianity are routinely subjected.

Kenya: One church leader was killed another wounded during an ambush by the Somali-based Islamic terrorist group, Al Shabaab ["The Youth"]. Abdi Welli, a Muslim who converted to Christianity in 1990, and became a minister, died at the scene. His colleague and former mentor, Pastor Ibrahim Makunyi , another convert to Christianity, survived after sustaining gunshot wounds. Abdi’s last words were, “It’s good to be in the hands of Al Shaddai,” an ancient name for the Judeo-Christian God. He leaves behind a wife and three children. In response to these latest Muslim murders of Christians, Somali’s much oppressed underground church declared “The Somali Church is the Lord’s and he will protect it from the evil one. No degree of Muslim persecution will destroy the Somali Church.”

Libya: Christians from all walks of life were arrested, and some tortured, on the accusation that they were trying to evangelize Muslims. On February 10, in Benghazi, four foreign Christians were arrested, including one with American citizenship, on the claim that they were “missionaries.” Three days later, two more Christians from Egypt were arrested. Three days after that, a seventh Christian, also from Egypt, was arrested. Then, on February 27, Benghazi forces raided another Coptic church—rounding up some 100 Coptic Christians and accusing them of being missionaries—simply because they had Bibles and other Christian “paraphernalia,” such as icons of Jesus. Many of these Christians were detained and tortured, including by having their heads shaved and cross tattoos removed with acid. Under such torture, one Copt died.

Nigeria: In yet another attack in the Plateau State, Muslim herdsmen used machetes and guns to murder 10 members of the same Christian family; half of the victims were under the age of six, as confirmed by the military and government. According to one official, “Five little children including a two-month-old child were slaughtered.” As happens all throughout the Islamic world, the area’s Christians accused the military of involvement in violence on behalf of the Muslim tribesmen—some of the attackers were apparently dressed in military uniform—although a military spokesman denied it: “Somehow, some hoodlums and criminals gained access to our old uniforms,” he said.

Pakistan: Younas Masih, a 55-year-old Christian, died shortly after being shot five times in an attack that involved his resistance to convert to Islam. According to sources, “Younas’ Muslim colleagues had been pressuring him to convert to Islam. Repeated threats and blackmail attempts had been made against him but he had remained firm in his faith. On the day of the shooting, Younas’ co-workers made another attempt to persuade him to convert. A heated discussion ensued, with insults and threats issued.” This is not the first time a Christian is slaughtered in Pakistan for refusing to convert to Islam. Younas’s son tried to register the attack on his father with the police, but, as usual, they refused to launch a criminal investigation. Also, after local Muslims accused a 19-year-old Christian of being in relationship with a Muslim girl (Islamic Sharia law bans Christian men from marrying Muslim women), he was “barbarically assassinated”: three Muslim men broke into his home in the early hours while the family was asleep, and smote the teenager on the head with an axe while stabbing him with a dagger. When his father awoke from the screaming, the Muslim assassins fled the scene. Further, in Lahore, Roshan Masih, a 45-year-old Christian, was shot dead after an argument over religion. According toAgenzia Fides, “it was an act of murder in cold blood: Roshan’s defence of his Christian beliefs compared to Muslim beliefs, may have been considered ‘blasphemous’… Days before the murder he had a heated argument over religion with a local Muslim, Sohail Akhtar. The latter waited for his opportunity, and, on 16 February, seeing Roshan sitting outside a shop run by Sadiq Masih, another Christian, Sohail Akhtar, armed with a rifle, shot him dead there and then.”

United States: A Muslim man slaughtered two Coptic Christians in New Jersey. Although authorities believethat “the defendant was ruthless and calculating in the manner in which he carried out the killings and attempted to prevent identification of the victims by cutting off their heads and hands before burying their bodies,” it is relevant to note that Koran 8:12 records Allah saying, “I will cast terror into the hearts of infidels, so strike [them] upon the necks [behead them] and strike from them every fingertip.” Moreover, as one report puts it, “Privately some wonder if it had something to do with the victims’ [Christian] religion.”

Read the rest at Gatestone Institute

An Islamic Declaration of War on Christianity

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Unprecedented: one of Christendom’s most sacred sites turned into a war zone under the Muslim Brotherhood’s President Morsi.

Unprecedented: one of Christendom’s most sacred sites turned into a war zone under the Muslim Brotherhood’s President Morsi.

by Raymond Ibrahim:

While it is easy to confuse the recent jihadi attack on Egypt’s St. Mark Cathedral in Cairo as just more of the usual, this attack has great symbolic significance, and in many ways bodes great evil for Egypt’s millions of Christians.

Consider some facts: St. Mark Cathedral—named after the author of the Gospel of the same name who brought Christianity to Egypt some 600 years before Amr bin al-As brought Islam with the sword—is not simply “just another” Coptic church to be attacked and/or set aflame by a Muslim mob (see my forthcoming book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, for a comprehensive idea of past and present Muslim attacks on Coptic churches).  Instead, it is considered the most sacred building for millions of Christians around the world—above and beyond the many millions of Copts in and out of Egypt.  As the only apostolic see in the entire continent of Africa, its significance and evangelizing mission extends to the entire continent, including nations such as Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, to name just a few.  As an apostolic see—the actual seat of an apostle of Christ—the cathedral further possesses historical significance for Christianity in general.

In short, Muslim mobs—aided and abetted by the state of Egypt under Muslim Brotherhood tutelage—did not merely attack yet one more Coptic church, but rather committed an act of war against all Christianity.  Such an open attack on a Christian center which holds symbolic and historic significance for all Christians—St. Mark, whose relics are in the cathedral and who authored one of the four Gospels of the Bible, belongs to all Christians not just Copts—was an open attack on a universally acknowledged Christian shrine.  It was precisely these sorts of attacks on eastern and orthodox churches—including the destruction of the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem in 1009—that presaged the way for the crusades (back when Christianity was not utterly fragmented and disunited as it is today).

Put differently, this jihadi attack on St. Mark Cathedral is no different for Copts than a jihadi attack on the Vatican would be for Catholics.  Or, to maintain the analogy, but from the other side, it would be no different than a “crusader” attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca for Muslims.

While one can only imagine how the world’s Muslims would react to a “Christian/Western” assault on their most sacred of shrines, “post-Christian” Western leaders, as usual, stand by idly (not unlike Egyptian state security, which stood by idly as the Muslim mob opened fire on the cathedral).

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Cairo: Mob Attacks Coptic Christians in Cathedral

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Egyptian Coptic Christians mourn after a previous attack. (Photo: © Reuters)

Tue, April 9, 2013:

Egyptian state media reported that one person was killed and more than 80 wounded in clashes at the St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in central Cairo after a funeral service for four Egyptian Christians killed in sectarian violence with Muslims.

Hundreds of Christians were under siege inside Cairo’s Coptic cathedral as security forces and local residents, some armed with handguns, launched a prolonged and unprecedented attack on the headquarters of Egypt’s ancient Church.

At least one person was killed and at least 84 injured as Christians inside the walled St Mark’s cathedral compound came under a frenzied assault from their assailants.

Following the funeral service, thousands of Christians poured out on to the street and began chanting slogans against Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian President and long-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Copts chanted, “With our blood and soul we will sacrifice ourselves for the cross.” They shouted slogans calling for the departure of Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood movement as the coffins were carried head-high into the church.

The funeral was for four Copts who were killed in the city of Khosous, about 10 miles (15km) north of Cairo, after inflammatory symbols were drawn on an Islamic institute, provoking an argument. A melee ensued and the four Copts, along with one Muslim, were killed.

Witnesses reported that the violence at the funeral began when a mob attacked the mourners as they exited the cathedral, pelting them with bottles, stones and petrol bombs. The Christians responded by throwing stones back until police arrived and attempted to quell the unrest, firing tear gas into the cathedral compound. After being hit by rocks thrown from the roofs of nearby buildings, the mourners were reportedly forced back into the cathedral compound.

Read more at The Clarion Project

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Hudson Panel: U.S. Ignoring Increasing Christian Persecution

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by John Rossomando

Christian persecution is on the rise throughout the Muslim world, and the United States is leading from behind on the issue, according to a panel that gathered at the Hudson Institute in Washington Wednesday to discuss the book, Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians.

The U.S. State Department and Western governments have been largely silent on the issue of Christian persecution because of political correctness and multiculturalism, panelists said.

“If there is a hiker … abducted in Iran, the State Department has no hesitancy to come out and make a major issue of these cases, but it seems like when Christians are involved, they shy away, ” said panelist Nina Shea. “It is found in both Republican and Democratic administrations.”

Panelists cited the case of Iranian-American pastor Saed Abedini, who was sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran, as an example of the State Department’s failure to take action on its own when Christians are being persecuted. However, the State Department announced Wednesday that Secretary of State John Kerry had called on the Iranians to release Abedini after being pressured to do so by the American Center for Law and Justice and others.

The Obama administration recently refused to send a representative to a hearing by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission two weeks ago to discuss Abedini’s plight.

Commission Chairman Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., slammed the administration in a release on March 20, saying that the State Department’s failure to send a representative showed that religious freedom was not a priority of its foreign policy. Several State Department officials did meet with Abedini’s wife and counsel that same day, however, so claims no one was available to appear at the hearing seem disingenuous, he wrote.

“In short, the Department misled the commission and in doing so sent a dangerous message to rogue regimes the world over – even human rights abuses that compromise the safety and security of American citizens will be met with virtual silence from the U.S. government,” Wolf wrote in his letter to Kerry.

In Egypt, the Obama administration is asserting a moral equivalency between actions by government forces and the Coptic Christian minority, said Shea, director of Hudson’s Center for Religious Freedom. She noted that the State Department failed to forcefully condemn the Egyptian government for sending tanks and bullets after Copts protested the burning of their churches in October 2011.

The massacre left 24 Copts dead and 272 injured.

“The U.S government put out a response condemning it and asking for both sides to refrain from further violence,” Shea said. “Sam Tadros said in NRO at the time that I should tell the military to stand down and tell the Copts to stop dying.”

Moderator Eric Metaxis suggested that the Obama administration chose to throw the issue of religious freedom “under the bus” in the interest of greater peace.

But this situation is just a recent manifestation of an increasing wave of radicalism that has swept the Muslim world over the past 10 to 15 years. Christians have found themselves subject to increasing persecution in places such as Indonesia and Senegal that were previously known for their tolerance of non-Muslims.

“The Arab Spring had made things much worse, and it looks like it’s not going to get any better,” said panelist Lela Gilbert, a co-author of Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians.

Read more at IPT News

Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians

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Christians Face Persecution, Extinction in Islamic Lands

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COPTIC CHRISTIANS PRAY INSIDE CHURCH IN CAIRO

During this Christian holiday season, the message from the world — and even from the top ranks of Christendom — to Christians facing Islamic jihad and the imposition of sharia would seem to be: “You’re on your own.”

by Clare M. Lopez
Radicalislam.org
March 27, 2013

Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Islam is on the march again and Christians are marked for annihilation. In lands once known as the heartland of Christianity, where the Apostles and early missionaries spread their faith, Christianity is a faith under fire and Christians themselves are a dwindling presence.

Nowhere is the Islamic assault against Christians more intense than the killing fields of Syria, where rebel advances by both the al-Qa’eda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated militias of the Syrian Free Army (SFA), inevitably result in pogroms against Christian populations in every town they capture from the Bashar al-Assad regime that previously had protected Syria’s minority Christians.

As Nina Shea wrote recently at National Review Online, the 2,000-year-old Christian Assyrian community in embattled Syria literally faces extinction, as an Islamic “ethno-religious cleansing” targets its defenseless members with kidnappings, murder, rape and threats.

Like Iraq’s Assyrian and Chaldean communities before it (some of whose members had fled to Syria for safety), the Christians of Syria are now fleeing in droves, many to Lebanon, and some even back to Iraq. The Chaldean Catholic bishop of Aleppo, Antoine Audo, reports that as many as 30,000 Christians have fled that devastated city alone.

Juliana Taimoorazy, the founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, has highlighted the desperate plight of Iraq’s original people, the Assyrians and Chaldeans, descendants of mighty civilizations and Christian since the first century. Since the Council’s founding in 2008, Taimoorazy has made it her mission to document and speak about the devastation wreaked against Iraqi Christian businesses, churches and homes in the years since 2003, when the ouster of Saddam Hussein brought to power the jihadist forces of Shi’ite Islam.

Waves of violence, killing and forced displacement have slashed the pre-2003 number of churches in Iraq from 300 to just 57, and the number of beleaguered Christians from some 1.4 million to perhaps only half a million in 2013.

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Muslim Persecution of Christians: January, 2013

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by Raymond Ibrahim:

Egypt: A court sentenced an entire family – Nadia Mohamed Ali and her seven children – to fifteen years in prison for converting to Christianity.

The year 2013 began with reports indicating that wherever Christians live side by side with large numbers of Muslims, the Christians are under attack. As one report said, “Africa, where Christianity spread fastest during the past century, now is the region where oppression of Christians is spreading fastest.” Whether in Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Somalia, Sudan, or Tanzania—attacks on Christians are as frequent as they are graphic.

As for the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity, a new study by the Pew Forum finds that “just 0.6 percent of the world’s 2.2 billion Christians now live in the Middle East and North Africa. Christians make up only 4% of the region’s inhabitants, drastically down from 20% a century ago, and marking the smallest regional Christian minority in the world. Fully 93% of the region is Muslim and 1.6% is Jewish.”

How Christianity has been all but eradicated from the region where it was born is made clear in yet another report on the Middle East’s largest Christian minority, Egypt’s Christian Copts. Due to a “climate of fear and uncertainty,” Christian families are leaving Egypt in large numbers. Along with regular church attacks, the situation has gotten to the point that, according to one Coptic priest, “Salafis meet Christian girls in the street and order them to cover their hair. Sometimes they hit them when they refuse.” Another congregation leader said “With the new [Sharia-heavy] constitution, the new laws that are expected, and the majority in parliament I don’t believe we can be treated on an equal basis.”

Elsewhere, Christians are not allowed to flee. In eastern Syria, for example, 25,000 Christians, including Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholics, Chaldeans and Armenians, were prevented from fleeing due to a number of roadblocks set up by armed Islamic militia groups, who deliberately target Christians for robbery and kidnapping-for-ransom—then often slaughtering their victims.

Categorized by theme, January’s batch of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed by theme and in country alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity:

Church Attacks

Egypt: Reminiscent of the 2011 New Year’s Eve church bombing in Alexandria, which left over 23 Christians dead, a car packed with explosives was discovered by a Coptic church celebrating Christmas [which is in January] and was neutralized before it could detonate. As patrols seized the explosives-packed car, another car with masked men in it sped away. Separately, hundreds of Muslims chanting Islamic slogans in the village of Fanous destroyed a social services building belonging to a Coptic Church. Security forces arrived only after the building had been completely destroyed. According to the AINA report, the social services building “had all the necessary government permits; it had a reception hall on the first floor and a kindergarten on the second. But the Muslims insisted that it would become a church. Mosques in surrounding areas had earlier called on Muslims, through their megaphones, to go and help their Muslim brethren in Fanous, because Christians were “building a church.” Hundreds of other Muslim protesters rioted outside yet another church in Upper Egypt; on claims that a Christian man had sexually assaulted a 6-year-old girl, they threw stones at the building. Four stores owned by Copts were torched. Police are investigating the accusations against the merchant.

Nigeria: A total of 30 Christians were slaughtered in two separate attacks carried out by armed men ahead of the New Year, in the Muslim-majority north: on Sunday December 30, 15 people were killed when armed jihadis stormed a church and opened fire on worshippers. The night before, Muslim terrorists broke into targeted homes and slaughtered 15 other Christians in their sleep. “The victims were selected because they were all Christians, some of whom had moved into the neighbourhood from other parts of the city hit by Boko Haram attacks,” said a relief worker. Meanwhile, Nigerian president Jonathan revealed that Boko Haram has enablers even within his own government: “The saboteurs in government condoning terrorism by Boko Haram, you do not love this nation,” he said. “Those of you who leak secrets to Boko Haram do not love this nation.”

Pakistan: On Christmas day, “when Christian worshipers were coming out of different Churches after performing Christmas prayers, more than one hundred Muslim extremists equipped with automatic rifles, pistols and sticks attacked the Christian women, children and men,” according to a Pakistan Christian Post report.Several were shot or beaten relentlessly. Much of this appears to have been exacerbated by a fatwa, or an Islamic edict, that came out right before Christmas, saying that, “Christmas cannot be celebrated by Muslims because it is against the concept of monotheism in Islam.” Due to the subsequent chaos, Christians “were under siege from Christmas day and running out of food supplies and milk for children on fear of safety and security of life from further attacks of Muslim mob…. The news of this attack on Christians on Christmas Day was intentionally blocked by media and administration of capital city Islamabad.”

Russia: Security forces in a North Caucasus province on Sunday killed three Islamic militants suspected ofplanning attacks on church services during the Russian Orthodox Christmas holiday in January. Security forces tried to stop a van in a Muslim-majority province but its occupants opened fire and, in the ensuing battle, were killed. Guns and ammunition were subsequently discovered in the van, indicating that the men could have been planning attacks on churches during the services that marked the Russian Orthodox Christmas. “Deadly exchanges of gunfire between police and suspected militants at road checkpoints are common in Russia’s North Caucasus, a string of provinces hit by an Islamist insurgency rooted in two separatist wars in Chechnya,” the report added.

Read more at Gatestone Institute

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Obama’s New Libya

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Libya_Jihad-450x333By :

Remember all the hoopla the Obama administration engaged in after helping Libya’s “freedom fighters” oust (and sodomize and murder) the nation’s former president, Muammar Gaddafi? Remember the rationale used by Obama to justify using the U.S. military to help Libya’s “opposition”?  In his March 28, 2011 speech, he spoke of “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings,” adding that not assisting them “would have been a betrayal of who we are.”

Although it was common knowledge that al-Qaeda and other fiercely anti-American forces were involved in the Libyan jihad, this did not shake Obama’s “responsibilities” to his “fellow human beings.” Predictably, the thanks the U.S. received was an al-Qaeda attack on the American embassy in Benghazi and the murders of four American officials, including Ambassador Chris Stevens (an attack the Obama administration tried to frame as a product of an amateur YouTube video that had “offended” Muslims).

Beyond the attack on Libya’s American embassy, there has been no end of examples of the true nature of the “New Libya” Obama helped create. On Sunday, December 30, an explosion rocked a Coptic Christian church near the western city of Misrata, where a group of U.S.-backed rebels hold a major checkpoint, killing two. Two months later, on February 28, another Coptic Christian church located in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by armed Muslim militants, resulting in serious injuries for the priest and an assistant.

On February 10, four foreign Christians were arrested in Benghazi, including one with American citizenship, on the claim that they were “missionaries.”  Three days later, two more Christians from Egypt were arrested. Three days after that, a seventh Christian, also from Egypt, was arrested. Then, on February 27, Benghazi forces raided another Coptic church rounding up some 100 Coptic Christians, accusing them of being missionaries—simply because they were found in possession of Bibles and other Christian “paraphernalia.” Many of these Christians have been tortured, some with acid.

Read more at Front Page

 

Hatred of Christians Unleashed in Libya

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copts-attacked1By Raymond Ibrahim:

Last Thursday, a Coptic Christian church located in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by armed Muslim militants.  Initial reports indicate that at least one priest, Fr. Paul Isaac, was injured, as well as his assistant.  It is the second church to be attacked in two months.  Earlier, on Sunday, December 30, an explosion rocked a Coptic Christian church near the western city of Misrata, where a group of U.S. backed rebels hold a major checkpoint. The explosion killed two people and wounded two others, all Egyptians.

Such attacks rarely if ever occurred under Col. Gaddafi.

There are currently few details.  Based on countless examples from past experience—including centuries of demonstrable continuity—there were likely loud cries of “Allahu Akbar!” with an exuberant sense of Islamic supremacism in the air. As for motivation, it was likely sheer anti-Christian sentiment.  For where else are Christians being Christians than in church—where they are being as apolitical as they are spiritual, simply trying to worship their God in peace, only to be attacked yet again.

At any rate, here is one more piece of solid evidence to validate my observation from last week—that the recent spate of arrests of Christians in Libya on the accusation that they are “missionaries” is a pretext for simple, good old-fashioned Christian hate.  After all, this armed attack on a Christian church in Benghazi occurred right around the same time 100 Christian Copts were arrested and tortured, their heads shaven and their tattooed crosses burned off with acid.

Libya’s Islamists had no problem arresting and torturing these Copts, indeed, boasting of it by posting a video of them on the Internet.  Libyan law makes it illegal for any Christian to display their Christianity or, worse, preach it.  Thus the Islamic militias are off the hook, as they were merely performing the equivalent of a “citizen’s arrest” when they abducted and trapped all those Egyptian Christians because they had crosses, Bibles, and religious icons.

Read more at Front Page

Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the DHFC, is a widely published author on Islam, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. Join him as he explores the “Intersection”—the pivotal but ignored point where Islam and Christianity meet—including by examining the latest on Christian persecution, translating important Arabic news that never reaches the West, and much more.

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